Free Write

Today in English class, all of the students were instructed to do a freewrite. Apparently, this means that you must never pause when you are writing, and you must write everything down that comes to mind. This is exactly what I am doing right now. Please take this as some kind of disclaimer, should this exercise prove to be a failure.

Last term, my Spanish teacher recommended that I watch a PBS documentary named "Commanding Heights." I managed to find the entire program on the PBS website (which can be found at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/hi/index.html accessed April 14, 2008). I am now on a chapter within the first of three subdivisions, entitled "Chicago Against the Tide." So far, the documentary is discussing the intellectual battle between Kenyesian state-centralized economic planning versus Hayek's idea of the freedom and flexibility of the markets. I did not know that after World War 2, one-third of the population of the world lived under socialist governments, including notable countries such as China, Russia, Britain, and (to a degree) the United States of America. This socialist planning was endorsed by an economist named John Keynes, who the documentary explains as perceiving the economy as a "machine" that could be regulated instead of a financial circumstance as a result of the push of market "forces."

However, because I am someone who is looking into the past from the 21st century, I have the immutable advantage of watching the economic trend of history. The central planning of Soviet Russia has failed, the United States is beginning to feel the weight of an aging baby boom population that will (I think) cause for an eventual, drastic cut back on the medicare system, and along with many, many other examples that I can't look up enough specifics to post online because that would ruin the point of this free write, how could anyone ever sponsor socialism? In my mind, great, I guess they didn't get the message. I am not ignorant that poverty and maldistribution of wealth exists; trust me, I want to eliminate poverty and be as economically fair as much as the next person, but I feel that free market forces and economic growth (labor-intensive or capital-intensive, it doesn't matter because either way I think it will end up being put into the economy to generate more growth) can pull people out of poverty better than inefficient government planning. I worked as an intern on capital hill this summer. I had to go to many defense briefings explaining the defense department's spending. Isn't it a wonder that our government is so bloated with bureaucracy that, as a nation in war, we need to contract out a majority of our construction and security tasks because our government is simply so wasteful and slow? This is awesome. I'm being completely sarcastic. It sucks. I have a lot more that I would enjoy ranting about, but this seems to be a good place to end my freewrite.

Thank you for reading.