Filiality and Mortality

I've liked Karl Denninger since the credit markets crashed and I was lying on the couch with a broken kneecap (no connection to my credit situation) with all the time in the world to figure out what was going on. I'm sure Denninger and Pound would see eye to eye on great many things. I'd be there with them.

His "Recognition of Reality", a post at his Market Ticker forum, is really worth reading. I'm sure that lots of people I respect would take issue with his ideological stance (he's a libertarian), but you've got to admit that his diagnosis and his proposed treatment have the advantage of being fresh.

I've written about filial piety before, a central tenet of Confucian ethics (and politics). I have also increasingly been thinking about the need to accept the plain fact that we will die. I'm tired of the so-called ethical dilemmas that so-called medical-science (read: the psycho-pharmacological complex) puts us in. And I'm tired of the politics of the ordering of welfare priorities. I do know where all this kind of thought too often leads. So I'm wary of it.

But, speaking personally, I've been raising my kids on the assumption that I'm going to spend a great deal of time with them in their adult lives. And, perhaps naively, on the assumption that I'm going to die. I don't plan to spend a lot of private or public resources putting that inevitability off.