Shutting Detroit Down

I dislike repeating talking points. Repeating singing points ... Well, that's a different matter.

Country Music singer John Rich dropped a charged song called "Shutting Detroit Down" expressing anger at the ruling class.

Personally, I don't think populist anger will end up solving any of our problems. The problem is that the ruling class is adept at channelling partisan anger to their ends. A prime example of this was the skillful maneuvering last week that channelled the anger about excessive government spending toward the AIG executive bonuses.

History seems to show that, more often than not, populist anger tends to backfire on the people. Too often the populist falls for the line that they must vote in a charismatic strong arm to battle the corruption when, in practice, the charismatic strong arm is often the source of the corruption.

The song hits an important point that the real economy was actually doing pretty good a few years back. The problem is that our politicians, banks and hedge funds snuck in a large number of regulations that allowed financial institutions to make leveraged plays against the equity created by others.

When the house of cards collapses, the politicians and banks get together in an effort to settle the accounts on the real economy.

Anyway, it looks like this John Rich guy will end up climbing his way into that top tax bracket this year. We need honest people, who file their taxes, to make some money so that we can pay for all of the government spending; so, I decided to spread this singing point. I put the Amazon widget to the side. The iTunes button will launch your iTunes player.



Hopefully future generations will realize the folly of a financial system that allows insiders to use credit default swaps and short selling to leverage off the work of others.