Fed Orchestrated Money Printing Lifts Stock Market Higher

Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2010
Mar 21, 2010 - 06:04 PM

By: Steve_Betts

Technology is usually a wonderful thing. Advances in production allow us to manufacture and ship countless items, to every corner of the world, on a daily bases. Improvements in communication allow an individual to call the other side of the world in seconds whereas four decades ago you would wait hours, sometimes a day, for an international operator to place your call. You can now surf a thousand channels on your TV instead of the three channels that existed when I was a kid, and world events are brought into your living room as they happen.

Advances in medicine cure diseases that would have killed you twenty years ago. All of that’s the bright side, but as with everything in life we have a dark side to technology. We need the life saving changes to compensate for the effects of pollution, chemical preservatives in our food, and genetically altered meat, poultry, and seed. The one thousand channels I mentioned also bring a level of sex and violence into our homes that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago. With mass production quality seems to suffer, and I would maintain that creativity suffers as well. Just walk into any Wal-Mart and look at how many useless items are stocked on the shelves.

I can’t and won’t argue that technology allows us to live a longer and more comfortable life, but I have to wonder at what cost. Quality seems to be the first casualty, at least in America. The internet has such wonderful possibilities and yet the best they can do is send me fifty e-mails a day for Viagra! Is that all there is? Oh yes, and the government has discovered that the internet is a wonderful tool to use to spy on its citizens. Americans have yet to discover that the world-wide-web is putting a serious dent in their civil liberties. Technology should be used and appreciated for what it is meant to be, a tool to improve the human condition. It should also be recognized for what it is not, i.e. a replacement for the human brain. We have allowed our educational system to deteriorate, and slick ad men have replaced learning with the X-box. Most people now go through life without ever having an original thought, and that was not how it was intended to be.

There have been other periods in history of technological explosion. In the 1920’s the US experienced a real economic, social and moral explosion do to the introduction of the radio, the car, and airplane. Man went from a solitary rural life, traveling on horseback, to flying through the air and listening to the Yankees live while sitting in his living room a thousand miles from the stadium, and he did it in just twenty years. Unfortunately, society often behaves like a kid who just got his driver’s license, and dad gives him the keys to a really fast car. A little too much foot on the gas, at just the wrong time, and tragedy strikes! That happened in 1930 and it took a world war and almost twenty years to recover, all because of too many excesses. A smart man would look at that and say we should find a way to prevent excesses. An even smarter man would say you can’t prevent excesses any more than you can have a one-sided coin. A pendulum must be allowed to swing both ways. Then he would go on to say that we already have a way to deal with excesses, and it’s called a “free marketâ€