No, It Wasn’t A Typo

“The word ‘amerce’ means to fine or, more broadly, to punish. If Romney’s policies for America are implemented, America would indeed become ‘Amercia,’ the country of the punished.” Sanford Rose

Dolors & Sense

by Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—6/18/2012—The Romney campaign’s policy statement, “A Better Amercia,” has been widely ridiculed as an instance of a simple careless misspelling.

But it is no such thing. At best it’s a Freudian slip.

The word “amerce” means to fine or, more broadly, to punish.

If Romney’s policies for America are implemented, America would indeed become Amercia, the country of the punished.

Romney staffers, no doubt in tune with their boss’s autochthonous* beliefs, simply expressed them in a way not precisely sanctioned by standard orthography.

But make no mistake: Romney’s policies would deeply punish the country, for they are the policies of debt reduction through austerity which, in reality, is not debt reduction at all, but debt expansion.

To cut spending when so many are unemployed or underemployed—the “true” unemployment rate being 14.8 percent—is a recipe for less growth in the future and therefore lower tax revenues and concomitantly larger federal deficits.

Austerity in the present economic circumstances achieves precisely the opposite of what it intends.

Does Romney know this?

It is very likely that he does, but that, as many contend, he has less interest in growth and prosperity than in pandering to popular misconceptions born of the economic illiteracy assiduously promoted by the Know-Nothing and now dominant wing of the Republican Party.

But it is also likely that Romney seriously espouses austerity and lifestyle retrenchment.

He is, after all, a religious man whose behavior, like that of his distinguished father, exemplifies the traditional Protestant values of hard work, abstinence and saving as opposed to spending.

The American lifestyle in the decade immediately preceding The Great Recession grossly traduced these values.

It was a decade of overspending fueled by over-borrowing against highly inflated housing collateral.

And most of the people who over-borrowed were those with the least “right” to do so—those uppity, largely non-Protestant immigrants, many of whom had no jobs or indeed assets other than the housing assets they were trying to leverage themselves into possessing.

Are not these people deserving of punishment? Should not they suffer prolonged unemployment for having shaken the foundations of our great edifices of finance?

These people stepped out of line. Should they not be taught never to do so again?

Of course, in punishing them by eschewing appropriate contra-cyclical spending policies, we also punish the country as a whole.

So what? The grand design of punishment should never be compromised by narrow materialistic considerations.

Merci for those who amerce, for they act in pursuit of higher objectives.

*autochthonous = indigenous, native; by extension, characteristic.