Now that he doesn’t have to function as a full-time apologist for the Bush Administration, Rush Limbaugh has returned to what he built his career on: bashing so-called “liberals.”  This was evident during his recent appearance on the new Jay Leno Show, on which he went right after Barack Obama and surprisingly garnered a fair amount of applause.

At one point, Limbaugh mentioned the failure of Social Security and Medicare, given that the two institutions are effectively bankrupt.  Leno countered by saying that Limbaugh’s assessment only considers “profit” as the barometer of success, whereas the programs actually exist to “help” people and have not failed in the least when this is factored in.

What Leno doesn’t understand and Limbaugh didn’t point out, is that we’re not talking about a simple inability to turn a profit.  We’re not talking about entities that just break even or operate a bit in the red while struggling to stay afloat.  We’re talking about utter and massive insolvency.

Medicare is already paying out more than it takes in and Social Security soon will be.  For this reason, it’s no surprise that Ponzi schemes tend to be illegal, unless of course the schemes are government-run.  When the government decides to operate a Ponzi scheme, it plays for keeps, as the “customers” are recruited at gunpoint, and those who refuse to “invest” get thrown in a cage or worse.  And that’s what we have in America’s prized Social Security and Medicare systems — a completely unsustainable pair of programs that take (i.e. extort) money and then dole it back out to the lapping masses.  A Ponzi scheme.

Mr. Leno seems to believe it’s okay to adopt completely failed business models that have the potential to wreck entire economies, so long as one can nebulously claim the failure is somehow “helping” people.  Isn’t there a better way, Jay?  Maybe one that doesn’t require violence?

Yesterday (10/14/2008), President George W. Bush said to his audience: “These measures are not intended to take over the free market, but to preserve it.”  He was referring, of course, to the U.S. Government’s injecting of $250 billion into banks in exchange for partial ownership (a stock buy-up, in essence).  In true Bush fashion, his statement is both a lie and laced with a profound ignorance.

In reality, there is no free market in the United States.  There is a quasi-private market, which is not even remotely the same thing.  No free market can run on state-monpolized fiat currency, protected from competition by armed threats and cages.  Actual free market proponents like the Austrians have been decrying U.S. economic policies for decades as antithetical to liberty, prosperity and common sense.  Now that the corporatist mini-regimes that have whored themselves out to government for as long as they’ve existed (and vise versa) are collapsing under their own weight, generations of steadily increasing state intervention in the economy have been strangely omitted from the bulk of public discourse.  Rather, recent events and the policies which led to this point are termed “market failures,” as opposed to the more accurate and redundant “government failures,” thereby opening the way for foolish tools like George W. Bush to claim that current activities which could not be more anti-free market are actually intended to “preserve” the free market, which just so happens to not even exist.

If Bush wanted to be more truthful, he could have replaced “free market” with “capitalism” or “corporatism,” yet he, like so many other politicians and their apologists, seems perfectly content in his fallacies and abject ignorance of economics.  Of course, government, like religion, is not in the business of discovering and propagating truth, but rather the business of selling a particular dogma and ensuring that the largest number of people possible believe in it, regardless of truth.

For more information on the current economic madness, I recommend “The Bailout Reader” at Mises.org.