Free-market, lib­er­tar­ian, con­ser­v­a­tive extrem­ists on the right are just as dan­ger­ous to the econ­omy as those com­mu­nist, social­is­tic extrem­ists on the left. As in most things in pol­i­tics and soci­ety, the so-called Golden Mean, to use Aristotle’s phrase, lies in the mid­dle. Too much of the lat­ter leads to eco­nomic stag­na­tion; too much of the for­mer leads to an enslaved lower-class akin to the new Dark Ages (and, even­tu­ally, eco­nomic stag­na­tion as well).

Unfor­tu­nately for my blood pres­sure, I was watch­ing the super­fi­cial vapid­ity of “The Five” on Fox News last week when co-host Eric Bolling (pic­tured), whose eco­nomic igno­rance makes me ques­tion… Con­tinue reading

“The stress and depres­sion [over my debt] has got­ten so bad at times that I’ve seri­ously thought about killing myself. I’ve thought more about walk­ing into a finan­cial aid office, or a bank, and just blow­ing every­one away. Why even bother rob­bing them, all cash is trace­able now. No, I’d do it because my dead body or some­one else’s dead body means some­one else, some­where else, has to do more paper­work than me for a change. I’d do it for the [laughs], basically.”

That was a dis­turb­ing com­ment in a Fark.com online forum dis­cussing a recent arti­cle on the level of col­lege loans for stu­dents cur­rently held by young peo­ple in… Con­tinue reading