“The politicians’ challenge is to wrest well-functioning energy and financial markets back from a financial, activist and media class that seems unshaken by the anticonsumption, income-redistribution miseries their agenda is inflicting. Culture war, indeed.”
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Samizdata quote of the dayJohnathan Pearce (London) · Economics, Business & Globalization · Environment · Slogans & Quotations February 11th, 2022 |
 15 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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If the wealth creators didn’t have to waste so much time fighting the wealth consumers we could have the twenty-first century we were promised.
That is a great line. Although given 1914, 1918, Stalin, and Mao one might say wealth destroyers. Ideology and theft have kept the whole planet down.
Amen to that Roué!
The political spectrum no longer runs Left to Right, it is the Collective Blob v individuality.
Power and money v the peons who must learn to serve their new masters who know best.
Sadly the wealth creators do not stand up for themselves, or for the economy – without which there would be mass death. Yes mass death – for a densely populated island such as this can not survive without large scale MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY.
The wealth creators are mostly Corporations – controlled by hired managers who will not hand the business on to their children (because they do not own business) and are “responsible” to other hired managers – as most shares are NOT owned by individuals (and have not been for many years), they are owned by other “institutions”.
The hired managers are either so “educated” (indoctrinated by the schools and universities) that they believe the Collectivist “Woke” doctrines (“Climate Change Emergency”, “Diversity, Inclusion, Equity” DIE, “Environment and Social Governance” score system – the Western version of the Chinese “Social Credit” system) or they just DO NOT CARE ENOUGH to oppose the doctrines.
“Why should I risk my job – I will just go along with the ESG stuff, who cares about the long term effects on the business – I will not even be here in the long term”.
Punishment for resisting “Woke” economic policies is savage – people are driven from their jobs, and presented as an evil person even in the eyes of their own children, yet these “Woke” economic policies are (to use a favourite word of the modern age – I hope the late Brian Micklethwait will forgive me) “unsustainable”.
“Woke” economic policies will lead to the collapse of manufacturing industry – and that will be the end of us, it really will.
As for the Credit Bubble monetary and financial system – everyone here knows what I think of this system, I have denounced in all my adult life. Although, yes, Richard Cantillon was there a few centuries before me. It has got WORSE every year for DECADES – and it is too late for action to save the system now (the last person to take real action was Paul Volcker in the early 1980s – he bought the fiat money and Credit Bubble banking system decades more life, by showing some restraint and discipline).
Now reform of this system (the Credit Money bubble system) is no longer possible – it will collapse, and that is all there is to it.
That makes both manufacturing industry and farming even more important.
“But Paul – the United States is vastly bigger than Britain, it can survive without lots of manufacturing industry and with the rewilding of farm and ranch land”.
No it can not. “Rewilding” of farm and cattle ranch land in the United States (which that madman Bill Gates, and his Davos pals are pushing) is insane – totally insane, especially as the American population has (in my lifetime) DOUBLED – mostly by low skill mass immigration (“you RACIST!” – pipe down Central Office, the followers of the late Herbert Marcuse are never going to vote for us, and farming is a serious life-or-death economic matter).
And outsourcing manufacturing to the People’s Republic of China (a fanatical enemy of the United States – and of the Western world generally) was also insane – totally insane. You do not place the hand even of a friend on your throat – and we in the West have placed the hand of a fanatical enemy (the People’s Republic of China) upon our throat.
You can not run an economy of hundreds of millions of human beings by endless creating money (creating money from NOTHING) and importing-importing-importing.
Donald John Trump may not have had the solutions – but at least he grasped the problem, a lot of so called “free enterprise” types (including the Wall Street Journal) do not even understand the problem.
“But this is what Adam Smith wanted” – no it is not, Adam Smith wanted to pay for imports with exports, NOT by endless money-created-from-nothing.
What next? Increase taxes to crushing levels (relative to the size of the economy) as was done in Ireland in the late 1840s, and then call it “laissez faire”?
Cities based on endless government spending, crushing taxes, endless DEBT, and the Credit Bubble monetary and financial system, are going to FAIL.
And yes I do mean New York and Chicago – and other cities to.
“But we have free trade – so that means we have a free market economy”.
Oh just f… off.
The politicians are as much at fault (and guilty)as “financial, activist and media class.”
The real group that needs to reseize control is the investors. Individuals, pension funds, mutual funds. They need to realize that the anticonsumption, income-redistribution miseries agenda is destroying their investments. And maybe their society.
The financial class should know that too, but they seem to have been captured. Maybe because government has become their savior for bad decision-making. Apparently, they aren’t as smart as they think they are, and they need government to absorb their losses and redistribute them to the taxpayers, while they keep their gains for themselves. The risk/reward system of a true free market has been murdered.
Paul,
Here’s a cool way of looking at it… 1/12 people alive now globally were alive when Elizabeth II became queen. So… Now a lot of those are in poor countries. Can we honestly, decently tell a Kenyam he can’t have a car or an Indian she can’t have foreign holidays? This point needs to be made loud and clear because the people who want the brown folks to live as something between a museum exhibit and the noble savage of utter lies are much the same people who scream loudest about racism and want the likes of me to atone for slavery. That same slavery that my nation (via the Royal Navy) expended much blood and treasure to fight and not without success.
In 1996 I visited Fort Pulaski, Georgia, USA. It is now a historic monument but at the time of the US Civil War it defended the Savannah River. It was the ultimate stop for Sherman’s great march. This fort struck it’s colours very rapidly. The Union had brought new-fangled Armstrong rifled cannon with them. These totally out-ranged anything the Confederates had. These guns were made in my home town of Newcastle. I was quite proud about that. Alas, the site of the factory on the Tyne is no longer a cradle of industrial innovation.
The site now boasts this place. I temped there very briefly. I didn’t see the naked breakdancing but I did see a total shit-show of an organisation. I was fired for being able to type. It was showing the rest-up. Fortunately I had a good agency so quickly found work elsewhere. I can’t recall where exactly but they did actually value my ability to use a keyboard in a secretarial role.
I’m not making this up. I guess there is a moral to this ramble. Making things can make a positive difference. Making-up non-jobs less so 😉
I think part of the problem is that this isn’t entirely true.
Over the decades, I built up some qualified accounts – IRA’s, 401k’s – and for the past seven or so years, they have all made phenomenal returns. Anyone in equities has made out like a bandit.
Those people without investments have been the ones to suffer. And that disparity has fueled a hard division in economic wellbeing.
“The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. . . ” seems to be the case right now, and it’s primarily fueled by the great returns in investment money – which is really “what you have extra.” If you don’t have this extra, you don’t get to play.
But that’s what bubbles are for, I guess.
My mercifully brief experience of Brussel’s EU-office behaviour on the continent also did not include naked breakdancing. However I did witness ‘legal’ shakedowns of delegates (whom the EU had ordered to attend because their companies had been so unwise as to take EU grants; EU officials were good at recycling the money they handed out back to themselves) along with an incompetence so profound that the idea that delegates to a conference might need to know when and where talks were happening came as a profound (and very belated) realisation. A lowly Irish EU employee assured me “It’s always like this”.
bobby b Your observation is noted, but not entirely true. Once you start factoring in the long-term inflation that these morons have kicked off, your so-called returns are going to evaporate quickly. A lot of your current gains are because the dollar is dropping in value, but the stocks that are priced in dollars are holding even in value (and thus appear to be gaining). And they can always change the rules about 401k’s and IRA’s … and the Left has often discussed taking government control of such things in order to embezzle,… oops, I mean gain access to the funds, just like they did to social security. For your own protection, don’t you know?
So even those who are able to “play” are not necessarily going to be winners in the long haul. Your fat 401k is vulnerable, and when the riots the ruler-elites instigate burn you out of your pricey home, you’ll be just more economic flotsam. The real winners will be the technocrats, politicians, heads of financial industries, and big-box retailers CEO’s (think Amazon, Home Depot, Lowes) who get to compete in a thinned field where covid mandates have eliminated much of the small businesses they competed against.
The end goal is to seize all means of wealth production and bring it under the control of the international fascists, by seizure or regulation. They want people like you and me to be nothing more than cattle to be herded where we are told.
bobby b – yes those who have invested in the stock market have done well, because the stock market (and so on) has been pumped up by the Federal Reserve (its funny money – via the banks and other such) since Paul Volker left the Fed. Paul Volker being the last Fed Chairman who was sort-of rational – yes, and I know I just praised a Democrat.
But that age is coming to an end Sir – to a horrible end.
Get out of the stock market – get out now. And get out of cash AS WELL – as inflation is hitting.
For the young who understand it (I am not young and I do not understand it) – “Bitcoin” may be the answer (I do not know). For older people – physical gold (physical gold – not the fake gold that the London and New York “gold markets” sell).
NickM.
I think we both wish we had seen the old Newcastle.
The Newcastle of Georgian and Victorian buildings – and of the industrial production of Armstrong and others.
As for what has replaced it…..
If those Civil Servants had NOT been sex-and-drugs crazed lunatics IT WOULD NOT HAVE MATTERED.
They would still have been a black hole in the economic universe – producing nothing, and consuming much.
A country like that can not stand – not in the long run.
“In the long run we are all dead” – NO – YOU are dead Lord Keynes, I care about the people who are still alive – and who going to suffer.
For this is the long run – it is arriving.
There are few government, or other office, workers that I would care to see naked even just standing still.
Certainly, the long-term consequences of current prog thinking are going to be grim for everyone – but they will be worse for some than for others.
People without $$ buffers at all are going to be in far worse shape than those who have some resources, even if the value of those resources are degrading. The completely broke are going to be competing for that last loaf of bread with people who have some dollars remaining. It really comes down, not to specific dollar amounts, but to relativity: If I’m close to broke but you’re broke, I get the loaf of bread.
(P.S. My “pricey home” right now has eight wheels, and an arsenal. Let ’em try. 😉 )
Physical ammo. Not “ammunition maker stocks.” Individual 5.56mm cartridges are spendable in a blasted economy – 3 for a loaf of bread? – while lumps of gold really won’t be useful day to day except as a high-density piece of “wealth.” And in an ante-collapse economy, ammunition price just keeps rising.
Anything else I can think of – land, equipment, whatever – works as an investment and depository only so long as a system remains to protect my ownership interest in it. If I depend upon government to enforce my property rights, but it’s the government actively seeking to quash those rights, I’ve done myself no good. So my chosen form works both as a repository of wealth AND a means to protect that wealth.
So I keep equities in the hopes that the system does find a way out of this mess, but I also go for the tangible bullet and some physical gold as a hedge.
(Bitcoin – I cannot imagine a worse prepare-for-the-worst asset to hold. Internet down = we’re all broke. Maybe it will be a good medium-sized-collapse currency to hold – we’re all broke, but the system is still functioning – but that’s a brittle plan.)
(P.S. No, I’m not a whacko prepper. I do not foresee the end of the world as we know it in the near future. But I would feel very stupid if I ignored that small chance and did nothing, however cheaply, to prepare for it. ruralcounsel, the people who lack resources now can’t even afford to prepare for such things in the future – another way the rich are in far better shape than the poor right now.)