|
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.
0 Comments
[SERVICE NOTICE: For the foreseeable future, I am going to publish one article per week, every Friday. There will still be a smattering of other quick posts, such as quotes, and links to interesting posts on other websites. But Friday will be the day for the real "thought pieces."]
In my post of 3/24/2025, I discussed Conquest’s Second Law of Politics, which states that any organization that is not explicitly right-wing, sooner or later becomes left-wing. Part of my analysis revolved around the question of high versus low culture, and the difficulty in maintaining the higher form, which is a bedrock of civilization. The entropic forces in society, always present, tend to drag us down to the level of low culture, which is one of the symptoms of Leftism. In the article below, first published on the original AWOL Civilization blog just after the 2008 presidential election, I examined this issue from a somewhat different perspective. * * * So it finally happened: a bonafide neo-Marxist has been elected President of the United States. He will have a sympathetic majority in both houses of Congress, along with a choir comprising the judiciary, the press, academia, the cultural “elite," and the most hardened enemies of America at home and abroad. This is not a macabre scene from a dystopian novel. It is our reality. In order to grasp the full significance of the catastrophe that has enveloped America—and indeed, Western civilization—we must cast our intellectual net far and wide, so that it encompasses the great thinkers of the past. They can guide and inspire us as we confront a phenomenon with which we, in America, have no experience. They can help us re-examine our approach to politics, the arts, education, and a host of other realms, a task that is part and parcel of salvaging and reinvigorating our culture. We can start by reconnecting with the thinkers of the ancient world. It is there, in the literary masterpieces of Athens and Rome and Jerusalem, that one finds clues to the riddles that present themselves to us. It is there that one sees how people prevailed in the face of upheavals that defy the imagination. In this spirit, I would like to present two ancient literary references that have been in the forefront of my mind in recent days. The first is from the Bible, the second is from the comic theater of Athens. In Genesis 25:29-33, a moving scene occurs between Esau and Jacob, the sons of Isaac. Esau sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a bowl of pottage (a type of stew): “And Jacob cooked pottage, and Esau came from the field, and he was faint, and Esau said to Jacob, Give me to swallow, I pray thee, of that red pottage, for I am faint…And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright. And Esau said, Behold, I am going to die, and what benefit is this birthright to me? And Jacob said, Swear to me this day, and he swore to him; and he sold his birthright…” The American people possess an impressive birthright: Living in a land of liberty, with all that is necessary to pursue their dreams. All the accoutrements are available: natural resources, a beautiful landscape, vast spaces, a noble history, brain power, and a deep tradition of opportunity. But we have sold our birthright for the slick visage of Barack Hussein Obama, our latter-day bowl of pottage. The moaning, self-proclaimed victims have thrown away their heritage. What good is it? they ask. “Behold, I am going to die," so just feed me and clothe me, and let me forget the rest. The second reference from the ancient world is The Frogs, a comedy by the great Athenian playwright Aristophanes (c. 450 – 388 BC). The play was written in 405 BC, as the Athenian empire stood on the brink of destruction. Dissension was rife in the city, and defeat at the hands of the Spartans was nigh (it occurred in 404). The plot is simple. Dionysus, patron of the drama, descends into Hades (the underworld) to find the greatest Greek playwright. The intent is to bring the champion back to the land of the living, to Athens, where he might be able to rescue the city’s decomposing culture. The selection process for best playwright boils down to a contest between Aeschylus and Euripides, in which each attempts to demonstrate that he is the greatest practitioner of the art of tragedy. Dionysus acts as moderator of the debate. Aeschylus (525 – 456 BC) represents the old world, with its fine manners, its gymnastics, its piety, and its honor. Euripides (484 – 406 BC), by contrast, is presented as the poet of decadence, sophistry, and philosophical relativism. Euripides accuses Aeschylus of using highfalutin language, of ignoring romantic love, and of being an elitist divorced from the taste and temperament of the people. Aeschylus, for his part, accuses Euripides of contributing in no small measure to the downfall of the city: “You have taught boasting and quibbling; the wrestling schools are deserted and the young fellows have submitted themselves to outrage, in order that they might learn to reel off idle chatter, and the sailors have dared to bandy words with their officers…Of what crimes is [Euripides] not the author? Has he not shown us procurers, women who get delivered in the temples, have traffic with their brothers, and say that life is not life? ‘Tis thanks to him that our city if full of scribes and buffoons, veritable apes, whose grimaces are incessantly deceiving the people…” Then there is the following exchange between Dionysus and Euripides, almost creepy in its applicability to our current predicament: DIONYSUS: And you, Euripides, prove yourself [fit] to sprinkle incense on the brazier. EURIPIDES: Thanks, but I sacrifice to other gods. DIONYSUS: To private gods of your own, which you have made after your own image? EURIPIDES: Why, certainly! DIONYSUS: Well then, invoke your gods. EURIPIDES: Oh! Ether, on which I feed, oh! Thou Volubility of Speech, oh! Craftiness, oh! Subtle Scent! Enable me to crush the arguments of my opponents. We learn that Aeschylus used only heroes and god-like figures in his plays, whereas Euripides invented every sort of vulgar character imaginable. Euripides explains that his intent was to “please the people." Moreover, he says, “I introduced our private life upon the stage, our common habits…I did not burst out into big noisy words to prevent their comprehension; nor did I terrify the audience by showing them Cycni and Memnons on chariots harnessed with steeds and jingling bells. Look at his disciples and look at mine. His are…all a-bristle with long beards, spears and trumpets, and grinning with sardonic and ferocious laughter, while my disciples are [the effeminate and loquacious] Clitophon and the graceful Theramenes.” Euripides democratized the theater. He catered to the popular desire to portray the vulgar, the seedy side of life. Often, his characters were beggars dressed in rags. Theater was now for everyone, and about everyone. It is tempting to speculate: How similar was the situation in the Athens of 405 BC, the year The Frogs was written, to the America of today? Could one not easily think of a contemporary Euripides, some best-selling author or popular screenwriter, succeeding handsomely here in our dumbed-down victimocracy, with its effeminate and sophistic king, crowned by the rampaging mob? Which great cultural figure would Dionysus bring back to help save us? We cry out for our Aeschylus—who would it be? [Quotes from The Frogs taken from Aristophanes, the Eleven Comedies, vol. 2, Immortal Classics republication of the 1912 London Athenian Society edition, pp. 227, 245-46, 235, 239-40.] We have discussed in several posts one of the major challenges facing America at this late stage of its cultural meltdown: the seizure of power by rogue judges. This threatens to derail many of the reforms instituted by the Trump Administration, and to further tighten the stranglehold of the Left on our collective throat. The question I ask today: From what ideological septic tank percolates this audacious assault on the political system?
To begin with, let us note that this is nothing new, though admittedly the current surge is rather extreme. Degradation of judicial practice in the United States has a long and storied history. It received notoriety during the tenure of the Warren Court (1953-1969), i.e. the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. That period overlapped the Civil Rights Era, and the Court (along with the rest of the federal judiciary) did its utmost to stretch the Bill of Rights to a degree that would have made the Founding Fathers spin in their graves. Earlier instances of creative interpretation still bore some relation, however shaky, to the actual wording of the Constitution. But in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Court gave itself the authority to extract from the Constitution whatever principles they desired. In the words of Justice William O. Douglas, “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” Penumbras and emanations, got it. Translation: We can invent any legal principle we want. The actual text of the Constitution became irrelevant; the door was opened to Leftist bullying under cover of supposed constitutional law. This brazen attack on the foundations of the American republic paved the way for the eventual complete disregard, by Leftist judges, of due process of law; nay, of the entire Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. Our current judicial insurrection is an outgrowth of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ seemingly inexorable march toward totalitarianism; more specifically, the expansion of the modern administrative state to monstrous proportions. This springs from a compulsion to control human behavior by means of central planning. If it can be achieved in the realms of health, economics, education, etc., then why not the political machinery itself? It is up to us, says the federal bench, to ensure that the federal government (and state and local, for that matter) dutifully obey the maxims of the Progressive canon. In this view of the world, everything is justiciable. There can be no sphere of life that remains outside the purview of the black-robed priesthood. Whether it be the laws passed by the legislature, the executive functions of the president, or the way a man interacts with a woman, they consider it their proper role to intervene, at any time and for any reason. A natural result of this infinite justiciability and destruction of the rule of law is the proliferation of lawyers, courts, and lawsuits. The legal system has become the arena for the settling of every imaginable type of dispute or moral controversy, across nearly all tiers of society. Normal human life, under these conditions, is gradually asphyxiated. To my knowledge, no individual or institution has ever slowed the progress of this bulldozer. And here we are. "People are sometimes confused about the apparent contradictions in that wider world: What do, say, open borders have to do with the trannification of the school system? Well, it's not difficult. What they have in common, throughout the West, is chaos: you get on the bus and a 'migrant' stabs you; you send your little girl off to school and she comes back a little boy; your boy gets picked for the rugby team and drops dead on the pitch; you could really use a break, but the airport is closed.
The easiest way to figure out the purpose of public policy is to look at the universal outcome: the abolition of even the possibility of normal life." — Mark Steyn 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.
As more and more of the business of life is conducted electronically, one might be tempted to pause and consider the advisability of this trend. I believe that in most cases, the abandonment or minimization of in-person contact is detrimental to the future health of mankind.
Our species has a deep need for community, and the online world is a cheap substitute for the real item. Think of the small town or urban neighborhood of yesteryear. Its beating heart is Main Street, the primary thoroughfare of commerce, where flesh-and-blood humans interact to meet each other’s basic needs. They exchange physical money for physical goods; a value-for-value transaction occurs. Meanwhile, the humans speak to each other, cementing the bonds of community. Even the most trivial small talk helps to fulfill this function. This is one reason why using cash is so important. Granted, our fiat currency is a pale derivative, far removed from real money. Nevertheless, some-thing at least is being exchanged. Cash is a key vestige of meaningful human interaction in commerce. This is gone when you interract with a screen, avoiding the direct transfer of an object of value to the person with whom the transaction is made (if a person is even present). Returning now to the small town/urban neighborhood model: Expanding outward from the commerce of Main Street, we see schools, churches, playgrounds, parks, stadiums, courts, and the private offices of physicians. All of these are the scene of face-to-face encounters, most involving (gasp) actual physical contact. Schools, universities, and the learning of trades can never complete their mission in an online environment. Sure, via a computer screen a person can accumulate facts, but not craft. Craftsmanship, including in the white-collar world, can be acquired only from live human interaction. One must see the trade being practised, and receive on-the-spot feedback for one’s own tentative efforts. This is why true experts almost always had a tutor, mentor, master, or coach to guide them in the early days, and even throughout their careers. Let us take a step back from this later stage of education, and consider child-rearing. The creation of offspring is obviously a physical, in-person act, but so is proper upbringing. Once again, only live human role models can do the job. Integrity, character, honesty, etc. cannot be transmitted on line. My heart breaks when I see a parent giving a child, often a very small one, a screen of some kind to play with. I wonder whether this phenomenon contributes to the plague of autism-like behavior among our youth. We lament the rise of loneliness and alienation in our society. The causes are many and varied, but part of the story is surely the factors cited above. Of all the manifestations of the dehumanized society, one that is emblematic, in my mind, is “working from home.” Very few individuals possess the maturity and intelligence to work effectively in this manner. For the vast majority, it is the adult equivalent of playing hooky. This computer-age farce contributes to the angst that sits on us like a heavy fog. The infamous lockdowns, along with other totalitarian measures, led to the normalization of “working” from home. The bonds of human society were degraded. Small business was dealt a blow. Feelings of alienation were exacerbated. The building of real community, from out of the miasma that is contemporary Western civilization, would require the curtailment of lawlessness on our city streets. It also would require the restoration of freedom of association. I will cover this concept in a separate post. As the Trump Administration takes action to crush DEI, and put an end to this disgraceful chapter of American history, it is important to examine the ideological antecedents that gave birth to the plague. In this vein, I invite you to read an article I wrote in 2007 for American Thinker, entitled “Diversity, Nihilism, and the Anti-Rational Mind.”
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. As I wander through the dystopian wasteland that passes for a society, one aspect that stands out is the infantile fascination with flashy technology and electronic gadgetry.
About ten years ago, after a long absence, I spent some time in New York City. One fine day, the weather was perfect; I took a leisurely stroll down Central Park West from 96th Street, where I was lodging. Seeing those grand pre-war apartment buildings filled my spirit with admiration and satisfaction. Eventually, I found myself in front of the Museum of Natural History, at the corner of 81st Street and Central Park West, waiting for the light to change. I glanced around, and witnessed a profoundly disturbing scene: a mass of humanity, at least two dozen individuals, all staring into their little screens. They were oblivious to each other, to the scenery around them, in short, to the rest of the world. Naturally, I had previously seen groups of people communing with their electronic babysitters, but never this quantity of people, and with a backdrop of such magnificent architecture. The future had arrived, and it didn’t look pretty. This obsession is called, in our current Orwellian linguistic haze: smart. Welcome to our new smart world. Everything is smart, down to the last fingernail. Translated into reality: smart = a device which can perform every electronic pirouette, and serves every purpose except its original intended use. Infinite bells and whistles, but core functionality has been pushed so far into the background, it is often hardly visible. I have never owned a smart phone, but on the odd occasion when I try to use one provided by a friend, I find that one of the most cumbersome tasks to execute on this wondrous telephone is to make a phone call. Or consider a smart coffee maker. You can tear your hair out just trying to make a simple pot of coffee, without having to fiddle with the settings. Come to think of it, one is always compelled to configure; it is becoming impossible to use tools in an uncomplicated and straightforward manner. In other words, we are awash in counterproductive and unnecessary complexity. Then there is the modern automobile. Wasn’t the purpose of this machine to transport people, and light cargo, from point A to point B? Now, it is a computer with wheels attached. The constant ringing and beeping and buzzing can drive a person bonkers. Not to mention the harebrained and often dangerous “safety” features, such as the car suddenly taking over your braking or steering. My car is from the model year 2017. This may have been the last opportunity to opt out of these rolling video games, by insisting on the base model, with no options. Not anymore. Buying a new car? You can’t escape. What’s more, the endless gizmofication pushes the cost up. Instead of a simple means of transportation, with a reasonable level of comfort, priced at say, $10K, we are presented with these ludicrous smart monsters at nosebleed prices. (I realize that there are many factors contributing to the rising cost, but this is one of the main culprits.) If you want a device that performs its intended function simply and efficiently, you either have to buy it used, or pay more. I recently shopped for a blender, and was compelled to spend a fair amount of money to acquire one with actual dials (remember those?), three speeds, no screen, no settings, no Wi-Fi, no unrelated functionality; just a blender that blends, thank you very much. And I haven’t even touched on the issue of social control, where the government (or its proxies) can monitor, turn off, or modify one of your smart devices without your knowledge or approval. I am not opposed to technological innovation, it’s just that the innovation is not always beneficial. I would trade all the smart phones in the country for, say, a Japanese-quality subway system in all of our major cities. As the population gets dumber, the devices get smarter. I wonder if there’s a connection… 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. |
Dystopian literatureWelcome to the blog! While you're here, check out the six dystopian novels by Gary Wolf. His latest is The Cubist Supremacy. 
Archives
April 2025
Categories
All
Interesting viewpointsAce of Spades |
RSS Feed