Right up there with the Abu Ghraib prison and Gitmo, a shopping mall is one of my most unfavorite places. My annual Christmas trip to the mall this year was especially bad … rather depressing, in fact.

The place was mobbed, as though people were determined to have one last go at the good life, perhaps sensing that next Christmas the shopping malls might be turned into homeless shelters. I watched with great interest as people stood in long lines to pay for the on-sale merchandise they clutched tightly in their arms.

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As religious fanaticism continues to pester civilized people, one wonders how civilization has managed to advance as far as it has. One would have thought that by this time, religious fanaticism and intolerance would have become passé.

Religion aside, it would seem that the least everyone could agree on is a single, self-evident point: that a Universal Intelligence exists. I guess if an individual chooses not to believe that there is a Universal Intelligence (“God,” “Conscious Universal Power Source,” “the Universe,” “Supreme Being,” etc.), there’s nothing wrong with that — provided he doesn’t try to interfere with the rights of others to connect in their own way.

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In Part I of this article, I offered some examples of people who seem to have paid for their bad deeds with “compound interest” added. The belief that everything that goes around comes around is a comforting view of the world, but two other possible scenarios destroy the idea that the world operates in such a manner on a consistent basis. They are:

In thousands of years of recorded history, no one has even come close to being able to explain why bad things sometimes happen to good people. It could be that God has a plan to which we are not privy. Or that appropriate rewards will be forthcoming in the afterlife. Or perhaps that God doesn’t care about earthly events. Who knows?

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When asked what he believed to be the greatest discovery of the 20th century, Albert Einstein is said to have answered, “Compound interest.” And wealthy people — you know, the ones who clip debt-instrument coupons as a pastime — would undoubtedly agree with him.

Compound interest, however, can accrue on things other than money. When I was a very young man, I observed that I almost always ended up paying considerably more for a “wrong” action than what I had hoped to gain from it. When the payment came due, it was like an invisible balloon note that carried onerous, compounded interest. (Sound familiar?)

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A recent Time cover displayed a mockup of Barack Obama decked out to look like FDR. And if you caught the special about FDR that The History Channel did about a week ago, you can understand why. BHO, a master at recycling old, tried-and-failed ideas — ideas that have never enhanced either prosperity or freedom anywhere in the world — clearly intends to be the chocolate version of our thirty-second president.

Like FDR, BHO has the arrogance to use your money to “create” a job for someone else. The fact that creating jobs is not a Constitutional function of government doesn’t seem to bother BHO anymore than it did FDR. And, just as FDR’s intervention in the economy kept the U.S. in a depression seven or eight years longer than was necessary, BHO’s shenanigans are virtually certain to have the same effect.

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Right now, we’re in a deflationary period, which, as I have explained, is a good thing for the economy long term. It cleanses the market of excesses and forces people to be more frugal, more prudent, and more rational in their planning and spending.

As I shared with you in Part I of this article, my friend, Leo the Centimillionaire, believes it will be several years before the government prints its way out of the deflationary hole it has dug for us. He could be right … or he could be wrong. For all the reasons I’ve previously stated, it’s simply impossible to predict the timing of economic events in an economy that is artificially manipulated.

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Could we actually be headed toward a massive deflation — perhaps a deflationary depression? To me, the bottom line is that the political buffoons in D.C. have things so screwed up that no one can predict with certainty exactly how our economic debacle is going to play out.

The only thing we can be certain of is that virtually everything the government does will make things worse. Regardless of whether it’s “jobs programs,” “rescue packages,” or any of a myriad of other anti-free-market measures government loves to impose, its spending must be paid for in one of three ways: printing, borrowing, or taxing — and all three are bad for the economy.

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Another one of those dimwitted financial experts recently popped up on CNN and said that she believed the economy would start “turning around” by the end of the first quarter of 2009. She offered four reasons:

1. Banks are now lending to each other. (So?)
2. Government programs are working. (They are?)
3. Consumer confidence will rise. (It will?)
4. The housing market is ready to revive. (It is?)

I’ve gotten so used to this kind of gibberish from TV-created experts that her inane opinion did little more than cause me to shake my head and smile condescendingly. It was right up there with O’Reilly saying that the media is hurting the economy by scaring people. Sure, Bill. Maybe we should put a cap on scare mongering right along with gas prices.

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I thought long and hard before chiming in on the latest O.J. saga. Since everyone is now pretty much in agreement on the character of this psychopathic primate, I’m not interested in getting in a few “me too” jabs.

Nevertheless, as I watched O.J. near tears in court, the word karma came quickly to mind — as it probably did with you. Not only because of the way his life has turned out, but also considering the lives of so many of the other actors in the fourteen-year run of this modern-day Greek tragedy.

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Now that I’m finally back down to my playing weight, I can tell on myself: I was a bad boy on Thanksgiving. To steal a couple of my own (old) jokes, the way I ate, I was lucky the universe was expanding. They say no man is an island, but I came close. It was sheer gluttony!

Of course, what I ate was a mere snack compared to what I devoured at the Thanksgiving dinners of my youth. But that was then and this is now.

Gluttony is defined by the dictionary as “excessive eating and drinking.” But, metaphorically speaking, just about anything one does in excess is gluttonous.

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