“A Delusional and Dysfunctional State”

JHoward

From two of the best minds on our economic times, Charles Hugh-Smith of the OfTwoMinds blog and Gordon T. Long. h/t Zero Hedge.

My comments tonight are brief, but I encourage the reader to consider the literal definition of words like delusional and dysfunctional and not to think them entertaining rhetoric or hyperbole. I also encourage the viewer to not assume that any sort of financial credentials or insights are needed here — in fact, I encourage us to set such preconceptions aside and realize that if our particular kind of money is the primary tool of the delusional State, which it is, then we shall simply live in a dysfunctional reality.

Ours is now that reality.

There’s little I can add, although protein wisdom regulars will find that much of Hugh-Smith’s and Long’s conversation rings as familiar as it does true. Some of it is as chilling as it is both calmly succinct and indicative of the high civility the classical liberal (if Hugh-Smith and Long will permit me) must employ just to get a small audience, so corrupted by now is the State’s tacitly official and utterly timed and practiced narrative. The condemned man’s mind is reduced to its finest and frankest eloquence just before dawn, as it were.

Earlier today Jeff forwarded a comment from GeoffB, linking to the following:

Essentially, there are four preconditions in Modern Monetary Theory:

Money enters the economy through government spending, as the total amount of money is constrained not by gold but by the total output of the national economy;

Government spending is speculative as it prints as much money as it needs to control production and, as a byproduct, employment, and spending beyond productive capacity leads to inflation;

Taxes do not pay for expenditures but are instead a way to throttle private sector demand; and

The government is the issuer of the currency, sovereign governments that issue their own currency are never insolvent, so debts essentially don’t matter.

A condensed view but as far as it goes, exactly right.

As I replied to Jeff this afternoon, protein wisdom has long been about how the table has been set in the postmodern, Progressive milieu so as to own the narrative and many outcomes. Progressive money and finance are how they own us outright — just as with language, in our perversely cheerful adaptation to distinct, sequential, radically different approaches to reality itself.

The normal view grants obvious real function — what Classical Liberalism is to hard politics and with them, objectively to human nature. Here the Austrian School and your and my households naturally and intuitively accept an ages-long verifiable view of sound money and its management.

As corruption sets in we find the postmodern version of, well, virtually everything — the progressive new reality, one simply subject to exciting majority reinterpretation as the sole standard. Hence protein wisdom’s war on the willful corruption of the instruments of sound definition.

Last comes the outright acceptance of The Lie and then an overt and accepted policy of falseness. In the swamp of rhetorical “truth” baseless opinion is naturally just as valid as its faulty federal policy is for managing physical, monetary instruments, the kind that could steal from you, hurt you, and today, perhaps even end your existence. All shall be rationalized and all shall be subject to the entirely subjective, parasitic, State monopoly, that being progress.

Of course, assimilation is the ultimate progression of Progressivism. Many will not resist this progression but will deny any admission thereof — they cannot care what’s real because of the internal dissonance and discomfort. Their masters are themselves too self-impressed by their clever escape acts from reality, while their egos greatly fancy their dogmas in a circular, self-supporting dance: I’m smart because I’ve escaped reality’s clutches and I’ve escaped reality’s clutches because I’m smart.

For now and only when I squint.

I’m sure that’s biblical in more than a few ways, FWIW. There really is nothing new under this sun.

Posted by JHoward @ 7:10pm
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