Mr. Peterson's 7th Hour Econ Class

Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do. -- Old Joke # 1219

It's no wonder that the people are confused about government and economics. There's an obfuscation of the cause and effect connecting government and economics. It's clear to me that virtually all economic problems are traceable to one government program or another.

Government and Econ were the classes taught in high school, often by the same guy, that were skipped regularly by my classmates. Why did Mr. Peterson always seem to have 7th hour? Why were his classes so dry and uninteresting? Yes, there is a constitution, and it says something about our rights, and yes there's the economics of check writing and maybe some other stuff about money.

I wonder if Mr. Peterson didn't believe in the value of history. Maybe he himself did not understand the significance of economics, and why Americans need to understand it. Today, if he was looking at what I'm looking at, he would have grabbed us by our collars and screamed about this crucial stuff. Many of us thought calculus was some kind of mysterious orb of truth that we had to spend time in contemplating. Truth is, we'd all have been better off reading another economics book; because lo and behold, that's where the problems lie today that will consume our country.

I realize that 30 some years after high school; virtually nobody understands economics. Few of us know that taxes reduce disposable income, destroy incentives, and kill job growth. Fewer still realize that every spending bill from congress has myriad unintended consequences including the growth of government infrastructure to support it. Forget bridges to nowhere. Those are a very small drop in the bucket compared to the long term neutron economic bomb contained in the typical bill itself. Pick any new government program. It came with a couple of tchotchkies for the congressman, but it cost a lot more than that.

Now the government is printing up 700 billion to rescue Wall Street. When exactly did Wall Street become a ward of the court? Probably the least productive of all persons are those who merely carry someone else's money. Wouldn't society have been much better off letting these guys become policemen, golf caddies, or (dare I say it), plumbers?

Here's the thing: every bill that grows government hurts us all. "No child left behind" has conditioned teachers to teach test taking 101, when what the teachers should be doing is teaching Econ 302.

So, in our long term detentions, we travel along an economic path electing one big government champion (Bush 41) to another (Bill Clinton) to another (Bush 43) to another (your choice), and we expect that one of these left turns will eventually turn out "right". It reads like an old joke, and it is, one most certainly on all of us.