Impoverishment As A Form of Group-Think

We are learning the value of individual visionary honesty from World Savings whistle blower Paul Bishop. We are learning the lack of value in blind faith from the infamous Bernie Madoff and Texan Allen Stanford.

Now lets learn that current American impoverishment is in significant part a function of dishonesty, blind faith, and group-think.

Some of that dishonesty has been in the form of economic propaganda directing us toward group-think:

Yet until very recently Americans believed they were getting richer, because they received statements saying that their houses and stock portfolios were appreciating in value faster than their debts were increasing. And if the belief of many Americans that they could count on capital gains forever sounds naïve, it’s worth remembering just how many influential voices — notably in right-leaning publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and National Review — promoted that belief, and ridiculed those who worried about low savings and high levels of debt.

(Economist Paul Krugman, italics added). Group-think was promoted a la Big Brother, and that led to group-think sized problems.

And it can lead to even greater problems according to Krugman. As we try to correct the problems which group-think got us into, we can't use group-think any more:

And as the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out in the 1930s, the things people and companies do when they realize they have too much debt tend to be self-defeating when everyone tries to do them at the same time. Attempts to sell assets and pay off debt deepen the plunge in asset prices, further reducing net worth. Attempts to save more translate into a collapse of consumer demand, deepening the economic slump

(ibid, italics added). So how do we shake ourselves free from yet another curse of the deceit business using the current economic stimuli now being administered?

Individualism triumphing over group-think of course.

Hey, Americans should be able to do that because we claim to have individual freedom.

Civil rights and all that jazz. Individualism has saved our bacon many times before.

If we don't individualize we will have to suffer until we do.

American constitutional individualism comes in the form of state's rights, municipal rights, and the supreme rights of the people.

Those are some, but not all, of the forms of anti group-think national wisdom handed down from our forefathers and foremothers who knew for sure what they were talking about.