The Importance of Failure and Not Being French

When you were a kid, and even as an adult, you failed at stuff. Oftentimes, when you failed at stuff, you were forced to try again, to develop a better way of doing whatever the hell it was you failed at. This is the way life is supposed to work. You ask out the hot cheerleader, she shoots you down, you learn she has a drug problem, you buy some of her favorite drugs, you invite her over to do said drugs and then bam, instant cheerleader sex action. In this odd, second-person scenario, your desperation and innovation helped you get the girl. And you may have even developed some character as a result. We learn from failure. We’re supposed to. Learning is one of the reasons failure even exists.

Failure is a part of life, and as such, it exists in business, science, love, sex, drugs and even rock n roll.

But failure and its importance mean nothing to our government. You see, all our government really wants is control. They want more power, more of your freedoms and (most importantly) they want the ability to define what you and your money are worth. You may think this is paranoid thinking on my part but you are wrong.

Have you ever considered why the government sets a minimum rate at which banks can lend money? Seems to me, that kind of thing should be left up to the banks. I mean that kind of regulation is a little like the government telling McDonalds how much they have to charge for a cheeseburger.

And so, as the housing crisis continues, America’s two largest government chartered loan companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have lost so much money that, in a purely capitalistic world, they would have become insolvent and gone bankrupt.

But the government had a better idea.

The government has decided to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Your tax dollars are always used for stupid crap, from wars you don’t believe in to studies that don’t need to be done to regulations designed to make your money worth less and on and on. Your tax dollars will always be used for stuff you don’t believe in. There are a lot of us in this country and it’s impossible to please everyone.

But that’s no excuse for bailing out businesses.

You see, when a business goes under, another one typically takes its place. In simple terms, if Bob’s Ice Cream Parlor doesn’t make enough money because it pushed the wrong flavors for a few years, Bob’s would go out of business and the ice cream demand would be filled by another retailer and/or Bob would learn how to do his job better.

Lessons from failure are important.

If, as it is now, the government can just step in and use our taxpaying money to bail out businesses that made stupid decisions then how will any business learn to evolve? How will we avoid future mistakes if the government simply steps in and saves the very companies that screwed up?

We won’t.

The end result of creating a political climate with no accountability is citizens with no accountability. Think about every fucking no-good loser, non-job having, Hot-Pocket sucking burden on society that you know. Think about the kinds of things they say when confronted about why they got arrested, why they don’t have a job, etc. They almost always blame someone or something else for their plight. They don’t have accountability. They shift the burden of blame from their lack of action to society’s limits. And in the end, you get tired of their bullshit and you kick them off the fucking couch.

Metaphorically speaking, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are on our couches. They are taking food from our fridge, money from our pockets and gas from our cars and they are laughing all the while because they’re fuckups. And they’re fuckups who know that we will always be there to take care of them.

One of the reasons that America earned its reputation as the badass mofos of the free world is that we had rugged individualism, brought about in part because of our capitalistic roots. If you get away from that, if you encourage the government to control our money, to insure our lives, to dictate how we live, then you take the first steps towards becoming a welfare nation, a nation of irresponsibly stupid nimrods who expect the government to save them when they fail.

And after that happens, it’s not long until we’re just like the fucking French.

And really, who wants that?