We Had to Destroy the Village to Save It

In the Vietnam Conflict there were many moments of absurdity. Probably one of the worst, was the interview of an American commander, who called in an airstrike to obliterate a South Vietnamese village, totally destroying it, to save it from the Viet Cong. As I recall, it was later discovered that no Viet Cong were in the village.

In the late 1800s, millions of buffalo were killed, to deny Plains Indians food, so that white settlers could move into their land. An entire eco-system was destroyed in California, in the pursuit of gold at the same approximate time.

The urge of human beings, to destroy, in order to build, is an historical fact and an irony. It does not work!

We are seeing the same thing in Europe and in the United States today, in the approach to economic problems.

The urge is to cleanse, to destroy, to cut, to annihilate, in some kind of belief that less is more, that to fire thousands will fix things. These approaches, like the one in Vietnam, result in destruction alone, and more misery.

Herbert Hoover found this out in 1929-1932. The conventional wisdom of the time, was to balance a budget if the economy went into a downturn. Every time that had been done, the economy flat lined even more, but conventional wisdom dictated that the government had no place in economic regulation. So, Hoover fiddled while the country burned.

It took Franklin Roosevelt, who applied some of the principles of a little known British economist, Keynes, to regulate free enterprise, stimulate the economy through government spending, (WWII really did that), to turn the American economy around. And, from 1945 to 1980, the New Deal, continued to produce the largest economic expansion in American history. Keynesian economic ruled the conventional wisdom, the government grew, income was re-distributed into a huge middle class, and America prospered like never before.

Then came 1980 and the Laffer Curve. Once again, the naysayers got the American Public's attention. Once again, the bitter medicine approach was adopted, cutting taxes and allegedly cutting spending; with the result that from 1980 to present, we now have the largest gap between rich and poor since the post Civil War era. The middle class has shrunk, and misery through austerity seems to be the conventional wisdom, especially with the far right; especially the RICH far right.

And what now, Republicans are once again chanting that they must shut the government down to save it; that not paying social security payments, defaulting on the debt, will somehow lead to a cleansing of our troubled economy.

We even get them saying that our grandchildren's lives depend on it.

Bullshit! That is right, bullshit! It is the same idiotic reasoning that called in an airstrike to destroy that Vietnamese village. Even if the Vietcong were there, what was accomplished by leveling the place? All the animals, people, babies, grandmothers, children were killed. Whose village was it when it was gone? How can you save something by destroying it?

Likewise, the killing of the buffalo herds may have starved the Indians, but it also led to the immense grasslands being thrown out of ecological balance, leading directly to the dustbowl, the worst environmental disaster in history. The white settlers, who got their land, got a living hell in the bargain.

And California's destruction of its watershed to save the gold, resulted in a disaster that billions of dollars are still trying to resolve via the Central Valley Project.

In short, beware of "cleansing solutions" or destroying or cutting to "save" things.

Finally, we have evidence right now, if we only look at Europe, of the irony of a destructive austerity approach.

They decided, wrongly, to adopt a strict austerity plan to counter the recession, and are back in another one. Greece, that American Conservatives like to point to as proof for an austere approach, continues to not pay taxes, cut spending, and is approaching the economic status of a banana republic.

Cons were wrong in 1870, 1890, 1929, 1968, 1980, 2003, 2007, and 2013. If they shut down the government to "save" the economy for "our grandchildren", they will destroy their grandparents, shoot us yet again in the foot, and plunge our nation back into economic disaster.

As Forrest Gump famously said, "Stupid is as Stupid Does"!!!!!!!