"But Who's Got You?" -- Lois Lane

‘The problem with socialism,’ Lady Thatcher once said, ‘is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.’ This time, it is worse: we are running out of our children’s money, and our grandchildren’s money. We are assuming we will have a never-ending supply of borrowed money, and we have no backup plan if this supply chokes up. Things may feel safe at the moment. We can still borrow easily from international markets. So could Lehman Brothers on 12 September 2008 — the day before the bank imploded. 

This is but one of many stunning paragraphs in a new piece by Johan Norberg that is sure to keep awake even the most somnolent ignoramuses amongst us. It's long but well worth a careful read.  He accurately describes the decades old Ponzi scheme all governments have been playing, which is predicated on the ill-fated notion that borrowing can go on forever.  Voters the world over have explicitly and implicitly allowed this to happen.  For not only have they not collectively said, "Enough already!", but have made it quite clear that any political party wanting to take a principled, economically sound stand (aka no more "free" goodies) would be thrown out of office asap.  So on & on it has gone, like a collegial group of gambling addicts around Vegas who keep on borrowing from each other in an endless loop.  But the time is coming near when there'll be no one left to borrow from.

This cycle will only end when the citizenry of a nation collectively laugh at and dismiss those politicians who keep insisting that we can have something for nothing.  Until then, there's no hope.