In his NTY column yesterday,”That ’30s Feeling“ Paul Krugman confesses that he is getting that old familir feeling.
“[H]ere in Germany, a few scholars see parallels to the policies of Heinrich Brüning, the chancellor from 1930 to 1932, whose devotion to financial orthodoxy ended up sealing the doom of the Weimar Republic.”
Kurgman is worried about a deepening recession. I worry that things are much worse than an economic slowdown.
Krugman’s old familiar feeling is not history repeating itself. It is stupidity repeating itself.
Our current situation cannot be mapped onto the events that led up to the debacle of the 1930′s and 1940′s. Although our capacity for stupidity remains basically the same, back then our primitive technologies limited our capacity for self-destruction to a mere 48 million people.
Just think about the differences between the Weimar Republic, circa 1930, and the Obama Republic, circa 2010.. Back then, we were just messing around. We had no nuclear arsenals, bunker busting missiles, or remote controlled Predator aircraft. Satellite communications and Global Positioning Systems hadn’t even been thought of yet. Truly massive global corporations were just a twinkle in the eye of oligarchs. Why we couldn’t even drill for oil in a wet spot much less the abyssal depths of the sea. Global warming hadn’t even entered discussion back then. Come to think of it, there were just 2 billion people on the planet back then, while today that number has risen to 7 billion!
No, you can’t map today’s events onto those of the 1930′s and 1940′s, but you can map human stupidity onto our current situation.
Consider these ideas for example.
- What’s natural is good. Greed is natural and therefore good. Hooray for greed!
- By countervailing the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the method that best serves greed is profit, by which you minimize what you put into the system and maximize what you take out of the system. Boo to the Second Law of Thermodynamics!
- To profit more, an ever-increasing number of people must receive less from the system so that some can receive more from the system. Hooray for people who get less and less!
- The wealth and profit of a nation is best measured in GDP even if the 95% of the GDP of a nation of 350 million accrues to just 10% of those millions. Hooray for GDP!
- The business of profiting can only flourish without limits. The resources and markets of the world must be laid open to exploitation and anyone who resists is counterinsurgent. Boo to counterinsurgents!
- The problems of the world are always caused by “others” who get in the way of profits, including but not limited to; Latino immigrants, Chinese commies, Muslims, black-skinned people, Israeli Jews, homosexuals, socialists and socialist-minded liberals. These miscreants are all counterinsurgents who need an attitude adjustment. Boo to Others!
- Those who profit are good and true and beautiful. Those who suffer and have less are genetically flawed. Someday, the human genome project will lead to solutions to this problem… for a profit, of course. Hooray for the super-race!
Oops! Sorry, I misspoke. I didn’t mean to say super-race, I meant to say hooray for goodness, truth, and The American Way. We’re all for that, right?
