America Needs Its Frontier Spirit

[HT:NF]
The greatest danger in the current economic crisis is that the United States will lose its historic appetite for risk. The mood now is that risk-taking got us into this mess. Risk, though, is the quintessential American trait that built the nation -- from the Battle of Bunker Hill to the rise of the microchip. If we let risk give way to a new ethos of commercial reserve and regulatory restriction, the upward arc of the U.S. ascendancy will flatten. Maybe it already has. [snip]

The great danger now is that a depressed and angry people will allow the risk-taking American baby to be thrown out with the toxic-securities bathwater. The line of waiting washerwomen is long. France's Nicolas Sarkozy ("Laissez-faire capitalism is over") and our European friends propose a global regulatory body to monitor financial risk, which of course means it would corral America's cowboy capitalists. Barney Frank wants a "systemic-risk regulator." [snip]

The current crisis is the result of a world gone madly long on real estate. Daniel Boone, the famed American frontiersman, went belly-up speculating on Kentucky land. He moved on in 1788 and paid his debts. So should we, without losing sight of the American frontier, where we discovered the rewards of risk.

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