Corrigan: Unsound money and unrestrained credit

Over at The Cobden Centre, another superb article from Sean Corrigan:

Unsound money and unrestrained credit combines far too readily with Man’s inherent disinclination to live off the sweat of his brow to make him an easy mark for every smooth-tongued, silk-suited chancer who promises him a ticket out of the Land of Nod and, once, again, this fatal weakness has led us to a ruin which has engulfed the innocent along with the guilty.

This collapse, so our friends on the left were only too happy to declare, marked the ‘Death of Capitalism’, but it looks as though their declaration may have been just a little premature. Here we are, only two years after they jubilantly read the rites over the first corpse and the trillion dollar wake they threw may have led directly to the demise of their beloved Provider State as well.

The irony here is that while people may be blind to the notion that their own reckless borrowing and determined over-consumption was what led to disaster, they are far more likely to acknowledge that a similar act of untoward extension by the State is not to be countenanced.

As the limitations of ‘Crude Keynesianism’ became more apparent, the debate swiftly moved on from the phoney war of whether there should have been a bail out or not to a similarly heated one about whether we now need something categorised as ‘austerity’ or a further dose of Big Government stimulus.

The truth is that even to frame the issue in this simple, sound-bite fashion is to concede half the argument.

What is ’stimulating’ about plying the drunkard with more drink or offering the glutton another helping of cake and what is ‘austere’ about the profligate being told to live once more, within his means?