But you’re going to have to turn some of that cool, detached engineering gaze on yourself. It’s not the Liberals or the statists who aren’t hiring you, remember? Its the “job creators” who aren’t “creating” a position for you. Aren’t Conservatives always telling us “government can’t create jobs”? That its up to us to go out and offer something to the world, not wait for it to hand it to us? If you want to argue with someone, go pick on them. Regardless of what is beyond our control, we must also accept responsibility for our own lives and actions. Isn’t that what Conservatives like to smugly preach to the unfortunate, or those who have failed? I think the contemporary phrase is “man up”.

You have a lot emotionally invested in your political positions, and you find it intolerable to even consider that maybe its your ideological heroes and champions and philosophies that might be at fault for your own personal problems. That someone might have the audacity to even suspect, much less suggest it publicly, absolutely infuriates you. So you have to devise this elaborate Rube Goldberg apparatus of cause and effect in your own mind to find someone to blame for your, and the nation’s, distress. Then you come here and expect us to validate it for you, to reassure you that it’s not your fault; its theirs.

And when we don’t cooperate, when we don’t obediently play your game, when we don’t rush to reinforce the fantasy that you manufactured, you are outraged and accuse us of failing to use our reason and our logic to assist you in erecting this structure of justifications and excuses. No, Tom, what you really want is for us to wilt away in shame and helplessness when exposed to the blinding force of your reason and the irresistable power of your intellect. Sorry, but I’m not impressed.

Listen up, get this straight, because I’m fed up with putting up with your abuse just because you need a punching bag to take out your problems on. I had nothing to do with your economic or employment situation. In fact, it doesn’t really matter who is at fault, or even if anyone is at fault. Whether you’re right, or I’m right, or if the truth is somewhere in between, doesn’t really matter, does it? Sometimes shit just happens, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. The world isn’t necessarily out to get you. It doesn’t even know you’re there.

I am under no obligation to provide you with a sounding board for you to test your theories on. I myself have no need to justify my own opinions to anyone. If I enjoy discussing them at all its because I find them of academic interest, I am curious about how the world works, and I enjoy the use of the English language.. But I don’t have anything emotionally invested in it like you do. I don’t need to know I am totally 100% right all the time and anyone who doesn’t agree with me completely must not only be a fool, villain, or a traitor, but personally responsible for my problems. And I don’t need for anyone who does not accept my view of the world to step forward so he can be sternly lectured and instructed on the Truth.

Besides, I have troubles of my own.

Now and then I call them on it. Not as often as I’m given opportunity–not by a long shot. And you might notice that there are some people I don’t argue with at all. Ask yourself why.

What do you want me to do about it? Why is it so important that I believe you? Even if I did, there is nothing I could do about it, and there is nothing I would want to do about it. You’re starting to nag like some kind of Hare Krishna devotee, or a Jesus freak, or a UFO conspiracy weenie, desperate to be BELIEVED.

Would it make you feel better? Are you trying to convince me, or reassure yourself? You’re the Objectivist, you’re the Libertarian. You deal with it. Sing your freedom of choice mantra. Recite “Invictus” if it makes you feel better.

I’m fine where I am, no thanks to you, besides, I couldn’t go anywhere else even if I wanted to. It’s a good thing, too, because “better society” or not, its been mighty short on options lately, or haven’t you noticed? What am I supposed to do, get a job? Tell me, are you hiring? Do you know anyone who is? I don’t need a job. I was forced to make other arrangements, remember?

I already live in Galt’s Gulch. I moved here two years ago. And I like it just fine. I can’t help it if you missed the last train. It wasn’t my fault.

Almost nothing in your post is factual. Seriously.

I could deliver the facts, in detail, but it’d be pissing into the wind here, wouldn’t it?

I’ll throw in just two:

- Manufacturing output in this country, right now, this minute, in constant dollars, is double what it was in 1975.

- The number of people employed in this country, right now, is twice what it was in 1965.

I doubt all of that involves selling pizza.

Bonus project: Describe for me a better society, where money is not “wasted” on “cars and roads and suburbs, and fancy houses and appliances and furnishings to put in them.”

Take your time.

After the war, fearful of a resumption of the pre-war depression due to a cutback in war production and millions of returning GI job seekers, the nation embarked on an orgy of consumer goods production. Everybody went to work making widgets, and everybody bought way more widgets than they needed. Of course, they couldn’t afford to pay for the widgets, because no company (or country) can sell all its output just to its workers, they don’t get paid enough, there is overhead to be considered.

So we sold widgets overseas, and actually loaned them money so they could buy them, to keep up our domestic production and growth. We had our banks print money (Republicans call it “finance”)and we sold stock (that’s how companies print money) and people went into debt slaking their widget lust, and companies expanded their widget production…all on credit.
Inflation? Who cares? it allows us to lower our future debt so we can borrow more now. That’s how we paid for the war. Or at least, that’s how we postponed paying for the war.

We pretty much ran the world in those days, so we got away with it. They had to pay our prices, and we got to buy their raw materials at prices we were willing to pay. That’s called economic imperialism, but that’s another story.

While we were at it, we gave our middle class all kinds of bennies, nice educational benefits, nice housing loans (jobs for the construction industry), everybody wanted a cushy job in an air conditioned office, and instead of upgrading our own steel mills, we sold new, efficient ones to the Japanese (on credit) while we let ours decay. Pretty much the same happened to our infrastructure, like our railroads and urban public transport. Only our highways flourished, because that was profitable for the oil and motor industries, and they lobbied the pols like crazy to make it happen. When the oil ran out, we went overseas for it. Hell, what are aircraft carriers for, anyway?

I freely admit the Democrats were behind a lot of these measures, because they wanted full emnployment and economic growth, but the Republicans loved them too, because they were very profitable–at least, in the short term. But since the end of the war, the American economy has been based on growth. We have to have growth to pay tomorrow for the money we have borrowed today. Without constant growth, the economy stagnates and stalls. This is what the economists and sociologists of the 60s warned us about, this kind of economics was unsustainable, and we ignored them. What did they know? They didn’t know squat about bizness.

When we did borrow money, we did not spend anywhere near enough building the infrasturcture needed to support future growth, instead, it went into planned obsolescence, tail fins on V8s, a military capable of waging planetary war, and consumer goods that were supposed to demonstrate how prosperous and hard working and sexy we were.

And when we found it was cheaper to export jobs and make widgets overseas, we did that too, while our capitalist drones made fortunes doing each other’s laundry, selling each other pizza, and giving each other haircuts, but not actually making anything.

So stop your whining. This country has been run EXACTLY the way the business community always wanted it run, by both Democrats and Republicans, and now the system is seizing up because we’ve spent the last 70 years wasting all our money and effort building cars and roads and suburbs, and fancy houses and appliances and furnishings to put in them. And we couldn’t stop because we had to sell more and more of this crap every year to be able to get the collateral to borrow for next year’s production and consumption of worthless crap.

I know you can’t accept that, because you’ve bought into that program totally and now its left you sucking canal water, naked, with your hands in your pockets, along with most of the baby boom generation who thought it could disco forever. Well I didn’t, and I’m not. I don’t need to blame anybody else for my problems, least of all some international socialist conspiracy, or the predatory, greedy demands of our ruthless senior citizens.

I’ve seen this coming for a long time now and I made the appropriate choices a long time ago.

The hippies were right.

“Most of what’s wrong with the economy is not ideological, it has to do with historical conditions and developments, and decisions made a long time ago that seemed like perfectly good ideas at the time.”

For eight years, the economy was all about conservative ideology. At least that’s what I was constantly hearing here. What’s changed? Suddenly economic failure is an “act of God” or something?

Of course it’s “ideological.” There are specific and known sets of ideas that result in economic growth, and known sets of ideas that result in economic failure. It doesn’t take a professor of philosophy to see this. Sheer empirical observation is enough, as we see from watching decades of people voting with their feet.

You want to talk about “decisions made a long time ago that seemed like good ideas at the time?” Look at the hard numbers on what’s dragging the Federal government down fiscally and ask yourself if you really want to go there. Do we need to go over “unfunded liabilities” yet again?

But if Mr Romney gets elected, and he cannot stop or reverse the economic decline, I doubt he or his followers will refrain from blaming it all on Obama.

Why would this be any less valid than the endless excuses we’ve been hearing since Obama was elected? Bush has been walking around with “the buck” for three and a half years now.

The deficit now is three times what it was when liberals were howling about Bush’s “un-American” deficits. More will be added to the debt in Obama’s four years than Bush added in eight, and Bush added a lot. Unemployment has hung at 8 percent and above for 42 months, the longest run since the Depression. Back when the same kind of ideas Obama is pushing held unemployment in double digits for a decade. Remember when unemployment rates below 5 percent was “the worst economy ever?” I do.

What fantasies and excuses are liberals going to concoct if ideas like free markets and limited government actually start to work?

Romney is not going to “fix the economy.” What can happen, with luck, is that the president and Senate will stop blocking things that will fix the economy. Want things to start working again? “Get the hell out of the way.”

But if Mr Romney gets elected, and he cannot stop or reverse the economic decline, I doubt he or his followers will refrain from blaming it all on Obama. “The Liberals left us such a mess not even we could fix it”. Or they would simply claim they “were able to prevent the Obama recession from getting any worse”. Sound familiar?

Whoever wins, we will not have the alternate reality to compare to to determine whether he saved us from disaster, or simply made things worse.

Out basic problem is that we seem to think that we can run the nation (and the world) by selling each other pizza and giving each other haircuts. We have an unsustainable consumer economy based on the promise of constant future growth, reliant on the creation and consumption of goods and services that are primarily expected to create jobs that enable people to buy even more goods and services next year, which will create more jobs. Its a vicious circle that only works because of easy credit and cheap natural resources. Well guess what, we’re running out of both, aren’t we?

When I was a kid I used to ask people why we changed the car models every year, and why were they always getting bigger and faster and shinier. I was told “it keeps people working”. I suspected there was a problem with this when I was ten years old. Ten years later, there was no doubt in mind. This basic fallacy is not just Republican. The Democrats believe it too. In fact, they invented it.

The reason I vote Democrat is not because I think they have any answers. I just believe they are more likely to allow some of the wealth to trickle down, people will get some benefit, some comfort, some relief. I got education, it was my way out. (They “pandered” to me.)

But if the Democrats don’t have any solutions, the Republicans don’t believe there’s a problem. I don’t think that they care what happens, as long as they’re safe.