“Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.”
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
If you want to read a more rigorous analysis of a where economic principles go wrong, read Benoit Mandelbrot's The Misbehaviour of Markets in which he discusses modern risk models and the efficient market hypothesis that emanate from Fama, Black, Merton and Scholes.
Blyth says that people believe dumb ideas because they don't have anything better.
I think they do so because the professionals are strongly motivated to believe them, and often rewarded to persuade the great mass of people who don't know any better to believe them as well.
How else can we explain the renaissance of economic trickle down theory, which seems to reappear in every new era of economic control frauds and chicanery, and is as great a canard as the natural efficiency of unregulated markets.
"In the past 5 years the amount of UST's the US needs to roll over every year has risen by nearly 15% CAGR, the while US nominal GDP is just over 2%. A 1200bp gap isn't sustainable for very long, yet the overwhelming consensus [assumption] is that it's sustainable for decades."-
Luke Gromen
"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation, the second is war. Both bring
temporary prosperity; both bring permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and
economic opportunists.”
Ernest Hemingway
"People who know nothing of God and whose lives are centered on themselves, imagine that they can only find themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world.
They try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply of created goods and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and the other men who have less than they, or nothing at all."
Thomas Merton
"This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, but a whimper."
T. S. Eliot
"And what rough beast, its hour come 'round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born."
W. B. Yeats
Along with love, darker spirits are moving among us. To whom shall we turn? This is the critical question for each of us.
And when the unsustainable does not sustain any longer, we might see a bipartisan effort by the moneyed interests to come after what remains of the working class, in an attempt to finally roll back the last traces of the 'New Deal' and make of the public's misery a burnt offering.
If the last Gilded Age is any indication, and if history repeats, they will not stop in their mad quest for everything until blood is flowing and cities are burning, How easily we forget the past.
These darker gods serve none but themselves. Their worship is the way of madness, unleashed upon mankind again.
"At a late stage, speculation tends to detach itself from really valuable objects and turn to delusive ones. A larger and larger group of people seeks to become rich without a real understanding of the processes involved. Not surprisingly, swindlers and catchpenny schemes flourish."
Robert Z. Aliber and Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes
"Excess supply could be more readily absorbed if we increased demand through redistribution. Unfortunately, with tax cuts and austerity, this is not the direction of travel! Our political masters, our esteemed economic advisors and Central Banks have all forgotten about distribution effects of their fiscal and monetary policies.
We have been victims of a long line of theorists and ideologists who utterly failed to address the distribution effects of policies. Ruled by fools so long they conditioned us for more fools at many levels of government and society. Idiocracy may indeed have become built in."
Let us pray for those whose hearts have grown cold, and become hardened against His grace by greed, fear, and the seductive illusions of pride.
We ask to receive the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness—so that we may obtain abundant life, and the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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