For last week, most of the economic talk has been about either the pending auto industry bailout, or Obama’s purposed new stimulus plan. (And the fact that we are now ‘officially’ in a recession, but that’s not a policy question.) Everybody has their own opinion on these two plans. Most of the liberals say that the auto industry bailout is just the same thing that was done for the financial industry, except that the auto industry counts as ‘main street’, so now, it’s okay. The stimulus plan is supposed to have the same effect as the tax refund – increase spending, and get the economy ‘moving’. The difference? It’s supposed to be better, because the states will have more control of the money. The conservative answer to all of this? “Where’s the money going to come from.”

They’re all wrong.

Yes, I realize I simplified in the above paragraph. But here are the problems with the above plans:

The auto bailout: Cars are wasteful and horrible. The use immense amounts of resources to manufacture. They pollute the environment. They use huge amounts of energy. An electric car, which is at least not polluting directly (there is, of course, coal and nuclear pollution!) likely uses more energy than a gasoline car! Americans buy cars far more often than we need too – leading to even more waste. And cars kill a tremendous number of people during operation! We don’t need more cars. That money would be much better spent in finding way to help people avoid needing cars, not to prop up a mismanaged industry. Find some other way to help the auto employees.

Of course, we needed the wall street bailout even less than we needed this one, but two wrongs don’t make a right.

Economic Bailout. We don’t need to spend more! Spending is what got us into this mess to begin with. Americans consume more per capita than any other country, and that is:

1. Unfair and exploitive, and

2. Impossible to sustain without resorting to force, to keep the other countries giving us stuff for free.

What we need is to consume less, and keep the percentage of the population who consumes a disproportionate amount of value from doing so. More spending is not the answer!

I wish that, instead of the Democratic and Republican parties being the two major parties, that the Libertarian and Green parties were the major parties. I think that they would balance each other out nicely.

Here’s what the Libertarian Party has right:

1. Small government. The smaller, the better.
2. Economic theory. supply and demand really does work out. Debt is a bad thing.
3. Military isolation. We have absolutely no business playing world policeman.

And the Green Party?

1. Social policy. The government exist the serve the people – and especially those who are being exploited.
2. Economic practice. Those with power (capital), abuse that power, and all the free markets in the universe can’t stop that.
3. General foreign policy. Fair trade. The idea that the world does not revolve around the US.

I think it would be a great improvement if the power were to shift to those two parties, rather than the present state.