Masters of the Universe

Richard Berry writes at The American Thinker that the financial mess we are seeing can be traced right back to the arrogance and incompetence of the Baby Boomer generation. And indeed, the people at the heart of most of our problems today are boomers who have, in one way or another, been systematically attacking the foundations on which this country rests for the last 40 years or so. In any area you can name, whether it be the popular culture, the economy, law, the arts or education, the lefty boomers have been consistent in their attempts to tear down centuries old institutions and replace them with their own gargantuan egos. The results have been predictably disastrous.

Given that the boomer left has always been hostile to the free market and capitalism it comes as no surprise that they have been working feverishly for years to undermine and destroy it. What is also clearly self-evident in this situation is that those boomers who went to work on Wall Street and for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, as well as those who went into the government, are also afflicted by a huge ignorance of how a free economy actually works and how fragile a society is when the foundations that hold it up are eroded.

They think that ever higher taxes on the productive and red tape to stop people from productive activity are good things. They think that destroying the rule of law and eliminating the objective standards of society will somehow improve it. They do not grasp that society is a delicate machine and that smashing the gears has a negative effect on how it runs. And they don't care if it harms you and your family. From their point of view, you are consuming too much anyway, and thus keeping the rest of the planet poor and oppressed. That the poverty and oppression is the result of the lack of a free market and limited government is a thought that does not occur to them because everything that they have ever been taught says otherwise.

Sadly, most schools don't teach real free market economics any longer because the teachers are hostile to it. Instead, if you are a student you will get some sort of warmed-over marxism boilerplate that blames capitalism and America for all of the world's problems. So those who go into business are left without an intellectual understanding of the system that they work in. Ask yourself if you would want to hire a mechanic to work on you car who was hostile to engines and who had never really taken a course that explained how they work.

But that is where we are, because the boomer elites have taken over our institutions and they have destroyed them. We will have a very big job fixing them, after the boomers have retired or been ejected from their positions of arrogant privilege.

My cohort, the sainted Boomer generation, now rules this country and its institutions. The elite of this generation, graduates of the finest schools, cosmopolitan in taste and sensibility, and left-liberal in political and cultural allegiance -- have always been counted the smartest people in the room (just ask them).

Now these new Masters of the Universe have made a shambles of the US and world financial system. This is, to be sure, not the construction put upon things by the main stream media, but it is plainly the case. The current market turmoil is a product of every bad trait the Boomer Elite has long exhibited in other social and political contexts: unbridled greed and hubris, exorbitant self-regard, breathtaking recklessness, insatiable appetite for immediate gratification, and a rollicking sense of entitlement.

We are seeing in the Wall Street implosion the inevitable result of the Boomer Elite outlook and the behavior it spawned. Storied investment banks were being run on 40 to 1 leverage. Fancy new securities were designed and widely disseminated whose terms are opaque even to highly knowledgeable and experienced hands. Mortgage securitization techniques were developed which, our betters assured us, would magically spread risk and thus stabilize the financial system. However, simultaneously with these brilliant innovations, lenders were being forced -- by Boomer Elite congressmen with an aching love of the poor and oppressed unique to themselves -- to loan to uncreditworthy borrowers at subprime rates and without adequate documentation. These loans, packaged into securities together with standard, performing loans, rendered unknowable the value of the securities, leading to mandatory write downs and drastic capital impairment or outright insolvency for many very large firms. Given the high degree of integration of the international financial system, critical destabilization was the real result of this confluence of Master of the Universe genius and Boomer Elite turpitude.

The unwillingness of the rest of us to underwrite the moral excesses of the Boomer Elite perfectly enrages them. So, today, the rest of us are being screamed at. In fact, the barrel of a gun is being pressed to our temple. It is demanded that we play our accustomed role of sheep to the slaughter. We are told we must funnel the better part of a trillion dollars to the fantastically imprudent, self-dealing Wall Streeters that gave us the mess, and that we must also chip in the odd tens of billions more on pet lefty projects with which the Boomer Elite, with characteristic cynicism, lard up the package.

Our efforts to be responsible citizens in this crisis are ridiculed and shouted down: exclude from the bail-out the pork and the payoffs to interest groups? How dare we! Include measures that might actually spur badly needed growth in the tough times now surely coming, like cuts in capital gains and corporate taxes? Leave the room!

This crisis is, at bottom, about self government in two senses and the Boomer Elite is against both. On the macro level, they don't want the American people to govern themselves under the terms of the Constitution of 1789, preferring to rule over us by anti-democratic means wherever possible, and to the full extent possible. On the micro level, being Rousseau's children, they abjure governing their own appetites, and bid everyone act likewise. The Boomer Elite ideal is a sort of Directorate in the political system and economy, moral anarchy in personal conduct, and a quasi-totalitarian PC regime in societal relations. It is bad character as a manifesto, and tsarism as a mode of governance.