Savers vs Alcoholics

Paul Krugman has been reported as being against austerity. The current economy is too fragile to avoid further stimulatory public spending, he says. The time to save money and trim spending is well into the future. That's his plan, to find the extra bucks to fill in debts when times are flush.

It won't work. The problem with stimulus spending is that it tends to be strongly captured or directed to those who can express, show, or prove the deepest human-felt need. Typically, the best "alcoholic," meaning the people with the most abject addiction, will make the best guilt-inducing case for the extra stimulus. The funds then are spent badly, without return on investment, and the government goes deeper in debt.

Really, the battle is titanic. It is the savers versus the alcoholics. Savers are responsible, putting money away against future adversity, denying themselves near-term pleasures, suffering, striving, working, doing the hard work of protecting their piece of humanity, whether themselves, their family, their team, their business, their company, their church, from the wild and wanton forces of nature. The alcoholics, typically addicting and loving their addiction, fill the need any way they can, indulging in short-term pleasures, spending, consuming, failing to plan, and carving bits of time, attention, money, and sanity from the people and institutions around them.

To the alcoholics, it is a game. "How much can I get away with?" is what they think. It is highly amusing to them to carve off a piece for themselves and have their community fail to notice, to excuse it, to let them get away with it. There is nothing more pleasurable to the alcoholic than getting away with stealing "juice," whether is genuine alcohol, cash, crime, overspending, or any other vice from which they derive pleasure at the expense of the future.

It takes a special person to be a "great" alcoholic. They strive to out-do themselves. They may feel guilty, but it is very brief, and then they have the pleasure of the successful crime, of getting away with it.

For the saver, encounters with alcoholics can be deadly. The ethic of self-denial, investment, careful stewardship doesn't have sharp and pointy weapons like the alcoholic's powers of indulgent destruction. There is no saver's "power move" comparable in strength to the alcoholic's running up of a credit card on worthless consumer goods. A saver is alone, an individual. The alcoholic might have entire government agencies under his command to flush millions of dollars to no good effect, with no one that can organize to stop him.

So, Paul Krugman, the excuses you supply to the spending alcoholics may have a dramatic short term effect on pure dollar flow, but each time you milk the savers to pay for these stimuli, you come closer to inducing an accidental societal fatal overdose. There is no evidence that you know how much more juice the body politic can take before it becomes toxic. After all, the actions and movements of the "liver" of the body politic, the savers, that remove poisons from the organization and purify it through the mending metabolics of investment and frugal habits, are nearly invisible to the alcoholics, who would have no idea how to replace the societal "liver" of savers if it were lost, or even what doses are toxic.

When you live in a fog of pleasured spending indulgence, it is extremely hard to gauge the meanings of those who do not indulge.