Reality check

The stock market is on a nosedive, as is real estate and housing and insurance and banking and the auto business and retail and just about everything else and that means the economy in general.

A clear sign to the average guy, as if foreclosures weren’t enough, is that jobs are hard to keep and harder to find.

It’ll get worse before it gets better. It sounds cliché, but even Barack Obama says it now!

It doesn’t matter how much money the Feds pour into the private sector and pretend they know how to run corporations profitably; we’re in for tough times

It’s amazing how bureaucrats and politicians – many who’ve spent their entire “professional” careers in government, who’ve never run a business of any sort, never met a payroll or dealt with expensive and dizzying government paperwork – suddenly consider themselves expert economists and businessmen.

It’s especially ludicrous because they set the rules and regulations that caused the problems in the first place.

But they ignore that and want to tell business what to do and how to do it. They fire accusations at corporate directors, and if that doesn’t work, move on to what they consider the next step: Throw money at it and take over.

In the real world, that’s called nationalization. In the real world, that’s not part of our form of government nor our Constitution, but our politicians do it anyway.

In the real world, past and present – the Soviet Union or Cuba or Nazi Germany or fascist Italy or any Central or South American country or banana republic – nationalization doesn’t work.

It ruins the economy, eliminates the private sector, destroys incentive, makes the lives of the average person hell and only benefits those who make the rules. They always benefit; the little guy gets ground under their heels.

Times aren’t good for any of us regardless of income bracket, and people aware of history warn we’re in store not only for a massive recession but what could be another Great Depression.

For those educated by the public schools and don’t know what I’m talking about, that was a time – from the stock market crash of 1929 until World War II began – that this country, economically, was flat-lining.

To say times were tough would be to put it mildly. There were no jobs. The value of the dollar was virtually nil. People who had money or property or stock investments lost everything.

When you see movies of that time showing people selling apples or pencils on street corners or people living in shanties made of wood, tin or cardboard in villages called “Hoovervilles” after President Hoover – it isn’t fiction being depicted.

It was real, and there are many people alive today who lived through it. That experience shaped their lives. They’re our grandparents and parents. If you wonder why they’re so careful with the dollar and why they save things, it’s because they know from personally what it’s like to have nothing and to have no opportunities and still need to survive. They learned to make do.

My parents told me of their family experiences – of the near impossibility of getting a job. My father finally was able to work for the phone company in New York City for the grand total of $7.50 a week. My mother told me of having such a tight family food budget that one lamb or pork chop a week had to suffice for two or three people. Parents simply did without to buy nourishing food for their children.

Young people couldn’t afford to marry; it was too expensive to set up a new family. They lived with their parents and all worked together to survive – literally.

My grandmother who had been widowed and had to get along financially on her own – no job, no career, no inheritance, no pension, no social security or welfare and certainly, no “rich uncles” – created several businesses to support herself and her children.

They opened a tea-room/restaurant and my grandmother also read tea leaves. I’m told she was very good! They made sausage and sold it door-to-door as they did with homemade potato chips sold for 5 cents a bag – long before today’s brand names.

My grandmothers did piece work at home for the apparel industries – cutting embroidery and lace, sewing blouses and dresses, either as whole garments or just parts – setting-in sleeves or collars or doing belts or buttons. It was drudgery and didn’t pay well, but it did pay something, and that something was the difference between survival and starvation.

Those grandparents and parents were of a generations that didn’t feel entitled. They didn’t expect the government or anyone else to bail them out. The Great Depression was caused by events and actions beyond them, but they bore the brunt of it. Their lives were never easy, but the money crunch of the nation and of the world at that time made it worse. It affected them in ways they couldn’t have anticipated, but they survived with dignity.

And today? What about this generation and the boomers? They do feel entitled.

Their lives have been ones of “bling” and immediate satisfaction. I want; I get – now!

They grabbed “no interest-no down” loans and now want a government bailout. They want their credit card balances forgiven! They still want something for nothing – and politicians, who are always playing “cya,” are willing to give it to them.

The problem is, those giveaways will destroy the system and drag everyone down.

But those old-timers and those with their old-fashioned ways of survival in tough times will get through it OK.

The rest? They’ve got a lot to learn. It won’t be pretty.

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