If you can’t accept where we’ve been, and that Trump’s election is a symptom of decades of rot as opposed to year zero of a dangerous new world, you’ll never come to any useful conclusions. As such, the most meaningful fracture in American society today is between those who’ve accepted that we’ve been lied to for a very long time, and those who think everything was perfectly fine before Trump. There’s no real room for a productive discussion between such groups because one of them just wants to get rid of orange man, while the other is focused on what’s to come. One side actually believes a liberal world order existed in the recent past, while the other fundamentally recognizes this was mostly propaganda based on myth.[1]An aspect of this divide might be the belief of the most powerful, even now, that the Federal Reserve plays a necessary role in safeguarding the monetary health of the nation as opposed to those who think that the dollar's loss of 97% of its purchasing power since 1913 is an unmitigated disaster. Two percent annual inflation as a sensible goal! My foot.
The first group are unfazed by disaster, just as globalism and multiculturalism fanatics are unfazed by the total disaster of the fanatic mixing races, cultures and religions throughout the Western world.
Notes
[1] "The Illiberal World Order." By Michael Krieger, ZeroHedge, 11/25/19.
It will take a lot of time for the United States, and its economy and culture, to recover from the damage inflicted by the Left. Probably more than my own lifetime.
ReplyDeleteBut, we gotta start somewhere. Trump, and many of us bloggers, are at Ground Zero. We're fighting for some breathing room. Some ability to pass on the hard-won lessons to the younger ones. Some creation and growth of our new institutions that battle the Left.
Two percent growth in money is reasonable when considering population and innovation. That was the original intent. It has morphed into 2% inflation which is two percent growth in money supply OVER growth in population and innovation (generally, but in my opinion wrongly, associated with productivity).
ReplyDeleteThe Fed's ability to do it's job was all but eliminated in the late 80's - thank you Michael Milken. Money, like currency, was tightly controlled til then. It is the only real lever the Fed has; it has tried to engage in political power to replace it, but that was a dead end from the beginning.
I USED to support the FED. I've learned my lesson long before it has learned its.
Linda, my evolution is much like Krieger describes, though a bit of an amalgam. I used to think America's purposes were righteous ones in the Cold War but the end of that war merely exposed deeper currents of malevolence that merely cloaked themselves in the righteous mantle of opposition to a monstrous tyranny. The lies since 1991, the absurd expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia, and our idiotic wars and exercises in "nation building" reflect a greasy agenda cobbled together in some dark place not visited by any media organ and hence a thing of decay and lies.
ReplyDeleteThe rebuilging or building of healthy institutions will not occur until the citizens categorically reject all of the pieties of our present debased polity, not least of which is the reigning and sacred interpretation of the Commerce Clause of Art. I, Sect. 8 to encompass "all human activity having the remotests, most tenuous, most fanciful, or most absurd connection with interstate commerce." Citizens must absolutely withdraw their consent to this, open borders madness, "diversity," sexual confusion, foreign wars, and a host of other lunatic endeavors.
But, bottom line, I'm definitely in the first group. The present catastrophic growth and oppression of the federal government is not in the least consistent with an honest interpretation of Art. I, Sect. 8. Fedgov should be no more my concern than the city government of Cincinnati.
Tracy, I can grasp the idea that the money supply has to increase to keep pace with economic growth. At least I think I can. It's not exactly clear to me that the use of 1913 dollars today couldn't handle current transactions with pennies having roughly 100 times there present value. Maybe that's stupid but I can say with confidence that working to PRESERVE the value of the currency has not been on the Fed's agenda since whenever. I'm not convinced that a "reasonable" 2% inflation is any better than the "unreasonable" on of 2% growth on top of growth necessitated by economic expansion. Who knows? This is why I chose to major in basket weaving in college rather than finance.
ReplyDeleteI have my doubts that the money supply was tightly controlled until Milken. Whatever the Fed thought "its job" was until then probably had little to do with sensible economic policy. Fiscal policy and constitutional interpretation have been nothing but evil exercises so why would the Fed be a fortress of virginity?
Anyway, the stupefying monetizing of the debt and QE are just nuts and merely an elegant form of groveling at the banks and their evil "[to heck with the peasants]" excesses.
Colonel,
ReplyDeleteI will admit to being a fan of Friedman, though not of every detail. I am Austrian in my economic policies, with a decided flavor not needed to go into here, nor do I want to expound or support the original comment except to note currency is a subset of money and it definitely needs to grow - except by the 80's we were losing control over the currency supply and it now resides in the economies of dozens of countries "illegally".
QE was the desperation of the tyrant that imposed (democratically chosen) socialism and finds it increasingly hard to 'manage' such an economy. Our fundamental nature makes such difficult to impose/vote upon in the US, so $ is the only lever of government. Yep, the FED is compromised and has been almost from the start. A good book on it, The Secrets of the Temple. The banks THOUGHT they were on top of things....til 2008. Now they are as desperate as the bureaucracy. Trillions to the banks in the last decade and they are demonstrably worse off now and of course, so are we. Watch the derivative market: when it was 4x world GDP people were 'terrified'...now it is 6x.
I presented Congress (hand delivered to committee and leadership of both parties) a budget for FY2014. It was originally published as The Apocalypse Plan - because that was what it was going to take to implement it. If we descend into Civil War, or the world economy completely collapses, we will not recover in our lifetime, nor in the lifetimes of our grandchildren. We will be different - I wish I could be optimistic about it (I am for ME) but it will be the Dark Ages and the Plague multiplied. To get to where you (and most of us) think we need to get to, it is going to get much, much worse first.
Thanks for the reply.
T
Tracy, you're welcome. I struggle to put it all together but one thing I'm certain of is that the PTB are as clueless here as everywhere else. There's no voting ourselves out of this and the people with any vision are just sidelined. The first bench of the Dems should turn every normal person's hair white.
ReplyDeleteThe West is beyond redemption. I started to put my thoughts on the US down in pixels in an email to a friend and it was high-octane doom and gloom. Nothing, not nobody is out there with both the insight and the reach to rally people. The European electorate is all you need to examine. Despite innumerable opportunities to turn on or punish the elites who have sold them out over immigration they have consistently reward them with solid majorities. Patriot parties receive pathetic bumps of two or four percent that are as likely to vanish next time around or go to some upstart group. Here at home the electorate resoundingly returned the House to the Dems as though it were 1950s America with all kinds of slack and economic health.
I am fond of Solzhenitsyn's image of the "pitiless crowbar of events" that awaits Western elites when they are unwilling to remove the armor around their minds. Armor is one thing but it's worse than that. It's down-to-the-bone stupidity. In . . . EVERY . . . area of political, social, legal, and cultural life. Beto, Kamala, or AOC await us in one form of another and every opportunity to reverse direction will be foregone. God bless you for delivering that budget proposal but the phrase "pearls before swine" intrudes.
Best wishes.