Among the Anglo-Saxons, there is a school of thought called the "Whig view of history," which sees the course of events as an unrolling tapestry on which is woven a record of a steady, ineluctable progression from barbarity to civilization.
Yet, ironically, the Whigs' own supremacy — mostly enjoyed during Britain's years of commercial and military triumph in the 18th century — was underwritten by a system of rapidly expanding government debt, deviously and often corruptly financed through the offices of the fledgling Bank of England.
As a result, the period was not unblemished by periods of wild, speculative excess and interposed monetary panic, the most spectacular instances of which were the two, partly interrelated schemes whose respective Mississippi and South Sea Companies served to give us the word "bubble" itself.
No one who reads the accounts of those roistering times can fail to be entertained by the tale of human folly they contain, though not without a rueful reflection that they also prove the Whigs were hopelessly optimistic in their perception of man's relentless self-betterment.
For, indeed, our own experiences of just the past decade show that, if we follow a recipe that mixes the eternal human failing of avarice with the oft-recurring mass delusion that one lives in a "New Era," and which allows the kitchen to be supervised by sharp-minded financiers, it will produce just as explosive a cocktail today as it did nearly three centuries ago.
Of course, these were not the Old Whigs of whom Hayek spoke, and, though many powers of 10 times better than the American Whig Party, the movement's chief speakers, my beloved Acton, Gibbon and Macauley, did indeed perpetuate the belief that history was a linear path upward. From which it is all too easy to deduce that the hard-earned lessons of the past no longer apply to our situation now.
There appears to be no evidence that the Founders of this nation were afflicted by any such delusion, but were rather grimly aware that any human, entrusted with too much power, would soon succumb to its enticements. It was Acton, of course, who said, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," but all that did was mitigate, for a time, the logical development of Whig History into Progressivism.
Indeed it was already too late. The descendants of the Puritans in New England had already developed secular/messianic tendencies that meshed all too well with Hegel's theory of history. Unfortunately, Whig History supported that trend.
By the way, when you can understand this paragraph, to quote Master Kan, "...you will have learned":
This is why the middle-class poor are able to "invest" so much even as they spend more than every last earned penny on iPods, designer beers, exotic holidays, and vast McMansions — plowing money into ETFs and emerging bond funds even when it costs $200 a pop to fill up the 6-year-lease-bearing new Hummer in the driveway.
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