Countries that go through paper money crack-ups tend to be overwhelmed by some combination of financialization and taxation — both of which amount to close to the same thing.
Finance, properly understood, exists to make complex plans feasible. Finance under central banking tends to perform some of the same functions as with more historically stable hard-money finance, but with some critical distinctions — namely, that to make most plans possible, everything needs to go through the public banking system at some point.
Further, a central bank or some sort of coinage monopoly can continually skim and redistribute throughout the financial system. Currency ceases to be a highly accurate unit of account — a means of ‘keeping score’ — and becomes more a measure of how well connected and obedient you are to the system as a whole.
Under such a system, price distortions become systemic. This is what Mises called the ‘calculation problem’ — when the currency is elastic, it becomes a matter of debate as to whether or not its quantity is increasing or decreasing. Traders and other actors in the financial markets will often debate whether or not conditions are ‘inflationary’ or ‘deflationary,’ because even with all the reporting requirements, it’s not even possible for the central banks to ascertain with total accuracy what’s actually going on with the money supply and what the direction is likely to be.
Just correcting these price distortions becomes an entire industry. Speculators correct price distortions, but the need for them becomes most dire in paper-money type systems, since the unit of account is systemically and unpredictably distorted through unequal and challenging-to-predict gyrations in the supply of money and credit along with the political system.
Under such conditions, to be a skimmer becomes higher-status than to be a producer. If producers exist to be milked by the connected, more people will try to pile in to the skimming side of things than the productive side.
The overloading of university systems throughout the modern world tends to be a good indicator of this development. Students who attend for careerist reasons tend to be there to accumulate credentials under the false pretense of learning ‘skills’ or ‘relevant knowledge,’ while they’re really accumulating connections and pull.
This problem has become most severe in Europe in particular, as entire generations of young people — who had expected to enjoy happy, fat lives as parasites upon graduation — discovered that the existing parasites were not too keen about leaving their blood-sucking spots. So they must return home, be unemployed, and collect paltry welfare checks instead while they post updates on social media.
It’s less that, as Ayn Rand had hoped, the producers would band together and rebel. Rather, it’s mostly the opposite — the producers will instead happily collude with the parasites to kill off their competitors. Rand also sort of understood this — which is why she put so much effort into the construction of Objectivism as a secular philosphy and social group — but it never reached the stature of a religion or full culture which could have prevented the eventual destruction of the West on the predictable socialist line.
The descendants of the classical liberals will tend to want to save liberalism from its own consequences, while still preserving it as a tradition. What seems to be more likely is that the liberal states will just be destroyed by internal strife and external competitors. Its line will be broken, and the land where it thrived will be salted over.
This is the difficult-to-conceive of aspect of things that few will want to say. It’s one thing to contemplate your own death — quite another to contemplate the death of your civilization.
The alternative prediction, which some have made, is that no such external competitors exist, and that the internal strife will be manageable. Judging on the longer historical scale, neither seems all that likely, even allowing for impressive technological changes like the development of nuclear weapons.
This doesn’t pass the test of observation, as states like Russia have seized territory from the American orbit with only a weak, erratic, and unenthusiastic resistance — quite recently besides. Weak rebels have sent Americans packing from Libya to Yemen, with no attempt to mount a defense or a retaliation. The loss of informal territory is already happening abroad. The highly unstable and unpredictable international financial system is a fulcrum on which all the other international systems rest. As it destabilizes, so will everything else.
The political scientist Kevin Philips said counties go through three phases: agricultural, industrial then in decline, financial. We are clearly in the financial phase – and empire always goes along with it.
I still think the British system of the Bank of England, The City of London and the Gold Standard represent peak skill of Finance and the Nation. Not quite a Central Bank but the Crown’s interests, same with the City of London.
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Ayn Rand was written from The Pale, of The Pale, and for The Pale. So no, it wasn’t going to take here….or anywhere else. However the insights into mutated morality are valuable.
We should simply act to save ourselves from predators, the real estate and resources alone point towards something other than a salting of our earth.
http://grammarist.com/usage/systematic-systemic/
Aside from use of “systematic” for “systemic,” I admire the word choices.
Such minutiae aside, this article makes me reconsider the role of classical liberal dogmas in the modern world. If we are not going to be classical liberals, we need to look back at the axioms that we had imbibed with our mothers’ milk and re-evaluate.
E.g.: Classical liberal axiom: It does me no harm if my neighbor believes in one God or twenty; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
If that axiom leads to false conclusions, we must revise it to the following:
Empirical evidence suggests that neighbors who believe in no God, or twenty, sometimes use their religious beliefs to coordinate mass aggression that ends up picking pockets and breaking legs.
It sure matters a lot when your neighbor’s god tells your neighbors to skin you alive.
The same was said of homosexuals, that what another man does in his bedroom is none of my business, except when he reaches in to my pocket to pay for his expensive HIV-deferring drugs, then I do mind. The same can said for religion, in the case where a religion’s teachings command leeching from the host, and providing nothing in return. Think of the food the progressive screeches, thanks, but I can make my own kebabs.
Is is what it is, when you have the greatest organized crime system ever organized in human history, well you have the greatest organized crime system ever devised in human history.
It is complete with a system of administrative tyrants and perfumed mandarins, armed badged leg breakers, and a mock court of black robed Nazgals presiding over the punishment of acts refusal to comply with this organized extortion racket called fiat serfdom, funded by the very people who get the broken legs.
Now how ironic can that be?
The way I see it, the “elites” sole function now is to survive if not thrive their illegitimacy. And the only path to that is to employ ever more egregious methods of illegitimate forms of abuse and application of power and influence. You can see the use of force and application of violence is become a means to an ends. But what ends? These are sociopaths and psychopaths who in legion, and singularly, by the very nature of their addictions to power, this insatiable hubris which rules their darkest hearts, drives their actions where it will never be enough to rule over others. It must be total control over every facet of these unwashed lives. Just look to the institutional classification of the frontiers outside the centers of gravity of this system of slavery to the state: They have named these frontiers the “uncontrolled spaces”. Uncontrolled? That only means one thing in regime parlance, it is deemed an area and people who reside within it who must be controlled.
Look to Operation Jade Helm. All the spin aside, the basic truth here is if you have the US military in close cooperation with local, county, and state “law enforcement” running around the “uncontrolled spaces” conducting counter insurgency warfare on American soil, towns and cities, well you have the US military in close cooperation with local, county, and state “law enforcement” running around the “uncontrolled spaces” conducting counter insurgency warfare on American soil towns and cities.
It seems like a most self destructive mania which permeates every aspect of this system of totalitarianism which passes for Republican form of legitimate government.
I think too right now we are seeing the beginnings of serious efforts orchestrated to make most everyone useful afraid, who will willingly lay the chains of tyranny upon their own necks to retain the illusion of safety bequeathed upon them by the state for their compliance, secure no matter how insidious the tyranny, and in doing so this isolates all who are deemed either useful cannon fodder for the social and cultural upheaval of intended and unintended consequences of this monstrous meddling in our affairs, and those who are not afraid, a small but dangerous entity, making it much easier to single out and destroy those deemed enemies present and future of the state.
Where else is this all going?
Remember, unlike any other nation of peoples, it is America where millions are literally armed to the teeth with excellent battle rifles, the ammo and gear, and yes in increasing numbers, the training and will to use their arms in defense of their liberty, families and property.
If I was a megalomaniac out to rule with impunity, this little fact of an armed civility would be a very troublesome obstacle to my power and illegitimacy indeed.
But that is just me. And who am I to assume such things?
After all, I’m just unwashed ancient white racist trash who clings to outmoded ideas and traditions, codified by other old white radical slave holding trash, who just also happens to have faith, oh what a terroristic concept!, in a false white God, and heresy of heresies, thinks my property, my rifle, is to defend myself from the tender mercies of the all knowing all seeing eye of Mordor on the Potomac.
Funny all that.
huh?
God bless ya.
If you huh?, haven’t figured out where all this is leading, here is a definitive essay may help to enlighten your ignorance of history of tyranny.
I hope it does for all our sakes.
http://bojidarmarinov.com/blog/when-they-come-for-the-smaller-groups/