Posted on 03/01/2012 1:33:00 AM PST by plsjr
If you know how bad the situation is and don’t feel the need to subject yourself to any more of my patented Barnhardt Phillipic and Funeral Dirge for Civilization, take your leave now, because I honestly think that this is the the saddest, most profoundly depressing post I have yet written. And I’ve written a few. A few thousand. The topic is the US Dollar, and currency in general. The Federal Reserve has been willfully and systematically debasing the US dollar for a century by claiming that 2% inflation is the benchmark of a healthy economy. Since the universities and media have been overrun by Marxists, there is hardly anyone alive who A.) is in possession of the capacity to independently think and reason their way through such a question and B.) anyone who cares in the first place.
In addition to the slow grinding debasement by the Fed, the Marxists have finally fully usurped and overthrown the government of the United States, and thus have now executed the coup de grace: wild, flagrant money “printing”, and by “printing”, please understand that we are not talking about the fabrication of paper bills. We are talking about computerized entries into the Federal Reserve’s ledger. The Fed literally types in an addition of x billion or y trillion dollars into its balance sheet – creating dollars out of thin air that exist as zeroes and ones on a computer server – and then use those new dollars to purchase US Treasury bonds. In this way, the Obama regime and its puppetmasters have debased the US dollar by roughly one half the total GDP in less than four years. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at barnhardt.biz ...
Does anyone think we're going to pull out of it? If so, how?
I doubt it. There are limits to the imports and the debts to buy them with. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, though, if Uncle Jintao would continue to send both to our government employees, pensioners and other dependents of debt infinitely, for free?
So no, the dollar won’t start rising against falling currencies and inflations of those with huge trade imbalances against us.
By the way, one of the solutions is to radically cut spending in all levels of government, and bite the bullet. Another is to cut local zoning regulations against new, small manufacturing operations in sparsely populated counties.
First - keep Hope - Trust in Jesus, alone. Man, alone, has done this to us. OK, women and LGBTQAXYZ too.
Second - This is country has gone the way of Sodom and Gomorra, 21st Century style, financially and socially we’re going to be on fire. Since we allowed this to happen, He’s permitting this upcoming much deeper suffering to befall us as a nation, the world over.
Self-indulgence, materialism, perversion. Unlike Ninevah, we’re not going to turn around our hearts anytime soon nationally, and the world is even in worse shape.
So, suck it up, repent, and see it through. He’ll be waiting for us! His people will make it through - future generations.
Or buy guns, store a bunch of food, dig a bunker and find the same thing, watching the fire come down with the protection of a comparative umbrella.
keep Hope - Trust in Jesus, alone, and repent of yourself.
| At the end of the day, any currency is backed not by physical commodities or a collective abstraction called “a government”. No. A currency is backed by the character and integrity of men that constitute the issuing nation or body. In short, WE ARE THE GOLD. We are the bearers of the “full faith and credit” which backs our Federal Reserve notes today. And that, dear readers, is why this country is not going to turn itself around anytime soon, and is almost certainly doomed in the short-run. [...] We, the people, always have been and always will be the ultimate backing commodity of our currency, because at its core, money is merely the representative device for a man’s capacity to produce and create. Dishonest men do not create or produce. They steal. Thus, the currency of a morally degenerated society is by definition degenerate itself. The currency of a degenerate society is the proxy not for a man’s ability to work and think, but rather a proxy for a man’s capacity to steal and evade work. We used to be like gold – beautiful and warm. Now we are like pig iron - cold, brittle and good-for-nothing. And THAT is what constitutes the “full faith and credit” that backs the U.S. Dollar. So long as our culture remains degenerate, our currency can never be anything but spiraling, worthless trash. |
To me, these are the important points and are generally overlooked by most people who think of the economy as something managed by the President. It is not. The economy is people and capitalism is what they do when you leave them alone. The best planning by a President for the economy is to simply get out o the way.
I don't believe the future is assured, no matter how bad things look today or tomorrow. There will be pain, no doubt. But I have no doubt that the proper political course can turn things around. The welfare state and federal leviathan must be dismantled in a logical, slow, steady and progressive manner. Education must be returned to our children and particularly an education about what it means to be an American. Americans have always been and are still the most intelligent and hardest working people in the world.
Capitalism isn’t a “theory”. It is a law of nature. Like gravity. Even Marxists are using it. They are just selling snake oil to dumbasses.
Close, but not quite right.
Markets always exist, in some form or other. They're a law of human nature. But capitalism is not just markets.
By capitalism I assume you mean productive investment of capital for profit. That can exist effectively only in a society with a rather large number of preconditions: rule of law, enforcement of contracts, high work ethic, respect for other's property, etc., etc., etc.
Capitalism is what happens when you leave people in this type of society alone.
People "left alone" in a typical Latin American, African or Arab society will not evolve to true capitalism. At most they'll develop a form of crony capitalism, which is not really capitalism at all, any more than the Democratic Republics of eastern Europe were either democratic or republican.
That may take a while. :-)
"The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1821.
By golly, I think you got it ;-)
I don’t like the term capitalism, either. It implies dominance by society of those possessing capital, which isn’t necessarily so with a truly free market. I prefer “free market economy,” which existing capitalists usually oppose, as Adam Smith pointed out a couple hundred years ago. They prefer crony capitalism, in which they compete with each other for favors from the government rather than with everybody under the sun for the favor of consumers under a free market.
I wish I were as sanguine as you about non-free societies evolving naturally to free markets. I’m afraid a more common, and frankly more logical, response by competent and ambitious people in such a society is to gain control of the levers of power for themselves and their friends rather than to disassemble the levers. And of course incompetent and unambitioius people will never accomplish anything, anyway.
I believe the arising of (sort of) free markets was an anomaly of historical processes. It doesn’t happen naturally.
I also believe that great wealth has historically been associated with political power, and has usually arisen from that power. People naturally expect this. Great wealth arising without political power is extremely unusual historically, and I suspect feels unnatural to many.
BTW, per your TJ quote:
He was quite correct about the inability of traditional despotisms, European or Asian, to extinguish the flames of liberty created by modernity.
He did not foresee the development of new and more efficient systems of despotism: fascism, communism, the nanny state.
Of course, not long after this Tocqueville DID foresee the development of the nanny state, which he considered an inevitable outgrowth of political democracy. It looks like he may be right.
Did the industrial revolution happen naturally? For that is when I believe markets became much freer and in the ensuing 200 years man went from a general state of extreme poverty where his next meal was often in doubt to a state where starvation is an anomaly.
I suppose that this history can be said to be not natural in that man built it for himself but then the question would be, "What is natural and does it matter?" Also, perhaps, "Is the state of man static?"
I believe there is a duality in the nature of mankind and not just amongst men but in every man. Good or evil, lazy or industrious, humble or vain, etc. And I believe it is circumstance that is the main determinant of a man's nature. So. when things are good for him, he is a better man and the world is a better place.
There is a great American writer of the old right, that is, before FDR, named Garet Garrett. He wrote, in story book form, an economic history of mankind called "A Time is Born". It was published in 1944 and is beautifully written and filled with wisdom. There is a pdf on line of it available here. And because I hate the pdf format, I transcribed it to text and you can download it here.
For a little taste, here are several of the beginning and ending paragraphs:
PREMISE-- DURING AN INTERLUDE of twenty-one years between two global wars Heaven swung low and then high again.
When it was very low, seeming almost to touch the hill tops, the human race prepared to celebrate the death of poverty. In the whole world material well being advanced to an unexplored plane. If the contrasts that continued to exist were thought to be anywhere greater than before, that was an illusion owing to the fact that so much news of prosperity made people more conscious of disparities. Certainly in all civilized regions poor living was already better than good living had ever been for the fathers; and for those who had gained the heights there was mankind's first view of the Land of Immeasurable Plenty.
So far as they could see there was no longer any limit to the satisfaction of human wants. That was not all. A remorseless law was about to be repealed.
Hitherto it had been that the sum of man's satisfactions could be increased only by more labor, wherein he lost the pleasure of his possessions. Here at last was plenty without end at a diminishing price. The hours of labor were going to be shortened and the hours of leisure accordingly lengthened. And for this, thanks from economic man to no relenting deity. He had done it for himself, by knowledge, invention, method and machine power.
The American peak was the highest of all.
[...]
LANDFALL--
—As the machine delivered man from the fear of famine so alchemic technology now delivers the machine.
—The Malthusian doctrine of raw materials for the machine belly is overturned.
—Revolutionary implications of that fact.
—Man acting upon the inwardness of matter to change its forms is man in a new dimension.
—Now he may adapt his means to his fantastic ends instead of adapting his ends to the limitations of matter as nature made it.
—What will that world be like?
[...]
If at last the human enigma does not blow himself off the earth he may come to a future such as he had not imagined, and, for all his folly, a future of his own making, knowing as he made it more than he could believe.
It is a future that cannot be planned. No new world ever was planned. But from the causes that will be acting in it certain effects may be supposed, such as:
THAT we shall find out what the machine is for, tame it accordingly, and use it only for what it is for; and that certainly is not to serve man in his flight from work, nor yet to serve those who would use it to fix others in an inferior economic status.
THAT the world will fall naturally into regions of balanced economy, essentially self-contained, with the result that conflicts over the division of labor may cease as between nations and races and continue only as between the parts of a complete social body, each part of which can see the whole and see itself belonging,—
For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office, so we, being many, are . . . every one members of one another
THAT civilization will become much richer in variety, probably as rich in that sense as it was before machines, expressing itself rather in contrasts than sameness;
THAT the distinction between industrial and non-industrial people will disappear;
THAT the land will be restored to its former estate because agriculture more and more will become a chemical science, and great organic chemical industries will be founded on the soil;
THAT the machine itself will be modified by the characteristics of the people who employ it;—in the East smaller machines answering to the Asiatic hand and in the West always more powerful machines suited to the spatulate hand;
THAT the fearsome behemoths of the industrial age, like the behemoths with which nature experimented, will give way to formations of optimum size, so that bigness as such will cease to be a problem;
THAT dense masses of industrial people will disperse, going themselves to the land instead of importing its produce from afar, and,
THAT in these migrations the mass man, with his mass thinking and mass ethic, whose projection in the world of the crashing wheel was toward chaos, may tend to disappear.
—END—
Looks like the link I posted went dead. Probably will come back later. Anyways, I also put it up a timeisborn.txt here.
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