Dire Predictions: Guessing Game

We are in recession; that’s official. Actually it’s far worse than that, but our government is notorious for torturing statistics, among other victims, and these statistics will confess to anything the torturer wants to hear. To the government’s advantage, the economy is so very large, fundamental changes take awhile to manifest completely. This gives them time to find an escape hatch before they are trapped in the sinking ship of state. Far too many people I know just don’t believe it’s that bad. They question whence comes these dire predictions I share with them.

Aside from their general acceptance of government sponsored propaganda from the mainstream media, they simply don’t know economics, and are woefully short on history. Not just the facts of history, but the meaning of it. When I confess to struggling with grand sweeping trends, they don’t confess to the existence of such a thing. For them, all trends are never more than a decade or two in length. I’m not some elitist intellectual. This material is out there for all to see. We didn’t begin this country during the 1930s, but you’d think so by the way folks refer to nothing prior to that, since they were born during that time. Even the things we have experienced are likely not the same for others elsewhere. We read history to have some idea what others went through before we were born. This points out human tendencies we might otherwise miss as we reflect on what is happening now.

Fundamental example: If a fad suddenly seizes upon the fancy of a nation wholly dependent on marketers for what new thing is a “must-have” toy, you will make a great deal of money selling that fad. So much so, you can probably afford to do little else. It’s glamorous, it makes you instantly rich, and as long as folks keep buying, your power and influence in this world is great. But then, something happens and everyone loses interest. Your business dies overnight and you are stuck with tons of useless inventory. If you were smart, you sold out just about the time some investor was knocking on your door with a big offer. If you were extremely intelligent, you would do this for every fad that comes along. But at some point, all this consumerism takes a hit from some outside force, and people quit buying fads. They are lucky to pay rent and eat. No fad is selling. The farmer who was plodding along with his low profits is not making any greater profits than before, but he’s also not out of work.

There’s great profits in manipulating human vanity. But those profits have to stand on top of something fundamentally sound in the economy. There has to be a valid reason, a substantial feeding of genuine human need, in place and efficiently produced so as to set others free to specialize in meeting higher needs. Over the past few decades, we have clawed out the very solid base underneath our prosperity, cannibalizing that underlying prosperity to feed the dizzying rise of high-stakes markets. We do build our own homes, just barely. The percentage of home-building labor has been just a little too high in foreign workers (okay, “wetbacks”), but we managed it well enough. However, we do not make our own clothes. We really do not grow our own food; plenty comes up from own soil, but most of the labor is imported. The rest of us are running around doing what amounts to each other’s laundry, supporting endless whimsy served up to each other, with no actual production of what life requires.

But there seems an endless supply of money, and it seems to have real value of some sort, so it calls out to some real shysters on a very high level. Taking a great deal of this economic surplus, we went off to make war. Few things consume excess money like war, because the military and it’s supporting industries is probably the most inefficient boondoggle in human activity. Naturally, we American make it even less efficient, because of the political friction which scrapes off huge amounts of wealth just getting stuff into production, then scrapes off a bunch more getting that product into the troops’ hands. Once there, huge amounts of it are wasted in training programs carefully designed to be wasteful. Finally, a bunch of it is destroyed because procedures require it all be done in the most inefficient manner, that we might have some mind-numbing uniformity to feed our sense of greatness and importance. Finally, at the battle front, we have ten cents worth of warfare costing ten thousand dollars, and it may not even be the best tool for the job.

Hey, we can afford it. We carefully select enemies who can’t even afford to fully exploit whatever resource it is we go to war on them for, and they are getting a dime’s worth of warfare for only a dollar. But since their economy is nearly dead, barely producing a subsistence level with precious little output or manpower to spare for war, we are able to win — sort of. Okay, in Afghanistan we aren’t winning, because sometimes they get a dime’s worth of warfare for only a dime. Must be something in their situation which is “do or die” that makes them so efficient. A handful of their guys manage to destroy several millions of dollars worth of our stuff. Oh, wait — that was a black ops thing, a false flag to blame someone else, so we can convince the sheeple they need to support a war against yet another country with stuff we want to exploit. I guess million-dollar attacks against weddings aren’t quite paying off enough in terms of rage and provocation.

Meanwhile, the sheeple are going broke. You see, the lack of underlying economic production to fund all this stuff is not only less efficient; it’s not there. We don’t produce anything of real value. In fact, we don’t even produce the fads we used to buy. We just spend and spend, and then suddenly realize we are in a hole. And we can’t climb out. We don’t have anything to sell, important stuff we have to have to live, not even to each other. All this time we’ve been living off loans from other countries, and they have run out of spare cash, too. That is, we have quit buying from them all that good stuff, along with all that cheap stuff we didn’t really need. The underlying engine of our economy is not only too weak, it’s flat out gone. We can put it back, but it will take a while to shift our resources and thinking over to doing the essentials again.

How that plays out for you where you live is variable. Some cities and states are so completely built from one thing, they don’t have a fall-back. When their one-and-only economic engine goes away, they’ll starve. Literally. Other states were never that rich in the first place, but that’s because they were chugging along doing stuff that was essential. That would be the US Heartland.

When people get hungry, and can’t even get food because there isn’t any at all in sight, they get rowdy. That’s just human nature. So we can expect riots in some big cities. Bet on it — blood in the streets, etc. No government agency can fix this, nor even prevent it, because all of them are going broke, too. Like all bureaucracies, there is nothing in the system which allows for reducing consumption of resources, no mechanism for adjustments, because bureaucrats are inherently more turf-oriented about nothing than any other human entity on the planet. Soldiers got nothing on them. Bureaucrats have this crazy notion those who feed them can’t get along without them, can’t go through life producing unless someone else is there sucking up lots of stuff and telling them how they can’t do this or that. Look for government officials to start turning up dead.

Now, you know that once bureaucrats are certain they are essential to life, they will not only be hostile to cutting back, but even more hostile to resistance in general. So we’ll have big showings of force, confrontations and crack-downs, and moves to disarm (in every sense) those who are being governed. Effective resistance is inconvenient to government. And government is not only unconscious of what you suffer when things change, but are openly hostile to reality itself when it changes. However, you will be the focus of their wrath. So we can expect a tremendous rise in social unrest. That’s why I said “blood in the streets.” Our unique American “culture” breeds one of the most difficult government bureaucracies in human history.

Yet, it remains a guessing game in terms of how bad these things play out along the lines of human tendencies.