I have on many occasions preached the dangers/wonders of our much-abused ‘medium of exchange,’ to the point that many of you are inclined to conclude that I’m schizophrenic on the subject.
It’s not a love/hate thing…nor am I of two minds on the topic. While I keep repeating that money itself is ‘meaningless’, that doesn’t make it ‘useless’.
Needless to say, your confusion is perfectly understandable.
Anyway, I came across this article by Hellacious on Sudden Debt this morning.
While it is a very good treatment on the topic of moneys’, er, ‘multiple personalities’, more interestingly, he comes as close as anyone I have yet read in addressing the ‘heart’ of the matter…
As things have developed lately it is this small minority that is calling the shots for everyone else, i.e. the finance tail is wagging the entire economic dog, now more than ever before. The borrow-consume-grow economic model that was espoused - and is still espoused in the guise of government "bailouts" - led to such an explosion of debt world-wide that Holy Smoke! is now the only form of money that really matters, the state that calls the shots, if you want.
This is completely unprecedented in economic/monetary history. It is even entirely wrong to compare today with the Great Depression and to attempt to draw parallels, examples, lessons or possible solutions from it. This is a new reality, so new as to have become invisible to politicians and economists who operate under the principle that if you can't "see" it; it doesn't exist. (To be fair that's how most of us operate, day-to-day anyway.)
I would quibble that this phenomenon he describes is not ‘new’…the difference he notes is this is the first time it has been pushed to this extreme! (Where government funds have been used to ‘bail out’ failed private investment…to save the financial system from collapsing; a mission that still hasn’t been accomplished!)
There is ‘too much’ funny money out there. We can’t even begin to put the economy back on track until the bulk of the, er, ‘illegal bets’ have been eliminated.
This ‘small minority’ he refers to is crucial because these are the same assholes who control (believe it or not) the ‘value’ of your money!
But you don’t ‘understand’ what that means, do you?
You can’t wrap your head around the idea that a, for lack of a better term, ‘bunch of suits’ sit around on any given day and decide how much a barrel of oil will go for.
Why oil? Our entire economy, our very way of life is based on cheap and abundant energy…and that way of life is rapidly exhausting the resource it was predicated on.
EVERYTHING is ‘keyed’ to the price of energy.
Worse, this price has no ‘basis in reality’! They can’t charge what’s its really worth or our civilization would collapse right here and now!
The whole capitalist ‘scheme’ of things will dissolve into chaos (not Anarchy, we should only be so lucky!)
FULL STOP! [You have to ‘get’ this!]
Oil is a ‘finite’ resource that we WILL run out of. [That’s a ‘statement of fact’.]
While fossil fuels ARE being created/processed by Mother Nature today, we are using them much faster than the millions of years it will take for the planet to produce more.
Now try to wrap your head around the idea of a world that plunges into pitch blackness from the time that the sun sets until it rises again.
Picture that same world in the dead of winter (in the northern/southern latitudes.) There are neither enough trees nor enough ‘whale oil’ to make those latitudes ‘habitable’.
Are you beginning to comprehend the ‘scope’ of the problem?
Let me refocus you upon a crucial fact: ALL OF THIS is being done by a ‘small handful’ of individuals.
These individuals have already made ‘choices’ which are not ‘favorable’ to you and yours.
In the infamous words of Goldfinger, they don’t expect you to cooperate, they expect you to die in the third world hell-hole they are creating for us.
And there isn’t a fucking thing you can do about it…well, ‘legally’ anyway.
I sincerely apologize for inflicting the ‘painful truth’ upon you…you are now free to enjoy your sunny day like none of this is happening.
Worse, I’m willing to bet that most of you will do just that.
Considering the alternatives we really don’t have much of a choice…
Which is to acknowledge that people that don’t have our best interests in mind are making those ‘choices’ for us!
Which, bizarrely, is precisely the way that all civilizations collapse!
This could be fun if it weren’t so friggin’ deadly!
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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