THE CASE FOR CALCULATING THE GOING CONCERN VALUE.

Rush Limbaugh took a call from a resident of Port Huron that touched on a variety of things.  One part of the conversation stood out to me.

RUSH: I just turned 67. When I was your age, my grandfather and people his age were telling me that if we didn’t get a handle as a nation on the national debt, that by the time I was ready to retire, I wouldn’t be able to because the country would be in such dire financial straits. So I spent my early years thinking the national debt was something really important, and I saw it get bigger and bigger. I never heard anybody talk about reducing it, and I remembered people I trusted and loved telling me it was gonna be the end of the country.

Now, here I am 50 years later, and we’re in the midst of an economic revival. The national debt is over $20 trillion. It was doubled in the eight years of Obama. We are running budget deficits every year, and I have yet to see any evidence that the national debt is causing us any harm at all. The theory is that if the government owes so much money that they have to borrow to pay money, the interest on that debt, and that that leaves less money in the private sector for people like you and me to borrow to buy homes, to buy cars, whatever we would need to borrow money for. That hasn’t happened. I mean, the credit markets are wide open. Look at people’s credit card debt.

We might have to fear yet another credit bubble, complete with liar loans and all the rest, and yet, without a proper understanding of the going concern value of the United States, we're going to continue to have this confusion over whether large public debts are or are not trouble.  I'll repeat.  The Treasury is a long way from not being able to service the borrowing.  Now, if our political masters could get their act together long enough to pass a series of clean appropriations for the current functions of government, in such a way that Perils of Pauline adventures involving the debt ceiling, continuing resolutions, and whatever sideshow posturing politicians see fit to bundle with the ceiling extension or the continuing resolution cease, at least for a few years!

Rent-seekers, however, gotta rent-seek, and posturing politicians gotta pretend they're Doing Something.  (It's For Your Own Good, and We'll All Be Better Persons For It.)

Nobody’s saying no when you want to borrow money, unless you’re an absolute, total risk. So all these things — and I still don’t have an answer for this. I can still find people, Greg, who sound today just like my grandfather did 50 years ago. “The national debt will be the end of the country!” Look, I wish the government was smaller, and I wish more Americans felt they didn’t need it. I wish the government was smaller because I don’t like it involving itself in as many aspects of people’s lives as it can.

Because there’s a certain political class that wants to do that, believing that you and I are incompetent and incapable. They want to manage our affairs, manage our lives for the sheer power of it. But, man, you get there, I guess, and the idea that you have all this money to spend and people love you after you spend it? It’s gotta be one heck of an aphrodisiac. There have been people who try to make the government smaller. The Republicans balanced the budget one time, in 1995.

The caller is aware, dear reader, that perhaps the best thing for government to do is to go away.

CALLER: I live just fine without government. You know, just like we’re required to have health care. I can’t work more than 19 hours a week because I have to have health care. But I’m young and I’m not sick. Same thing. You know, I just don’t need government telling me what to do.

RUSH: What I would urge you to do is not change. We’re gonna need as many people like you who learn this stuff at your age and then hold on to it and learn how to defend it, fight for it and all that, because you’re gonna be up against people your age just like you described. They almost descend into a panic when they hear the government shutting down. They don’t even know what it means. But they still get into some sort of great fear that something’s not gonna be able to be available or happen or whatever. It’s a great illustration of just how successfully the Big Government crowd has been in convincing people they can’t live even a day without it.

Whether that is because the Big Government crowd sees the benefits of expanding the scope of Collective Action By Force for their own benefit, i.e. becoming parasitic on the body politic, or because rent-seekers have sold an expansion of that scope so as to benefit by it, i.e. becoming parasitic in a different way does not matter here.  What does matter is that the government sector has expanded beyond a state of symbiosis with the other forms of cooperative action.