The Procrastinator

By: Trey Smith

The story of Don Quixote is basically about this guy who loses his mind and creates a fictional reality for himself. In his conception of reality he is a knight, his neighbor is his squire and a local farm girl (who doesn’t know that she’s been incorporated into this reality) is his damsel in distress. After various misadventures, including fighting windmills that he believes are marauding giants, and practical jokes are made at his expense, Don Quixote becomes depressed and slowly slips back into sanity. The only problem is that regaining his sanity actually makes him even more depressed.

The book was so influential that is led to the creation of a new word: quixotic. The word quixotic is a reference to the main character’s last name, Quixote, and means to behave nobly or act chivalrously but in an absurd or impractical way.

I believe that the current stimulus package is in fact quixotic.

I must point out that my level of economic knowledge is limited to economic books intended for popular consumption. Therefore we’ll forgo a debate between the pure market-ism of Adam Smith and the interventionism of John Maynard Keyes in order to just stick to the sentiments that drive the supporters of the bill and its detractors (although when you get down to it, Adam Smith was much more on an interventionist than he gets made out to be). It seems to me that the minutiae of the stimulus bill was derived from the sentiment, “well we have to try and do something” while the opponents of the bill adhere to the ideology of, “no, let’s do nothing and hope this all just works out.”

It’s easy to deride a ‘do-nothing’ attitude. The Democrats had that attitude when things were bad in Iraq; they just wanted to bail. But the Republicans were desperate to do something, anything. They were so desperate that they actually listened to General Petraeus’ plan for a troop surge even though it centered on logic and practicality, something the Republican administration had steadfastly avoided in Iraq for 5 years. Ultimately the surge was a success and made Democrats look like pansies for not supporting it. Moreover, in order to be proven right, Democrats were put in a position wherein the surge would have to fail. But that constitutes hoping that America fails, and in this case failure would’ve meant massive loss of life among Iraqis and American military personnel. Politics is not without irony, however, because now the Republicans find themselves backed into the same corner. It’s fine to oppose the ideology of the economic stimulus just like the Democrats opposed the ideology of the war in Iraq. But when the other side does something, the success of a do-nothing attitude hinges on the failure of the action taken. Thus, now the Republicans seem to be hoping for America to fail so as to prove that the stimulus bill was a bad idea.

Ultimately the question is whether or not the do something attitude leads to an action that is merely a short-term band aid or a sound long-term strategy or solution. I believe the surge was a viable long-term strategy because the absence of US troops would have allowed the country to collapse entirely. Due to the surge, there is space to build and grow a new country (of course this will take many years and require an American troop presence for a very long time). Conversely, I do not think the economic stimulus package is a long-term solution, but rather something that tries in vain to cover the overwhelming stench of corruption and greed that got us into this mess.
Our initial invasion of Iraq made it a temporarily collapsed state and therefore a blank slate upon which to develop a nation (unfortunately that rebuilding was bungled for 5 years). On the other hand, the US has been a developed nation for a long time. What was wrong with Iraq was reconfigured, blown up, or arrested. What was wrong with America went unchecked and tacitly encouraged and therefore became ingrained in the system. Their new government can marginalize Iraq’s ills while ours are so deeply entrenched that they actual exist within the society and government themselves.

Imagine a scenario in which America was afforded the opportunity to go back in time and told that if we acted less greedily and less financially irresponsible we could avoid this whole financial crisis. Even knowing what we do now I think people would travel back in time and fall into the same old bad habits. The few people that did take corrective action would be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous.

My master’s dissertation was about the potential social and political development of collapsed or weak countries. However, social and political development must be prefaced by economic development. Starting from scratch with a collapsed state, if you build a just and equitable economic system, then the society will come to value justice and equality and their political institutions will reflect those social values. America’s problem is that our economy evolved on just and equitable principles but then devolved around corruption and greed. As a result, our society values radical self-serving individualism and our politics reflect that. There is a deep sickness in the system itself and it cannot be rectified by addressing the symptoms of the disease, which the stimulus package seeks to do. Even if we had the money we lost, we’d just lose it again on whatever the next ‘bubble’ investment is.

The stimulus bill is chivalrous in that it hopes that given the chance to do things differently, people would. However, we must realize, like Don Quixote did, that this world of chivalry is imagined. In the real world, the system itself is broken and any patchwork attempt to fix it is just tilting at windmills.

Until the internet ceases to exist and only the rules of Thunderdome apply, Trey can be reached at dantzlersmith@gmail.com.