tion? And if China were to tap its vast cash reserves and begin a domestic shopping spree, it might create a consumer revolution at home, in which ever-increasing expectations would fuel ever-rising discretionary spending. If one billion Chinese started investing in three-bedroom homes, SUVs, and power boats,toms wedges black lace, would the Chinese environment support it? Would China’s labor remain competitive? Could the government still control public discourse and expression?Besides the strange ways in which we addicts justify our borrowing habit vis-à-vis China, such huge sums have also warped politics at home. Republicans have not balanced a budget since the latter days of the Eisenhower presidency. We are supposed to nod and smile when they talk about financial responsibility, like the crowds at the naked emperor’s procession. Nixon, Reagan, and the two Bushes all employed varying exegeses to justify red ink — Keynes, supply side, tapering deficits, a balanced budget by 2010, etc. Clinton, in contrast,toms shoes jeans, was the last president to actually balance a budget — thanks mostly to a Republican Congress.The recent Republican-Democratic symbiosis about borrowing is bizarre: Democrats in Congress run up debts like teenagers, enabled by the fact that their Republican parents in the White House never call in their credit cards. Republicans, in turn, started calibrating debts and deficits as percentages of GDP, not in real dollars, once hundreds of billions had metamorphosed into tens of trillions.Liberals privately talked about “gorging the beast,” hoping that their out-of-control spending would force higher taxes, and with them a long-awaited redistribution of income and government-mandated equality of result. Conservatives have talked of “starving the beast,” by voting in tax cuts that would dry up government revenues and therefore force an end to huge federal expenditures. In the end, we got only higher taxes and higher spending and higher deficits and more debt. Republicans now say of Obama’s fantasyland deficits, “He’s gone way beyond Bush.” Democrats reply, “But Bush did it first.” Pages12Next ›Last »[标签:标题]
Utopia Versus Freedom If you cannot tolerate imperfections, be prepared to kiss your freedom goodbye. ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.” We have heard that many times. What is also the price of freedom is the toleration of imperfections. If everything that is wrong with the world becomes a reason to turn more power over to some political savior, then freedom is going to erode away, while we are mindlessly repeating the catchwords of the hour, whether “change,” “universal health care,toms size 9.5 womens shoes,” or “social justice.”If we can be so easily stampeded by rhetoric that neither the public nor Congress bothers to read (much less analyze) bills that make massive changes in medical care, then do not be surprised when life-and-death decisions about you or your family are taken out of your hands — and out of the hands of your doctor — and transferred to bureaucrats in Washington. Advertisement Let’s go back to square one. The universe was not made to our specifications. Nor were human beings. So there is nothing surprising in the fact that we are dissatisfied with many things at many times. The big question is whether we are prepared to follow any politician who claims to be able to “solve” our “problem.”If we are, then there will be a never ending series of “solutions,” each causing new problems calling for still more “solutions.” That way lies a never-ending quest, costing ever increasing amounts of taxpayers money and — more important — ever greater losses of your freedom to live your own life as you see fit, rather than as presumptuous elites dictate.Ultimately, our choice is to give up Utopian quests or give up our freedom. This has been recognized for centuries by some, but many others have not yet faced that reality, even today. If you think government should “do something” about anything that ticks you off, or anything you want and don’t have, then youRelated articles:

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