Thank you MSM & Thrift as a Virtue

It's not often I can say this, but when both of my blog posts come courtesy of CNN (see below) and Newsweek, I have to give props to the much derided main stream media.

Joseph Epstein's article on prudence as a virtue again hits it on the head. If I was a narcissist, or was blind to the reality that only 3-4 people have visited this little corner of the internet, I would think the guy read my blog posts on Keynes and virtues. But while my hopes for originality have perhaps been dashed, I am much the happier to know that there is a growing recognition of the value of virtues that our modern society until so recently considered outdated and irrelevant.

The brief article is worth a read in its entirety, but a couple nuggets:

If the old game plan for American ambition entailed the slow but steady accretion of wealth, the new plan called for getting it now, lots of it, and as soon as possible.

This spirit is distinctly not the spirit of thrift. At a lower level of ambition, neither of course was the spirit of thrift to be found in the millions of Americans who allowed themselves to lapse into heavy credit-card debt or bought houses they couldn't afford, thinking, hope against hope, that they could somehow swing it, that something, surely, would turn up that would allow them to live beyond their means in perpetuity.

Preach. And on the current situation:

The recent global economic meltdown has put paid to unfettered financial optimism. But will it restore the spirit of thrift to Americans in their economic behavior? Hard to predict, of course, especially when government financing, backed into the corner of the present crisis, is far from being able to practice thrift. Quite the reverse. Balanced budgets, we have been told, are a thing of the past, and not likely to be part of the immediate future. The necessary thing, we are also told, is to get credit flowing again, to trigger people's spending, so that the economy can swing back into action. In all this, the practice of thrift doesn't really come into the conversation. Thrift is at its base anti-Keynesian. Lord Keynes, after all, said that "in the long run we are all dead." He also said, "The engine which drives enterprise is not thrift, but profit."

Is it possible to spend and yet not be spendthrift? It once was and had better be again, or we may all have had the course. (The name of the course is Western Civilization, Decline and Fall.)

Right on Joe, but can I maybe get a little mention next time?