Taking Statism Global

Having now poured stimulus upon stimulus into their respective National economies, and begun the long and arduous process of setting said economies on the road to bankruptcy, the leaders of the world's greatest economies have spent the last several days gathering to see if they could strike a deal to take their failed policies supra-national. And so they have. We are now set to get a new $1 trillion global stimulus package to complement the, now, $10.5 Trillion that the United States has already appropriated/spent on various bailouts, stimulus, and TARP projects over the last half-year or so.

(For those of you keeping score at home, our national GDP was $14.3 trillion last year - meaning that, if President Obama gets his wish and we do get a 'TARP II', we'll have kindda spent our whole, entire economy in order to, uh, save it. Because that clearly makes sense.)

Apparently TANSTAFL has been replaced as the one, hard-and-fast economic rule by a new one, which rests on a firm belief in the ability of deficit spending to cure all ills - the actual numbers be damned!!

As far as this new, global stimulus is concerned, its basically an extension of all the quasi-socialist/genuinely statist bullshit we've been getting here in the United States. We're going to give some more government bureaucrats the ability to regulate and restrict bankers' pay and bonuses - because, damn it, if some red-meat populism is good, more is even better. And nothing stokes populist fires (and poll numbers...) like hating on evil corporations, bankers, etcetera.

Nevermind that it's actually counterproductive as an economic policy.

Of course, having already gotten on the 'regulation' bandwagon with the banker stuff, it only made sense for these folks to take that a step further with other institutions. Thus, we are also going to get a new set of stricter and tougher regulatory policies for hedge funds and credit agencies. Because, again, nevermind the actual relationship between government regulation and economic growth, let's do it anyway.

We're also going to give more power to the IMF; because, clearly, what we need in order to solve these economic problems, and prevent them from happening ever again, is more input from international government bureaucrats whose own chain of command is somewhat murky. Finally, in this time of economic hardship and ballooning deficits, we're also going to take $100 billion and give it to poor countries; in other words, all the little tyrants running fake democratic countries in sub-Saharan Africa are having trouble in this economic climate too, so let's give them some cash.

And that's about it, more bullshit spending that inches us further away from a free-market system and transfers power and money from people to bureaucrats. Only this time, it's gone global. Change, indeed.