Looks Like Everything’s Gonna Be OK!
Our modern society depends heavily on substantiating claims and backing them up with “facts”.? We see these here everyday, as writers for thelobbyist attempt to demonstrate that we do not just come up with the stuff we write out of thin air.? We are not the New York Times, so we are not afforded that privilege.? John Adams once sarcastically quipped that facts were “stubborn things,” and their stubbornness lies in the inherent inability of anyone to disprove what can be taken as a fact.? Such is the problem of the fact-value distinction: a derivative of the modern project that is exaggerated by political scientists and economist.? Take the numbers as they are, and let their quantitative values speak more loudly than their qualitative values.? What is better?? The fact that a policy raises more money, or the fact that a policy that raises more money also can contribute to cultural decay such as gambling.? There is no more right/wrong anymore, because that is all relative (to both liberals and many conservatives).? Instead, the answer will always be the one supported by quantitative facts.
So how then, are we to digest the recent GDP numbers that were released yesterday?? The news undoubtedly brought optimism to the number crunchers and economists who are no friend to the good life but rather the abundant life.? The DOW yesterday, ascended as though carried into the heavens on the wings of their optimism 199 points after a several-day long slump.? I am reminded of the line from the movie Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, particularly the commercial (the line was sadly stricken from the movie which, I did indeed, pay to see and enjoyed) when the police officer says to the people with eyes the size of saucers, “Looks like everything turned out?O.K.!” as a flying piece of food destroys the building right behind him.
The recession is over… right?? A recession is defined as two or more quarters of economic contraction generally, or a 1.5% rise in unemployment, or any other number of things.? By all technicality, the worst recession in 7 quarters is over.? Those are the facts.?
This announcement was followed shortly by another economic declaration regarding the slumping consumer spending figures.? Economists admit that the strong GDP can be attributed to the government spending programs like “Cash for Clunkers” which turned out to have cost $24,000 per car.? In the end, however, it is being admitted that we can go ahead and plan for weaker than normal 4th Quarter profits.? Nevertheless, the fourth quarter is the one that leads into the holiday season, which will allow the administration and wall street syccophants to use that all so clever “we still had growth, it just wasn’t as much as we hoped,” or “we planned for it being bad, and it wasn’t as bad as our worst predictions.”?
Which of these facts shall we use to mold our own ideas of what the future will bring?? Is the recession over, and on the verge of full recovery?? Is the only thing holding us back from such a recovery is the opposition to the President’s federal expansion?? Why are there so many different figures pointing so many different ways?? Do they not understand that in our modern society we would rather be guided by mundane facts and figures instead of by reasoning toward the good life, and that we cannot do that so easily and escape the “pain of thinking” and the “agony of living” as Tocqueville warns??
The government programs that will be credited with bringing us out of an officialrecession do not touch or explain away human nature and the deeper problems our regime is facing.? We must dig to penetrating depths into the soul of our Republic, and learn to start thinking about what is right and wrong, and stop this slide into not thinking at all but reacting to the latest facts, figures and reports.?
-rj
