Blessed Are the Thrifty...

Thrift (also known by its broader name, Temperance)as a virtue ~ a notion familiar to the ancient Greeks, Buddhists and Catholics ~ an idea whose time has returned. That idea is a real hard-sell in post Great Depression era America. A 55 year old boomer, I have watched over my entire life as the buy-now-pay-later hucksters have quietly seized, gagged and bound our entire economy. I've watched people abuse credit card debt, bankruptcy laws and their fellow man at an ever-increasing rate, to the point that a fellow of my acquaintance who shall remain nameless, astounded our entire family and many of his friends and former colleagues and clients, by filing for bankruptcy over his credit card bills. He had the wherewithal to pay them having both an income in the high 60K range and having come into some money near the 200K range. But he chose not to. He made a calculated and more or less rational decision to leave the credit card company holding the bag and his fellow Americans making up the difference in increased interest rates, or fees, or however the credit companies figure such things. Billions upon billions in "bailout" cash, hot off the presses, and Ponzi schemes as a Wall Street fact of life based on pure greed and the fable of "something for nothing", all point like a smoking crater to a meteor crash site to the absolute requisite return of thrift and temperance.

Be sure and click on over and read the whole thing ~

From John Zmirak at Taki's magazine:
QUOTE People say that the best cure for a hangover is a hair of the dog that bit you. The people who say that are typically alcoholics. They’re using the logic of an addict, whose reason has been fried by a short-circuit in the pleasure-centers of the brain. Such people think it’s funny when they fall down at a parish Christmas party (even if they’re the Monsignor), when they puke on your champagne colored carpet (“Good thing that’s what I was drinking!”), when they shout some slur that gets you into a fight with numerous ethnic strangers—and they’ll probably think it’s funny when, one morning in the shower, their liver slides out of their ass.

And that, boys and girls, is what happened to our economy. As it lies there on the porcelain, we want to pick it up and put it back but we’re scared it might just dissolve. Anyway, the process would probably hurt. Do we really need it?

But that’s really what it means, when the Magi of either party discuss the need for an “economic stimulus,” or financial journalists worry about the decline in consumer spending—by consumers who are losing their jobs. Just to break things down: This winter our country crashed into a wall because of our addiction to spending money we haven’t got for stuff we don’t need. We overdosed, ran through our stash, and now we’re thrashing around in a cold turkey withdrawal—but here comes that nice man with the methadone…. UNQUOTE