Other peoples’ money
30th November 2010
Eric Raymond is basically sound.
“The trouble with socialism,” Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples’ money.” This observation is the key to understanding the wave of government bankruptcies that has already begun to break over us.
What’s actually happening here is that bond investors are catching wise about the largest political truth of the post-Cold-War era: government is bankrupt. It’s not just individual governments that are headed for financial collapse, but the entire model of ever-expanding statism that began with Otto von Bismarck’s Prussian state-pension system in the late 1800s.
Took ’em long enough.