Spite and Consequence

Megan McArdle:

I don't know that bankruptcy will destroy the UAW, but they probably won't have a lot of members and money left to campaign for Democrats in 2010.

Nobody will have money to do anything they need to do, including you. Your little hero Greenspan really effed us up but good, along with Wall Street and Bush's White House.

Some things can't be fixed.

The American experience for a few generations has produced an adult population with very childish instincts, increasingly worse each decade. For instance, the desperate power fantasies among the younger tattooed lumpenproles -- those with next-to-zero real economic power -- suggest a certain unappetizing playing-out of resource competition when the supply of Cheez Doodles and Pepsi starts to dwindle. But even the heretofore gainfully employed middle classes are pretty lost in fantasies at least of comfort an convenience. For years now, I have wondered how their sense of grievance and resentment will be expressed when the supermarket shelves run bare and the cardboard signs get taped over the local gas pump and the cable TV gets cut off for non-payment. You wonder, to put it bluntly, how far gone we really are.