Voters have given the GOP the opportunity to make an unbelievable difference in the history of our nation. Let's not waste it!
The economy is the most important issue right now, and it will continue to be for the forseeable future. The Republican Party has taken great interest in foreign policy and social issues, but we've forgotten not only what makes an economy thrive, but why. Our party's politicians voted for record-breaking deficits, prescription drug entitlements, and stood by quietly while Greenspan and Bernanke floored the monetary printing press. Republicans didn't stand up against these actions because they didn't understand precisely why they were wrong.
Learning economics--real economics--is the only way we survive, both politically and financially. The conservative movement has a great tradition of economic wisdom. The arguments for low taxes, low spending, and low monetary inflation are sound, tested, and proven.
When the Federal Reserve's first bubble economy popped in 1921, unemployment soared to almost 12%. The Republican Harding administration took a complete laissez faire approach: no stimulus, no bailouts, no "quantitative easing". Within three years, unemployment returned to nearly 2%.
When President Reagan inherited from Carter an economy on the brink of inflationary depression, Reagan and Fed Chairman Volcker stopped the monetary printing press, raised interest rates, cut taxes, and put the brakes on spending. The economy suffered a brief recession, got the muck out of its system, and returned to a decade of a solid growth.
On the other hand, every time government tries its hardest to intervene in and stop a recession, the recession gets drawn out into an economic catastrophe. Hoover and FDR's New Deal (yes, it was a joint effort) turned the 1929 crash into a Great Depression. Ford and Carter's interventionism gave us the Great Stagflation. Bush and Obama's New New Deal (lest we forget that the bailouts and stimuli and inflation were Bush's ideas) has turned the routine popping of an asset bubble into a Great Recession.
There is a reason why free markets work and interventionism doesn't. Markets work because people are allowed to come together and coordinate their wants and desires through mechanisms such as prices and interest rates. Because no central planners can ever possibly know what consumers want and need better than consumers know for themselves, central planners are doomed to failure. Where ever governments intrude, they merely distort and black out these market signals, making it impossible for buyers and sellers to coordinate their activities.
We need to become experts on economic history, and we must be able to articulate how an economy functions.
I challenge you, the reader, to go read at least one book by each of these three authors, and to try to finish the books before the next Congress reconvenes on January 3rd:
•Any one book by Murray Rothbard. (My personal suggestion: What Has Government Done To Our Money?)
•Any one book by F. A. Hayek. (My personal suggestion: Individualism and Economic Order)
•Any one book by Milton Friedman. (My personal suggestion: Free to Choose)
We can make a tremendous difference, and make 2010 an unforgettable year of right decisions in our nation's history. We just need to learn what works, what doesn't, and why.
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Published on RightOSphere.com.
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