In Jim Cook's Archive

THE FALL

I have this reoccurring fear that the present path of America is leading to something ugly. Emerson had it right when he claimed that pride and excess would collapse upon itself. He wrote of how a great leveling would follow those with too much success. The process of inflating can supercharge the economy and give us a temporary high, but it often accompanies the decline and fall of empires. Booms lead to busts. Hubris leads to pain and humiliation. Every indication points to the fact that we are in an era of excess. Is not free money excessive?

I was at a wedding anniversary for a friend. He introduced me to his granddaughter and in the next breath he told me she was a communist. They sent her to a college in St. Paul, Minnesota and after four years she came home an ardent Marxist. Is that not something to worry about for your nation?

Last week I was at a reunion lunch with my high school classmates. One of them asked me if I thought we had lived through a golden age? I said yes. Now, on top of civic unrest, rising crime and our mutual antagonisms, we run the risk of a runaway level of inflation followed by an economic collapse of epic proportions leading to a depression of unprecedented magnitude.

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