The human race, in its advanced economic form, is committing euthanasia. The US, UK, Europe and Japan are all implementing economic policies that must ultimately result in the complete destruction of their currencies; and if you destroy the means of exchange of goods and services, your people will starve. The political class and government establishments have drifted in incremental steps into this tragedy. Far from being the guiding hand for society, they are its destroyers.
We all look to government to supply what we used to provide for ourselves, in the naïve belief that it is our servant, it has our interests at its heart, and that it can deliver. Collectively we have chosen not social co-operation, but the disintegration and ultimate destruction of society itself. We labour under so many misconceptions about where our true interests lie that we have completely lost our bearings. We have in our time witnessed other nations destroy their own economic and social structures and do not see it happening to ourselves.
When reality intervenes, we deny it. The state controls money and prices. It makes economic calculation meaningless. It takes our property in the name of the common good to dispose of as it sees fit. There is nothing new in this: Keynes himself advocated the euthanasia of the rentier, or saver, in his General Theory, which is every neo-classical economist’s vade mecum. He advocated replacing the functionless investor with limitless state capital, and even capping the profits of the entrepreneur. We have been following Keynes’s grand fallacies for 90 years now. His vision is our sad reality.
The cost is our own impoverishment and loss of freedom. The state only values us for our contributions to it. We must be controlled for our own good. The state does not fear for itself so long as there is any wealth left to sequester from us and any freedom left to us to pursue non-statist objectives.
All the governments mentioned in the first paragraph are running out of their citizens’ money. Together, they are destroying their capital at an accelerating rate, just so that they may survive. They rely on mutual planning in the erroneous belief that it will save them, when the only chance for any one state to survive and eventually prosper is to stop conspiring and face up to the problems of its own making.
Instead, next year – when the weaker governments begin to collapse under the hammer-blows of economic reality – when they cannot hide the insolvency of their state-regulated banking systems, the stronger governments will sequester the remaining resources of their own citizens to prop them up, as Germany is doing to her people today.
To paraphrase Macbeth at his lowest ebb: it is a tale, full of sound and fury, destroying everything.
This article was previously published at GoldMoney.com.
The people from the government are here to help (themselves).
The terrible thing is that the people are helpless.
Take, for example, the recent electiions in Japan and the Republic of Korea.
In both elections the people voted sensibly – against insane ravings of the left.
The “Green Jobs” fantasy of the (now former) government of Japan – endless additional government spending (on “public services” as well as corrupt “Green Jobs” projects) on top of massive existing deficit spending.
And in Korea the people voted against a Presidential candidate who thought handing out more welfare payments, and hiring another half a million government employees (to do something or other) would be “good for economic growth” (and if one believes the insanity of Keynesianism – it is, because all this would “increase consumption” and “consumption” is good for the economy……).
So insanity is defeated and we should celebrate?
No we should not celebrate – because, whilst more moderate than those who lost, the people who won the elections in Japan and the Republic of Korea are also in favour of “create more money [from NOTHING] and we will be better off” policies.
Elections are not a choice of direction.
They are just a choice of speed.
How fast do you want to go?
As you head towards the cliff.
“””
Elections are not a choice of direction.
They are just a choice of speed.
How fast do you want to go?
As you head towards the cliff.
“””
A nice (if depressing) little poem :-)
“The human race, in its advanced economic form, is committing euthanasia.”
Good. Its advanced economic form is incapable of survival. It should be the goal of every sentient being to speed along the demise of the nation-state rather than forestall, or actually postpone it. Accepting the fact that events in human history are determined not by systems but by personalities, sociopaths like Alexander, Napoleon, Bismarck and lesser politicians, people must come to the realization that huge nation-states allow the power-mad psychopaths to harm too many innocent, uninvolved parties. A return to smaller communities would limit the inevitable harm that these monsters could inflict.
“A return to smaller communities would limit the inevitable harm that these monsters could inflict.”
Unfortunately the world isn’t likely to move to smaller communities all at once.
As long as there are some larger communities, they will pose a threat to smaller ones. People feel they need a big strong government to protect them from external threats, but such governments inevitably infringe domestic liberties.
Nuclear proliferation might help even the odds, I suppose …
In reality, there are many such smaller groups not just surviving but thriving while keeping as much of a distance as possible from the machinations of the nation state. In the US religious sects such as the Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites engage economically with their neighbors but maintain as much distance as possible from the US government. Others, whose membership in tribal organizations prosper around the world in spite of attempts to exterminate them, defend themselves from an increasingly unwieldy state apparatus. Witness the Pashtun tribesmen of Afghanistan who are unintimidated and undefeated by the technological advantages of the West while adopting the ones they want. They’re amused by the “suffering” of the western populations over financial set-backs whose biggest real problems are obesity and the onset of type 2 diabetes. Americans accept as sane the fact that they’re number of 320 million is represented on a national level by 537 elected pharisees who can’t effectively protect them from external threats or internal miscues and institutional theft. Size doesn’t necessarily make for efficiency.
As a real economist once noted, conservative inflation hawks have predicted ten of the last zero periods of high inflation.
Russell you are making the Irving Fisher mistake of defining “inflation” as “prices of stuff going up in the shops”, this means you miss asset price inflation. The money supply is increased by the government Central Bank (and the private banks it backs up) and goes into things such as stocks and shares or house prices.
This means that you (like Iriving Fisher) are astonished by a “bust” because you thought the that the “boom” was real – not an inflationary event.
“After all”, you say “prices are not going up in the shops so there is no inflation”.
Tradtionally (before Irving Fisher and co) “inflation” was often understood to be an inflation of the money supply.
Either of the “monetary base” or of “broad money”, bank credit, by banks (and other such) lending out “money” that was never really saved. Of course if “broad money” expands that is a “bubble” which will eventually collapse back down towards the “monetary base” in a “bust” (unless the government-central bank increases the monetary base to save the bankers and other such – and such a policy has its own problems).
If there is genuine economic development, if people really are finding better ways to produce goods and services, then prices (let us leave aside the problem that “price indexes” are a farce) should be FALLING.
If people say “the economy is getting better” what are the saying? If they are saying there is GENUNINE economic progress, that people are finding better ways to produce goods and services, then prices should be FALLING. If they are not falling then this should at least be a “hint” to people that something is wrong – that their “prosperity” is, in fact, a bubble.
This was not understood by Irving Fisher in 1921 (so the bust came as a shock to him), he still did not understand it in 1929 (so the bust came as a shock to him again – and he continued to predict prosperity).
People still did not understand during the Alan Greenspan orgy years (ouch – that is a nasty mental image) when this silly man Greenspan “saved the world” again and again by bailing out (in various ways) banker bubbles – not understanding that he was making the monetary bubble BIGGER AND BIGGER.
And it appear, to judge by Ben B. and “real economist” Krugman-Russell, that they STILL DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
The world is saturated with inflated money (look at the stock market) yet you say “there is no inflation”.