Today Is Already The Tomorrow

[cgnao]

"There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: ‘In the long run we are all dead.’ And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and ripest wisdom.

"But the tragedy is that, on the contrary, we are already suffering the long-run consequences of the policies of the remote or recent past. Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore. The long-run consequences of some economic policies may become evident in a few months. Others may not become evident for several years. Still others may not become evident for decades. But in every case those long-run consequences are contained in the policy as surely as the hen was in the egg, the flower in the seed."

- Henry Hazlitt

[right_freds_dead]

in the long run we are alive. the rest is more or less a test.

because if its not, im busting out the nudie mags.

[Red Baron]

Today's UK economy resembles a table tottering on two legs.

It is based on little more than selling each other property at ever more inflated prices and an extended credit card binge on imported goods from China. The creation of 'real' wealth, by the production of goods and services that we can sell to the rest of the world, has been sacrificed on the altar of a self indulgent, debt-fuelled, spending spree that must be the biggest and longest in this country's history. Meanwhile those service industries, much trumpeted by Thatcher as the future for the UK, migrate overseas to lower paid, well educated and motivated workers.

I think the UK is in for an appalling few years when the hangover kicks in.

Edited September 15, 2005 by Red Baron