Monday, July 25, 2011

The Platonic Hell of our Commercial Guardians

It is a global clusterfuck of looting at the moment.  Power and money are confused to the point that ideas like corruption and ethics are simply no longer relevant. A self serving global elite has captured the levers of all of the worlds major currency systems and is looting on every continent on an epic scale.  The problems begin with the United States, the monopoly issuer of a floating fiat currency that is pretending it is on the gold standard to justify as necessary a massive upward redistribution of wealth.  

This policy, and a similar one at the ECB leaves open the door of currency manipulation on a global scale by entities with the economic power to execute.  The Chinese have to buy bonds from both the EU and the US in order to force an export market by depressing the value of the Yuan which in turn prevents the Chinese from consuming and thus exports demand to debt selling countries.  China is able to do this because both western systems pretend they are constrained in some unexplained manner from simply creating the money their economies need rather than selling debt to, among others, the Chinese.


The Great Leap Forward

The capitalist "Great Leap Forward", of which we are on the brink, like its communist predecessor is an attempt to impose on reality an ideological system's claims to universal truth, regardless of the underlying reality. The Maoist conceptions of "collectivization" and "industrialization", with perfect knowledge of how humans will behave in the communist utopia to come, were uninterested in the realities of how millions and millions of Chinese actually got their daily rations. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people had to die to kill this vision.
The capitalist conception of "efficient markets" and "rational expectations", with perfect knowledge of how humans will behave in the "free market" utopia upon who's brink we teeter, are uninterested in the realities of how millions and millions of Americans and Europeans get their daily rations. So committed to their utopia are mainstream economists that  they take it upon themselves to scold the reality based community for it's sinful insistence on reality.
Shut down the government, cut off social security, medicare, medicaid, food stamps and other income supports. These all offend the free market utopia. How many will need to suffer how much to prove the insanity?