Topic: Economics
Gimme a Ron Paul Budweiser Another American icon goes foreign.by Random Outlier
(libertarian)
Monday, July 14, 2008
Okay guys, if you're old enough to shave you remember it, so sing along with Ol' Random...
"When you've said Buuudweiser, you've said it all!" (Rim shot.)
Now get out your Berlitz foreign-phrase guidebooks and learn to croon in Walloon or some other bastardized French dialect.
God and the Regulators willing, those big handsome Clysdales will be unharnessed from the massive American beer wagon, hitched to a little gilt cart, and taught to mince through the cobblestone arrondisements of Old Europe. And you know damned well the barons of Brussels will order the stable hands to weave some pansies into their manes. Diapers are a distinct possibility.
For crying out loud, will Ben Bernanke ever quit screwing up our American culture like this?
For $52 billion in inflated U.S, currency, an outfit called InBev, of Belgium, is buying Anheuser Busch, America's biggest beer monger with just under half of the total United States beer market.
On second thought, it's unfair to blame Ben totally. He's just doing his job as it was defined by the Fed's inventors, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal team of 1930s levelers and collectivists who just loved a certain Brit playboy-cum-economist named John Keynes.
John is most remembered by the sane set as the guy who said we could all get richer if most everyone worked for the government -- even if the berries* could think of nothing better to do than hire one bunch of guys to dig a hole and another to fill it in.
You pay the diggers and fillers with real money for as long as it lasts (several seconds, usually), then say abracadabra whereupon a little ink-stained fairy gives you another ship load or two of the stuff. Magic. Repeat as necessary.
My current displeasure with Dr. Bernanke is that he does his woebegone job so enthusiastically. With the Greenback currently trading at 63 Eurocents (down from more than 100 a few years ago), America is for sale.
His latest order to the Bureau of Printing and Engraving is, "Tell those printing fairies to crank the presses up another notch. We gotta help our buddies Fanny and Freddy. "
Well, heck, everything on Earth is for sale, we suppose, but you hate to see 300 million shrewd Yankee traders with everything they own spread out on the lawn behind a "BIG yard SAIL!" sign, attractively lettered with a can of Krylon on corrugated board.
I guess that's what happens, though, when Christie's sneers at your offerings and the Chinese won't loan you any more cash unless you promise to undertake "serious domestic economic reforms." (I recall first hearing that phrase when the World Bank was thinking about a loan to Zimbabwe. Or maybe Ecuador.)
It could be that my hyper-irritation with swapping Bud for a few container loads of Federal Reserve Notes stems from having read Ron Paul's "The Revolution" this weekend.
It's a fine little treatise, putting into summary form what we libertarian types have been saying more or less forever. If nothing else at all, he writes with infinitely more grace and clarity than any other congresscritter I ever read.
And Dr. Paul does something fine which has received too little notice. He proves Shakespeare wrong. The first thing you do if you want to run things all by yourself is not to kill all the lawyers. That comes second. First you debase the currency.
Then, after you turn your money into so much junk mail, you make it easy for the Japanese to buy your golf courses, the Saudis to swallow up Manhattan, the Abu Dubai turbans to eat your greatest banks for an afternoon snack. (Or was it Qatar? Probably both.)
A decent respect for the opinions of that portion of mankind with which I am intimate requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to exasperation:
"I hold this truth to be self-evident, that the laws of Nature and Nature's God endow American beer swillers with the inalienable right to own the source of their preferred guzzle."
Next thing you know we'll have to sell Ford to the Venezuelans. And if you retort "Serves 'em right," why, you're just a danged cynic.
---
Never mind that I drink Budweiser only out of politness in the homes of a few friends whose beer taste is somewhat undeveloped. They really like that smelly old rice water whose primary effects are more frequent trips to the loo.
So what? If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to freely select the diuretic of your choice.
As for you, Ben, the heart of America -- its barrooms and taverns and backyard patios -- would suffer less walloonery if you would ameliorate your tomfoolery.
---
*"berry" = bureaucrat, cf:
http://www.nolanchart.com/article4217.html
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Funny, Food Lion (a Belgian corporation) purchased Hannaford Supermarkets about 10 years back, and as far as I know, the sky has not fallen.
Belgians drink more beer per person than any people on earth (including Americans, Germans, and Czechs). They have also mastered the art of microbrewing, as opposed to marketing the watered-down Clydesdale piss to prepubescent adolescent male drunks, all while passing for "The King of Beers" and an "American Icon." If InBev changes anything at all, it will be for the better.
We're in a global age, where I, as an American, hold stock in British, Norwegian, and German companies. As Libertarians, we should be celebrating the victory of market transactions over the partisanship of national borders.
I'll raise a toast (a glass of Smithwicks, of course, or maybe Guinness) in the hope that InBev can actually turn BudSwill into something with taste...
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