Clifford Asness embodies the American Dream as we understand it. What Obama perceives as the American Dream is our nightmare. I don’t see this ending well and I mean that in the ugliest fashion you can imagine.

The beauty of a guarantee is that it seems to involve no money, and need not be budgeted by the government. Eventually, there is a sudden need to pay out billions when you find that the guaranteed parties have borrowed at low interest rates and can’t pay anything back. The unexpected disaster was that building too many houses wrecked the market value of housing, to the surprise of left-leaning economists and politicians.

The current bailouts and huge budgets continue to serve the self-interest of politicians and government aligned groups. The government continues to leverage its ability to use guarantees, to borrow what it wants by promising repayment. It couldn’t possibly do this if it had to raise the money immediately through taxes. It won’t be able to raise the full amounts through taxes, even in the future. The result will be high taxes AND inflation.

We Guarantee It
The government is guaranteeing us into poverty. The story of the housing and economic crisis.

I’m not going to try to impose godliness, but certain basic moral precepts have to be accepted by the vast majority of the population.

Thou shalt not covet. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness.

And, Thou shalt not murder (abortion).

Also, Thou shalt not have any other gods before Me.

Its time and past time for the ‘Business is God’ people to realize that their primitive morality is not the whole Book. Its only a part of the Truth. And without the other parts, eventually the businessman will go down to defeat as well.

Its past time to stop trying to bargain with the Devil. “I want to be wicked, except in business where I wish an honest system.” The Devil will swear this contract with you, but he doesn’t deliver. See the Governator. Nice liberal social values, but he was going to be a good fiscal conservative. Didn’t happen.

If you find someone in Congress who’s hard core in defense of capitalism, you almost always find a social conservative.

And yet, people keep trying to repeal the Law of Gravity.

Now what are we going to do about it? We are not going to recover by stabbing one another on the back, not by plotting to read one another out of the movement.

We had a winning coalition and we can do it again, but it is going to take a gung ho–pulling together–effort. The way to build and maintain a winning coaition is to practice deference to our coalition partners with respect to each respective sunject of concern.

Some place the lives of the unborn above all else, others cling bitterly to their guns; others pursue economic freedom and an ownership society; still others, a vigorous conception of their country’s place in the world–it goes on and on.

We need to drop the dream of winning without any of our compoents. To be dropped also is the pipe-dream of winning by poaching the other side’s players. Peace-creeps, affirmative action parasites, gun-grabbers, Aztlan revanchists and yes, perverts, cannot be bought at any price we could possibly pay.

The only thing to be accomplished by pretending to try would be to demoralize our own people which would result in a right-schism and the end of our only chance.

It’s time for conservatives to get themselves a copy of F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” and give it a couple of good reads.

“The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored inquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call ‘the problem of happiness’ – in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude. Without economic security, the love of servitude cannot possibly come into existence…”

Here’s another (apologies for the lengthy ramble):

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers…”