Why does the economy tend to go to pot every 65 years or thereabouts? I have a thought.

I think it is because of this: Experience is a great teacher, and a fool will have no other.

The answer for the 65-yr-cycle is that the folks with experience and influence tend to die off. There simply aren't enough folks from the Great Depression era around who are saving money, being careful with their business dealings and contracts, and otherwise helping perpetuate a safe and rational business environment. I noted this in the late 1990s when many new companies were sprouting up, investors were sinking big bucks, the stock price kept rising, and yet the companies were losing money. It was even more apparent when one of the young CEOs, a darling of the "new paradigm" school, actually said in a major article in a major business magazine that "profits don't matter any more!"

The young CEO had never, in his lifetime, known a stock market that actually declined, at least very much for very long. He concluded that he and other brilliant people had created an economy which would always grow and in which no one ever lost money investing in the stock market.

Now we have a country in which there is no significant number of people who recall the ravages of the Great Depression, nor, for that matter, the perilous times of great danger to the world posed by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. A large segment of our population believes that one can discuss differences rationally with terrorist nations that are fanatically bent upon our destruction. This is as rational as believing one can calmly ask a rabid dog to play with the neighborhood children in the back yard.

They simply have no experience with a truly dangerous enemy, and they can't even imagine such exists.

Those New Paradigm CEOs are now gone, for the most part, along with most of their companies, as they could not recognize the impending collapse of their financial house of cards. One hopes that the USA will not join the scrapheap of history as a country which did not recognize the impending peril.

The citizenry is also amnesic about the causes of the Great Depression, and they are clamoring for the exact same "remedies" that hastened and deepened the economic misery during the 1930s. We will pay a price for such a short memory.

Georges Santayana was correct: "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Soi-disant progressives should note that this quotation is a call for conservatism, for remembering what did and didn't work in the past, not for some willy-nilly "change."