“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry” – Shakespeare
Everyone in the United States – indeed, the world – is
either 1) a buyer, or 2) a seller, or 3) someone who facilitates buying and
selling. There are no exceptions.
Politicians consider themselves service providers. Their
opening, invariably, is “We’re here to help.” As a general rule, politicians
collect money from some people, launder it through bewildering, little
understood administrative ganglions, and give it to those who, they determine,
need help. A sizable chunk of the gift is devoted to the labor costs of the
administrative apparatus, and other parts are parceled out to grease the
political machine.
Politicians call this “investing.” They imagine they are
doing what millionaires do effectively in what is still laughingly called, here
in the un-United States, a “free market.” A free market may be defined
correctly as an unregulated selling floor, where people who want goods and
services are free to purchase them from sellers without undue interference from
third parties not directly involved in buying and selling. In our
Coronavirus cancel-everything era, we have seen autocratic governors swollen
with plenary powers shut down the whole economy -- schools, restaurants,
businesses, even the legislative and judicial branches of government.
The political universe, in which politicians invest additionally
in their own continuance in office, is not at all like a public marketplace
where goods and services are freely exchanged. In fact, in many ways, the
political trade is just the opposite of a free market. It is where regulations
are made that encumber the free flow of goods and services, sometimes in the
interests of the general public.
The Shakespearian line quoted above is spoken by Polonius,
who is giving fatherly advice to his son Laertes before his trip to Paris. Do
not borrow or lend, the father advises, “for loan oft loses both itself and
friend.”
Modern banking has solved the problem of lost friendship
owing to imprudent borrowing because, as we all know, bankers are not friends.
One who refuses to pay a loan from a bank quickly loses his credit, but never a
true friend.
We know, either from bitter experience or hearsay, the
dangers of imprudent getting and spending – assuming we are not profligate
spenders like the majority of politicians in the so called “land of steady
habits.” It is the special mission of progressives to unsteady
habits. Here in Connecticut, governmental debt is $67 billion as of
September 2020. Nationally, the debt is much larger, about $26.70 trillion
as of August 2020, but one cannot expect a small state to keep up with so large
a spendthrift neighbor.
Polonius tells his son that imprudent borrowing “dulls the
edge of husbandry.”
Whatever can Shakespeare mean by that? What was husbandry in
the Elizabethan era, and how is the sharp edge of it dulled by borrowing and
imprudent spending?
When Banquo says in Macbeth, “There’s husbandry in heaven;
Their candles are all out,” he means that the angels are illuminating fewer stars
in order to economize.
It turns out that Shakespeare was a notorious borrower of
the literary labor of others and, at some point, Thomas Tusser's Five Hundred
Points of Good Husbandry may have fallen under his eyes. The book was very
popular in its day.
“Husbandry,”
we learn from Tusser and others, was a term that had developed from the word
“husband.” It was used to refer to the ordering and management of the
household. The term, used more broadly, applied as well to animal and agrarian
management. The farmer who excelled at husbandry was, in a word, thrifty, which
was why women in Shakespeare’s day were attracted to good husbands. Nowadays, a
different alchemy, occasionally involving cosmetics and minor surgery, is used
by non-farm women to catch wanted “partners”, not necessarily husbands, in
their subtle nets. A good Hollywood husband, a gym rat and buff as a new penny,
is one who leaves you in material comfort after the divorce.
Divorce and household management aside, the question of good
husbandry –thriftiness and economizing -- is conspicuously absent in both
Tinseltown and politics, because husbandry in the Shakespearian sense and
marriage in the post-modern period are both regarded as steps backwards and a
lamentable indication that one has failed to “move forward,” whatever horrors
the future may hold for us, some of which may be glimpsed in urban fatherless
families and politicians who little care what sprouts from their spendthrift
progressive soil.
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