Collateral Moral Damage

In 1933, after a decade and a half of tumultuous politics that frequently turned into street violence, the German “Reichstag” (parliament) empaneled a cabinet led by Adolf Hitler to run things. Hitler’s “Nazi” party was not the biggest party in the Reichstag – they’d actually lost seats in the most recent round of elections – but they were in a strategic political position.

While the Nazis are (mostly mistakenly) called “far right”, the interesting thing is that the “Hitler Cabinet” had about as much support from Communists and Socialists as it did from the populist and “conservative” (which meant monarchists and Catholics, at the time) blocs in the Reichstag. Both sides – Communist and Monarchist – had the same reason to support the Nazis taking control of a coalition government; a bunch of populist extremists with a private army of thugs would drive the German middle to the Left or the Right. That is most extremists’ first goal; make the center untenable.

It backfired on the brilliant minds of the Reichstag, of course; Hitler, promising an end to divisive politics from all sides, forged “Unity” (by co-opting, neutralizing, exiling or killing the geniuses who’d put him in power); his cabinet led the entire world to war seven years later.

The only thing worse than “divisive” politics is no politics at all.

Keep that in mind when you see episodes like those last Saturday at the MN State Capitol, where masked thugs attacked Pro-Trump demonstrators, or two weeks ago at Berkeley, or…well, the list is going on and on and on, even now. I’ve seen more than a few people on social media, no doubt angry and frustrated, exclaim how they’d like to be at the next such rally, to break some heads (and I’ll confess, in my heart of hearts, the thought’s crossed my mind, at least for a moment before I chased it out).

Just like 85 years ago, that plays into the hands of the *real* extremists. Extremists are happiest when they’re creating more extremists – and it doesn’t even matter whose side those extremists are on. And then, when the vast middle gets sick of “politics”, and turn to someone who’ll just bring “order”…

…well, I’d say “we know where this leads”, but all too many Americans really really don’t.

103 thoughts on “Collateral Moral Damage

  1. Those living through 1917 in Russia and 1932 in Germany didn’t understand everything had changed forever — they thought it was more or less business as usual. So today the British (with Brexit) and the Americans (with Trump) don’t understand that everything has changed forever. It will take us a few generations to decide who to trust. In the meantime, a lot of populists will become leaders, quite a few wars might be started, many gullible young people will be inspired to express their political beliefs through terrorism, and it will be difficult to have a reasoned conversation with anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the same version of the truth as you do. Welcome to the beginning of the post-democratic age.

  2. Normally content to just read the comments I rarely post here. Emory, wtf are you smoking? I really hope everything HAS changed forever. Maybe your side’s overblown rhetoric will finally be revealed for what it is. Post-Democratic Party age has a nice ring to it.

  3. Those living through 1917 in Russia and 1932 in Germany didn’t understand everything had changed forever

    Really, eTASS, you ignorant slut? More moronic words were never spoken. No, wait, everything eTASS says is moronic and there are indeed more moronic verses, but that is up there with them.

  4. “He will not divide us” seriously sounds like something out of Nazi/communist propaganda. Im sure the irony on LeBouef was lost. Funny how trolls took down both of his living art projects. That was hilarious. He does need help though.

  5. “The only thing worse than ‘divisive’ politics is no politics at all.”

    Give me divisive politics every time.

    In Minneapolis, a voter wanting to express his preference for mayor can only rubber-stamp the choice made for him by his betters–the “politics” are taken out of it. The voters of L.A. just “elected” a mayor with 80% of the vote going to a Son of a Democrat. Fidel Castro seldom won by such margins.

    By contrast, our recent presidential election was decided by a hairs-breadth. It was a rollicking contest in which the winner laid out exactly what he planned to do in public rally after public rally–and now he’s keeping his promises. Real contests are divisive. Rigged games are quiet.

  6. @TKS: Perhaps instead I should have wrote: “Welcome to the new Renaissance.”
    I find Trump to be a reassuringly steady beacon in an uncertain world. With most politicians, I can’t be sure whether I’m hearing the truth, a lie, or some combination thereof. With Trump, I bask in the warm certainty that I’m getting complete, unadulterated BS. We have to be seriously worried about Trump. He gets his news from Breitbart, InfoWars, Levin, Drudge Gateway Pundit etc — the lunatic fringe. He seems incapable of acting reasonably, or maturely. He launches irrational attacks with no evidence, such as his most recent one against Obama, just making himself look bad.

    What is most troubling with Trump, Le Pen, or the Brexiteers is the defeatism that they promote, that we have lost and must close ranks to protect what little is left. No, let us instead smooth inequality, let us regulate migration of peoples sensibly rather than stop it, let us listen and respond to the needs and fears of those outside the elite, even if it does delay our approach to some utopian ideal of free capitalism or liberalism.

    Reform and move forward. Don’t look backwards for a solution.

  7. Emery Incognito wrote:

    “I bask in the warm certainty that I’m getting complete, unadulterated BS”

    Thanks for the unintentional self-referential humor, Emery Incognito.

    “Reform and move forward. Don’t look backwards for a solution.”

    How empty and blind.

  8. What is most troubling with Trump, Le Pen, or the Brexiteers is the defeatism that they promote, that we have lost and must close ranks to protect what little is left.

    Read the jobs report this morning E I? He wasn’t pushing defeatism, that would be Barack ‘Lets lead from behind’ and ‘Red line’ Obama. Trump tapped into the people who were tired of getting kicked in the balls by the establishment for the last 30 years, on both sides of the aisle. He won because he gave those people hope, something to believe in. And frankly so far he’s delivering

  9. Then again I speak of American Exceptionalism something you clearly don’t believe in or have a concept of.

  10. Unseasonably mild winter weather undoubtedly played a role. But near record high job openings and record low layoffs underpin the entire job market.

    Trump has exactly as much evidence that Obama “wire tapped” him as he does that Obama was born in Kenya

  11. We shall see. If there’s one thing that this election season has taught me its that conventional wisdom, ie the narrative the MSM pushes, HARD, is usually dead wrong.

  12. Something to keep in mind when people are pointing at one another and shouting “Nazi!”
    Immediately after World War Two, the tendency was for the blame for World War Two and the Holocaust to be placed on Hitler and his henchmen, and not the German people. This was self-serving because it shifted the blame onto the dead, and justified making the Germans key allies in the cold war (Germany was the natural invasion path from the East into Europe).
    Starting in the 1970s, the tide began to turn, and there was a greater tendency to blame the German people themselves — or capitalism — for Hitler and Nazism.
    The problem many historians have is that the early opposition to Hitler in Germany and Europe was often totalitarian itself. It was international communism, directed by Josef Stalin.
    Mainstream history is corrupt. It will tell you, for example, that both Hitler and Mussolini were anti-union, and that this links them to conservatives and the modern Republican Party.
    However, the reason why Hitler and Mussolini were anti-union was because the labor movement in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was controlled by Stalin. Hitler and Mussolini were against organized labor because they were against international socialism. Trade unionism was Stalin’s cat’s paw. Modern American conservatives oppose organized labor because it infringes on personal liberty and because unions tend to oppose policies that improve workforce efficiencies and promote economic growth.
    We think about politics very differently than the educated classes of the 1920s and 1930s. The European and American elites of the 1920s and 1930s were not great believers in liberal democracy (though it is hard to get today’s elites to admit this simple, historical fact). Many of the anti-fascist intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s were pro-Stalin.
    Modern historians are not comfortable with the fact that the individuals and organizations who opposed totalitarianism of both the Left and the Right between the wars reasoned from religion, or natural rights (which amounts to the same thing).

  13. Let me continue my last, long-winded comment with a short conclusion. I thought that it would be clear from the text, but maybe it is not 🙂
    Modernists try to find a modern reason to oppose totalitarianism. There aren’t any. The only arguments against totalitarianism that have rigor are pre-modern, e.g., they are conservative.

  14. PoD: At some point, Trump will run out of executive orders and realize that to get some major legislation done, he will need to get more diplomatic and win people over. I worry the bad Trump will overwhelm the market — friendly one, taking markets and perhaps the country down with him

  15. Emery wrote:
    PoD: At some point, Trump will run out of executive orders and realize that to get some major legislation done, he will need to get more diplomatic and win people over.
    Not really, and the media won’t allow a “nice Trump” to ever emerge. That narrative ain’t going to happen on the major networks and newsfeeds. AP seems to have declared war on Trump. It is printing anti-Trump opinions in straight “news” stories that have nothing to do with Trump or his policies.
    For Trump to succeed beyond executive orders, he needs congress, and that means mostly the GOP senators and reps. To get them he needs senators and reps to believe that their chances of re-election are greater if they support his agenda than if they oppose it.
    This may not be as difficult as it sounds. An anti-Trump GOP Senator congressman will be supported not by the Dems or the GOP base, but only by the GOP donor class.
    I refuse to make predictions.

  16. Baloney Emery! The bulk of Trump’s EO have been in direct response to the EO that Obama crammed down our throats. AND THAT’S WHAT HE PROMISED HE’D DO!!

  17. My point was there is very little Trump can achieve with further EO’s. Obama was highly aware of what was going on, but was sometimes (in my view) too cautious in acting upon what he saw and what he knew. Trump is just oblivious. He is not cautious like Obama, he is just unaware.

    Add to that Trump is grossly deficient in his basic knowledge of how the government and the world work to hold the office that he occupies. I don’t expect a president to come into office “fully formed” as it were to tackle the myriad responsibilities that come with the office, but I expect the president to be a quick learner who immerses herself into all of the various areas that need to be gotten up to speed on, and fast.

    During that steep learning curve, I expect the president to speak less, rely heavily on a core group of knowledgeable, wise, professionals in their respective fields of expertise, that keep the president from embarrassing himself, until he gets to a place where he can speak in public without looking completely out of his depth or ignorant on any number of issues, the economy, foreign policy, constitutional separation of powers and the respective roles of the three branches of government, as well as the vital role a free and independent press plays in our democracy, as the fourth estate.

    I expect the president to be intellectually curious, and a passionate self learner who throws himself into reading and absorbing as much as possible as soon as possible to get to place where he can handle the many challenges and crisis that will come his way as president.

    Its clear to me at this point into his presidency, that Trump possesses few of those qualities that I expect someone who is president to possess in order to be minimally qualified to be or become competent as our Commander in Chief. I sincerely hope I am wrong for all of our sake. Oh, and Mr. Trump, get off of twitter you fool…

  18. Gotta be some good weed Emery’s smoking. Minnesota medical, or did you go to Colorado, EI? Or, seriously speaking, everybody who had read a bit of anything Marx, Lenin, Engels, or Hitler wrote knew damn well that 1917 and 1932 changed a LOT there. By 1934, Schicklgruber had made serious concessions to the Vatican to avoid every priest in the country denouncing him and his party. And as others noted, a lot of the intelligentsia were indeed praising the Bolsheviks and the Nazis.

    For those who read the papers, there are just a couple of differences between that and what’s going on with Trump and Brexit. And it’s worth noting that the path back for both the Germans and those under Soviet domination was….the path back to what was before.

  19. For anyone trying to argue reality with eTASS, please remember his dire predictions about immediate apocalyptic collapse of UK after Brexit vote. ‘nuf said.

  20. Have you read Rousseau? I find Rousseau to be similar to Marx in many ways. Both were trenchant critics of the accepted wisdom of their times, and of the flaws they observed in society. Their critiques are often sound. But their proposed solutions are Utopian and naïve. Worse, others have taken their work and used it as a justification for autocratic and totalitarian governments. Do we blame Marx for Stalin and Mao? Do we blame Rousseau for The Terror, Napoleon, Peron, or Trump? Partly yes, partly no. Yes because both called for tearing down the system, rather than fixing the existing one. When you provide justifications and call for societal destruction and chaos, you must take some of the blame when it happens, even if the political actor is using your ideas and words opportunistically and contrary to your original intent. Do I slight Rousseau when I associate him with every autocrat who calls for a revolution against the elite to “make their country great again” through solidarity with the common man? Sure, that’s unfair, because he had a lot of other things to say, too, and he’s taken out of context. But a lot of bad leaders have started with a script borrowed from Rousseau.

  21. Trump has exactly as much evidence that Obama “wire tapped” him

    And you have proof he did not as much as you do that Russians meddled in election. You are indeed a tool of the commissariat. A very, very dull tool.

  22. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 03.08.17 : The Other McCain

  23. I find Rousseau to be similar to Marx in many ways… …Their critiques are often sound.

    And this is where you are dead, dead wrong. Marx’ “critique” was not sound but based on false and fabricated data and assumptions. But then your heroes are never wrong. Everything they did, and everything done in their names is sacrosanct, including murder of tens of millions of people. But that does not matter to an amoral slug like you. Yet again you let the cover slip and the glimpse inside proves what we have known all along – libturds have no soul or morals.

  24. Rousseau sounds somewhat compelling until you read about how he abandoned his own children to orphanages, and near certain death, rather than marry their mother. Great guy. I once got myself into (mild) trouble when I was reading his discourses, and just broke out into laughter when reading “the virtuous man is an athlete who likes to compete in the nude”. Obviously Rousseau wasn’t thinking about football or hockey.

  25. When you look at nations that have tried Rousseau solutions to governance, you first see totalitarian military dictatorships like Napoleon, Hitler, and Mussolini, which failed after a decade or two under the weigh of needing a superman leader, and instead finding ordinary men with extraordinary failings in charge. Iran under the Ayatollahs has been an attempt to pursue strong moral governance under a benevolent but all-powerful despot, and they’ve honestly done better than the aforementioned, but still the people chafe under their restrictions, and the system is hopelessly corrupt and inefficient.

    But Voltaire-esque meritocracy in the rich world democracies is proving hard to manage as well, leading to Rousseau-esque eruptions like Trump, Brexit, and le Pen, when inequalities increase, and when liberal internationalism forces uncomfortable mixing of cultures. Putin is another example of a Rousseau inspired leader, an autocrat who promises the glories of the past, who provides stability but with corruption and a poor economic future. The less successful in a society love a good autocrat who promises a return to an imagined, more moral past, where all were more prosperous and equal. Rousseau encouraged tribal loyalty, and fear of ‘the Stranger’, because he highly valued the solidarity of tribes and nations. He was willing to sacrifice the efficiencies of consumer focused liberal economics, because he did not value materialism.

    People struggle to come to terms with these conflicting philosophies. They like meritocracy, but all meritocracies are flawed, as the winners always seek to reward themselves and their friends and family in excess of what is merited. They like the solidarity of tribalism, and fear strangers instinctively, but they realize excessive tribalism conflicts with rewarding merit. They like the freedom of democracy when prosperous, but opt for autocrats when times get tough.

    Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if candidates in an election debated the virtues and shortcomings of Voltaire and his meritocracy, and the validity of Rousseau’s critiques of supposedly meritocratic systems, but the failure of Rousseau’s solutions when they have been tried. Clearly a more fair meritocracy is needed, but we find ourselves instead slinging insults back and forth rather like Voltaire and Rousseau 300 years ago, while peddling their same old slogans. Rich countries are repeating an old argument once again, while many more newly middle class countries are debating the same question for the first time. It argues for a better education for our citizenry in history, civics, and philosophy, does it not? Better than we’ve managed for the last 300 years of repeating the same argument. Or perhaps there is no better answer than to oscillate between extremes.

    And yes, Voltaire was great anti-Semite. He’s a flawed source of inspiration as well, who must be sampled carefully.

  26. For Sweden, sensible regulation of migration would have started with sinking the boats before they got to Greece because once the migrants got ashore, there was no stopping them. Re-read “Camp of Saints” for more details.

    In the US, it’s building The Wall, which Trump is working on as well as he can with every Democrat, every establishment Republican and the entire media working against him.

  27. …well, I’d say “we know where this leads”, but all too many Americans really really don’t.

    NROS’s Andrew Stuttaford knows where this will end. Regarding the Leftist physical attack on Charles Murray at Middlebury this past week, he wrote:

    “These last protestors were masked. If they, and those like them, prevail, they will, one day, be wearing uniforms.”

    http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/445501/middlebury-thoughtcrime-and-punishment

  28. PoD: At some point, Trump will run out of executive orders and realize that to get some major legislation done, he will need to get more diplomatic and win people over.
    Yes… hopefully he learned from Obama how NOT to do a presidency and barf up majorities in both houses.

  29. Joe Doakes on March 8, 2017 at 3:30 pm said:
    For Sweden, sensible regulation of migration would have started with sinking the boats before they got to Greece because once the migrants got ashore, there was no stopping them.

    An awful lot of the world’s problems are holdovers from progressive ideas that were known to have failed decades ago, such as immigrantion from ethnically exotic nations can make up for falling First World birth rates, or that Third World nations could become modern, economically and culturally, by helping their regimes build modern infrastructure (Africa is usually given as an example of this, but I believe Pacific Rim nations make for a more interesting example).
    I call these “zombie ideas.” No one really believes in them anymore, but they have to pay lip service to them and pretend they work to avoid conceding that Progressivism is untenable as a world-governing, universalist philosophy.

  30. And yes, Voltaire was great anti-Semite. He’s a flawed source of inspiration as well, who must be sampled carefully.

    So was Martin Luther but it didn’t make his 95 theses and critique of the Catholic Church any less valid. Although he did kinda go nuts at the end of his life….

  31. I find Rousseau to be similar to Marx in many ways. Both were trenchant critics of the accepted wisdom of their times, and of the flaws they observed in society. Their critiques are often sound.

    Dear God I hope you’re not serious. Rousseau was as oblivious an idiot as has ever lived. His conception of man as god-like being who was corrupted only by his social surroundings was as idiotic as it was ignorant of all history. His noble savages corrupted by society from their natural morality is the height of nativity. And a man who abandoned his own children to the foundling hospital allegedly because he didn’t trust the family of his mistress to education them, and who then went on become a scion of education and child-rearing deserves a special place in hypocrisy Hell. He was either a liar or a hypocrite, but in any case he was in my view a cold-hearted villain for that act repeated no less than four times.

    Sure, he was a critic of social conditions in just before the Revolution in France, but he wasn’t alone and he surely wasn’t the most disinterested or insightful critic. And someone who can’t see that any religion is more moral than any other is a particularly blinkered and unread individual whose own morals need to be examined.

    You can look up to Rousseau, and to be certain many of the “intelligentsia” of France do so to this day, but you have to ignore a pile of his behavior that denies the central thesis of his writings to do so. Frankly, I view him as one of the less worthy philosophers of his era.

  32. But Voltaire-esque meritocracy in the rich world democracies is proving hard to manage as well, leading to Rousseau-esque eruptions like Trump, Brexit, and le Pen, when inequalities increase, and when liberal internationalism forces uncomfortable mixing of cultures.[…]

    Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if candidates in an election debated the virtues and shortcomings of Voltaire and his meritocracy, and the validity of Rousseau’s critiques of supposedly meritocratic systems, but the failure of Rousseau’s solutions when they have been tried.

    Yes, Rousseau was a proto-Marxist who criticized the systems of pre-Revolutionary France, but he completely missed the nature of man as an animal and stubbornly refused to see within himself and within his actions the utter destruction of his argument as to the nobility of unfettered man. His proscriptions for the ordering of a society were laughably ignorant of history and practicality.

    Your characterization of Voltaire as a supporter of the French system is fairly laughable, as he was a well-known satirist of the institutions of the day, as well as an outspoken critic of state sponsored religion (note the trouble he got into in his first love affair with a French Protestant refugee in the Netherlands). He praised systems that rewarded what he viewed as merit, and satirized those that didn’t, and in that sense he was in the right.

    I have no doubt that were Voltaire to examine the supposed “meritocracy” we have in our elites today he would be resorting to satire very quickly. To take a quick example, the presidents that followed Reagan have all, until the present one, been the products of Ivy League education. And they have all negotiated or been bribed (*cough* Bill *cough*) into naive and impractical trade relationships that have destroyed the industrial capacity of this nation. I find it laughable to call the products of the Ivy League “meritorious” in any sense since so few of them come out understanding anything other than a very narrow, blinkered, and absolutist philosophy that has been discredited by history.

  33. His noble savages corrupted by society from their natural morality is the height of nativitynaivety.

    I hate autocorrect.

  34. I think eTASS would definitely benefit from reading

    Reasons To Vote For Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide – February 8, 2017
    by Michael J. Knowles (Author)

    As deep, thoughtful and insightful this book is, even he can comprehend the content (but not necessarily the context).

  35. QUOTE: What is most troubling with Trump, Le Pen, or the Brexiteers is the defeatism that they promote

    Brexit is about no-account political centralization being a disaster everywhere on the planet.

    Trump is simply about getting ***YOUR*** fascist in control of our crappy fascist government system. This is how Wilsonian statist inflationism ends.

  36. Please everyone. The central banks are out of gas. There is going to be a horrible recession / market crash so the Fed will do an embarrassing QE4. Then the bond market backs up and the government runs out of money. I’m dead serious

    There is little Trump affects either way on this.

  37. “The tipping point must be when there are just not enough people creating wealth to pay for the insatiable number of those consuming it. This is as much a problem for the United States as Europe. The corporatist state is with us now, it reflects in public and private sector borrowing in amounts that are beyond human understanding, it grows exponentially. Once the roller coaster ride has started it is almost impossible to stop. Recipients of social or corporate welfare cannot ever be expected to change the system electorally to their disadvantage. Moreover the idea of the State taking responsibility from cradle to grave is attractive to significant sections of the electorate, socialism and fascism are a form of political comfort eating on which the bureaucracy grow fat and the electorate apathetic.”

    http://iddeurope.org/what-is-fascism/1313

  38. TFS so your saying only gold silver and lead are good investments now? Also doesn’t Trump have to sign off on a QE4?

  39. There is no combination of inflation and GDP that will “defease” all of the debt on the planet. The political system requires inflation because they can’t tax even a gentle deflation. It’s been an inflationist ponzi scheme since Woodrow Wilson. Confidence in central bankers will go to zero at some point.

    So I like gold, silver and lead.

  40. To answer your QE4 question: For one POTUS isn’t supposed to have anything to do with Fed policy, but the Ruling Class, the banking system and all of the government parasites has to have inflation so it’s really a facade. This process generates debt, which props it all up. It’s breaking down now, however.

  41. “Who knew a Trump presidency would be negative for gold?”

    It’s not. Gold isn’t risky until sometime after interest rates go way, way up.

    We’re getting a new global monetary system the hard way. That is what is going to happen.

  42. TheFedSucks on March 8, 2017 at 5:59 pm said:
    1.9% GDP for eight straight years. It’s the Keynesian end point.

    Which Keynes foresaw and warned against. The forward-lookers anticipate reduced future government benefits and/or increased taxation to pay for government debt, so they react to “stimulus” spending by putting their money in a mattress.

  43. MP, there’s a reason Keynes wasn’t a Keynesian when he died: he’d seen how his nice theoretical model behaved when subjected to Real World implementations.

    But overall, I’m not very optimistic about the future. We’ve reached type II debt diabetes stage, where the system has become progressively more and more immune to the stimulus effects of more debt. Coupled with the massive bills coming due in both “entitlements” and interest payments on the debt, you can rest assured that your retirement nest egg will be taxed and inflated away while the economy stagnates. Our Keynesian Kenyan made our business elites happy by socializing their losses and leaving them sitting pretty, and in return they’ll take care of him. Unlike what’s been happening to everyone who depends on a reasonable investment environment to retire.

  44. But overall, I’m not very optimistic about the future. We’ve reached type II debt diabetes stage, where the system has become progressively more and more immune to the stimulus effects of more debt.
    Yes! This is something debt and inflation doves (like Krugman) must realize, but soft-pedal because they do not want to admit that there are limits to the ability of the government to manage the economy.
    In the short and mid term, I think we are okay, but in the long term I believe that money will have to return to having a basis in real, physical assets of some kind. This is how, in the early 1920s, the German government stabilized the Mark and ended hyperinflation.

  45. For some reason debt hawks are always pushing gold as a hedge against inflation. In fact the hedge just has to be something tangible that has value. Farmland, cartons of cigarettes, cases of chile, whatever. The important thing to do is to avoid assets that are based on debt.
    Some people are inflation doves because they believe that it favors labor over capital. The idea is that labor is produced anew every day, so it is “inflation proof” compared to capital.
    But in fact laborers depend on savings — with the money they get paid with on Friday, they must save enough to buy bread each day for the next week.
    The people who did the best during the German hyperinflaltion of the 1920s were farmers. Workers didn’t do very well at all due to “shoeleather” costs.

  46. Gold is money and it’s performance isn’t a function of GDP. That’s the difference.

  47. QUOTE: We’ve reached type II debt diabetes stage, where the system has become progressively more and more immune to the stimulus effects of more debt.

    Since the Fed was invented we have been operating on an inflationist system of CONTINUOUS credit growth regardless of if that debt was that great of an idea or not. That wouldn’t happen under natural, sightly deflationary economy.

    Computers, robots, NAFTA, China labor market opening up are all slightly deflationary (better living through everyday prices) but a highly centralized government based on graft, dependency, rent seeking, and underfunding Medicare etc. REQUIRES credit based inflation or asset inflation so they can tax it. They can’t tax better living through deflation. It was nice while it lasted.

    Procreating FICA slaves and being honest and productive is a sucker’s game in our system.

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