The Coming Crisis
The challenge that’s coming is going to be difficult. I don’t know that the capitalists are up to it. They face an onslaught from the left and Modern Monetary Theory. That’s a theory that makes sense, and seems to use capitalist principles to allow for a quasi-communist state. It takes the government’s power to create money and spreads it all across society, insisting that it can perform the same sort of precise work as borrowing does to expand and contract the money supply. They say that inflation is a sufficient check on such practices. But they don’t have anything to say about what such thinking would do to the communal mind.
The power to make people conform would be huge, given that it comes with the decision making power of success or failure financially. It isn’t that Modern Monetary Theory is some kind of false doctrine, or that it’s not applicable to the US. The problem lies with human nature and the people’s propensity to overreach. The banking system, through expansion or contraction of the money supply, may be telling the powers in charge, be they official or phantasmic(resting in the opinion of the net), that one initiative or another will fail but if the government insists they can make the thing succeed.
Alright, it is possible to extract a sort of utopia from such a thing. It could be used in conjunction with the banking system’s role in regulating the money supply rather than allowed to pardon excess by force of will. It’s much more likely, however, that, given human nature, what you will get is a strangulating force upon investment, as those who differ from the generally accepted social order’s view of what should and should not be fear appealing to the powers that be for money. Right now, the invective is focused upon those who always deserve society’s scorn, Nazis and the like. That could easily change, and the invective become directed at some much more mundane group which takes on society’s capricious ire. Likewise, when corruption prevails there would be no check upon it, as the people themselves come to believe that without such embedded corruption things couldn’t proceed. It would become part of the social order rather than blown up in stock crashes. The only sort of crash that might free the people might be hyper-inflation.
Where does this come from? You might be tempted to blame those on the left being infatuated with gory Marxism. But that’s not true. The origin of this is the fact that the success of capitalism in the US should have been extended to all of its people. Instead, it has been assigned to the winners of the game. The growing and shameful inequality that has arisen is the source of this. That is because Monetarism, the current prevailing economic theory, has no way of keeping wages aligned properly with the growth of the money supply. Monetarism uses the rate structure to align the money supply with its understanding of what ought to be at any given point. The trouble is that wages are always last in that understanding, and that rates are not capable of addressing them before such a catastrophic realignment takes place, so they have hung back in the basement of the 70’s.
growsomeart 