The speculative greed of the many—the suckers—is what enables the few to pull off their uncreative destruction. But not only the greedy get hurt when one of these bubbles bursts or scams explodes. Widows and orphans, pensioners, the unemployed, and the destitute, not only in the U.S. but around the world, suffer the most when Americans contrive to wreck their own economy for a season.
Like the football coach whose pep talks wear thin, a President who turns every cause into a holy one, every enemy into a Hitler, and every conflict into a genocide, may soon find his audience sinking, exhausted and disbelieving, into the very cynicism he hopes to surmount.
