dereliction

The US reached and surpassed its legal debt ceiling, before it was raised by Congress just before all money was obligated, back in mid-May, and extraordinary bookkeeping measures, creative accounting not far removed from the kind of shenanigans that led to the collapse of Enron and WorldCom and more recently, averted or deferred--Merrill-Lynch and Italy, were implanted to buy the government a little more time. Those extra weeks certainly were not devoted to serious contemplation and meditation. This paying Peter to rob Paul, was in part, financed by floating funds from the Thrift-Savings Plan (TSP) accounts of soldiers and government employees. Who's to say whether or not those retirement-nest-eggs were the first things made whole again, once the borrowing-limit was raised? That was no different than any other pension-raiding scheme. More so than any precedent that has coloured economics for good or bad through war, plague or invention, what I think we are seeing is not a failure in business but a crisis in governments. Avarice always dampens business-ventures, but globally governments have also been negligent in safeguarding treasure and creating, enforcing the regulatory framework that makes growth and meaningful employment sustainable. The job of governments is to protect its citizens from threats and promote equality of opportunity. Too much effort, however, is squandered in the name of safety from imagined but serviceable dangers and into cultivating the ideal consumer culture, instead of concentrating on ways, creative, dogged or just brute that makes people independent, self-sufficient and self-determined.