I t’s not what most people think: a return to some hypothetical
“normality,” with the ghost of Ronnie Reagan beaming down like a sun-god
under his lopsided pompadour, and all the happy self-driving GM cars toodling
back and forth from WalMart-to-home loaded to the scuppers with new electric
pop-tart warmers and 3-D underwear printers. (Or drone deliveries of same
from Amazon.com.)
I mean, surely the thinking folk out there must be asking themselves: what
is the way out of this Federal Reserve three-card-monte,
one-percenter-stuffing, so-called “economy,” and what is the destination of
this society when that mendacious model for living fails?
I digress for a moment: there was a chap named Richard Duncan on the
pod-waves this weekend (FSN
Network) putting out the charming idea that quantitative easing (QE —
governments “printing” money to buy their own bonds) had the effect of
“cancelling debt” and that it could continue for decades to come. I don’t
doubt that there are Federal Reserve officers who believe this. The part they
leave out — and Mr. Duncan also left it out until pressed — is that there are
consequences. Consult the operating manual of the universe, and you will find
that there really is no free lunch or get-out-of-jail card.
The truth is, when you rig a money system with price interventions,
distortions, and perversions, they will eventually express themselves in ways
destructive to the system. In the present case of world-wide QE and central
bank monkey business, these rackets are expressing themselves, finally, in
wobbling currencies. In many nations, people are deeply unsure of what their
money is worth, and how much it might be worth a month from now. This
includes the USA, except for the moment our money is said to be magically
appreciating in value compared to everyone else’s. Aren’t we special?
Get this: nothing is more hazardous than undermining people’s trust in
their money.
All of this financial perfidy conceals the basic fact that the human race has
reached the limits of techno-industrialism. There are too many people and not
enough basic resources to grow more of them — oil, fishes, soil, ores,
fertilizers — and there is no steady-state “solution” to keep that economy
going. In other words, it must either grow or contract, and it can’t really
grow anymore (despite the exertions of government statisticians), so the
authorities are trying to provide a monetary illusion of growth, when instead
we’re in contraction.
Yes, contraction. The way out is to get with the program, shed the
dead-weight and go where reality wants to take you. In the USA that means do
everything possible to quit supporting giant failing systems — Big Box
shopping, mass motoring, GMO agribiz, TBTF banks — and get behind local Main
Street integrated economies, walkable towns, regular railroads, smaller and
more numerous farms, local medical clinic health care, artistry in public
works, and community caretaking of the unfit. All this surely implies a
reduced role for the national government, and maybe the states, too. You
could call it a lower standard of living, or just a different way to live.
I don’t think we’ll go there via rational political discourse. The current
instabilities around the world are so sinister that they are liable to lead
to even more strenuous efforts at the top to pretend that everything’s
working, and even war is one way to pretend you’re okay (and the “other guy”
isn’t). Of course, war has already broken out, in the MidEast and Ukraine,
and it has everything to do with the sequential failure of nations, in one
way or another, to overcome the limits of techno-industrialism. America will
be dragged kicking and screaming to the realization of what it needs to do.
The 2016 election will be the convulsion point.
