Sunday, December 06, 2009

Clair de Lune

We're living in fairly chaotic times, at the moment, with the eco-nutters about to try to drag us back into the Stone Age, at Copenhagen. There's also the counterfeiters Bernanke, Obama, King, and Brown, trying to drown us in paper scrip, to keep us in permanent stagflation, and other assorted socialist nonsense.

In some ways, you could say that the whole of history is the story of the individual free market of human voluntary desires of peace, prosperity and freedom versus the envious coercive socialism of human aggressive desires delivering war, poverty, and slavery. Although, like the price of gold in a bull market, the rise of civilisation has been marked by the dominance of the free market, we have reached a point where the forces of socialism are now so great that we are about to spend a long time going down back towards its Stone Age tribal origins and away from the free market's international division of labour.

Or are we?

It's hard to tell. Like Uncle Murray, I am a great long-term optimist. Things may look terrible in the short-term, but in the long-term I hope people will see sense. They saw what the Soviet Union brought. If socialism continues its current bull run, they will see what that will bring, with its declining living standards and greater oppression, and they will reject it.

I hope.

Anyhow, while contemplating this issue, I always find a little Debussy helps. Here is Clair de Lune, with Maria Kovalszli:



And here it is again, popping up at the end of Ocean's 11, where the gang members find its relaxing theme as reassuring as I do with the current socialist malaise we are living through:

No comments: