Chrysippus, a favorite and very quotable Stoic, once said that poverty teaches by force those lessons that philosophy tries to teach by persuasion.  In this I am inclined to agree with him.  Recently, the American news media have been much agitated over reductions in consumer spending, for example, and the decline in conspicuous consumption - nakedly expressed as such even by that media - has been widely lamented.  Now there are great fears about declining sales of, for example, automobiles.

Now, I am not so ignorant of economics as not to recognize the ill effects of an abrupt decline in the velocity of money.  But the Stoic in me can't help but ask:  Since when is it a bad thing for people not to act like morons?  Any child knows that people who direct their lives toward the acquisition of things are as good as dead, and any adult knows that overconsumption, and the associated overmanufacture of crap, is the main engine driving the rapid die-off of the few surviving non-human species of Earth.  Perhaps a Great Depression would be a good thing, if it would knock a few heads sharply enough to grant them some sense.  Certainly, it is hard to miss the relative importance of people and life, of beauty and virtue, on the one hand, and of candy and toys, flash and bling on the other, when you have no choice but to find your satisfaction in the things that endure.

So, here's my vote for a crippling national economic crisis.  No car sales at all sounds even better than fewer.  I guess I should have voted for McCain after all!