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Will the Children Keep Ruling the Nursery

Robert Patton

For more than two weeks, so-called journalists have been wailing about the “government shutdown.”

There have been meetings with so-called leaders, right up to the head cheese himself in the White

House. What did they discuss? That’s not for us to know.  

Instead we heard nothing but rhetoric of the basest sort. We’ve heard interview after interview of 

pundits who claim to know things that are largely unknowable. We have heard estimates of our

economic losses, and the frightening consequences potentially threatening the entire world. Those that

have some reluctance about continuing the decades-long process of going deeper and deeper into debt

are holding the nation hostage. Worse yet they are threatening the “full faith and credit” of the United

States. What is that anyway?

However honest and hardworking you may be, try convincing a lender that they can trust in your  full

faith and credit in granting a loan, not just once, but year after year as you ask for new loans to meet the

payments on the old ones. If that strategy could work for anyone but our elected and appointed leaders

we could all enjoy rich lifestyles without effort. The late Murray Rothbard, a brilliant economist who has

a huge following today, nearly two decades after his death, offered his solution to the fiscal problems of 

a government that could not function without borrowing more and more from its own citizens and from

foreign nations.

There is no choice, said Rothbard, “repudiate the national debt.” This idea was invariably greeted with

shock by anyone who heard it. What about the full faith and credit of the United States, they would ask.

Repudiation would destroy the credit of the country. Murray would patiently point out that the US

Government produces absolutely nothing and depends solely on confiscating assets from those that do.

Repudiation, what our politicians like to call default, is the only honest solution. It is a frank admission

that through years of fiscal irresponsibility, government debt has reached the point where it can never

be paid off. If that happens to any individual, organization, or corporation, the inevitable consequence is

the bankruptcy courts. Many national governments have experienced bankruptcy. What makes us

different?

The difference is that while Greece can be bailed out by Germany and a Latin American republic can be

bailed out by the United States, we are at the top of the food chain. There is no bailout available for aonce prosperous nation that has traveled a long road to the verge of financial ruin.

Well the manufactured crisis is over, but the real crisis remains. A 35-page document in Congressional

legal speak has allowed the nation to go deeper into debt for a while. Amazingly, they even managed to

squeeze a bit of pork into the bill. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s home state of Kentucky will

receive funding for a lock and dam project on the Ohio River and the widow of the late New Jersey

senator will receive $174,000 in compensation in spite of the family ’s net worth of nearly $60 million. 

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Everything is now once more on the back burner. If our leaders are intelligent and mature, they will be

work hard and seriously to device a way to responsibly deal with the burden of debt that we carry and

that, unchecked, will inevitably destroy the dollar.

Or they can continue to behave like unruly children and lead us down the same dark path.