Crunchy Con: William K. Black: The government is lying to us.

"Lord Karth" comments:

April 4, 2009 4:09 PM
I watched the entire webcast of that interview. May I offer a perspective ?

There's more at work here than simple greed or incompetence on the part of some business/financial and political types. THOSE have been with us since forever. I could tell you stories about all sorts of bubbles bursting, from the South Sea Bubble to the Tulip Craze to Teapot Dome.

What's going on here is an entire social system that is failing, in important respects.

Since about 1900, we have had in place a system in which most Americans (and most Humans, for that matter) are surrounded by---"marinated in" would be more accurate !---thousands upon thousands of media messages a day. These messages, by and large, are messages of "Buy/Spend/Consume". Since 1950 or so, "Buy/Spend/Consume" has had "go into debt" added to it. More modern media messages have added things like "product placement" to them, to the point where we expect our fictional TV characters to drink Coke, drive Hummers and eat at McDonalds. This further reinforces the "Buy/Spend/Consume/Indebt" meme as socially dominant.

Meanwhile, the formal (school/college) educational system has had virtually all elements of financial-literacy education removed from it. I recall my grandfather (a former public-school teacher) telling me that almost everyone who went to school when he was a youth took "Commerce & Banking" or "Commercial Transactions" or some similar class, and in those classes, they were taught about things like compound interest, mortgage calculations and the like. (Of course, back then money was "hard" and relatively scarce, so a knowledge of how it worked was more or less an essential.) Nowadays, it is considered daring and on the cutting edge to inform college students of the dangers of credit-card debt !

Meanwhile, the financial and manufacturing magnates, along with their counterparts in the central- and provincial-government apparati, have used this process to their advantage, at the expense not just of the citizenry, but of the very concept of citizenship. By expanding the large corporation as a force, they create a society composed of employee/consumers. Employee/consumers have a different mindset, and approach the world in a different way, from freemen/producers. A simple example: the employee/consumer thinks "What can I get ? What are the benefits ?" The freeman/producer thinks "What do I need to do---what do I have to offer in order to get paid ?"

Politically, the employee/consumer is a "beneficiary", a receiver of goods/money provided by someone else, namely the all-benevolent State. The freeman/producer is a taxpayer; it is his/her production that is siphoned off from in order to generate the benefits.

Philosophically as well, the employee/consumer/beneficiary is vastly different from the freeman/producer/taxpayer. The first category of person thinks of the world first in terms of "rights". The second category of person thinks of the world first in terms of "responsibilities".

In practical economic and political terms, the current elite--the alliance of State and megacorporate congeries---has managed to maintain the power and tenure-in-office of its members through a program of trading lavishly-dispensed economic and legal "privileges", including large quantities of consumer goods for votes and money.

This society-wide "transaction" has been financed by increasingly onerous exactions from the actually-productive class, through taxes and mass-indebtedness, to the point where said productive class is increasingly unable even to afford to be able to reproduce itself. (It is no accident, IMO, that the former Western nations' current financial problems have coincided with their inability to reproduce themselves and their related immigration/assimilation problems.)

OF COURSE the government and financial elites have been lying ! It's what they do ! It's how they stay where they are !

What this produces---I'm sorely tempted to go so far as to say that the outcome is just about inevitable---is an environment where Humans are more "consumer" than "citizen", more sheep than shepherd, and more child than adult. This kind of environment simply cannot be sustained over the long term. (See the population-reference above.)

I predict that now and over the course of the next 20-30 years, the "bubble" that is our entire society will continue to burst, as the reassertion of financial and social realities over the artificially generated illusions of the elites reveal the actions of those elites as the frauds that they are. As political/social decision-makers, they have two choices: either downsize and decentralize (politically and economically) towards a society based on localism, production and personal responsibility, or try to maintain their position through keeping up the current set of income-transfers, personal "freedom" and a goaded-consumption, increasingly illusionary economy---until the wheels come off.

They'll go for "Door Number Two", of course. After all, it's what they do best. Hang on to your hats, gang. We're in for one whizzer of a wild ride.