President Acorn: "Europe Broke as a Joke. Spend to Mend"

How bad is America's fiscal policy? Pretty bad. Even the drunk-sailors of Europe are lecturing us on the need for greater fiscal probity. The Europeans! Last time I checked, most European countries were allowing public sector employees to retire with full salary at 50, importing jihadis so that they could be put on welfare and paying farmers massive subsidies that force farmers in the Third World to starve to death. And yet the Europeans are right. . .

Here we are in 2010. The UK is led by Prime Minister David Cameron, who speaks openly about the next few decades of limitations imposed by prior overspending. Germany's Angela Merkel patiently explains to President Obama and gonzo-economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman why you actually cannot spend your way out of a Recession.

Merkel will again explain at the G20 summit in Toronto why it is time to pair back the "stimuli" and allow the private creation of jobs and wealth. This is 180 degrees away from what President Obama is asking Europe to do.

It is bad enough that Europe is facing the demographic catastrophe of no native children. Now America's policy is to induce Europe to go bankrupt. Then again, at least when the Turks/Arabs inherit the great nations of Europe, they will be stuck with huge bills and no way to borrow more money. Win?...

Perhaps we might suggest that the so-called "intellectual" President of the United States read Edmund Burke's "Speech on Conciliation," delivered before the British Parliament in 1775 and available here.

One excerpt deals with the previously unheard-of explosion of goods and services in the American colonies.

"We stand where we have an immense view of what is, and what is past. Clouds, indeed, and darkness, rest upon the future. Let us, however, before we descend from this noble eminence, reflect that this growth of our national prosperity has happened within the short period of the life of man. It has happened within sixty-eight years. There are those alive whose memory might touch the two extremities. For instance, my Lord Bathurst might remember all the stages of the progress. He was in 1704 of an age at least to be made to comprehend such things. He was then old enough acta parentum jam legere, et quae sit potuit cognoscere virtus. [Footnote: 17] Suppose, Sir, that the angel of this auspicious youth, foreseeing the many virtues which made him one of the most amiable, as he is one of the most fortunate, men of his age, had opened to him in vision that when in the fourth generation the third Prince of the House of Brunswick had sat twelve years on the throne of that nation which, by the happy issue of moderate and healing counsels, was to be made Great Britain, he should see his son, Lord Chancellor of England, turn back the current of hereditary dignity to its fountain, and raise him to a higher rank of peerage, whilst he enriched the family with a new one—if, amidst these bright and happy scenes of domestic honor and prosperity, that angel should have drawn up the curtain, and unfolded the rising glories of his country, and, whilst he was gazing with admiration on the then commercial grandeur of England, the genius should point out to him a little speck, scarcely visible in the mass of the national interest, a small seminal principle, rather than a formed body, and should tell him: "Young man, there is America—which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men, and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, [Footnote: 18] show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world. Whatever England has been growing to by a progressive increase of improvement, brought in by varieties of people, by succession of civilizing conquests and civilizing settlements in a series of seventeen hundred years, you shall see as much added to her by America in the course of a single life!" If this state of his country had been foretold to him, would it not require all the sanguine credulity of youth, and all the fervid glow of enthusiasm, to make him believe it? Fortunate man, he has lived to see it! Fortunate, indeed, if he lives to see nothing that shall vary the prospect, and cloud the setting of his day!

"Excuse me, Sir, if turning from such thoughts I resume this comparative view once more. You have seen it on a large scale; look at it on a small one. I will point out to your attention a particular instance of it in the single province of Pennsylvania. In the year 1704 that province called for L11,459 in value of your commodities, native and foreign. This was the whole. What did it demand in 1772? Why, nearly fifty times as much; for in that year the export to Pennsylvania was L507,909, nearly equal to the export to all the Colonies together in the first period.

"I choose, Sir, to enter into these minute and particular details, because generalities, which in all other cases are apt to heighten and raise the subject, have here a tendency to sink it. When we speak of the commerce with our Colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.

"So far, Sir, as to the importance of the object, in view of its commerce, as concerned in the exports from England. If I were to detail the imports, I could show how many enjoyments they procure which deceive the burthen of life; how many materials which invigorate the springs of national industry, and extend and animate every part of our foreign and domestic commerce. This would be a curious subject indeed; but I must prescribe bounds to myself in a matter so vast and various.

"I pass, therefore, to the Colonies in another point of view, their agriculture. This they have prosecuted with such a spirit, that, besides feeding plentifully their own growing multitude, their annual export of grain, comprehending rice, has some years ago exceeded a million in value. Of their last harvest I am persuaded they will export much more. At the beginning of the century some of these Colonies imported corn from the Mother Country. For some time past the Old World has been fed from the New. The scarcity which you have felt would have been a desolating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true filial piety, with a Roman charity, [Footnote: 19] had not put the full breast of its youthful exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent."

Burke's lengthy speech goes on to review history and to expound on the reasons for the outstanding success of the American colonies. He attributes that success to the great spirit of liberty which is exhibited among the citizenry, traces and explains that spirit as having 6 sources--"Then, Sir, from these six capital sources—of descent, of form of government, of religion in the Northern Provinces, of manners in the Southern, of education, of the remoteness of situation from the first mover of government—from all these causes a fierce spirit of liberty has grown up. It has grown with the growth of the people in your Colonies, and increased with the increase of their wealth; a spirit that unhappily meeting with an exercise of power in England which, however lawful, is not reconcilable to any ideas of liberty, much less with theirs, has kindled this flame that is ready to consume us."

The Founders of America were passionate about ordered liberty. They saw the "Old World" as just that. In their "New World," oppression by government was not to be tolerated. He spoke of the character and unique study and learning of the colonists in America. Burke noted: "In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze."

In warning the Parliament and discussing how governments govern, at one point he observed, "Despotism itself is obliged to truck and huckster." A govrnment that is attempting to impose its will on a free people--in any country--must mislead and "sell" its cause. Perhaps that is what we are seeing today.

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