Time to Go Fishing Again

Back in October, Geir Haarde, the then Prime Minister of Iceland told his countymen it was time to go back to fishing again.

It was time to do real work rather that rely on magic money and elaborate banking schemes. Iceland was a country with "fantastic resources and an abundance of green energy" and it was time for the nation to return to its roots, which has historically been at the nexus of human capital and the oceans.

It was time to go fishing.

I am still waiting for that lecture here in America.

Getting America back on track is not going to be about magic. It's going to be about getting back to basics: real work, real savings, and quality products manufactured right here in America by Americans.

Instead of doing that, we have spent the last decade or more purchasing throw-away crap made in China while watching get-rich-quick infomercials, and borrowing on the house.

Hard work, we were told, was for fools.

The trick was to borrow a load of cash and leverage it. That's how you got rich in the stock market, and that's how you got rich in real estate, we were told.

Doing well was not done by producing quality work and pricing it fairly; it was about secret knowledge and financial sleight-of-hand tricks. It was about price-gouging and kickbacks and packaging bad debt as AAA bonds.

You were not supposed to go slow. You were supposed to "go big" by buying run-down houses for "no money down" and hiring illegal aliens to do shoddy work so you could "do a flip" every three weeks.

We were told we needed a "wealth building system" based on "winning in the cash-flow business."

We were lectured to by sleazy hucksters with pneumatic barbies on their arms who said we could become millionaires by doing parttime work.

This carnival of greed came with a matched set of dwarves preaching a New Gospel of Avarice, and it came with preachers who were only too willing to offer a Biblical gloss to it all

Right. And look where we are now.

It was not so long ago that James Glassman, a former financial writer for The Washington Post, was telling the world that the Dow would hit 36,000. According to Glassman, we should scrap the Social Security system so everyone could become a millionaire overnight.

Right. And how is your 401-K doing?

And, of course, we were all supposed to pay homage to the WalMart economy, where wages are poor, the work is part-time, and all the goods are made by workers unseen who live on a bucket of fishheads a day in a country half this nation could not find on a map.

And what are we supposed to do with our too-little wages, and eroding health care security? Why, go to WalMart of course, where everthing is low-priced, including the generic drugs.

The Prime Minister of Iceland is right; it's time to go back to fishing again.

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