THE MONEY CRUNCH
NOVEMBER 11, 2010. This article is about where we may be fifty years from now. Maybe you don’t care. Maybe for you tomorrow is the only issue. So be it. That’s fine.
But I’m predicting something extraordinary will happen to…oh, let’s call it DEBT: A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL.
The word debt will undergo a revolution…
These days—and for a long time now—you really aren’t a modern government unless you spend more than you have.
Debt-based governments, in fact, follow a strategy that is defined by some economists as: inevitable; good; healthy.
Healthy, that is, until the chickens come home to roost.
Even when the White House and state capitols are crammed with chickens, squawking, pecking, wandering the hallways, you can find experts comparing government debt to overall private-sector production and shrugging with practiced indifference.
That shrug seems to form the core of their PhD credentials.
“No problem. We can handle it.”
In California, the inability to pass a debt-laden state budget was the trigger that caused the recall of Governor Gray Davis. Arnold the Weightlifter, displaying an optimism worthy of a superhero, entered the scene—but he, too, failed to lift the debt from the state. Now, the bald ascetic, Jerry Brown, is the new messiah. Yet on the campaign trail, Brown asserted the state university system could gift free tuition to every youngster in California, legally or illegally residing here.
In California, Illinois, Washington DC, Greece, France, Italy, England, and numerous other places, governments are facing the same problem. They spent more than they had, in order to deliver goodies to people who “needed them, deserved them, demanded them.” And some of the recipients were their own public employees.
Still, the sentiment for gift giving is strong:
“People everywhere must be helped. No one should be left behind. Ever. Who cares how the spending is arranged? We don’t give a damn. Figure it out. This is what government is for. Change the definition of debt. Erase it off the books. Print more money. Invent money. Invent the invention of money. Don’t bother us with the details. Just get it done.”
And people argue whether these governments are socialistic. It’s rather amazing.
Governments have an answer to all this. They’ll control the means of production and distribution of goods and services. Not on the scale we see now—on a far larger scale.
Governments will calculate their slice of the money pie from this ownership bonanza, and they’ll take that slice. It will be big enough to make the case that the debt burden governments carry is reasonable, because they are profiting from owning, well, almost everything.
That’s the direction. That’s the plan. When you think about it, it always was. Freedom and the free market were always seen (by the experts and grand thieves) as a momentary blip on the radar screen. An aberration.
This is the real meaning of the term “market correction.”
The mind of government, such as it is, thinks about banks and corporations and financial markets and says: “Well, we sort of own them and they sort of own us, and now we just need to cement those relationships and make them more inclusive. The alternative is we all go down with the ship.”
When government envisions the day it stands at the prow of the ship, it believes dangerous debt will be a thing of the past, because how can there be debt when the government owns everything and shapes the very meaning and story of money? Who can then stand outside the structure and say there is a dangerous imbalance between what is profit and what is loss?
This is the game saver for governments. It’s the final answer when every other strategy has failed utterly.
Government can envision this end game because, of course, the answer has to be delivered globally.
No longer would there be a USSR crashing on the rocks and falling into a sea of red ink. That was the old system, in which one nation could win against another, one economy could be more powerful than another, and debts had to be paid off to creditors.
No, in the new universe, all this goes away. That’s the dream.
Enormous failure leads to complete triumph.
“We can spend and owe our way into oblivion, and that is a good idea, because after that there will have to be a reckoning that goes beyond reckoning—we will forge a different system where, by definition, such crises can never happen again.”
When you examine various experts’ mind-boggling acceptance of unpayable debt, you can, in fact, see this redefinition process has been going on for quite some time.
It’s a lead-in to a new kind of civilization. To call it socialism is to underestimate it. It’s a hybrid. Corporations, governments, banks, markets—they are blended together…and at the top, there is a group of financial wizards whose job it is to constantly depict and redefine what money and debt and credit ARE, so that crisis is, a priori, eliminated.
Of course, the obfuscation will be fantastic. It will look like science fiction. But so do other sectors of society. So what?
The flow and roll-down from the top of the pyramid, however, will, in a real sense, make everybody into a functionary.
Freedom in the marketplace will not only be severely constricted; people will have to adjust their actions and thoughts to align with the latest fabrications broadcast from the summit.
It will resemble, this whole structure, the Medieval Roman Church, where cosmology and its detailed implications were adjusted from moment to moment, to rule out invasive realities and discoveries, where the nature of history was recast, like wet plaster, to resemble Church mythology and doctrine, where the proliferation of that doctrine rumbled like armies and smashed flat the objections of logic.
This is the vision, puerile and absurd as it sounds, that backs up every lunatic act of massive government debtors of today. This is the future they see, dimly, or clearly. This is their anchor.
If you want a modern comparison, I point you to the so-called science and modeling of global warming. The airy mathematical castles built on other castles suck up selected historical observational data and resurrect them as evidence of alarming trends. There is nothing in these models that has a mandatory relationship to the physical world. When one castle is seen to be a fairy tale, three more are thrown up quickly to engender confidence.
If the vision of the future I’m sketching here comes to pass, the word debt will, a hundred years from now, be as incomprehensible and insignificant as a proposed piece of planetary debris floating around a sun a billion light years from Earth.
And some form of global altruism will be referenced to explain why this venal concept—debt—had to be scrubbed from human affairs and the human mind.
And you can take that to the bank.
Or:
We could preserve freedom.
“Debt? Oh yes. THAT. At one time, people with criminal motives suggested that ledgers should be kept expressing what was gained and what was owed. Those people were vicious proponents of a system they called the free market. Finally, we reduced them to ashes. We bludgeoned them out of existence. Debt was a fictional piece of propaganda designed to promote inequality. It was a dagger hanging over the heads of our people. It was a tool of hate, before the Great Change. Now, properly, there is only need and fulfillment of need…”
JON RAPPOPORT
Jon is the author of a unique course for homes schools and adults, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS. To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com