A mind, once stretched, has a difficult time going back to its original form.

~ Joe Maddon, manager Tampa Bay Rays (2008)

To realize how much fun it was to come of age in the roaring mania of the Great Moderation, one had to be young, possessed of the right credentials, and employed by a top-tier investment bank. To stroll into any restaurant and know that the bill was completely doable, well within reach, so much so that you never even bothered to glance at the price list, was a little understood, happy fact of my life. At our favorite haunt, outsized tips turned the staff into fast family; the stove in our apartment heated little beside water for over a decade.

At this moment in time, with the mania's wave having crested on the shore, I am shocked to find myself face down and hung over on an Austrian beach, a place where I should never have come ashore, much less feel at home. Despite a Top-10 MBA education and being groomed for speed, I am back with the proverbial high school art wing crowd, never to be invited to the cool parties.

The Austrians are going through a back-slappin' confab, the "I Told You So" tour, and they deserve to — but the arenas are mostly empty. In 2009 America being a libertarian or, if you prefer the term, a classic liberal, is like being a vegetarian who wandered into a nation of cannibals; none too many roam these parts and our future looks like stew.

The Love Train

Life's the allusion, love is the dream, Everybody's happy nowadays.

~ Buzzcocks

My first (though minor) compliant about the big downer that's at the heart of our Great Unmoderationing (2007 ), for me at least, is that finding yourself on the Austrian fringe, while it may find you on the winning team, vindicated, doesn't win you the girl but quite the opposite. I woke up from a long high party not carried atop shoulders off the football field to my waiting cheerleader prize, but hanging out with the debate society champions, showing off our first prize trophies to each other.

Seeing off my thirties before studying the life that was around makes me late to the game, but some say that everyone is born either a socialist or a libertarian so maybe I was fated to, in my mind, eventually think things through to my own end, which happens to be on the fringe. I've always drifted to what was left of the dial and believing in a gold standard certainly puts you firmly in the realm of social standing reserved for those "considered as foolish or as a dangerous extremist" (in the words of Dr. Pascal Salin). There go my boyhood dreams of working at the Fed.

When you've read the Austrian tomes, its Moby Dicks and Divine Comedies and your brain decides to agree with it all, you come to feel a mental tug of war about what you hear around you, about all that modern America trumpets, everything starts to sound like lunacy. I read things that seem to strike nobody but me as absurd, and while I can soothe myself with Thoreau's all men lead lives of quiet desperation, that it's not absurd to everyone else because I'm just such an insightful, smart guy, maybe it's not quiet desperation on everyone's part, maybe it's all lunacy on mine.

I once spent part of a Ron Paul event drinking and smoking with some bearded kid who was dressed as a giant purple dinosaur. We leaned against the bar, he was trying to sell me on the merits of "riding out the coming storm" in Quito, Ecuador and the female bartender delivered every shot with an accompanying warning about One World Government. I couldn't help to feel a bit like a lunatic.

But the biggest complaint about meeting the Austrians mentally is that it spoils the high, it made what little pockets remained of the paper party appear to me far more frantic, everyone merely putting on airs, as if doing was believing. People in my world are still vacationing overseas; I worry about not being able to find gold coins. There's a disconnect here and I regret it, despite my thousand dollar suit I no longer fit in.

There are still legions who fervently believe the powerful do have all the answers, that somewhere in that latest plan, based on the latest guesses and assumptions, they've gotten all the variables correct and things will soon smooth out, we'll see an upturn by late summer if not sooner, but I no longer believe and am not happy about losing that mind set, ignorance was bliss. Plus, I want to surf Costa Rica.

Lew Rockwell, bless his heart, is trying to perk up the troops, telling me I should feel "fortunate" to live in such times; that living through economic calamity has its bright side if you know your economics. Having knowledge of that sort, he says, "even in the face of calamity, there is no mystery, and hence fear is reduced."

It's no mystery that if I suffer a complete parachute malfunction after I jumped from an airplane that I'm going to die. That would do nothing to reduce my fear, quite the opposite, and everyday at work I'm watching Bernanke and Geithner and Barney Frank on CNBC, frantically yanking on every ripcord within reach — all to no avail.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

We are fortunate to be living in these times, for we are seeing the unfolding of events long explained and predicted by the Austrian tradition.

~ Lew Rockwell (2009)

Dr. Pascal Salin recently stated he was "lucky not to have known the Mises Institute at the dawn of my professional life" and I also feel the same way about being late to the game, though for different reasons. He would not have been tenured in a French University with such views, and I wouldn't have spent the past twenty years thoroughly enjoying the party.

A little bit of knowledge can be dangerous, and also depressing. Knowledge does not necessarily always bring happiness, and in this case it certainly doesn't. The benefits are that it gave me wisdom to re-position, to cut off the alcohol, and I did what I had to before the crash. But with the knowledge and foresight of what was to come I gave up on the happy ignorance I wore for the Austrian sackcloth.

A large part of me wants to become normal again and nod along to the soothing tones of the latest Fed minutes, secure that all will be well because we've got the best people — Ivy League to their eyeballs — spot on the job, and I can go about my day with a lighter step and lose myself in the crowd, happily debating what plan of all the suggested plans Obama should choose for us.

Instead, having wandered into the fringe where the Austrians and purple dinosaurs roam, I am weighted down like Marley's ghost, my heavy chains forged from ponderous copies of Human Action and Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, their thousands of pages of weight all boiled down to my sad bank statements. They say I've used up all my tomorrows. What's left for me?

I don't hold it against any of them, the Rockwells, Norths, and Hayeks who have ruined all the fun for me. Adam Smith once wrote of how to judge a person by "to the intention or affection of the heart, to the beneficence or hurtfulness of the design, all praise or blame, all approbation or disapprobation, of any kind, which can justly be bestowed upon any action, must ultimately belong." So we're cool. None of them meant to take my punchbowl away, they just pointed out the turd floating in it.

Unlike so many others, though, I'm even cool with the politicians despite their being the source of our sorrow. The political class will always make things as difficult as they can — and they have — but it's in their nature to do so. I feel them no more at fault over their sleazy, violent behavior than I would that of a lion that chased down and devoured the easy prey of a human toddler — they are merely doing what's in their nature. Every form of life on God's playground has its predator, something to cull the herd, why should humans be exempted? God in His wisdom choose it to be so and who am I to judge?

Besides, in His infinite wisdom He makes up for it with sunsets and flowers and Van Gogh and beaches and Paris Hilton, all created to show His love. I am happy with the world as it is and should be. The road back to my inner peace, which made me feel fortunate to be living in these times despite it all, was not through any knowledge found in Mises or Hayek, but by my study of a classic of self-actualization, Be Your Own Me, by Spinal Tap lead singer and philosopher David St. Hubbins. I absorbed its main message on the true path to inner peace and fortunate feelings. That message is, in the words of the great man himself, "take your sadness and shove it up your ass" — and there you will find your bliss.

Yet, I will always fondly recall my lost lamented ignorance, which lived in the days before "the unfolding of events long explained and predicted by the Austrian school." I recall Bill Clinton and Monica brightening our day with laughter, with Hillary thrown in for a foil, trendy dinners with trendy friends and blurry cab rides and trips to the Pacific Ocean, retching and heaving alongside the coast highway because of a bit too much.

And I recall everyone from Fool's Paradise blissfully unaware, dancing on seaside rooftops to Jon Porter's spinning. The sun would come up off Fire Island and we would always cheer as she peeked above the waves, and I too believed the promise of an endless summer.

March 7, 2009

The Best of C.J. Maloney