toomuchtime_
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- Dec 29, 2008
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An unraveling of civilization?
Hardly the Best and Brightest by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online
Hardly the Best and Brightest
The institutions run by our elites aren’t trustworthy, so why should we put any faith in them?
By Victor Davis Hanson
Most historians agree that earthquakes, droughts, or barbarians did not unravel classical Athens or imperial Rome.
More likely the social contract between the elite and the more ordinary citizens finally began breaking apart—and with it the trust necessary for a society’s collective investment and the payment of taxes. Then civilization itself begins to unwind.
Something like that has been occurring lately because of the actions on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. The former “masters of the universe” who ran Wall Street took enormous risks to get multimillion-dollar bonuses, even as they piled up billions in debt for their soon-to-be-bankrupt companies....
...Take your pick—on the one side, we have free-market capitalists who took huge amounts of money as their companies eroded the savings of tens of millions; on the other, we have supposedly egalitarian liberals who skipped paying taxes.
The result is the same. Our best educated, wealthiest, and most-connected in matters of finance proved our dumbest—and our political leaders were less than ethical in meeting their moral responsibilities as citizens.
If ordinary Americans were to follow the examples of Wall Street and Washington elites, the nation would neither collect needed revenue nor invest its capital. All that is a recipe for national decline and fall.
This is not even close to what happened. The political leaders in both parties urged Wall Street to use creative financing to provide abundant cheap credit, at first to restructure our stagnant economy in the 1980's and then to try to skip over economic slowdowns during the 1990's and 2000's. When Greenspan, whose policies fathered two enormous bubbles, the tech bubble that wiped out a whole generation's retirement savings, and the real estate bubble, retired, he and his policies were praised and given awards by governments and central banks all over the world and now those in government are saying Wall Street did it?
It was politicians from both parties who didn't want to have to run for reelection during an economic slowdown that began on their watch who continued to foster and protect easy credit policies, despite numerous warnings of impending disaster, that led to the financial crisis and the recession, and these are the same politicians who are now saying, Wall Street did it. Wall Street did exactly what the politicians now pointing fingers wanted it to do.
Wall Street execs were awarded gargantuan paychecks and regarded by many as the best and the brightest and as "Masters of the Universe" for the exact same policies that gave us the prosperity of the 1990's and then the tech bubble and that prevented a recession in the early 2000's and then gave us our present problems. Bush said Wall Street got drunk and now we all have hangovers, but the truth is Wall Street got drunk at a party they were invited to by the drunks who run Washington and now the rest of us are picking up the tab for the party that went on for twenty five years.
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