The Obama administration has been a golden age for lobbyists, which is a big part of the reason why Washington D.C. and its suburbs are now the nation’s richest province. The fat cats will do whatever it takes to defend their privileges.

For a consumer or household spending $750 in 1964, all they would have been able to afford was a console color TV from the Sears Christmas catalog. A consumer or household spending that same amount of inflation-adjusted dollars today ($5,300) would be able to furnish their entire kitchen with 8 brand-new appliances (refrigerator, freezer, dishwasher, range, washer, dryer, microwave and blender) and buy 9 state-of-the-art electronic items (laptop, GPS, camera, home theater, plasma HDTV, iPod Touch, Blu-ray player, 300-CD changer and a Tivo recorder). And of course, even a billionaire in 1964 wouldn’t have been able to purchase many of the items that even a teenager can afford today, e.g. laptop, GPS, digital camera.

Real economic growth solves most problems and is the best antidote to high deficits, but the problems that we have now won’t be solved by growth. They’re simply too big. Unless we have another Industrial Revolution or another profound technological revolution like electrification in the 1920s or the IT revolution in the 1990s, we will not be able to grow enough to pull ourselves out of the debt hole we’re in.

The NFL encapsulates, perhaps better than any other single business entity, the popular conceptions — and misconceptions — about capitalism and the nature of markets. The league is the epitome of statist “crony” capitalism. Its franchise operators demand huge government subsidies for stadiums while jealously guarding its prerogatives as a “private” business. Governments (and their media enablers) largely go along with this because they’ve been led to believe the NFL’s popularity is so immense that no respectable city can go without a franchise. Professional football is the ethanol of the entertainment industry. Since 1990, nearly every NFL franchise has either opened a new stadium, made substantial renovations to existing stadiums, or is currently in the process of obtaining a new stadium. Over this 20-year period the league’s franchises obtained over $7 billion in taxpayer subsidies raging from direct taxes to publicly backed bonds. Ten stadiums are 100% government-financed, while another 19 are at least 75% government-financed. Every single franchise receives some amount of government subsidies.

In my living memory, every socialist failure has been blamed on the weather. And so it is with the pathetic job growth figures in the U.S., which the New York Times attributes to “snowstorms.” Never mind the minimum wage, the payroll tax, the regulations, the mandated benefits, the dozens of agencies that add artificial costs and risks to the hiring process, the unions, and the vast governmental machinery that inhibits start ups. It’s really all the fault of mother nature.

With no disrespect to teachers or any other profession, no one is “more special” than anyone else. People who believe they are special are a huge part of the problem. Everyone wants their group protected at the expense of everyone else. Every group has their own excuse why they are special. It’s one of the reasons we are in this mess. The person who emailed me has decidedly biased opinion (his wife is a teacher). I also hear it from police think they are special because their lives are on the line. However, stats show that agricultural work is far more dangerous than police work. Fishing and roofing are of the most dangerous professions of all. Should fisherman, roofers, and agricultural workers get “special” pension benefits? It is time to stop kidding ourselves and admit that no working class is more special than any other class.

If you don’t have the money you can’t pay it. It’s as simple as that. Moreover, unions better get used to that idea, especially at the city or county level. Otherwise many of these cases will end up in bankruptcy court for sure. There are a couple of issues people keep throwing my way. The first is “fairness”. Excuse me but what exactly is moral or fair about hiking taxes on those barely scraping by to give unjust rewards to someone else. Moreover, there is nothing fair about dumping this problem on generation X or Y either, many deep in debt, fresh out of college, with no job and no benefits at all. Besides, there is no blood to give. Companies go bankrupt all the time. Ask GM or United Airlines what happened to them. They had a contract too. Fairness aside, I consider the contracts to be fraudulent. Public unions coerced, bribed, and threatened Armageddon if they did not get their way. They also bought the votes of corrupt politicians. To top it off, the unions got into bed with administrators working out raises that often went up for each of them, usually in sync. No one was ever looking out for the taxpayer. Thus, it is hard for me to feel sorry for, or beholden to those screaming about fairness or contractual obligations. Indeed the fair thing, is to default and work it all out in bankruptcy court just as United and Delta did.

Since the 1970s, Democrats tried to balance the two sets of interests by creating consumer protections but allowing the capital markets to manage themselves. This dynamic has created a serious political problem in the last four years, because complete capitulation to the banks in the capital markets has pillaged the low-income and middle-income communities the Democrats thought they were standing up for. It’s not that the people who made this Faustian bargain are bad so much as they are fundamentally irresponsible and childish.

In summary, the cause of the financial crisis was not Wall Street, Congress, the Community Reinvestment Act, George W. Bush, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or Alan Greenspan. It was all of them and all of us collectively. It was the social organism that is the financial markets; it was human nature. Good judgment and wise men do exist; but all humans will continue to make self-serving and foolish choices; it has been this way since the beginning of time; and human nature will never change.