Daniel J. Summers » Charter Member of the VRWC

I found this interesting…  Numbers for the Dow Jones Industrial Average over a couple of periods in our nation’s recent past.

September 10th, 2001 close: 9,605.51
September 21st, 2001 close (lowest before recovery): 8,235.81
Value change: -14.3%
Raw Numbers

November 4th, 2008 close: 9,625.28
January 19th, 2009 close (markets closed for MLK Day): 8,281.22
March 5th, 2009 close (lowest before recovery): 6,594.44
Value change (4 Nov – 5 Mar): -31.5%
Value change (19 Jan – 5 Mar): -20.4%
Raw Numbers

Feel free to infer (or not infer) whatever you’d like.  (Or, as one TV network likes to say, “I report, you decide.”)

First up is the latest column from Thomas Sowell entitled “Subsidizing Bad Decisions” in which he asks a very good question – “Why should taxpayers who live in apartments, perhaps because they did not feel that they could afford to buy a house, be forced to subsidize other people who could not afford to buy a house, but who went ahead and bought one anyway?”  Read the whole thing, particularly the part where he talks about “saving for a rainy day” and “sadder but wiser.”  I’d planned a longer post on the economy (and I still may do that), but this is pretty much the way I feel about it.

And, backing him up is some timeless advice from Adrian Pierce Rogers, via Neal Boortz…

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that, my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

If only Washington, D. C. understood that simple truth.