In the recent past, we’ve posted on the apparent dearth of good news in the world, including the reporting about Iraq, where Christopher Hitchens seems to believe that journalists report all news as bad news (e.g., “The glut of unused bullets in Iraq is causing an unfortunate slump in the price of ammunition for Arab arms dealers.  Horror!”).  The same goes for global warming.  How will the media spin the fact that the polar ice caps are larger now than they were last year?  “Polar bears have to walk farther to find water, says Danish climate expert.”  Economist David Ranson says the same goes for news about the economy: “Although markets are volatile and segments of the country are having a hard time, the national output is up, not down, this year. How has the economy pulled this off? Is there something the pessimists were missing?”  He continues, discussing how “the debt crisis” is no crisis at all, but that it becomes a great scapegoat for general human fear:

[F]or society as a whole, debt finance is a prime means of capitalizing production and growth.  It’s extraordinary, then, that in national debate the narrow view drowns out the broad. Aggregate private debt and trade deficits are widely regarded with equal suspicion and fear — even by “experts.” Instead of celebrating the role that private debt has played in creating prosperity, many blame “excessive” debt when things go wrong, and cite it as a basis for pessimism.

I don’t know if we want to “celebrate” anything about debt, but he’s at least being honest about the positive role of debt in a free market economy.  The money that we spend paying off debt is money that gets used in generally healthy ways by the people who take that money. 

A natural system has built-in redundancy. It manages and heals itself. The economic system is no exception. On this page about 10 years ago, Penny Russell and I argued against the idea that the economy is a “house of cards,” susceptible to collapse as soon as a few cards are dislodged. We suggested that it’s more like a beehive. The future of the hive does not depend on full employment for all the worker bees. In fact, an accident can put many bees out of action without compromising the hive as a whole.

I could argue, I suppose, that the media knows that reports of a bad economy are never good for the party in the White House, and they are playing that card for all its worth.  So the left blames the right for fear-mongering in the war on terror.  I suppose the right could blame the left for fear-mongering in the war on debt.