Is anything human, certain? Can we rely on the fact that all good times will end and that pain will surely follow any pleasure? I have a small dental business. It's not complicated. Anyone can imagine what I do every day. I became a dentist in 1984 like my dad(1949)and grandpa(1916). I wanted to be useful. I had spent the last 4 years in DC as a "social justice warrior" because I wanted to tackle the biggest problems and thought with my education I might have some contributions to make. The world though is not set up for bumbling innocence, it is more responsive to focused Will. You tend to achieve what you aim for. Enlightening others tends to be a futile pursuit. It's probably enough to please yourself. I was concerned about environmental degradation and the limits to growth and thought the contraction of industrial civilization was imminent and people needed to pursue Reality based professions. Resource issues would begin to bite in the 1990's and by the Year 2000 there would be a hard step down as all growing economies faced the limits to growth.
In the late 90's I was selling the SP500 index short in the futures market with a Lind-Waldock account and as they say, the market can remain overvalued longer than you can remain solvent. I quit that game in January 2000 and invested in some local businesses that have subsequently folded. I knew what would happen but not when and so did not profit from the correction. Later, 9/11 literally jerked a rip in my brain. The America I thought I knew ceased to exist. I could not buy the story or the response. The Middle East had always been an energy story not a foreign policy pet project in support of the plucky little state of Israel. But all of a sudden, the people who cared about Israeli sovereignty were running the show. And we still needed the oil from Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. No policy goal of becoming less oil dependent and more environmentally aware had been or was going to be, forthcoming. It was another "morning in America" moment when Republicans ask the citizens to go shopping to restore normalcy.
I never understood Greenspan, he was always Delphic but I could understand Bernanke and "helicopter" money. I thought, like Clinton's Carwille, that the bond vigilantes would never permit it. But, while coaching my son's soccer team in the early 2000's, I watched their parents: bankers, mortgage originators, appraisers, and the like make crazy money by simply pretending they were adding value--NINJA loans and false appraisals. A high school friend started a bank--loaned like crazy into a growing economy--and I finally understood our financial system. It's not about work, it's not about a product: it's identifying value and financializing it. Any real good, any revenue stream can be leveraged to multiply by a factor of 10, 20, or even 40 the amount of value it can support. Identify the value and invert the pyramid with derivative products. It's not a Ponzi scheme---it's reality. Reality became virtual on the internet. We simply moved on from the old Reality to live in a new virtual world. We live there now.
But in a pandemic, like many businesses, I am doing less work. Unless your tooth is hurting, I am not "essential". What I do, could be said to be more dangerous. Virtual workers are not breathing on one another. So my patients are tentative about their preventive maintenance and cautious about new treatment. I assume many service businesses have similar problems. Some businesses have become untenable: hotel/resorts, airlines, casinos, concerts, gyms. I have heard 25% of the restaurants in America could close this year. Facilities that rely on getting people together will have at least a one year pause. So the bills will be paid with made up money, if it can be acquired.
These facts are mini-explosions to the supports for our economy. Can the complicated structure we have created stand with many of its interlocking supports removed? A financial Jenga tower. It appears that we are transitioning to a command economy that is completely centralized. The authorities and legislators will determine who survives and who does not.
The reason everyone looks to Congress and the government to solve problems is not because they are wise and beneficent but because they can create money. They are doing so prodigiously. Our belief in made up money is a faith I call "clapping for Tinkerbell". When we all quit clapping, they lose that power and we will be on a stalled and rudderless ship. Is there a lower level of effective organization? Can States or municipalities organize effectively or are they, like Illinois, just another flavor of bankrupt eventually? The transnational corporatists have a Plan--to pay the officers on the bridge of the Ship of State, permit a few professionals and technocrats to occupy the cabins and convert everyone else to steerage. Only they can manage the supply lines. And they may be successful--Lowe's and Publix are not supplied locally. Amazon is an internet cargo cult. What exactly is life in America with nothing to buy?
How could the little man cope with the corporate grand plan? The Great Reset has begun by threatening the middle class and poor with disease, un-employment, and insolvency. Savings cannot withstand a Weimar, Venezuelan, Zimbabwean style re-evaluation of the currency. When will the currency WE use, blow up, and how long will it take?
I read The Long Emergency in about 2007 and it comported with my sense that the heyday of American exceptionalism was over and it was time to recognize our limitations at useful regime change and world financial management. My pessimism grew out of my mid 1970's think tank work in DC. The Overseas Development Council would be considered a "liberal" outfit because of our international focus on improving the lives of the world's poorest billion people. Today we would be considered "globalists". We recognized that America used 25% of the world's oil and other resources to support 5% of the world's population. We thought a more equitable world would be less conflicted and fairer. That awareness implied that the US should make some adjustments.
One of the formative books at that time was Limits to Growth. Another was Small is Beautiful. Earth Day had been celebrated in 1970 and there was a growing environmental consciousness embodied in the Clean Water Act and the formation of the EPA. There was an understanding that growth had costs and our policies needed to be more ecologically aware. Carter's solar panels and "malaise speech" tried to articulate the growing awareness that there were at least two major restrictions on the "unlimited potential" of the American Future: the Environment itself and the justice of our exploitation of it. Which did not address at all our actual strategic opponents: Russia, Iran, and China.
But those who sacrifice for the future are most often undermined by "The Tragedy of the Commons". The profligate prosper on the responsibility of the prudent. Few would actually choose that injustice. So the scolds squawked and the greedy made plans to improve their position. The rich had no interest in sacrificing for the poor except on their terms. Business could envision a nightmare of Lilliputian regulations and organized energetically for their own welfare. In the recent book Evil Geniuses by Kurt Andersen he traces this history of the rising accumulation of capital in the hands of the few. The poor, working class, and middle class were left behind by the elite. Government has gradually accommodated by representing the rich and their interests.
So there have been a lot of roads not taken. Politics has been about money and democracy has been undermined. And the current arrangements of life on Earth have developed a rather large sustainability problem. That is my read of the Long Emergency, the Long Descent, Too Much Magic, etc.. The global international system has a complexity problem that is increasing as our energy resources diminish. Growth cannot continue forever and fossil fuels are a finite resource. I would say that the pandemic has markedly decreased demand for real activity and increased the demand for virtual money to cope with it. Imaginary money gushes into the debts of the unemployed and raises the level of inequality. Those quarantined are not getting ahead and those buoyed by asset appreciation float ever onward and upward into the incredible lightness of being. The pandemic strikes me as a live exercise. It's real, but not existential. What is occurring is a dialing down of expectations for the middle and working class and a solidification of the current elite in their privilege. They are going to work the problem and the rest of us will stand by.
But the loss of trust in leadership has been growing. It is currently fractured into 2 teams: Team Freedom doesn't focus on fairness and Team Justice wants to control you. Neither satisfactorily addresses the Future of diminishing complexity we are stumbling toward. Both are distractions. The first problem we should acknowledge is the power to create money is absolute as long as the users believe in it. How did the Middle Ages go on for 1,000 years as a feudal system? The people believed the Church determined the most important Reality-your fitness and access to heaven. Gods had absolute power and the king and church were the earthly representation of that. They enforced your insignificance. Currently, the money you have determines your status. You cannot normally exist in this world without money. You won't eat or have a room to call your own.
Formerly, money was earned. Your effort acquired it. Slaves and serfs did not acquire money, they performed their required work or else. Our new system allows money to be credited to you for approved purposes. You may earn it but it can be managed for "everyone's" benefit by those who determine whether it is money or not. If I believe a dollar is money then the power that can credit it to my bank account determines its usefulness. If we contrast my pitiful ability to earn money with the governments ability to create money, then we can understand how their Reality controls what happens. We have moved beyond money being a measure or standard of account to its incarnation as THE power source, like the sun, for the human economy. Formerly the activity of men was mediated through the money but now the money flow determines the narrative. (I will give you $600, $400, $300 a week to be unemployed). You don't need to work, you need to do what you are told to get the subsidy.
When you are in a lifeboat with others and a fixed amount of food and water, what is the dynamic at play-cooperation, force, or guile? The reality of a hot day with no rescue can be visualized, what will occur on our little lifeboat? If you are going to succeed in life, what strategy will you employ as a Syrian refugee in Turkey, as a farm worker in Honduras, as a teenager in the projects of America? What are your middle class options? A good job gets you as close to the money creation machine as possible. The people control nothing if they don't control the money power. Do they want to control the money power? No, they accept it and wish only it would favor them. Play the lottery. Day trade. Get a good job.
How could people take charge of the money power? They could only oppose the current system by organizing to do so. It would have to become a part of the political narrative and the interested parties have no intention of allowing that to happen. Any new system will be negotiated in secret and delivered to us. I can say the government cannot create 1.9 Trillion dollars for a stimulus rescue package because they don't "have" it and it undermines what I have worked to save. But no one agrees with me because they want the money, not the aggravation of opposing it.
At what point, how does one say, Enough? You can exit the system and be poor. If you are invested in the system--a SS check, a pension, 401-K savings, then you are dependent. How could you ensure your SS check has a comparable value in 10 years? You have to have a majority of Congressman care and propose legislation that would determine it. Politics. Someone needs to lead a significant group that sits in the Congressman's office and says--money will not buy you this election. My group represents 25% of the people in your district and we want the following: X,Y,Z.
I could hope that better participation would improve democracy but I don't believe it can occur. Too many promises from a system that cannot keep them. The social fabric looks certain to rend. What strategy looks successful to navigate the ragged stagger to sustainability? When the plane is stalling you put the nose down and hope to catch enough lift to avoid the ground....
No one wants to change until they have to. We will stall then fall and we will then know how high we were flying....
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