Can we go back to being capitalists?

The Chinese, in the year 806, invented paper money. Yet it took a socialist horde like the Obama administration to perfect the printing of it, on a scale calculated to make a banana republic blush. Only an unapologetic progressive would have the audacity to debase the dollar by printing as much currency as the government’s appetite demands. And only an Orwellian Uber-bureaucrat would then call such a reckless inflationary move a “quantitative easing,” as though describing an act of charity.

While Rome burned in AD 64, Nero at least played a fiddle, providing some background music to the calamity. What tune is Obama singing in the midst of our fiscal tsunami? The same professorial monotone — a dirge with Keynesian lyrics — emanates from the presidential pie-hole. At another time in history, the Tower of Babel rose toward heaven. It, too, was unconstrained by any debt ceiling. Its builders wanted to rub shoulders with God, who, mortified, confused the builders’ tongues. Cacophony ensued, giving birth to the mainstream media.

Centuries later, as Americans pile up their national debt, they also install a “ceiling.” What started as a two-story colonial of sundry obligations soon grew into an entitlement skyscraper, capped by a penthouse whose ceiling, violating all building codes and architectural norms, has shot past its roof, teetering like a raft in the sky-full, like the Hindenburg, of incipient catastrophe.

The Boston Tea Party, reincarnated as a modern movement for limited government, has this advice for King Barack the Profligate: a quote from Ben Franklin. “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Multiply that by a trillion, and you’ve got an economic stimulus that’ll actually work. Then we can go back to being capitalists. Let the Chinese be the communists.

Alexander Lee

West Chicago