On Subscribing to National Review

Dear Dr. Bones,

Even though V. D. Blimp-Hanson is an old pal of ours, Paddy and Eye agree that it would be unseemly for us to offer the following as a maiden comment over to National Review Online, us being both brand-new subscribers and cultivated despisers of the KSM, "Kiddie Selfservative Movement."  So we shall park it here with you.

His neohonourable an' postgallant freelordship has perorated about ‘Austerity’ versus ‘Growth’ as follows:

Finally, there is one more problem with the fake growth/austerity juxtaposition. They are both simply reflections of much deeper ideologies that drive politics. “Growth” is a euphemism for the politics of hiring lots of government workers, preferably unionized, and expanding the number of people dependent on government, who in turn owe politicians their jobs and reciprocate at the polls in expectation of even greater largesse. The costs of expanding the number of government employees and offering them ever higher salaries, benefits, and retirement packages are met not through increasing productivity, but rather by increasing taxes on those who mostly make their livings under very different conditions in the despised private sector. “Growth,” then, is a sort of “gorge the beast” antithesis to the Reaganite “starve the beast” model. Both ideologies seek to avoid insolvency through a game of chicken — of front-loading the cost and hoping the other guy will blink first when it comes to paying for it. But where the Reagan model sought first to cut taxes, so as to cut revenue, so as to force down the size of government and prune federal dependency, the Obama paradigm seeks first to grow government, which increases dependency and therefore requires more taxes — itself a good thing because it means redistributing income from those who have no clue that they have passed the point at which they no longer need to make any more money. If politicians talked not of “growth” versus “austerity” but of “borrowing and spending” versus “fiscal discipline,” then there would be very little public support for their disastrous agendas. Instead, we are supposed to like the nurturers who “grow” and despise the “austere” who hack away. It’s that simple.

"It's that simple" is never a good sign.

Decent political adults are bound to wonder what it is, exactly, that Rear-Colonel Hanson-Blimp would prefer that we not bother our ignorant little heads about. I guess there is no way to know for sure unless his freelordship himself tells us, but one possibility is that “borrow and spend” would not be a bad description of Reagan Régime policy. As opposed to Jimmy Crater's "inflate and spend," that is.

Thirty years on, "borrow and spend" does not look all that wunnerful viewed from the self-whighteous side of the aisle.  It is rather a tricky business, though, to decide whether the G.O.P. Geniuses of the '80's may fairly be blamed for not foreseein' that B&S would probably never live up to its advertisements. They seem to have taken for granted that their own Class must always be poor Sam's chief creditors, an' therefore always in a position to dictate Sam's policy in a pinch, whereas in fact the heathen Chinee (mostly) has somehow crept into that key rôle.

Being foreigners, the ChiComs and so forth are not in a strong position, policydictationwise, but then, not bein' *primary* creditors any longer, neither are domestic Baincappers.

It occurs to me as I scribble that an anticipator might conceivably anticipate a buy-partisan consensus here, as follows no particular group of piper-payers can call the Fedguv tune, so ¿Why should Great Sam not borrow blithely instead of either (A) pullin' a long face an' mumblin' pious viennasausage about Austerity, or (B) just printing funny money?

Naturally there can be no serious question of Wunnerful US ever paying it all back, but that's O.K. too, in the sense that Lefty and I would not be broken-hearted if we eventually have to hold down a few noteholders and give them what you might call a "Romney School of Barber Science" haircut.

The Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom, L.L.C., for their part, have made it crystal-clear that they would not consider it a disaster either moral or fiscal to default on such Treasury obligations as are held by the Ponzi Security Administration. "After the first death, there are no others." That is to say, ¿Why not just lengthen that list of less-repayment-worthy bondholders a little that their freelordships have already started compilin'?

To be sure, it's not quite THAT simple, or at any rate damnwell won't be, should potential lenders work out what we are up to and decline to specuvest further in America.  At the moment, however, that danger is almost as hard to detect as is Mlle de la Main Invisible herself.

Poor Blimp could hardly have picked a worse moment to revile "borrowin' an' spendin'" or boost "fiscal discipline" than this present, when neither homegrown TopPercenters nor Lesser Breeds Without are able to think of anything better to do with their hardly-earned piles than hand them over to Geithner von Hindenburg and Bernanke von Ludendorff for safekeeping.

(( Fairembalance, the Fox Goddess, has asked me to point out that the good Rear-Col. is whight enough when he notices that this unprecedented (¿?) cheapness of money for Uncle Sam does not do a whole lot for ‘Growth’--not unless that G*d word be absurdly redefined.

(( The particular HansonoBlimpian absurdity offered, however, is only one of a number of possibilities. ))

Happy days.
--JHM