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Is this a Crisis?
With the advent of cable news, we are awash in crises real and imagined. Every time something does not go as planned, it’s a crisis! Currently, and this is just a very partial list because who really has so little to do that he sits and watches cable news all day, we have an oil crisis, mortgage crisis, finance crisis, automobile crisis, inflation crisis, unemployment crisis, and well, the list just goes on and on.
As I write this, I am on vacation in Newport Beach enjoying the perfect weather and activities. My son has become quite the surfer and I am my usual reader and writer. The distance from work gives me some perspective. What I think is that all of these things are not crises at all, just problems that will work themselves out one way of the other. 9/11 was a crisis. Get real about what we are facing now. No one is going to die; we are just going through a tough economic cycle.
This is not to say that there won’t be some tragedies as a result of all this upheaval. However, as my favorite dead economist Joseph Schumpeter said so wisely, capitalism is a process of creative destruction which means simply from the pain comes the gain. The result of the so-called energy crisis alone will be less consumption, lower reliance on foreign oil, alternative green energy sources, and lots of money being made and jobs created as a result. You can take that to the bank.
CNBC has to fill, just as an example, about 8 hours of financial programming per day. There is just not that much to talk about. The market goes up or down and that is about the heart of it. The rest are just talking heads with good publicists who get them on the air (and from the look of most of them I would say they have great publicists) to talk about whatever to promote their own interests. Every word out of their mouths should be viewed with considerable skepticism.
In fact the point that I most want to make in this missive is that we should all be skeptics all the time. Don’t believe the nonsense that we are all spoon fed by the news media. Most of it, heck nearly all of it, is not verified or carefully researched. It is just put out there so forcefully that we believe it.
And it is not just finances either. Guess how many children have actually been fed a razor blade hidden in candy or poison, ever? None. That’s right, Halloween was successfully screwed up by do-gooders across America based on rumor and nothing else. Gone were the good old days and the sense of community that trick or treaters brought. No one ever thought to verify.
So my friends, when you hear the daily drumbeat of doom and gloom take it all with a grain of salt. In fact a whole shaker full. At this moment we face no real crises at all. None. Relax.
Posted by Herb Kay on Thursday, July 03, 2008
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