The Wizard of Id cartoon brings up an interesting mechanism used often by the Id of power.How would it effect your behavior if you could print money from your computer with a quality that could fool merchants?
The toxins of power have corrupted government officials in the past, causing them, when the infection is strong enough, to become official counterfeiters in the sense that there is nothing of value to back up the currency they are pumping out.
Yes, the government can print money from its computers, however, if you or I do it is called counterfeiting.
On the other hand, it is called "fiscal management" if the government does it.
In such scenarios inflation can run wild to rob the people of what they have worked for.
Both scenarios are robbery, it is just that it is a "policy decision" if the government does it and a "crime" if you or I do it, even though the results are the same.
The problem we can identify here is the institutionalization of non-accountability.
When no one is accountable the toxins of power are at their strongest, while their victim is at their weakest.
In the United States system the doors and the windows of the treasury of the people have been accessed by the banksters secretly.
This is the worst case scenario for the toxins of power to be able to do their work of infection.
It is like drinking water contaminated with faeces and other toxins, which as we know is certain to spread an epidemic that will eventually do severe damage to the populace.
Besides counterfeit money, one of the other symptoms once toxins of power corrupt a society, is counterfeit information from the government, which is called propaganda.
Deceiving a society with propaganda can be compared to an individual losing consciousness, or losing memory to suffer amnesia or dementia.
That loss of the grasp of reality is a form of corruption that is always damaging to that society.
4 comments:
Dunno, Dredd. My view, our economic problems are not the result of corruption but incompetence... Misunderstanding of economic forces... Bad policy that they think is good.
And, for the record, I don't mean excessive spending. I think excessive spending is a result of bad policy -- which is why the debt and deficit problems are insoluble. One cannot solve results.
A
The Arthurian,
Noam Chomsky indicates that our educational system is a form of indoctrination, which has systemic defects:
"And, of course, there are power systems in place to facilitate this. Throughout history it's been mostly the property holders or the educated classes who've tended to support power systems. And that's a large part of what I think education is—it's a form of indoctrination. You have to reconstruct a picture of the world in order to be conducive to the interests and concerns of the educated classes, and this involves a lot of self-deceit." (Deceit).
Whether one prints way too much money while knowing there is no good reason for it, or why one does it while deceived into thinking there is a good reason for it, ends up doing the same damage anyway.
Sometimes "incompetence" is a result of propaganda or indoctrination, but sometimes it is self induced.
I would agree that toxins of power are not the source of all incompetence; there are multiple sources.
Semantics probably muddies the water a bit on this vast subject.
Economics and semantics. Q: If they print all that money, how come we have all this debt?
"Whether one prints way too much money while knowing there is no good reason for it, or why one does it while deceived into thinking there is a good reason for it, ends up doing the same damage anyway."
Dredd, they do not "print way too much money." "Print" is the wrong word. "Borrow" is the appropriate word. The reason we cannot solve the economic problem, I think, is that we do not see it clearly. People confuse printing and borrowing. People equate fiat money and credit-money. But clearly, credit-money is much more costly to use!
Everybody says they print too much money. I say they don't. I say the Federal Reserve restricts the quantity of money excessively -- which is why nobody has any money these days.
And I say Congress tries to stimulate the economy by encouraging the use of credit -- which is why we have so much debt.
I dunno, Dredd. Maybe they're all corrupt. But maybe not. Maybe they're trying to do the right thing. (That would be nice, no?)
But they are using policies that only make things worse. The economy will never improve as long as our policy is to remove money from circulation and encourage credit-use and the accumulation of debt.
But they will never stop doing these things until they understand that their policies are wrong.
Art
Art,
The controversy rages on, from Yogi Berra's cash is as good as money or vice versa to everything in between.
Print cash, borrow cash, print money, borrow money, whatever, I am holding to my bubble theory.
We print, borrow, and bloviate bubbles. ;)
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