Mark Gilroy

Bringing Books to Life!

Charles Darwin Discusses the Housing Bailout

Charles Darwin turned 200 years old on Feb. 12. Happy belated birthday.

I’m not going to touch his evolutionary theory in relation to biology and the origin of humans with a ten-foot pole – and I’m going to avoid cheap and gratuitous humor, like, “Charles you don’t need a match to light your birthday candles where he went,” or anything else juvenile.

No way am I getting anyone from any side of that debate mad at me. What I thought I’d do is get people mad at me for other things, like imagining what Darwin might have to say about Bailout Fever in Washington, D.C., applying aspects of his theory of evolution like natural selection, adaptability, and fitness.

Note: The views expressed may or may not be the views of the blogger in whole or in part. The character named Charles R. Darwin did in fact exist (Feb. 12, 1809 – April 19, 1882) but he probably did not state nor even think any of the following thoughts. This blogger is also not positing any theories of whether dead philosophers would agree to be interviewed. This is intended for entertainment only!

MG: Charles, what do you think of all the money the U.S. Government is spending to save companies and industries?

CD: They are simply rearranging chairs on the Titanic. The ship is sinking. And so will the whole fleet called Western Civilization if they keep pursuing such poppycock.

MG: Wow. How did you know that? The Titanic sunk in 1912 and you had already been dead almost 30 years.

CD: I have my sources.

MG: Like?

CD: Unnamed.

MG: I’ll leave it at that … but don’t you think it’s compassionate for a government to step in and relieve millions of people of the misery caused by such dramatic failures?

CD: Compassion? What does that have to do with survival? In fact, I’d say that rewarding weak and bumbling practices is the opposite of compassion. It hurts everybody.

MG: But it worked in the 1930s when FDR saved our nation from the Great Depression. Oh, I forgot you were already dead when that happened.

CD: I know the whole story.

MG: That’s right, you have sources.

CD: Exactly. In fact, I blame FDR and his adopted son LBJ for creating the conditions that will eventually lead the American economy into a death spiral.

MG: That’s rather dramatic. So are you saying that government assistance and intervention is always bad?

CD: First of all, I think government has an important role in economic evolution. I think Teddy Roosevelt got it right when he kept the Rockefellers from taking over the country and building an oligarchy that would have made Medieval feudal lords roll over in their graves with envy. You could argue that Teddy, not FDR, set the economy in motion. This opened up many more entrepreneurial opportunities. As a believer in letting natural selection take its course in a free market it doesn’t mean I don’t believe that there should be no accountability of corporations. For example, I believe they should pay for defrauding consumers. Nature has laws. Business should too. The business culture thrives when it adheres to good laws.

What FDR did may have helped America in the short term. But the course correction would have happened naturally, even if slower. And the companies that would have survived would have been much stronger for their resilience in face of adversity. But don’t be fooled. America is paying for FDR’s largesse with a populous that has screamed ever since, WHY AREN’T YOU SAVING ME? Maybe things are better for what he did and any argument about how history might have unfolded otherwise is pure speculation, either direction. I won’t say whether the payback is reasonable or not. But ask the Romans. Once the masses are promised that government will be the great problem solver, do they ever stop asking for their due? As a society you are constantly looking for money to fund the kinds of programs rolled out by FDR and accelerated by LBJ with his Great Society. Kennedy may have been from Boston but he would never put up with that kind of ethos. His dad taught him to exploit opportunities with the best of them. I digress. I’d just say again, the expectation and demand for more help, even after a crisis ends, never ends. People will ask for more and more government and more and more funding, which rewards ineptitude and punishes success. As glum as it looks in America right now, check out the economies of the more progressive social democracies. They won’t admit it but they would love to have your problems.

And ultimately natural selection finds a way anyway. When you crash and burn under the burden of compensating for a lack of fitness, you‘ll be singing a new tune, WHY COULDN’T YOU JUST LET US BE FREE?

MG: What about things like universal health care? Surely you can’t be so cold-hearted as to withhold that as a basic responsibility of the government?

CD: Again, I can’t think of a single country in the world that doesn’t envy your health care system. But I believe that when you move to socialized medicine America will absolutely love it. For a while. That is until services devolve and the governmental bureaucracy demonstrates it can no longer manage it. Then typical of America, you all will cry, UNFAIR!

MG: But it isn’t fair is it?

CD: Uh, who said anything about fair? I didn’t prescribe a theory of adaptation and fundamental fitness, I just described it. You all can do whatever you want.

MG: You seem awfully negative when it comes to government. Government gets a lot of things right.

CD: Sure they do. Other than eternal potholes around Chicago, Eisenhower’s interstate highway system was great. But when priorities and plans come from above, what happens to productivity? There ceases to be the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that feeds new design and development. There is no motivation to adapt to changing circumstances. So what you see is the eventual collapse of a healthy, breathing, growing economy. Capitalism does have to clean house in a big way every once and a while and incrementally on a daily basis, and yes people are hurt financially in the process. But you Americans worry too much about setbacks and love your histrionics. It sells newspapers! You take a snapshot and declare it is moving picture that will endure for 10 years! Almost as long as that Titanic film that came out a while back. I remember your end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it handwringing of 1987, which lasted about a month – and yes, I was already dead, but I do have my sources, so don’t ask how I remember. But in a fit and adaptable society, there are enough opportunities for people to get back on their feet. And don’t fool yourself. In a government-sponsored economic system, cataclysm comes as well. When the government can’t feed and clothe its wards the result is often violent and ugly in ways Americans can barely imagine.

MG: But owning a home has always been the American dream. Are you willing to kill that dream?

CD: You can manipulate the housing market with government rebates and incentives but it’s not going to solve the problem. Actually, if everyday Americans want to solve the housing crisis they can do so right now. Joe Homebuyer can go out and start a trend of buying and that will effect comparable sales and begin the process of price stabilization and even appreciation. But Americans aren’t doing that. Why? Not because of greed or corruption. It simply doesn’t make sense right now to buy. It’s not the investment it once was. The market was artificially inflated with government mandated lending policies and it’s still undergoing correction. Once it nears rock bottom people will buy again. Lenders will create new affordable lending practices to accommodate the demand. This will perpetuate appreciation. It will happen naturally. Just leave it alone.

MG: Where’s the compassion?

CD: Who said anything against a neighborliness that isn’t federally enacted?

Again, do what you want. Just make sure you have counted the cost of asking government to be the great financial problem solver. Does the make you more or less of a free nation? Does that fuel innovation and productivity or hinder it? Are you personally more responsible or less?

Having a government define and deliver what is good for the collective sounds compassionate and just might solve some short terms problems. But will government pull back from such a mandate? I’ve not seen such a tendency. One of my contemporaries, Karl, made a lot of utopian promises in an economic environment that was much more dire than it is today. Make sure the promises that have your heart thump thumping so excitedly today aren’t as empty!

It Was the Best of Times, the Worst of Times: The Economy

the economy: ups and downs

Economy: The Best Times, the Worst Times

I grew up in the volatile, exciting, and often strident 60s and 70s, finishing high school in the ‘spirit of ’76’ bicentennial year. During my formative years –

• John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated
• The culture of divorce and promiscuity took root and blossomed
• Watts burned and riots rocked Chicago during the Democratic National Convention
• America surrendered in war for the first time when it pulled out of Viet Nam – unless you count Korea, which was at best a stalemate
• Muslim terrorists killed Jewish athletes at the Olympics
• There was an energy crisis
• Commercial airlines and cruise ships were hi-jacked (and yes, my future wife was a ‘stewardess’ on that 1978 Delta flight that got redirected to Havana)
• The American auto industry lost its preeminent role
• A president was impeached and removed from office
• Disco conquered the airwaves – yikes
• The U.S. Olympic basketball team lost its first ever international game to the U.S.S.R. in a highly controversial ending
• Oh, and ‘we’ landed on the moon

Whatever you think of Jimmy Carter ‘the President,’ he made a number of profound statements that summed up where America was a month before the end of my teens years in a speech he gave on July 15, 1979.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea which founded our Nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else – public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We’ve always believed in something called progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.

Ironically, Carter’s greatest failing may have been the palpable sense of pessimism – a near doom? – that pervaded his demeanor and words throughout his presidency. And in case you are wondering, yes, this was part of his famous “malaise” speech. How was I going to argue with that? I didn’t feel very confident about the future myself.

It was Ronald Reagan who seemed to understand Carter’s words better than Carter himself and brought a positive buoyancy to the American psyche over much of the next decade. Some say he was just in the right place at the right time and got lucky that the business cycle turned around but even his most ardent critics have to admit his sense of optimism may have helped change some things.

In a Tale of Two Cities (1859) Charles Dickens penned the immortal phrase: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness … Set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, he showed how the peasants were oppressed and brutalized by the aristocracy and how in turn they were indiscriminately brutalized by the revolutionaries. (Brazilian author, educator, and reformer Paulo Freire described the psychological movement from oppressed to oppressor in his landmark book Pedagogy of the Oppressed [1968] that described freedom movements in South America.)

There is a lot of hand-wringing today. And for reason. There is a plethora of real and pervasive international, national, ethnic, economic, moral, social, personal, and spiritual problems. And yes, the American auto industry is reeling yet again.

Maybe it is the end of an era of prosperity and more importantly opportunity. But I suspect that the real reality is what Dickens described; we are living in the best of times and the worst of times. Even if consumer confidence was up and economic indicators were through the roof – the best of times for some – if there are oppressors and oppressed then it is still the worst of times … for somebody.

And yet a focus on such ‘realism’ simply doesn’t ignite passions and energize dreams. And what are dreams but what Carter called ‘confidence in the future’ … the belief – as unrealistic as it might seem – that my plans and actions can create a new reality. I can do something to build a better world.

Jesus said, ‘ the poor you will always have with you’ (Matthew 26:11) – very realistic – but men and women who have faith in Him have been at the forefront of compassionate ministry.

Even as companies fall there are people who still work to build new companies … and succeed.

Today is just like other days. The best of times. The worst of times. You may fall to one side of that equation personally. No matter. As a psychology professor said in a graduate class I took: I don’t care where you’ve been or even where you are … I want to know where you’re going!

So where are you going? What does the future look like to you?

Imagine Tat! What Do Tattoos Tell Us About a Person?

Do tattoos matter?

Do tattoos tell us anything about a person?

A friend in my age range – let’s not get too specific and just say somewhere between age 49 and 51 – just got a major tattoo.

I was at one of my 14-year-old’s AAU basketball games a couple Saturday’s ago and the mom of one of the players from the other team had also recently got ‘tatted’ up; a shoulder to wrist floral arrangement on both arms. Naive as I am, I kept thinking she had some sort of arm-nylons on under her sleeveless t-shirt. That’s what I explained to Amy who elbowed me because she thought I was looking over there too much.

Imagine tat!

Of course head for the local high school or even middle school and you’ll see a large number of young people with low ride jeans, high-rise shirts, and lots of tattooed skin. And then there’s the girls.

What do tattoos tell us about a person? Anything? (Is there an age limit on when you can get your first tattoo?)

The old adage claimed that “clothes make the man,” which seems way too superficial, just as getting worked up about tattoos seems judgmental, turning a matter of taste into a moral issue. Right?

Along those lines my grandpa insisted you could tell everything you needed to know about a potential job candidate from his shoes: “you don’t have to be rich to have your shoes shined.” He obviously hadn’t anticipated casual Fridays and Ecco comfort shoes.

But back to tattoos. Just in case you were wondering –

* 15% of Americans have been tattooed – about 40 million people
* 38% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 40 have been tattooed
* Democrats(18%) are more tattooed than Republicans (14%) and Independents (12%)
* Geographically the West (20%) outpaces the East (14%), Midwest (14%), and South (15%) among adults with tattoos
* About 20% of those who have been tattooed regret it, with the number one cause of regret being the person’s name in the tattoo (16%); 11% admit “it was stupid”
* Of those with tattoos 26% feel more attractive, while 5% feel more intelligent; 29% feel more rebellious and 57% of those without a tattoo agree that those with tattoos look more rebellious
* On google searches, more people are interested in Angelina’s tattoos than any other celebrity

I think the numbers speak for themselves. Besides proving that Democrats have a higher propensity toward rebelliousness, that Brad may or may not find tattoos attractive depending on which news source you take most seriously in the grocery store checkout line, and that the 5% of those who are tattooed may not be smart enough to know that ink on skin didn’t make them more intelligent, the conclusion really is quite evident and irrefutable … kids, the answer is still no … under no circumstance are you to get a tattoo!

Not even if you want a heart with Mom and Dad inside it.