Just in Case: Caveat

Let’s pretend for a moment, in some future events, my prophetic announcements about war with Iran turn out to be inaccurate. Under the Laws of Moses, you should stone me, since I dared to declare, “Thus saith the Lord.” Besides being out of physical reach, I do have one valid defense. I’m not a liar, but a nut.

You can go back into literary history quite some ways and find it has always been in vogue to claim a certain degree of madness. It’s a way of distinguishing oneself from the crowd, in part because it implies one does not see reality quite the same as everyone else. In human society, we judge someone not quite sane if their version of what’s real varies too much in one way or another from any recognizable thread of common thinking. The claim to be “crazy” becomes synonymous with brave and artistic rejection for something better, and implies the cutting edge of a new trend.

Other terms have also been hijacked: disturbed, insane, etc. But the clinical definition of “psychosis” is someone whose grip on reality is simply too far off what’s typical to even consider it trendy. We might imagine degrees, and whether or not there is a perception of danger of very real harm arising from the psychosis, and we might even discuss why there is this radical departure from perceptional norms. Still, the clinical side of the question offers a rather limited range for debate. When we label someone clinically psychotic, few would argue.

In may case, it really does not matter I am consciously aware of the wide gap between what is manifestly so and what I must pursue. It’s not literal voices inside my head; that’s only a figure of speech for the internal dialog all healthy humans engage. The fully conscious human mind is normally a place of conflicting demands from various threads of the self. One of my internal voices demands things which are obviously not connected with what actually happens. It happens to be the voice I cannot ignore. Doing so would be genuinely self-destructive, not to mention a threat to others.

So for me to assume the posture which is least harmful, I must listen to that one unrealistic voice which causes me to say and do things which can’t be true. Sorry about that, but you’ll have to resolve your madness your own way; this is my way. What I write here will most certainly be affected by that psychotic voice in my head. That has no bearing on my intelligence or talent (such as it is), so it may be I can still entertain you. And perhaps some of my brain spew here does approach reality as you know it, so that you can benefit from comparing notes. Glad I could help. As for the crazy stuff, you’ll just have to put up with it, because it’s all in the same package.

(Note: This works the same if you simply don’t happen to believe any part of my religion.)

False Economies

We’ve seen where hidden economies contribute to our actual production, but aren’t counted officially. Now we’ll discuss fake economies which are counted, but produce nothing.

A basic principle: Shuffling money and information is not production. Government also produces nothing we can measure economically, unless you want to count things like the Misery Factor. We can presume government enables a certain measure of economic growth, but that only counts when you have good government. At this point, we have had so much bad government, for such a long time, we probably wouldn’t recognize good government. So we don’t consider it.

There is so much bogus activity counted:

We get these GDP numbers. But then we find that GDP includes things like the cost of litigation, medical care, and an entire list of things that are not really productive — things that don’t create wealth. For a number of years I had speculated that if one only counted real, productive economic activity, then the economy of China was probably pretty close to that of the US.

Get your head around this: In any productive economy, up to now nothing can replace copper. Anything which might do the same job does it less efficiently for the price. If it does better, it also costs a whole lot more. When you watch the amount of copper consumed by an economic system, compared to the reported system production, you get a clear indication of how fake the reports are.

The decline in metal consumption is a direct measure of the decline of real wealth. Yes, real wealth is not dollars, it is oil; it is copper; it steel. As long as the per capita availability of these resources is increasing, our wealth is increasing. I have argued in the past that the suppression management of commodity prices is largely responsible for comparatively recent declines in their per capita availability….

A tonne of copper can’t be consumed until it is produced. But the government can spend money that it doesn’t have. So government spending can’t be part of what was produced by a country unless it has been covered by taxation — then at least the wealth was produced prior to consumption. If the spending is empowered by debt creation, then no production was involved.

When we read stuff like this, we instantly recognize it as truth. The measure of wealth is not the wealth itself. What most economists and business folks refuse to recognize is the basic truth that credit and debt is essentially immoral in itself. God’s Laws are not simply some primitive, harsh rule making for the sake of control. In our secular world today we consistently prove it’s accuracy.

The Laws of God say loans inside an economic system must be without interest. The whole objective was not about growing wealth, but helping people over a hump. Even with the wisest planning, some folks simply fall into economic tight spots and may not survive. So the whole point is not business, but human survival. While the Law of Moses permits loans for business purposes, charging interest is a sin. This should discourage loans outside the family. You had better not be thinking about charging interest to your relatives, but God wants us to think of our non-related community members as family-in-effect. People matter more than simply prosperity in itself, because the only reason to seek prosperity is for the sake of people.

Every business which attempts to grow by taking out loans is going to charge more than they would otherwise. Is that not obvious? The Bible views this as gouging. Yet the Western Merchant Civilization considers it a simple cost of doing business, because it values wealth above human life. If you have to raise prices on your goods because it’s necessary in paying off those loans, then you are denying access to those who can’t meet your new, higher prices. This whole business of accelerated growth of economic activity misses the whole point, according to God’s Laws.

It’s a big ugly canard to insist some market goods could not be supplied without borrowing to get the business going. Your calculation leaves God out of the loop. If He says He wants things a certain way, it doesn’t matter what the results are when you transgress those guidelines — it won’t be good, and He won’t bless it. It will, by definition, be destructive. The issue is not what our feeble human intellect can measure, but what God says is optimal. It’s the old argument of rejecting revelation because the human mind arrogantly insists it is capable of understanding the universe. The very notion itself is proof of man’s fallen nature, because that is the very flaw which is symbolized by the Genesis account of the Fall. Whatever else all that symbolism says, it amounts to the act of placing the intellect in the executive, for which the intellect is simply not capable. The intellect cannot possibly perceive the mystical moral fabric in the universe. Transgressing the Laws of God is harmful to human life, period.

But you may not have to buy all that to look back over the results of what we have and see that, given human nature as it is, not as we wish it, economic growth using debt will always turn out bad. In this case, the bad is a handful of plutocrats using the system to eventually plunder everyone else. In this case, the particular mechanism is a mixture of mass deception (the lie of our official GDP) while disenfranchising everyone who isn’t a member of the plutocrats. It’s fascism — economic profits privatized, economic losses funded by taxation.