

Tulips worth $1 million apiece, says Geithner, Bernancke,
and Obama
By
Craig J. Cantoni
It’s
a little-known fact that in their prior lives, Timothy Geithner, Ben Bernancke,
and Barack Obama were in charge of the Dutch economy during the tulip bubble, or
mania, of 1634-36.
At
the height of the bubble, when the equivalent of 12 acres of land and buildings
was being exchanged for one tulip bulb, the dynamic trio in Gucci wooden shoes
declared that it would be bad for the Dutch economy if tulip prices were allowed
to fall to their pre-bubble prices. They
came up with plan after plan to prop up tulip prices. All of the plans were based on the same
idea: that prudent people who didn’t
loan or borrow money to buy tulips should be forced to fork over money to those
who did.
“We
have to keep putting money into toxic tulips,” said Geithner, who was the Dutch
treasury secretary at the time. “If we
don’t prop up tulip prices, capital will go to more productive uses like ship
building or dike construction.”
Dutch King Barack Obama backed his treasury
secretary. “Sir Timothy is talking
sense. When I was a community organizer
in Amsterdam, I
worked with ACORN to make sure that ne’er-do-wells had tulips. It would be unjust to take their tulips away
from them.”
In
testifying before the Provincial Council at the
Hague, the head of the Dutch central bank, Ben Bernancke, said that
Britain, France, and Spain would be
upset if tulip prices fell, because they had loaned money to the Dutch to buy
tulips. “The value of the florin [Dutch
dollar] will fall if we let tulip prices fall and can’t pay back the loans,”
Bernancke said.
Enough parody. Let’s switch to historical facts.
As
the Dutch tulip bubble began to deflate in 1636, the Provincial Council actually
attempted to force buyers and sellers of tulips to either continue to pay
inflated prices or to submit to a government auction. However, the Dutch high court ruled that
debts incurred in gambling were not debts in law. In other words, people who bought tulips at
crazy prices were gambling, just as Americans who would later buy homes at crazy
prices were gambling. Of course, it
didn’t matter what the court ruled, because inflated tulip prices were
unsustainable economically and were going to crash sooner or later.
Fast
forward to present-day America: Last week, as I do every week, I bought
flowers for my wife at Wal-Mart. This
time they were tulips imported from Holland. The price was $5. Think of
that. For only five bucks, tulips were
grown in Holland and, through logistical
brilliance born from market competition, were flown to the United States
and trucked to my local Wal-Mart fresh enough to last a week after I had
purchased them.
There are actually Americans who believe that it would be
better for the economy if I had bought the tulips (or a house) at a wildly
inflated price with easy credit instead of a true, undistorted market price with
sound money. Unfortunately, the
imbeciles are heading our government.
_______________
An
author and columnist, Mr. Cantoni can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.