It struck me this morning, while listening to Obama talking about "saving the patient" that is our sickened economy, that the way that he intends to treat the patient is entirely parallel with allopathic medicine. The patient is sick. The treatments he wants to give are suppressive; they do not treat the cause nor induce a cure, rather they suppressed the symptoms of the disease and drive it deeper into the patient. This suppression of an acute disease causes the disease to shift to a chronic condition with much more fatal complications. And so it is.
The treatment I wish that Obama would offer would be one based in Naturopathic principles. What our sick economy needs is not more bailouts to suppress the symptoms of its illness. Rather, the economy needs to go through a healing crisis, during which it gets a hot fever and exudes waste products from every orifice. Our economy needs to eject all the corrupt banks, the military-industrial complex, the corporate-medical system and auto-makers like so much snot, vomit, sweat and diarrhea. The patient would feel weak but much better after such a crisis.
A healing crisis is the process of throwing off toxins and hitchhikers, in order to allow the organism to operate in the free and healthy way it is designed to do. As long as this economy is burdened with parasitic business, it will not thrive. The more sugar (cash) you feed into it, the sicker it will get with parasites and the resultant toxicity. And this is what is happening.
Americans are afraid of the healing crisis. Americans lack confidence in our own mechanisms and resilience, and so are accustomed to avoiding healing crises. Hence the levels of chronic disease and premature death that are present among us as individuals. Now we are letting it happen to the nation too.
Mind you, I realize that Obama is simply sticking with the status quo. It's not his fault that our economy is sick from eating sugary junk food, or that up to now our government has continued feeding it more junk food. But he's not ready to break with the allopathic paradigm, and our economy is getting sicker as a result. The longer the cause of the illness is ignored, the worse it will get. This patient is doomed by poor treatment, but the correct and curative treatment is too frightening.
Of course, you will probably be able to guess who I think is the ideal Economic Naturopath. Ron Paul. He understands the cause of the illness, and also the optimal functioning of the organism. Ron Paul would happily provoke a healing crisis if he could. Perhaps the 111th congress will be more interested in understanding economics than the previous congresses. I can hope.
For most experts, in particular Ben Bernanke, the causes of the current crisis are of a complex nature — i.e., they are mysterious. This is why practitioners of the mainstream methodology treat symptoms rather than causes. The outcome of such an approach is to inflict ever more damage on the economy.
It has not occurred to Bernanke that a massive amount of money cannot replace nonexistent real savings. If pushing money is going to fix the problem, why is a country like Zimbabwe in total ruin after doing just that?
~ Frank Shostak