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In several posts (particularly here and here), I pointed out that the Trump Administration has failed to establish its authority; or, looking at it from a different angle, the President has been unable to seize the power of the presidency.
At this juncture, seizing the power of the presidency might be a nearly insurmountable task. One major reason: too many people are in on the grift that Mr. Trump was elected to dismantle. How can you battle the Leftist Establishment, and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, when such an enormous segment of the population is dependent on it; nay, thrives on it? Let’s face it: America is becoming a Third World country, complete with crumbling infrastructure, banana-republic levels of debt, low trust, and rampant corruption. In years past, when considering the plague of shady dealings in most areas of the globe, I thought: Can’t anything be done about this? Couldn’t a few people be arrested, as an example? Later, as I sojourned in some of these places, it didn’t take long to realize that the corruption was endemic. Everyone was doing it. In many cases, they didn’t have a choice. If bribery is the only way to get things done, you bribe. If using false weights and measures is the only way for your business to survive, you falsify. And so on. In America, the vast majority depend on the “gubmint” gravy train, financed by ever-escalating debt. This applies to almost every sector and social class. Welfare, food stamps, and other direct transfers are just the tip of the iceberg. What appears to be a functioning economy, with real people doing real jobs, is mostly just an enormous charade in which government money is sloshing from trough to trough. Even Bitcoin is now dependent on Uncle Sam. Ditto for the stock market and the banks. Leviathan produces almost nothing of value. In fact, much of its activity involves placing obstacles in the way of value creation. You could chop every single component of the machine in half, and it would make no difference to the production of anything that people actually need. Is it any wonder that so many are apoplectic as DOGE turns over one rock after another, exposing the unbelievable fraud that permeates the system? As Elon Musk and his merry band of detectives must surely have realized, the fraud is the system. They found a house infested with termites, to such an extent that there is almost no wood remaining; the structure has become a stack of termites. Aided by this equivalency (system = fraud), various “empires” have developed within Leviathan. These are independent fiefdoms of grift that sometimes clash, but more often, it’s one hand washes the other. You let me develop an entire charity industry to “help” illegal aliens, and I let you launder billions through Ukraine. I let you expand student loans to finance your neo-Marxist woke university brainwashing factories, and you let me siphon billions from the public purse for my wind-power scam. All the while, the mainstream propaganda outlets grease the wheels. No single entity is in charge of this monstrosity. All the lines are blurred. Function ceases to coincide with offices and titles. Thus we have judges appointing themselves president, and Lindsay Graham appointing himself secretary of state. And they do so with impunity. I have lamented, on several occasions, that none of the Establishment criminals from the Biden regime, or those who currently are engaged in the slow-motion coup d’état, have been arrested or prosecuted. Now I am beginning to understand the dilemma: When everyone is crooked, law enforcement is well-nigh impossible. In our case, we’re talking about the entire Establishment. If you incarcerate a handful of the chief troublemakers, the rest of them will respond with even more sabotage and treason. I am not justifying the limp response of the White House. Rather, I would say that the people and methods employed during Trump 2.0, impressive though they be, have been inadequate to the task. And considering the ball of fire in which the Administration launched its campaign to clean the Augean stables, we may conclude that success would require an even greater force, activated by personnel (and circumstances) that have yet to appear on the scene. This mismatch of task and personnel reminds me of the scene in The Godfather, in which Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) explains to Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) the decision to replace him as top advisor (“consigliere”): “You're not a wartime consigliere, Tom. Things may get rough with the move we're trying.” Our current president also, despite his many talents, is not a wartime consigliere. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump at some point is going to have to put his foot down, and start taking chances. Otherwise, he may find himself impeached, incarcerated, and possibly worse. The brazen usurpation of executive power by the judges and Mr. Graham is bad enough, but the open rebellion by the state and local authorities in California, challenging the legitimacy of American sovereignty in their jurisdictions, crosses all boundaries of tolerance. It is certainly the equivalent of any act that was considered sedition in the runup to the Civil War. The leader of a country cannot allow this type of precedent to stand, and expect longevity, either political or personal. Nothing will change in this country until we see seditious state and local government officials led away in handcuffs. Otherwise, they have no incentive to desist from their subversive activities. They are seen by their supporters as heroes, and championed as such by the propaganda outlets. It’s all fine and good to send in the National Guard and Marines to quell the riots. But the madness will continue, in one form or another, until the Administration gets serious about ending the ongoing insurrection, of which the Los Angeles intifadah is only the most recent and brutal stage. A key part of the needed strategy is the imposition of consequences on the ringleaders. Real, personal, painful consequences. Our national edifice of corruption is not the most evil in the history of the world, but it is certainly in the running for the largest. Is it impossible to fix? I don’t know. Perhaps the termites must complete their job, so that the house can be rebuilt from the ground up, with a wartime consigliere at the helm.
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Contemporary life has many odd and often infuriating aspects that leave one scratching one’s head, searching in vain for some shred of logic to explain them. A prime head-scratcher is the late-model automobile. Have you ever wondered why cars have become outrageously expensive, ugly, overly complex, packed with unnecessary electronic nonsense, and increasingly unrepairable?
Wonder no more. Everything is explained with great clarity on the fascinating and informative YouTube channel, “Uncle Tony’s Garage.” Here's a sample. Trump did this, Trump did that. The Trump Effect. Trump is purposely collapsing the economy. Trump is saving the economy. The tariffs will lead to war. The tariffs will lead to peace. Trump is sticking it to Wall Street. Trump is working for Wall Street.
Many observers, pro and con, are assuming a tight causal linkage between two events: the implementation of the tariffs and the wild fluctuations in the financial markets. As the commentariat bloviates on the situation, they forget that correlation is not causation. President Trump and his associates are not causing anything. On the contrary, they are struggling to keep pace with a rapidly changing landscape that is mostly beyond their control, and for which the die was cast well before the advent of Trump 2.0. Like a person sinking into quicksand, the Administration will grasp at any stick within reach. Here is the quicksand they stepped into: The mother of all bubbles, an agglomeration of bubbles such as the world has never seen. A financial bubble. A debt bubble. A real estate bubble. A bubble of lies and fraud. A bubble of Progressive ideology, of Keynesianism, of central control, of fake science, of media propaganda. Of pure idiocy, of hypocrisy, of insanity. This megabubble is at its bursting point; a balloon in search of a pin. The tariffs are related to the bursting bubble, but not in the way that many think. Sure, they might advance or postpone certain aspects of the bursting, but those aspects are baked into the cake. Looking at the big picture, the imposition of these trade restrictions is an attempt to outwit processes that are already in motion. The Trump policy is not causing the stock market to be unstable, nor is it causing the demise of free trade and the Bretton Woods economic order; it is rather a reaction to the crumbling of the order and its constituent parts, a movement that has been accelerating for several years. The post-World War II international order, led by the United States, is dead as a doornail, with or without tariffs. The West is bankrupt, financially and in every other sense of the word. The financial system is a house of cards. NATO has been defeated in Ukraine. Europe is ruled by shrieking hags and ghoulish fanatics. Meanwhile, the BRICS countries are severing their connection with the Western system of global economic fraud. They no longer want to play the game of make-believe. Thus the frantic accumulation of gold, the anti-bubble par excellence. (The BRICS may end up with their own fraudulent system, but it will be their fraudulent system.) The tariffs are a reaction to this massive realignment. The Titanic is sinking, and this is a handy lifeboat, albeit one that has been in mothballs for a while. Will it really help rebuild manufacturing in the U.S.? I certainly hope so, because the extreme market volatility is only the start of the Great Bursting. The phony-baloney financialized economy, along with its ecosystem of institutionalized grift, is disintegrating before our eyes. When it’s all said and done, the only edifice left standing may very well be manufacturing, energy, mining, and agriculture, and the networks that surround these sectors. As more reports of waste, fraud, and abuse emerge from Elon Musk’s DOGE undertaking, I thought it would be an opportune time to offer some of my own personal experience in the matter.
After returning to the U.S. in 2006 from an extended stay abroad, I worked for a major defense contractor, and then a defense-related research institute of the Federal government. In both of these environments, waste, fraud, and abuse were in full swing. Let us start with the simplest aspect: basic incompetence. It was everywhere. Most of the people, from top to bottom, had no idea what they were doing. The majority of jobs were pure make-work. This was exacerbated by an inefficient, heavily bureaucratized organizational structure that suppressed any possible outbreaks of intelligence and creativity. Naturally, this state of affairs produced outcomes that were inexcusable, even by the low standards of FedGov. The problem was addressed by importing an endless stream of “experts,” many of whom were outside consultants living off fat contracts, providing zero value. They usually just added a new layer of procedure, clogging the system to an even greater extent. Speaking of systems, it seemed as though everybody and their grandmother was a “systems engineer.” In most cases, this turned out to be a pseudo-qualification, a special favorite of women and minorities. It was a way to identify as an “engineer” without knowing how to do engineering. They were very good at PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets, which were excellent tools for “streamlining” (adding more bloat). Then there was the diversity grift. Its influence could be felt in every nook and cranny. Again, “experts” floating around. Incompetent minorities coddled and promoted. Constant drumbeating, seminars, emails, and thinly-veiled threats. At one “workshop,” after hearing about an hour’s worth of preaching from poster-children of the oppressed, myself and three hundred or so other attendees split up into little working groups. We were tasked with “brainstorming” ways to be more sensitive to the needs of the unqualified delicate little flowers injected into the ranks by the DEI tyrants. When it was my turn to pour forth the result of my brainstorm, I asserted that diversity is a racist, un-American institution, a violation of civil rights, and should be abolished. Later that day, one member of my little group, a feminized, twenty-something NPC type, ratted on me to the authorities. I was warned by management in no uncertain terms that if there was ever another similar outburst of heresy on my part, I would be shown the door. The amount of money wasted was off the charts. The budget back then at the FedGov research institute was around three billion dollars per annum; now it must be at least five. There may have been some real benefit to national defense hiding somewhere in that pile of manure, but I never encountered it. Some of the issues were not caused by the organization itself, but rather inherited from the broken society as a whole. Some of the old-timers were bravely hanging on, trying to stem the tide of idiocy and wokeness from the younger cohort. But it is a losing battle when your recruits are graduates of the American educational system, particularly the “elite” “institutions” of “higher” “learning.” The last straw for me was the response to the Scamdemic. As you can imagine, both management and employees were engaged in a frantic effort to outdo each other in worshiping the golden calf. Even DEI had to take a temporary back seat to the Chicken Littles proclaiming every five minutes the arrival of epidemiological Armageddon. I resigned my post at the moment when I expected a SWAT team any minute to bang down my door and force the poison needle into my arm. My only criticism of DOGE is that it doesn’t go far enough. These days I read and listen to an enormous volume of commentary on the deepening economic and financial collapse. Much of this verbiage is repetitive, tendentious, and confused. Once in a while, however, I come across an article or a podcast that sums up, in succinct fashion, the situation as it stands at that moment. Such was the case with YouTuber “Jeremiah Babe,” who yesterday did just that. Worth a look.
On Sunday, President Trump reiterated his intention to create a “crypto strategic reserve” for the United States. Besides the usual references to Bitcoin and Ethereum, this time he also mentioned three relatively obscure cryptocurrency thingamajigs: XRP, Solana, and Cardano. In attempting to find out what these entities really are, I stumbled across this definition of Cardano: “A decentralized, open-source blockchain network that can execute peer-to-peer transactions and serve as a platform for deploying smart contracts.” On its website, Cardano boasts that it is “a blockchain platform for changemakers, innovators, and visionaries, with the tools and technologies required to create possibility for the many, as well as the few, and bring about positive global change.”
Translation: Very powerful people are creating make-believe digital toys and marketing them in a sophisticated pump-and-dump scheme that has already yielded untold billions of dollars. In the 24 hours following Mr. Trump’s announcement, the price of Cardano rocketed upward by nearly 50 percent. Now that’s some “positive global change,” right there. This whole crypto game is getting completely out of hand. There is an element within the Trump Administration, along with some of the President’s big-money backers, that is capitalizing on the financial woes of the country by sucking the last blood out of the nation’s fiscal corpse before the cadaver is sent from the morgue to the graveyard. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Congress responds to the challenge of $36 trillion in national debt by formulating a budget proposal that will actually increase spending. Nero fiddles while Rome burns. Government complicity in the crypto swindle is of a piece with the proposed “sovereign wealth fund” that will, in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “monetize the asset side of the US balance sheet for the American people. We are going to put the assets to work, and I think it's going to be very exciting….There'll be a combination of liquid assets, assets that we have in this country, as we work to bring them out for the American people.” Translation: We’re bankrupt, so we’re going to have a national foreclosure sale and sell everything that isn’t nailed down. Wait, on second thought, even what is nailed down can be “monetized” or “tokenized” or put on the “blockchain,” or whatever. Yes, Mr. Bessent, it is very exciting indeed, especially for the vultures who will be feasting on the carrion. The Trump Administration has done great work in exposing and dismantling some of the nation’s worst scams, such as green energy, diversity, and the Ukraine money laundromat. But please, please, do not replace these scams with new grifts that threaten to derail your excellent accomplishments. The Trump Administration has launched a multi-front attack on the slimy tentacles of the Deep State. We have all been witness to the blitzkrieg, and it has provided warmth for our hearts.
This campaign represents the end of an era; or more precisely, it heralds the transition from one era to another. Coming to an end is the modern era of Fantasy, perhaps the greatest and longest of its kind in world history; opening before us is the age of Reality, which is the default state of mankind. To whatever degree Trump and his associates succeed in resuscitating our bruised and battered country, there is no going back to Fantasy world. Even if they fail, whoever takes the reins of power will be staring Reality in the face. It’s here to stay. Our era of Fantasy began with the French Revolution, which instituted a slate of false, imaginary precepts by which man was expected to live. This constituted a mythological system that would put any primitive, superstitious culture to shame. The worst ideas and idols of the Enlightenment were dredged up and repackaged, forming the foundation of the Fantasy system, a foundation upon which we still stand. But not for long. The key ingredient is the myth of Equality. This is the biggest pipe dream of all, and the one upon which all else depends. It has enabled, over time, the construction of a mirror world, a parallel universe. Society devolved into two main divisions: those who perform productive work that results in the fulfillment of real human needs, and a steadily growing parasitic class. Today, virtually every sector is plagued with an internal and antagonistic Reality/Fantasy split. For example, agriculture. The Reality side: farmers, distributors, slaughterhouses, etc. The Fantasy side includes the bureaucrats and “thought leaders” that tell us to stop eating meat, and who bully the farmers into adulterating or destroying their crops and livestock. Once the Big Lie of Equality became entrenched, many other lies followed. Over time, we reach the postmodern society, in which misrepresentation is ubiquitous. We are saddled with fake art, fake religion, fake education, fake scholarship, fake jurisprudence, fake healthcare, and on and on. The never-ending train of lies has been interpreted by some observers to be the approach of the “Leftist singularity”: infinite Leftism in finite time. I believe that we reached something approximating this state of affairs as the Biden regime drew to a close. This is the hornet’s nest that was sliced open by Trump and his people, exposing unimaginable levels of corruption, malfeasance, and treason. In the Leftist singularity, or Fantasy world run amok, society deteriorates into a chaotic, dysfunctional mess. This has caused wealthy, powerful individuals like Elon Musk to defect from Fantasy world to Reality world. A type of fraud that is crucial to the operation of Fantasy world is fake money. Since time immemorial, money has been gold and silver. These are tokens of Reality world. In Fantasy world, money has been abstracted and transmuted, by degrees, into ever more empty and worthless derivatives. Cryptocurrency, the final divorce from Reality, is only the latest in a long line of these progressively more counterfeit forms of “money.” Fake money and its intellectual handmaiden, Keynesian economic theory, transformed debt from an embarrassing, temporary situation to an unquestioned and even praiseworthy status quo. Exponentially rising debt, like the universe exploding outward from the Big Bang, enabled the expansion of government to obscene levels. Needless to say, this has flooded Fantasy world with virtually unlimited resources. Until now. Of all the countless unsustainable aspects of Fantasy world, one in particular is the proximate cause of its demise, the spark that lit the fuse: the unfolding economic and financial collapse of the West. The debt/fake money system has reached the end of the road. The wealth is gone; the productive sector has been hollowed out by the parasites, and the rest of the world is no longer enthusiastic about supplying the goods or buying the debt. There are no suckers left to pay for the fun and games. Small wonder, then, that gold—prime symbol of Reality world—is experiencing a resurgence on the world stage. When it comes to international relations, Trump and everyone else knows that the jig is up. This was acknowledged by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when he admitted in a recent interview that the unipolar era of American dominance is over, and that we are now reverting to the historical norm of a multipolar world. Say goodbye to American exceptionalism; the dollar as reserve currency; “Pride” flags flying over U.S. embassies; the Fukuyama “end of history” nonsense; neoconservatism; and all the rest of the hokum. Incidentally, the Trump proposal for Gaza, whatever its merits and whatever its eventual result, is the first time an American president has proposed a solution that is based in Reality world. All previous Middle East “peace plans” were rooted in concepts derived from Leftist mythology, and thus doomed to failure. Fantasy world is in its death throes. Sure, it can still twitch in frightening ways, but it is a rotting corpse nevertheless. If Trump didn’t exist, he would have to be invented; someone was needed to officiate at the funeral service. The same applies to the other countries of the "collective West," many of whom are still testing the limits of the Leftist singularity. I do not intend to convey the impression that we are embarking upon some new, golden age. The Trump presidency is only the beginning of a lengthy journey into the unknown. All such interregnums are by definition unstable. We may very well emerge on the other side, healthier and happier. But it is quite possible that we descend into totalitarian madness; a host of thoroughly dystopian scenarios could ambush us. Whichever way it goes, the world as we knew it, the Fantasy world that emerged from the French Revolution, is over. Whatever comes next, good or bad, will be based in Reality. In reading and listening to commentary on possible cuts to the Federal budget, I have noticed that the Department of Defense usually is treated as sacrosanct. It is lumped in with Social Security and Medicare as a permanent, untouchable feature of the District of Columbia.
I believe that the restoration of fiscal sanity requires massive cuts to the defense budget. This can be accomplished while actually boosting national security. There is no reason, other than protecting sinecures and pork, to desist from wielding the scalpel. Bloat and waste are off the charts. The nominal defense budget is approaching the trillion dollar mark. It goes well beyond that point when you factor in dark ops, foreign military aid, and the numerous defense-related functions that are domiciled in other parts of the government. A prime example is the Department of Energy, which has responsibility for the nuclear arsenal as well as the national “laboratories.” We all know about the obscenely expensive weapons systems that don’t work, and have heard the legendary stories of hundred-dollar hammers and such. Is there no way to fix this? Should be a top priority for the incoming Secretary of Defense. He might also be interested in the battalions of consultants who do nothing but consult, and in the research institutes that research how to make PowerPoint slides. The trough that feeds these hogs is virtually bottomless. One beneficial move would be to restore the name of the DoD to the Department of War, as it was called prior to 1947. Let’s be frank about the purpose of this organization: killing people and blowing things up. Everything else is extraneous. If some project or personnel are not directly involved in this mission, they can be cut. This is one area that I believe will be at least partially addressed by the new administration, as DEI, gender madness, and other such pursuits are dismantled, saving money while improving the military’s warfighting capability. Of all the 800-pound gorillas wandering around the room, the hardest to tackle may very well be the role and presence of the U.S. military in the international arena. Does the defense of the United States really necessitate hundreds of bases and installations in scores of countries? Even if it did, the Federal government is bankrupt; an orderly drawdown is certainly preferable to the sudden impact of foreclosure. Putting an end to harebrained interventions such as the wars in Afghanistan and Ukraine will of course save substantial sums of money. Why expand NATO onto Russia’s doorstep? Come to think of it, NATO itself can be terminated; it has far outlived its original purpose. And on the other side of the world, do we need to constantly antagonize China by “patrolling” their backyard? And then stop the meddling in the Middle East. There is no longer any need to maintain the fiction of the Petrodollar system—it’s dead as a doornail. Let Saudi Arabia and Israel handle regional security. We can sell them weapons, and give them a free hand to manage the lunatics in their midst. Instead of "peace in the Middle East," try to forge arrangements that are sustainable. Here’s a novel idea: use the military to defend the homeland. Bring our boys home, as the Left used to say before they became warmongers. If you want to beef up America’s strategic position beyond its borders, concentrate on the Western hemisphere. While we thump our chests over Taiwan, China is quietly expanding its influence in Latin America. Yes, take back the Panama Canal, as Mr. Trump has promised. It’s time to revive the Monroe Doctrine. That would be the kind of imperialism I could get behind. Forge alliances with Milei in Argentina, and other like-minded governments. Meanwhile, I hear the cha-ching of the cash register in the background, as the savings pile up to the ceiling. In my post of 12/27/24, I reviewed the work of the great Friedrich Hayek. Now I would like to use that discussion as a springboard to further examine the ongoing collapse of the Western economic and financial system.
Hayek helps us to see economic life for what is is: the “extended order of human cooperation,” as he calls it. This is society’s vast network of ideas, contacts, and exchange; an endless web of human interaction. This order is infinitely complex, and in a constant state of flux; as such, it lies beyond the ability of any single authority to direct it. The extended order has evolved into its current form. Hayek points to the pioneering vision of Adam Smith, who realized that a type of evolution is the driving force behind the genesis and development of economic and other institutions. (Hayek remarked that Smith and similar thinkers were Darwinian before Darwin, and may have influenced the latter.) Think of law, language, and money: none were the result of a unified, conscious plan. Rather, they evolved in a spontaneous, self-ordering process, in a series of adaptations, producing a workable framework in which people could function. The upshot is that economic structures cannot be planned. Interference with the extended order is doomed to failure, and if pushed far enough, will lead to death and destruction. The case of the Soviet Union is obvious enough. But the same principle applies to our current predicament. Consider the extent of the disease: the colossal edifice of central planning in the West, guided by Keynesian economic theory, is sufficient all by itself to guarantee disaster. It has resulted in an activist Federal Reserve, unbacked fiat currency, rampaging inflation, out-of-control debt, asset bubbles galore, and a rapacious government that now accounts for fully half of what passes for an economy. Add to this the other poisons administered to the extended order, such as DEI and the Green-Industrial Complex, to name two of the worst offenders. None of these monstrosities would exist without coercive government interference. Needless to say, they demonstrate a complete disregard, and even contempt, of economic reality. We can point to additional distortions that result from economic illiteracy. One of them is the absurd notion of a “consumer-based economy.” Consumption is a result of wealth creation, not its cause. The people parroting this inversion of reality confuse the fruit of the tree with the tree itself. And our tree is dying, and will continue to wither as long as we concentrate our efforts on simply eating the fruit. Related to the consumer-based nonsense is the notion that China is dependent on the American consumer, and therefore we can punish them by restricting access to our enormous market. This could make sense only if we were exchanging something of value for the imported consumables. If we were paying in gold, or oil, or even manufactured goods of our own, the dependency story might be plausible. However, we “pay” for the goods with depreciating dollars that are conjured up on the keyboards of the government, the Fed, and the banks. And this means expansion of debt, which, ironically, was until recently being funded by the likes of China. They stopped buying Treasuries, but we can always compensate by creating more dollars, inflation be damned. So let me get this straight. We will punish China (and other BRICS countries) by threatening to stop consuming their goods while giving them nothing of value in return. How on earth will they survive? Real-world, Hayekian economics teaches us that wealth is created by production of tangible goods (instead of financial products), savings (instead of consumption), and the use of sound money (instead of unbacked fiat currency). All of which is coordinated by means of true price discovery and other market mechanisms—not by the declarations and schemes of bureaucrats and clueless academics. What is the proper role of government? Mainly to get out of the way. Stop interfering in the extended order. Instead, grease the wheels; facilitate commerce rather than hindering it. Safeguard property rights. Enforce contracts. Prevent crime and fraud. Build and maintain infrastructure. Humanity is not a proper subject for rational central planning. The aggregate of all human action, beliefs, and behavioral patterns is unknowable. These facts, as Hayek laments, run against the grain of mainstream economic thinking. It is time for a new paradigm. The improvement-of-mankind fanatics consider man to be an input to their calculations, in the same way as one might treat a chicken, a plant, or a steel beam. In other words, in their view, man is a part of the natural world: understandable, predictable, malleable. With the correct laws in place, and the correct government subsidies, he can be forced to live in perfect harmony with nature. This is a false and dangerous assertion. Man can never be integrated into the remainder of nature. He is condemned to stand outside it, to be an observer and an actor with his own unique agenda. This means that answers to the riddles of our existence will not be found in interventionism and central planning, which pretend that society can be harmonized, as if man really were a chicken or a plant. Many in the U.S. are hopeful that the incoming administration can solve the problem of inflation. This scourge continues to cause heartache for the population, particularly individuals and families with low income and without assets.
As with so many other issues, the first step in any serious campaign to resolve the dilemma is to correctly identify the problem, without political propaganda and other extraneous inputs. Our rulers can begin by admitting the extent of the damage. Government statistics on price increases (and unemployment) are nothing less than fraudulent. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that prices are not rising by three percent annually, or whatever similar ridiculous figure is being proffered by the sorcerers in Washington. Moreover, in addition to nominal price, there are other manifestations of decreasing purchasing power that need to be included in the equation. One of these is shrinkflation, the shrinking of quantity for a given item. We have all done the supermarket double-take when encountering, say, a bar of chocolate that is suddenly smaller than it had always been. The price, of course, remains the same or rises. A related phenomenon is crapflation. This means reduction of quality for a given item. One day, out of the blue, you receive a shoddier product, or inferior ingredients, but, once again, at the same or higher price. It’s just another way to hide the erosion of purchasing power. So what exactly is this “inflation”? It is not, as our Leftist friends would have us believe, a cabal of cigar-smoking capitalists in the back room of Kroger headquarters, rubbing their hands together and guffawing as they greedily jack up the price of milk. Rather, consider the word itself. Something has been inflated; think of tire pressure. And that something is the money supply. This used to be common knowledge. My 1991 Webster’s Dictionary defines inflation as “an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods resulting in a substantial and continuing rise in the general price level.” Today, Webster’s still conveys the general idea, but with some obfuscation: “A continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services” [emphasis mine; also note the flipping of the order, and the absence of the word “substantial”]. The American Heritage dictionary just buries its head in the sand: “A persistent increase in the level of consumer prices or a persistent decline in the purchasing power of money.” Going further up the causal chain, the expansion of the money supply is primarily the result of “money printing” by means of an inscrutable process involving the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the banks. Much of this takes place to either fund the obscene Federal deficits or to goose the stock and housing markets. Incidentally, the money supply has approximately doubled in the last ten years, with the magic printing press conjuring around eleven trillion dollars into existence. Yes, that’s trillion with a “t.” Increasing prices can never be reversed until this monetary hocus-pocus is ended. Here we have the crux of the matter. Compared to this, every other factor is minor. If they double the quantity of something, what do they expect will happen to its price? That’s right, it will be cut in half. Would any sane and honest person deny that the purchasing power of the dollar has been cut in half since 2015? But yes, there are some other factors contributing to price increases, usually due to government overreach. One obvious instance is government regulation. Automobiles, for example, are far more expensive than need be, due to the onerous safety, emission, and mileage requirements that are now out of control. Then there are the downstream effects of government subsidies and other market interventions, which create artificial demand and speculation, which drives up prices. Suppressing the interest rate has led to the perversely-valued real estate market, as well as a host of other bubbles and malinvestment across the economy. Another case of market intervention is government-backed student loans. Allowed to feed at this bottomless government trough, colleges and universities can keep hiking tuition; after all, the money is always there. Incentives for competition and efficiency have effectively been destroyed. (And the Leftist propaganda machine has its ideological hatchery fully funded.) Another factor is crime. In addition to successful shoplifiting, prevention of such is a significant expense that is passed on to the consumer. Viewing the security personnel at my local Walmart, one would think they are guarding a top-secret military installation. Let us not forget the spreading plague of idiocy and incompetence. This leads to defective products, lousy repairs, wasted time, and other ill effects that in the end, all cost money. The deteriorating quality of the population also makes neighborhoods, or even entire cities, unlivable. This shrinks the available decent living space, driving up demand for housing and amenities in the zones with "good schools." In summary, I hope the incoming Trump Administration has the stomach to tell it like it is. Otherwise, the world of monetary make-believe will continue on its merry way. |
Dystopian literatureWelcome to the blog! While you're here, check out the six dystopian novels by Gary Wolf. His latest is The Cubist Supremacy. 
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