A recent trip to China enlightened me on the ramifications of the so-called housing crisis . A $1 trillion American stimulus package, and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac’s possible $360 billion cost sounds fine and dandy in the news; even a global food shock can be mitigated by attenuated spending habits, and the only immediately comprehensible difference is visited when we go to the pump. But, driving down the newly built, raised highways in China that are regularly decorated by well-watered plants, you ask yourself why the houses below can be abandoned, taunting you, a North American, as they rot in the sun.

So I spent some time learning history: how can a country recover from foreign suppression, hyperinflation, external invasion, civil war, and years of communist starvation, and still win out over a global superpower that, in the meantime, experienced its golden age? I believe that in down-times, the facing of problems, such as economic disparity, favours underdogs, precisely because they are willing to fight harder, last longer, and stoop lower. But the game isn’t over; America has moves to play; as long as they stop allowing the game to be controlled by the ingenious inventors of the credit-default swaps, to which the notorious George Soros himself jokingly said “I don’t understand,” they can stop being the playthings of invisible forces, and the dinner-time jokes of their well-fed, government-regulated neighbours.

Can what? I’m not suggesting we adopt a communist system, but SOME bipartisanship never hurt.