Where have all the students gone?

Forty years ago American Universities were hotbeds of activism. Students took all sides of issues. Most were angered by the war in Vietnam. Some marched in the streets chanting "Hey, Hey LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?" But there were other students that believed that the war was a necessary response to what they perceived as the Communist threat. Peace demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio were gunned down by National Guardsmen. There were students on all sides of the issues, but almost all were involved.

Although Americans are still dying in foreign wars, the body count is far lower than in the sixties and there is no draft. Perhaps this is why most students are not taking today's wars personally.

But there are things going on today that students should take personally. Whether you graduate this month, next year or several years in the future, you are looking forward to a satisfying career and a comfortable life. Isn't this why you are in college?

The bad news is that the basic things your parents and grandparents enjoyed are not likely to be there for you. Your government has been spending your future at a frantic pace for years and the spending is not slowing down; it is accelerating. So what?

For starters, you are the guinea pig in an experiment that has never been carried out in the history of mankind. The entire world is no longer using money as it has been defined throughout history and as it is defined in the U.S. Constitution. Intellectuals with names followed by alphabet soup strings have gravely pronounced that money no longer need represent anything tangible but can simple represent lines of code in sophisticated computer systems.

Maybe this makes sense to you. But it is crucial to understand that this theory has never been tested. Previously corrupt leaders have dipped into the till from time to time. Some have shaved precious metals from the rim of coins, while still others have printed more money than their treasury's store of gold could back. In every case, these practices have triggered economic collapses of frightening magnitude.

A recent example is provided by Zimbabwe. If you would like to be a centitrillionaire, a few American dollars can get you a Zimbabwean $500 trillion dollar bill. It will look good on your wall, but don't try to buy anything with it.

The only difference between the American dollar and the Zimbabwean is that most of us still have confidence in the American note. That's it. That's the only difference. It's sort of like the Wizard of Oz. When his true identity was discovered his power vanished.

But who would lose confidence in America? The Chinese, to name 1.35 billion or so. Did you know that China has been supporting us for years? The clothes you wear, the toys you played with as a kid, the appliances in your kitchen, and the stuff you buy at WalMart mostly comes from China. We pay for it with paper IOUs. Of course when governments issue IOUs they use sophisticated names and methods, but in the end it's all just IOUs. And China is getting nervous. At some point they will want to redeem all that paper and when they do, we're in big trouble.

Then there is the $13 trillion projected national debt. It started a long time ago, but the Bush Administration gave it a big boost by pouring trillions into the Middle East. The Obama administration, not to be outdone by Republicans, is doing the same. Then there were those companies that were too big to fail.

Did you believe that line? If you did, you forgot about the buggy whip manufacturers that were put out of business by Ford and others. Shed a few tears for those craftsmen who devoted their lives to the creation of quality buggy whips only to be thrown out of their jobs by uncontrolled economic forces.

Maybe you believe that the bailouts saved the economy from a disaster? If you do, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I'd like to sell you. And there were the stimulus payments. Thanks to those stimulus payments the very lightly traveled last few miles of I91 North before the Canadian border are now in really good shape and a bunch of local police departments have some nifty new toys to play with at the firing range.

The current buzz phrase is "job creation." Obama created 75,000 jobs by escalating the war in Afghanistan and then there were all those census jobs. If this is your idea of job creation, our problems are over. Just put everyone to work in government jobs. Call it the single employer system. Full benefits with each position, of course and we could link salaries to current government jobs. I'm told that these average much higher that equivalent civilian jobs.

So, the problem is solved. Everyone has a job. Everyone has a guaranteed comfortable retirement. Everyone has top-of-the-line health insurance.

Wait a minute. Isn't that the system they tried in the Soviet Union?

You remember the U.S.S.R., don't you? That humungous country that was really good at producing nuclear weapons and well-paid amateur athletes. The one that isn't on the map any more.

The bottom line is that what our leaders in Washington are doing is not going to work. It can't work. The debt that has already piled up can never be repaid. The U.S. Government (that's us folks) has only two choices. We can repudiate the debt. When individuals and companies do this it's called filing bankruptcy. Or we can inflate the currency so that dollars of debt can be paid off with pennies. This is what Germany did after the First World War. And this is also a good part of what made Hitler's rise to power possible.

What we are facing is an economic debacle that can make the Great Depression look like a walk in the park. And the ones that will suffer the most will be today's students. Imagine graduating from college with a mountain of debt and going into a world where there are few jobs and escalating prices for everything. Isn't it time to make your voice heard?