Think Twice Finance

Learning to Love the Banking Crisis: Living With Evil in the Best Available Society.

I spend most of my time in this blog raging against the storm of deceit and cynicism that brought us to what might be laughingly called the North American Financial System. But July 4^th is a’comin, and it’s time to acknowledge that we live in the fairest, most egalitarian, financial system that mankind has ever devised – anywhere.

I’m not going to temporize that statement by pretending that some of the places with like forebears and like histories are close. I’ve been there; done that and I know what I’m talking about. They are not close. At best they are pious imitations of the real thing. That is proved, and will continue to be proved in the foreseeable future by patterns of migration, among the wealthy as well as the poor, so you don’t need to take my word for it. It is proved by the incidence and sources of individual wealth as well.

My focus here will be an attempt to explain why this horrible system is the best.

• It has something to do with the wonderful start we got.
• It has something to do with location.
• And it has something to do with immigrant self selection.
• (We tell visiting acolytes that it’s impossible to explain why our system works – it just does. Believing that is the quickest way I know to lose what is probably our temporary good position.)

The Wonderful Start: This is a no-brainer. We fell out with Britain at an historical moment that brought into practice scads of great British ideas at a time when there too few historians available to tell us we were nuts. The British themselves were not so fortunate. That we were nuts is best evidenced by the New Hampshire pledge: “Live Free or Die.” Historically more accurate would be “Live Free and Die Young.” but that is less inspirational.

Location: Things went so well in Colonial America that we would have been annexed by somebody if the Atlantic Ocean had not made that so inconvenient.

Immigrant Self-Selection: Immigrants are today, and I suspect have always been, overachievers who sit around complaining to each other about the manifest unfairness of being an immigrant and the simple pleasures of home that they miss so much. Some take the obvious alternative, but most hang desperately to the possibility of staying. Any educated person knows our success as a country depends largely on these optimistic, hard working people’s pursuit of the relative freedom we possess. The average voter thinks that if the process ended today we would be able to sustain our system through the successes of their ancestors. Too silly.

Whatever the reason, we’re lucky. This lousy, corrupt, greed-ridden, duplicitous society allows us to live with greater respect for the rights of others and the will of the majority than anywhere else on earth. It’s a little paradox.