The Economy ?

I continue to be bothered by the whole economy thing. It seemed like a guilt-inducing bit of news that gee, whiz, we mean nasty consumers aren't doing our part to help the economy. We should just have bought more and more at Christmas. And the way of giving us a tax stimulus rebate now is to just decrease our withholding. That way we are more likely to spend it instead of putting the One Big Check into a savings account.

Then the Burnside Writer's Blog posted this highly apt quote from Wendell Berry. It says it well, as would be expected from Berry:

The idea of the current crop of "conservatives" - that government can cater to greed and leave charity to volunteers - is vicious and it can't work. The "liberal" idea - that the failures of a greedy and wasteful economy can be effectively patched by government services and regulations - is also hopeless. There is no way to get a good result from an economy that institutionalizes greed as an honorable motive and excuses waste and destruction as "acceptable costs."

- Wendell Berry in a 2005 interview with Preservation Magazine