You may respond by saying that not all government spending comes from taxes, it can come from bond sales and federal reserve printing. Debt spending worked alright for the past 40 years or so, until around three years ago when shit hit the fan. You always have to pay the bill some time- now there’s a scarcity of jobs and there will be for probably over a decade even by optimistic projections.

Additionally, government spending is more arbitrary than producer/consumer spending because the government is so much of a larger institution, it doesn’t have the same flexibility and doesn’t have the ability to average itself out like a large group of people spending small amounts of money would. And the government spending is less responsive to actual needs of constituents and more responsive to needs of friends of politicians (or worse- campaign contributors. Corruption much?)

People often say “I like taxes because I want roads to be paved,” or something along those lines. But, due to the internet, we’ve finally reached a point where a large group of people can organize, with real-time information, to carry these projects out themselves with their own money. It’s like purposeful, voluntary taxes. Which would kind of be like freedom and autonomy, as opposed to compulsory service to a machine existence where you only have a voice in how money is spent in the most tertiary, mitigated way.

I’m sorry to rant but I just saw that sentiment expressed one too many times not to respond.

Votes formerly represented our freedom and autonomy- however the obvious reality is that  the American people are not free and are not autonomous, so your vote can’t represent freedom and autonomy because those things are largely non-existent in this country. Otherwise it wouldn’t be necessary to gang up in groups of tens of thousands of people and march around impotently with signs in order to affect the decisions which will have a dramatic influence on our lives. The people who make those decisions are largely beholden to powerful moneyed interests, who care nothing for community, interpersonal reactions, or satisfying lives. They care about “growth,” because the international monetary/capital system requires perpetual exponential growth in order to continue to get returns out of an economy.

In the late 1950′s, one man working 40 hours a week could make enough to buy a home, feed a wife, two kids, and a dog, take vacations, and still have some money left to leave to the kids when all is said and done. Obviously I’m not saying that the 50′s were perfect or that everything that’s happened since then was bad. But consider now that a married couple, each working well over 40 hours a week, has to sink itself deep into debt in order to afford things that were once considered basic accommodations. Certainly many people are living beyond their means, but the fact remains that after 60 years of “growth” we are a poorer, less functional country, more like slaves and less like sovereign independent people deciding the courses of their own lives.

People mock me for saying that Americans aren’t free, and I can admit that we’re certainly lucky for our many physical comforts. So far. But consider that we’ve been growing into a soft fascism since the 80′s, and now we have cameras in all urban centers and, since the passage of the humoursly-named “Patriot Act” (quite Orwellian) the government has unfettered access to information once considered private, may tap your phones without a warrant, and may hold you indefinitely as an “enemy combatant” if it considers you to be one, and that there’s no judicial oversight over these decisions. Also consider that, if this depression continues for over another year (it will), the middle class will be well on its way to disappearing entirely.

So the American social strata will look like this: roughly 90% of Americans will be poor debt slaves working hard for subsistence with literally no hope of upward social mobility, and probably 3-7% of people (those working in the upper echelons of the few large corporations which survive the depression, plus their government and military enforcers) will be extremely wealthy. It’s not difficult to imagine how citizens will react to this, so police presence will be increased (for your own protection, of course) and any unrest will be put down with as much violence as is necessary. Does this dynamic look familiar?

What does all of this have to do with voting? Votes and democratic change are the opiates which allows people to continue to feel free, and continue to feel powerful. But, as, I discussed, the people of the USA are neither free nor powerful. And, even though for a while we were able to delude ourselves into feelings of material comforts using debt, the reality is that we are already an impoverished nation, and it will only get much, much worse from here. The best actions you can take right now, with so much uncertainty, is first, not do anything to perpetuate the current money-hungry power structure whose demands for exponential growth have  destroyed the landscape, impoverished this nation, increased the incidence of cancer dramatically, polluted the environment, destroyed indigenous peoples and native species, and generally made the world worse while increasing “wealth” (as discussed, for most Americans this wealth was an illusion anyway).

That means, first of all, don’t vote. Don’t put your money in banks. Don’t buy from faceless, soulless corporations with no connection to your community, if you can avoid doing so. Don’t work as a paper-pusher or administrator or data-entry clerk for their corporate monarchies, if you can avoid doing so.

The second, longer phase of our economic cleansing will not be merely economic but also psychological, spiritual, and philosophical. Capitalism disclaims all value except monetary value… and the results speak for themselves. Look around you right now and think of all the ways the space near you could be better. Look out your window- can children play in the street near you? Would their parents feel safe about that? Is your neighborhood suitable for real human life? Or is it a mere habitation unit with plenty of roads and cars to take people from one gear in an economic growth machine to another? These are the important changes, the difficult ones, and it will require new values and perhaps even a new religion. But it’s what’s necessary, it’s possible, and it is the future. It’s up to you, and other individual people acting within their own local sphere, to make sure that there even is a future for us to create.

Have hope, embrace change, don’t vote.

I think the bailout is everything in this speech and why meaningful change won’t happen.  (scare tactics: “I know you guys hate that we gave billions of dollars to people who are already rich and who caused the problems, but that had nothing to do with the millions they spend on taking us out to nice dinners; we HAD to do it or there would be a super-depression”).

He has a vague plan to send people to school and to help pay for college. However, government subsidy for bad public schools (through conditions put on federal education aid money) and for college tuition (through government-secured and insured interest-free loans) are major causes for the problem in the first place. Pressure needs to be put on schools to lower costs, but that won’t happen through presidential fiat; it will happen when people aren’t willing to pay exorbitant tuitions anymore. So Obama’s plan will exacerbate the problem by continuing to subsidize the payment of overpriced tuitions.

As fas as innovation of our workforce, it would be happening on its own if everyone who made money trading paper for the last two decades was homeless right now. Spearheading great economic change during a post-bubble collapse is EXACTLY what a market economy does best. So I have slim hope that throwing borrowed money at the areas that we GUESS will be the jobs of the future will create any real jobs.

This was going to be a disastrous recovery without government intervention because of the extent of the bubble that burst. But I don’t think this government, whether during Bush’s or Obama’s administration, has done anything but put the disaster off until later. It’s still lying just beneath the surface, and it needs to happen. Propping up a failed economic model for the sake of politics isn’t the answer. “Seven slim years,” in the words of Jeremy Grantham. Better seven than seventeen or more, which is what might happen if the government exhausts all its resources on preventing a depression.

However, in order for democracy were to work in practice, it requires effort. This is why it inevitably fails: people are lazy. In order for democracy to work, everyone would have to devote, minimally,  5-10 hours a week to understanding the most important things effecting our country, because determining the cause and therefor helpful attempts at solutions to those things is a very complicated process. In order to elect and hold accountable competent leaders capable of dealing with real world problems, especially in a world where change is happening so much faster than the bureaucracy can keep up with it, the public needs to be constantly educating itself in order not to fall prey to the manipulative wiles of self-serving ideologues who distort facts in order to serve their own shortsighted agenda.

Instead, people watch television for an average of 28 hours per week, using up plenty of time that could be spent being a responsible member of the electorate, while at the same time filling their heads with propaganda in order to be more easily cowed into a state-approved point of view. Time not spent watching TV is usually occupied with consumption, whether of alcohol or some other drug in a setting totally devoid of responsibility for anything or anyone.

None of this would bother me in other circumstances; how one spends her time is not really my business if it does no harm to me. But it does harm me, and everyone, because it is the endorsement from these people in the form of their votes that allows the criminals in our government to assist the bankers and institutionalized investors to bleed all of the fucking money out of the world with no sense of accountability for all of the damage they do. The bankers and insurers and pharmaceutical companies harnessed an ignorant, fat, and irresponsible middle class in order to create a new tyranny out of what is still nominally a democracy. And you let it happen.

So fuck anyone who thinks that merely voting is enough to be a responsible citizen. You’re only harming yourselves with your ballots because you’ve made no effort to understand the actions of your government and their consequences, or if you have it was likely only a superficial survey that kept you well within the bounds of conventional thinking (i.e. slavery).

America has the leadership it deserves, and when this country finally finishes its thrashing, shrieking, pitiful death throes, hopefully ignorant, lazy people will know enough to stay the hell out of its government, for their own sake.

AB

My ideal for investment is a wealthy man, or a group of organized people who together have enough money to fund an enterprise, putting their own money on the line to buy into a business or investment (real property or commodities) with which they are intimately familiar so that they understand the risks they are taking and so they are confident in the likelihood of success and factors which may contribute to the enterprise or investment’s success or failure.

This model provides a basis for sound, consistent growth by forcing investors to be EXTREMELY CAREFUL with their investments – that’s the principal component lacking from the current model. What institutional investors do is gamble. You can tell me all you want about SEC filings, blue sky laws, audit inquiries, and all of the other disclosure and regulatory regimes that exist, but these investors are NOT intimately familiar with the companies in which they’re investing. They’re familiar only with paper filings, usually fraught with misrepresentations. The institutions that consistently profit do so by cheating, whether through market manipulation (w/ government complicity and support) or computerized frontrunning or whatever other methods are available.

Nor are they gambling with their own chips, a fact which requires no lengthy explanation. Other people give the banks their money to manage, and it is all insured by the support of taxpayers. So it’s easy to see how the element of EXTREME CAUTION is here completely lacking, and in fact has been totally abandoned in a fatalistic orgy of spend-’til-the-big-one-hits (and it will hit soon if there is any justice in this world).

So on that note I send out my sincere prayers to God, Allah, Krishna, Vishnu, Wotan, Thor, Mercury, Satan, Baal, Tammuz, Jesus, Yahweh, Jupiter, Ares, Shiva, Athena, Zeus, and all of the many other gods I’ve overlooked that boulders fall from the sky and onto the heads of all bankers, politicians, insurers, and anyone else getting rich from institutionalized theft, and all of those who support them, and also pharmaceutical company managers for good measure. While I’m certain there are good people among these groups, I do not wish for them to be spared. I would joyfully give loyal service unto my death and beyond for the deity who can accomplish this for me.

In all sincerity,

Mike Brewster

“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.” -Emerson

I’ll go one step further and say that all lives are experiments. There are endless infinities standing before us, paths leading through life in every possible way; each of us is here to try one of them. There are two principal reasons why it’s incorrect to always take the lead of others or to ignore your inner voice for the sake of satisfying the demands of others. The first is straightforward: if you’re not living your own life and following your own potential, then whose life are you living? Quieting yourself for the sake of satisfying the arbitrary demands of others is a kind of suicide and slavery and should be avoided by people who believe they are capable of achieving anything at all significant.

The second reason is more abstract but perhaps more significant: if new ideas aren’t considered and attempted, if the experimenting stops, the static framework which results will inevitably crumble. It’s beyond the scope of a short blog post to get into alot of detail, but if you’re willing to indulge me for the sake of a hypothesis (experiment?), take this for granted: the modern American is hyperstimulated, first by media images; and second by other people who, having also been exposed to the same media images, tend to reinforce the media influence on an individual.

The result of this overstimulation is an atrophy of internal thoughts and desires- the self is sacrificed for the sake of social acceptability. This has worked well enough for the past few decades. Ill effects of this situation include strong personalities either becoming alienated or gawked at like zoo animals until they submit to normalcy, depression and suicide becoming more frequent, and counter-culture becoming its own mainstreamed milieu just as stifling to the expression of personality as the TV culture. However, the worst consequences of the herding of America are only just beginning to be felt. The bigger we are, the harder we fall.

When you look at history, the greatest innovations, the longest leaps forward, and the most important solutions come less often from planned and coordinated efforts and more often from individual creative efforts. For example, a small group of technicians in Silicon Valley have created a culture where there is a computer in every home and have allowed me and millions of others to publish our writings online quickly and easily. The human species adapted in a way where a small percentage of the total population was creative and innovative, another percentage can inspire people to follow them, another percentage is careful detail-oriented; together this soup of human ingenuity is capable of conquering any problem.

However, by surrendering our children’s personal growth and development to a television screen, drugging away their unique abilities, and pigeonholing their opinions into select groups of state-approved nonsense, we stand a very real risk of incapacitating the various problem solving segments of our population, like a lobotomy on a national scale. The system has been failing since, at the latest, the 80s; we’ve been able to get by anyway with debt-financing and worldwide optimism about our economic power. Neither of these things will last significantly longer.

If there’s a theme to this blog, it’s that you should NEVER, EVER MESS WITH A COMPLEX SYSTEM. YOU DO NOT AND CANNOT UNDERSTAND IT, NOR THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS.

If the current administration succeeds in offering its national healthcare option the result will be disaster. It will fail its goals and impoverish the US on the same scale as the invasion of Iraq. I repeat, just because an idea makes people feel good does not make it a good idea.

That is why the government’s power must be limited: it’s a tool of manipulation which can only be wielded by the extremely wealthy, at everyone else’s expense. The problems are not limited to one evil company (as this recently popular article suggests) but rather is systemic and related to our entire government-economic superstructure. GS is just the best manipulator, but all the most successful companies are vampiric manipulators.

Important stuff, ya know?

Government, at best, can be seen as a means by which a people can express their general interest.

• This implies that government subsidies of special interests are tantamount to a theft from the people (if the people under a government want to donate money to a special interest, they’re free to, if they don’t then there truly isn’t a good argument for forcing them to)
• This implies that a group of people who have no interests in common should not be subject to the same government
• This also implies that a government should not legislate beyond the common interests of its subjects (e.g. the only good purpose for the USA’s government is to protect the 50 member states from foreign armies, this nation doesn’t have another common interest)
• This implies that full-time legislators are unnecessary parasites, as a government need only convene when a problem is to be considered, and even then solutions from enterprising individuals should be attempted before taxation

Don’t confuse this with “trickle down economics.” It’s organic economics. Allow the system to fulfill its functions naturally and it will adapt itself to any new challenges with which it is presented.

I do not believe that a loan to Lehman brothers would have prevented its failure or helped to stave off the current financial crisis. Expanding the Federal Reserve Bank’s authority so that it needed no security for a large loan would have been disastrous: its assets, like those of many of the banks and “banks” which have been begging for economic sustenance at the government table, had grossly inflated values and would not have been sufficient security for a private institution of the same scope as the Fed itself.

The banks and their policies aren’t per se systemic risks; it’s the economic superstructure by which all the banks together chased after a speculative gambit with the assurance that, by linking together with all the other gamblers and spreading their risks across the top of the entire economy, they’re “too big to fail.” The system itself is the risk, and the sooner it comes apart, the better.

If Lehman didn’t have assets to cover its risks, it’s right that Lehman failed. Michael Martin above calls for a more comprehensive system of information feedback, but this system is already built into the economy. Failures fail and successes succeed. This has and will continue to bring about gigantic losses in the economy, but it’s only because a tall tree, propped up by governmental supports, was allowed to grow at a 45 degree angle from the ground and is finally too heavy for any federal support to hold it up. It will fall down one way or another, and any band-aid solutions are bound to fail in the long run, and thereby only cause more economic harm and loss.

Any top-down, governmental interference is necessarily arbitrary and contrary to the natural progression of the economy. Your honor, we need more economic minds to see this truth and argue for the market to be allowed to do its job: to take the money out of the gamblers’ hands so that economic resources may be redistributed to more productive enterprises. Perhaps in the short term the market disaster appears to be a failure of capitalism. I ask that you broaden your perspective and see it as a correction of an unhealthy economic attitude which has grown like a cancer on the American mindset over the span of decades.