The Current State of Things

Obama has only been in office for a short while; however, as it stands now, I am not impressed at all with the direction of this country. We are getting closer and closer to the brink of Socialism in which we have entirely too much government control. Further, it appears that our government is not necessarily doing the work of the people, instead reserving itself to do the work of partisanship.

I was initially, and still am very much against any sort of bailout to the Detroit three. It's funny, an industry that has made a living doing everything in its power to screw you for every dollar you have, is now getting taxpayer dollars to offset years of bad business and over-indulgence.

A true system in which Capitalism works provides for it's own checks and balances on companies that have run a muck with bullshit. The Detroit three have run a muck and as a result, their weakness have been exposed. You see, that's what the economy does, as it moves along it exposes companies that are weak. In tough times, only the strong and those willing to adapt survive. However, government intervention can curb this correction and unfortunately in this case I believe the government got it wrong. Our society is global and in order to be competitive on a global scale, or any scale,one must operate efficiently. The Detroit three have not done that in many years and as a result should have been forced into bankruptcy. Doing so, I believe would have earned the respect of the people for a company(ies) that had to make tough choices, but made them and as a result emerged better and stronger as a company. The Detroit three didn't do this and as a result I believe have lost the faith of the general public. The government may have bailed these guys out, but I will show my objection by taking my business elsewhere.

I believe now, more than ever throughout this current crisis, that many of us will emerge and live our lives in the way that my grandparent's generation lived. I don't expect to see the masses spend wrecklessly like before, and I don't expect the masses to live outside of their means. My grandparent's generation always had a little more than they needed and as a result had a lot left over when they passed. For many of us, our parents began buring through that money and as a result many are no equiped to weather this storm. Time'll tell, but I believe history will repeat itself and we will see a more frugal society (of course, that is until all of us who can remember this time have passed and those who did not live through it have no sense of what it was like).

I'm not sure what to make of the Bank Bailouts and the talk of Nationalization. Really, I can see both sides of the argument and I also think bank failure is on a whole different scale than automaker failure. I believe the government is right to intervene here, but to what scale and with what level of restrictions remains to be seen. I do believe that if I you have to seak out my taxpayer dollars to save your failing business the last thing you deserve is a multi-million dollar bonus. That much I'm sure of.