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Prosperity is by all accounts a wonderful thing, especially if I were in a position to take it personally. But as the extended bull market pushes the Dow-Jones average above 11,000, as real-estate prices continue to soar, as profits and incomes keep setting records, perhaps America is getting too prosperous for its own good.
For evidence, look at any recent newscast, which
invariably features an assortment of sanity-challenged
Americans camped out to purchase tickets for The Phantom
Menace,
the first new Star Wars
movie since
1983.
Now, if they've been waiting 16 years, why couldn't they wait another week or two until the furor dies down? Only in a country with too much money, and thus a strange sense of priorities, would getting there first matter so much.
Besides, what other nation in history was so prosperous that it could spare thousands of its otherwise productive citizens to wait in line?
Indeed, analysts used to criticize the old Soviet economy for its inefficiency -- all the time that people spent waiting in line for bread or potatoes was time taken away from productive endeavors that might have improved the economic system so that people wouldn't have had to stand in line.
But America is apparently so rich that it can go without
the contributions of these aspiring Jedi knights, one of
whom told National Public Radio last week that Star
Wars
was the center of his moral and esthetic
universe.
A prosperous society can afford to indulge many varieties of lunacy, but there must be a limit somewhere, and we may have passed it about the time the Dow hit 8,000.
Another symptom of too much money appeared in the parking lot of a motel I stayed in last weekend. It was a Lexus, in itself a fine symbol of conspicuous consumption, but this one was not a mere sedan -- it was a gaudy four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicle.
There was a time when I thought these upscale SUVs were a threat to our back-country. During my jejune days, four-wheel-drives boasted a suspension system that could shake teeth loose on a smooth highway, let alone some talus-strewn washboard road. Steering one took wrists the size of sewer pipes, and switching to four-wheel-drive meant wading into the mud to lock the hubs.
Make four-wheel-drive comfortable and convenient, and then too many people would take up the habit, and our pleasant and uncrowded back roads would be overrun, I figured.
But I figured wrong. Somebody with $45,000 in a Sport Ute (or is it a Sport Yute -- where is the Colorado Commission on Official English when we need it?) does not want his investment scratched, dinged, dented, bashed, twisted or otherwise scarred. These drivers even park so that they're unlikely to catch a nick from somebody opening the door on an adjacent vehicle.
Thus they stay out of the woods, and this is a benefit
for our oft-ravaged back country. But only in a nation
with more money than sense would people be buying
CD-player-equipped smooth-riding leather-seated
off-road
vehicles.
As for government, we must give Douglas Bruce credit for trying to prevent Colorado from suffering from too much money. Alas, he did not fully succeed.
Last week, Gov. Bill Owens signed a bill that exempts biotechnology firms from state sales tax on their purchases for research and development.
Given that Owens is a Republican, as is the majority of
both houses in the legislature, it's rather surprising that
Colorado has adopted its own Industrial Policy
--
one of those discredited Democratic notions about
government picking winners and losers, rather than letting
a free market decide.
This is for companies doing reteach on ... potential
life-saving treatments,
and maybe you'll get a discount
someday -- when it's a matter of life and death, just tell
them you're from Colorado, and you paid higher taxes in
1999 to help the struggling folks at GreediGenetics in
their time of need, and fair is fair.
A better course, perhaps, would be to keep track of all the beer, wine and distilled spirits you purchase this year, and then file for a refund of whatever state excise and sales taxes you paid in the process.
All alcoholic beverages result from fermentation --
yeast microbes metabolizing sugar to produce alcohol and
carbon dioxide -- and fermentation certainly qualifies as
the biotechnology
that our legislature esteems.
Thus we, as much as anyone else, should be entitled to a
refund of any state taxes we paid for our private
biotechnology research.
Then again, that would just put more money into circulation, and we'd doubtless see new and improved forms of foolishness -- even more evidence that there's too much prosperity in this country.
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