Enantiodromia: The Word of the Day....

5 April 2011

The following is a comment I made on the Dollar Vigilante Blog. If a little more context will help you after reading this, then click here for Jeff Berwick's thought-provoking article ("Mortgaging Our Grandchildren's Future? That's Being Optimistic!"). In any case, my recent thoughts on enantiodromia:

Jung (the Swiss psychiatrist) used the term "enantiodromia" to describe the psychological principle of "running into opposites."

Historically, no people have ever been more opposed to centrally-planned, non-free-market economies than the citizens of the US. That, of course, has changed, and it is perhaps instructive to analyze why.

The healthcare system is one example.

Layers of bureaucracy and regulation have accreted over the years to PREVENT the emergence of government-provided healthcare in the US. The notion that government regulation can advance a free-market system has made the quasi-free-market health-insurance-encumbered US health system perhaps the most expensive in the world.

Like it or lump it, but government-run healthcare in Canada costs half as much, and for most people, it is also better.

Somewhere, the idea that the government and the Fed have the "responsibility" to rescue an economy in trouble became acceptable (our forefathers would not have accepted this idea for a moment), and the executives on Wall Street have been feeding at the publicly mis-regulated "private" trough for decades, making Animal Farm no longer an allegory (the pigs are running the farmyard).

A guy I respect (Bill Fleckenstein) says that the Fed (the US Federal Reserve Bank, headed by Ben Bernanke) has more implicit responsibility for this situation than any other body, including the big spenders in Washington and the over-leveraged risk-takers and game-players on Wall Street.

That is, easy money creates a climate in which elected representatives, business leaders, et al, simply believe they will be rescued.

And of course the public buys into this idea.

Who in Wisconsin is demonstrating in the streets, saying, "Hey, thanks for saving us taxpayers the money we can't afford to pay!"

Anyway, the greatest opponents of the centrally-planned economy have now morphed into its greatest advocates. Read more about it at the Dollar Vigilante....

Enantiodromia: the word of the day.....
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