Long Steep Fall

          During the Obama administration, the American standard of living has fallen faster and longer than during any other period since at least 1960.  Many of us have felt the pinch, but news and numbers to substantiate our feelings has been difficult to gather.  The Christian Science Monitor broke the sad news of America’s fall from economic greatness.  According to the article, since the start of the recession, incomes are stagnant, median income is down 9.8 percent and inflation has eroded buying power by 3.25 percent.  Those less well educated and with fewer skills are being particularly hard hit.

          Can you image how this awful economic news would be trumpeted if a Republican were in the oval office?  On Thursday, the story of America’s long steep fall from greatness was a minor mention three-quarters of the way through the NBC Nightly News, after the account of the Ohio animal release and the latest news about breast cancer.  I’m guessing that is what the media calls burying a story.

          The Founding Fathers created a limited government that was never meant to fix markets or chose winners and losers.  But today, crony capitalists and pandering politicians meddle in the housing, banking and other markets for their mutual benefit.  I want to shout laissez-faire, leave it alone!  By meddling in the markets, the federal government created this economic morass and now bureaucrats grope and tinker in the misguided belief that they alone can make it all better.   

          To paraphrase the philosopher George Santayana, those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it.  Recently I was browsing in a library and found a copy of the history book used when I was in high school, The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik Willem van Loon.  As I flipped through the pages, I read this about the fall of Rome, “But Rome as the ruler of the entire civilized world was a political impossibility and could not endure.  Her young men were killed in her endless wars.  Her farmers were ruined by taxation…. The Empire, the State, had become everything.  The common citizen had dwindled down to less than nothing.”  I can only hope that we learn the lessons that the Founding Fathers knew so well.