Some Quick Thoughts

Watching the market meltdown and having absorbed the campaign rhetoric from both sides, I'm struck by a few things.

1. The global consensus is that governments manage economies. I've got longer posts on this, derived from a book I'm reading now, but the essence is this: once we decided that governments managed economies, government budgets became untethered from fiscal realities. Balancing the budget could wait, the economic slowdown of (fill in a year between 1965 and 2008 here) had to be dealt with right away! Until this notion that the government runs the economy is put to rest, the debts will continue to grow.

2. Obama is running around saying this is the worst economy in the last 30 50 100 6012 years. If that's the case, doesn't that argue against more government intervention? The government just blew through $9,700,000,000,000 worth of borrowed economic stimulus and Obama thinks we have the worst economy since Caligula sang to his horse. Now we want to do even more?

3. That debt number is going to go through the roof as Social Security and Medicare fall apart.

4. Western Europe has done the same thing and has it worse.

5. McCain subscribes to this concept, too. He thinks we need to cut taxes to stimulate the economy. I thought that's what we'd been doing while running up that debt. How come it didn't work?

6. As we watch that concept painfully fall apart, there's another one that is falling apart, too. The secular, do-your-own-thing culture has proven itself a failure. People cannot determine morality for themselves. We actually need an objective, rigid set of morals that cannot be disputed. Barack Obama in his Greek Temple speech said this.

Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can't replace parents, that government can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework, that fathers must take more responsibility to provide love and guidance to their children.

Emphasis mine. In the absence of a rigid moral code, that means absolutely nothing. It could mean anything from more Similac and Pampers delivered to a guy's 3 baby mamas or it could mean marriage before sex. All Obama and his social liberal friends know is that whatever we're doing right now isn't working. They haven't quite made the leap to realize that the destruction of traditional morals has wrecked huge swaths of society.

I'm voting for McCain, but I think much larger forces are at work in the world. Two concepts that took decades for their failures to become apparent are going to have to be unwound no matter who wins the presidency.