Buy Nothing Day mischief

A Challenge to Popular Economics

I have been reading again lately too much of this analysis about how the dollar will apocalypse into a downward spiral bankrupting the U.S. and the result will push the American people into a near stone age economy and existence.

Those who predict such a Second Coming usually give us a due date with which we can check the accuracy of their predictions, but not so with the Dictatorship of the Marketplace old world economists who have been making the same prediction at least as long as there has been good economic history to read concerning the U.S.

These economic end of the worlders tell us over and over again, everything needed for their predicted economic apocalypse is already in place. Well, if so, where is the end-day? Did we drive through it like a small town already? Why has it not come simultaneously with all that purportedly adds up to it?

Most strikingly, according to economic theories stretching back however far we want to look, the end of the world has been knocking at the door of prosperity apparently since humankind first looked at money and said, there is value. Such is the continual state of economics.

The U.S. has been so very powerful since the Great War, and so very prosperous, that even the humblest of us have been degraded into the vices and follies of the yes-men of the Robber Barons, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan... We lost all measure between means and ends; and our headlong desires became our politics and our wasteful morals. Each of us dines better, travels better, has better medical care and is better educated than the Queen of England or the President of the United States a hundred years ago, Theodore Roosevelt, and yet, still we complain.

We all know our come uppance is due us, because the preachers of economic theory tell us, we are sinners, and so it seems. We are spoiled and somehow ashamed of our prosperity, and moreso the myriadness of our great debt.

But, the dollar is like air to the world economy, and the good will of it is endlessly driving goods to our shores ruining our balance of trade deficits to new record highs seemingly every quarter. The overseas merchants seem willing to take dollars ad infinitum. Why?

There is no alternative to our continuance as the goose that is laying the golden egg for the world economy. The dollar is supreme. And there is no alternative mentioned by these economists who archaicly advocate the gold standard, the silver standard, the bi-metal standard or just believing in their prophetic preaching because they have said, what they have said, over and over, again and again, decade after decade, century after century. They have proclaimed each American an economic sinner. We are all apparently doomed to an economic hell called "prosperity".

The boys in economics are crying, Wolf! again. So what? Even the economists have no answer there, to the question, So what? If there ever was an economist who ran a successful business, it is an unknown feat. They have no common sense. These economists work their minds and their machinations into fits of frenzy based upon the past. The U.S. economy has laid the Gold Egg upon the world economy. So, is this so bad? Of course it is, but economists don't tell us why.

A lot of currency speculators, amongst which are now the Chinese by their currency diversification, have made a lot of money buying dollars when others sought to sell them low. Buy low, sell high, right? Which of course raises the two most important questions, Who could benefit from the collapse of the dollar? and, Who would get hurt? The answers are, No one,, and, Everyone.

The answer to the second question is far more telling. It cannot end, and if it does, it will be the U.S. dollar that is last currency left standing as the rest of the world economically disenfranchises itself again into war, seeking again, our rescue. It need not be.

Surely, those Americans who acted financially foolishly by taking on too much debt during the housing boom will get hurt. There were lots of them, just as there were many similar fools hurt during the dot-com bust and, every bust before that. That is the economic reality of marketplace dynamics and what the economists measure. This phenomenon is literally part of the vitality of the U.S. economy, there being so many suckers with so much money to spend.

There were lots of fools in every bust, and in all these instances there were lots of these other fools too, the economic apocalypse preachers, that is. Irrational exuberance, eh? How much more clear does that need to be? Alan Greenspan was right. Humans are prone to hysteria in both directions.

The U.S. economy is strong, the dollar is strong, and the sky is not falling, at least not due to Greenspan's expansionist fed policies, per se, or any lack of basing our currency on gold, or silver, which are no different from paper as a pecuniary means, except as by their weight and inept scarcity.

The real problem that causes all these apocalyptic predictions to gain anyone's ear, the plague rat eating in the economic grain bin, is the surer sense and intuition that the ideas of expansion, progress, prosperity and even the idea of a strong economy don't add up when we feel intuitively the world's standard of living is slipping, even during the boom periods, perhaps moreso then, if it's your neighborhood that is being sprawled into the adjoining sprawl, your ocean that is getting fuller of sewage and plastic, or your primeval forest that is being cut down to make stereo cabinets and electric guitars.

No one alive today will ever travel to Calay, Siam, or even to the Old West, for they are gone forever, Americanized, as is the rest of the world with ever increasing rapacity. What hasn't been bulldozed or struck down with a ball and crain in Old Europe was bombed out of existence in the Great War. The favorite tourist destination of Canadians is Cuba which has been embargoed into a well worth it lack of McDonalds, BurgerKings, Wendys and Walmarts.

But, this is a problem with which no one has come to grips with, yet, the waste and utter obscenity of the economists' progress and prosperity.

As a philosopher I write here today to set forth the counteractive premise that economists have debased the whole world by their deceptions, that the economic measures of economy have had some real human meaning that could add up to a betterment of human life. To put it bluntly for the Libertarians and their socialist counterparts, economic policies have not given the human world a betterment of its human condition.

It simply isn't true that economics has improved the lives of those coming into this world in the future. There is no such progress being realized. It has all been a continual downward slide into a worsening human condition regardless of economic policies, progress, good economies or bad.

Any belief in current economic theories will provide nothing more than, more of exactly the same, but worse again.

Buying into what economists of any creed have been telling us, is like going to the local convenience store and buying a lottery ticket. If you think about it with due diligence, you know you're going to come up a loser. The odds are simply set up to ensure that you do lose. Only the money men win, and we are all money men in America, and still we lose too.

It is not a question of the Dictatorship of the Marketplace, versus the Dictatorship of the Proletariate either. Either way despite the promises of Utopia on each side of that wooden nickle, you have to know, economics as preached and proselytized by the economists is as sure a loser as there is in life. All economists are Voodoo economists.

These economic analysts are selling something very akin to old time religion. They are all sideshow hucksters. Such as it is with the advocates of most belief systems divined by humans, passed around lying mouths to tinned ears, or as it comes to us from the past written in the often pasty words of the past, words that generally have no static meaning. There is only wisdom if we look for it, and even then, wisdom is fleeting constantly into foolishness. Look around you!

Our notion of the word, progress, is faulty. In the past the word "progress" meant something positive, but no more. It now has the economists' notion, one fostered by economists of every ilk. Progress now means ruined, or ruined forever.

All the money in the world hasn't made the world a better place no matter by whose economic policies or theories all that money is purported, planned or simply allowed to go around. And quite amazingly enough to tell all these economists, someone could discover a gold mine that would double the world's supply of gold, and the net result would be zilch in the scale of bettering the human condition. Zilch. This fact stuns economists silent, but it is true. It is true, and the economist knows it.

What is clearly missing in the economics equation is exactly what economics purports it is not about, a moral justification for human actions in the field of economics.

The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world. That is human truth. It is absolute truth, or as near to it as we can get. It is not a truth however, encompassed by any theory of economics.

In my dredging research in the economic sludge of prosperity for this article, I was astonished at the number of economists who told me, man cannot live without consuming, and thus taking away from that which might be available to the future. What have we become that there are those who believe we must destroy the world to live?

To them, I have responded, the moral imperative implies we can leave the world better than we found it. Plant an apple tree. Build a bridge. Cull some of the mean froth of government. And, require every economist to apply the moral imperative as the first step in every economic analysis, and then every other step there after as they plod through their measurements of economic "growth," "progress" and "prosperity".

Don Robertson, The American Philosopher