The American Spectator

p>Which is why I predicted to my last Political Science 104 class that in their lifetime (unhappily, not mine) they will witness the dissolution of a major political party. Hint: It won’t be the Democrats! Years ago, when I was a very young subaltern, a grizzled, hard-case1st Sergeant commented on what he perceived as a chronically bungling higher headquarters: “Sir, if they can’t run it, just shut it down.” Conservatives need, and will eventually demand a reliable place to go. The shutdown and recasting are coming. br> — J.C. Eaton br> Chetek, Wisconsin /p> p> THE DOLLAR DEBAUCHED br> Re: Lawrence A. Hunter’s Stop the Debauchery : /p> p>”Stop the Debauchery” by Lawrence A. Hunter is brilliant! I couldn’t agree more. Washington Irving also wrote of such debauchery in 1819 in his “Crayon Papers”: br> /p>

[There occasionally arise] those calm, sunny seasons in the commercial world, which are known by the name of “times of unexampled prosperity” … Every now and then the world is visited by one of these delusive seasons, when “the credit system” … expands to full luxuriance, everybody trusts everybody; a bad debt is a thing unheard of; the broad way to certain and sudden wealth lies plain and open; and men are tempted to dash forward boldly, from the facility of borrowing.

Promissory notes, interchanged between scheming individuals, are liberally discounted at the banks, which become so many mints to coin words into cash; and as the supply of words is inexhaustible, it may readily be supposed what a vast amount of promissory capital is soon in circulation. Every one now talks in thousands; nothing is heard but gigantic operations in trade; great purchases and sales of real property, and immense sums made at every transfer. All, to be sure, as yet exists in promise; but the believer in promises calculates the aggregate as solid capital, and falls back in amazement at the amount of public wealth, the “unexampled state of public prosperity.”

Now is the time for speculative and dreaming or designing men. They relate their dreams and projects to the ignorant and credulous, dazzle them with golden visions, and set them madding after shadows. The example of one stimulates another; speculation rises on speculation; bubble rises on bubble; every one helps with his breath to swell the windy superstructure, and admires and wonders at the magnitude of the inflation he has contributed to produce.

Speculation is the romance of trade, and casts contempt upon all its sober realities. It renders the stock-jobber a magician, and the exchange a region of enchantment. It elevates the merchant into a kind of knight-errant….The slow but sure gains of snug percentage become despicable in his eyes; no “operation” is thought worthy of attention that does not double or treble the investment. No business is worth following that does not promise an immediate fortune….

Could this delusion always last, the life of a merchant would indeed be a golden dream; but it is as short as it is brilliant. Let but a doubt enter, and the “season of unexampled prosperity” is at end. The coinage of words is suddenly curtailed; the promissory capital begins to vanish into smoke; a panic succeeds, and the whole superstructure, built upon credit and reared by speculation, crumbles to the ground, leaving scarce a wreck behind…

When a man of business, therefore, hears on every side rumors of fortunes suddenly acquired; when he finds banks liberal, and brokers busy; when he sees adventurers flush of paper capital, and full of scheme and enterprise; when he perceives a greater disposition to buy than to sell; when trade overflows its accustomed channels and deluges the country; when he hears of new regions of commercial adventure; of distant marts and distant mines, swallowing merchandise and disgorging gold; when he finds joint-stock companies of all kinds forming; railroads, canals, and locomotive engines, springing up on every side; when idlers suddenly become men of business, and dash into the game of commerce as they would into the hazards of the faro table; when he beholds the streets glittering with new equipages, palaces conjured up by the magic of speculation; tradesmen flushed with sudden success, and vying with each other in ostentatious expense; in a word, when he hears the whole community joining in the theme of “unexampled prosperity,” let him look upon the whole as a “weather-breeder,” and prepare for the impending storm.