Things I Learned From The Chans- Rights
A guide to understanding if something is a “human right” or not (all sic):
If you can drive 300 miles into the desert, where there is no other person or government official, and you can still do it – it’s your human right.
If you can’t do it because there is no electricity / running water / wifi / Walmart / someone to take money from / someone to enslave – then it wasn’t your human right to begin with.
Let’s test this guide, shall we?
Walking, Running, Talking? You can do them in the desert, they are a human right.
Getting free food / healthcare/ tampons from the government? you can’t do that in the desert, hundreds of miles away from civilization, and therefor they are NOT human rights.
The World of the (un)Real, Part 2
A Sweet Deal Gets Sweeter (for some)
As we saw in Part 1 America created Magic Money after closing the gold window in 1971: the ability to create money in a computer and buy anything in the world with it because oil sales are denominated in dollars.
All those dollars sloshing around the planet in a process called exporting inflation. The US creates extra dollars which sit in overseas bank accounts or are invested in US companies or come back to the US banks to be lent out again…
And here’s the rub: making money from money has lower risk than starting productive businesses.
The cornerstone of the so-called “service economy” is the Finance Insurance and Real Estate complex, though now it’s being supplanted by the so-called FANGs: Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google. All four of whom could go tits up tomorrow with the world not missing a beat.
FIRE and the FANGs merely illustrate the principle that what is made matters far less than how it’s sold. After all, we can ship factories overseas, pay some Vietnamese schlub $2 a day to make $150 shoes with the majority of the money going to marketers and pitchmen! If Americans don’t earn enough to buy them, we can lend them the money!
Or we can make student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy and flood the market with seemingly cheap government backed college loans? Put the risk on the taxpayers and inflate the price of college to the point where 18 years olds have to take on $30,000 in debt to get a degree in an economically-worthless field? As a bonus we can hire the otherwise unemployable to skim off any excess dollars as various college administrators!
Or do the same in medicine by setting up byzantine insurance systems to skim money while providing NO VALUE WHATSOEVER. Not only that, what idiot would buy insurance against something that’s guaranteed to happen like checkups and routine illnesses? We’ll tell them that it’s a benefit to overpay and they’ll believe it because their out of pocket cost for substandard care will be so low! HA HA HA!
And here’s another idea- let’s con people with body dysphoria that they can change their sex through the magic of hormone therapy and surgery!
and if it turns out that defying nature doesn’t work out so well? We are all getting paid, so screw it!
So this is where we are in 2020: riding an economy that makes little of value in favor of skimming operations and activities that are so disconnected from reality. Productive enterprise is largely shipped overseas to take advantage of lower-cost labor so the managers and celebrities get a bigger skim. Then any residual profits profits (or even borrowed money if not enough profit is available) is plowed into share buybacks so the senior management gets paid more from their bonuses and stock options.
All fueled by magic. Illusion.
But that’s about to change, hopefully for the better.
The World of the (un)Real, Part 1
Get ready, it’s coming
We Live In The World of the Unreal
We live in a world of fake money and fake wealth: wealth created out of a magic trick the US pulled off over four decades ago in plain sight of everyone.
And Americans have still thought of their nation as the most advanced economy on the planet while more and more of the business of making things– things people want and need- left America in favor of the business of making money– the so-called “service economy” or ironically the FIRE industry: Finance Insurance and Real Estate.
It Stated Out Well Enough
Europe and Japan were in ruins after the Second World War as the United States,– untouched by the war– was both the sole producer and sole consumer of goods in the non-communist world.
This posed a number of problems for the United States. Not only did American companies need markets to export to, the American government needed stable partners in the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union and her allies.
Enter the Marshall Plan.
The United States spent massive amounts of capital to help Western Europe and Japan rebuild after the war. In return the US received military base rights and markets to export to. The dollar was exchangeable for gold so Americans could buy overseas goods and foreigners could redeem their dollars for gold. Remember this.
As the Europeans and Japanese built their industry from the ground up with modern plants and machinery they rapidly became more competitive against American firms leading to trade deficits.
At the same time that American industry was becoming relatively uncompetitive, the US military was spending trillions of dollars maintaining overseas military bases, providing military aid to anti-communists and fighting small-scale wars. The holders of these dollars couldn’t spend them in their home countries and had little reason to buy increasingly uncompetitive American products so they took their dollars to the gold window, asking the American government to live up to its pledge that the dollar was “as good as gold.”
Then The Run On the Dollar Came
The United State didn’t want to raise taxes to fund the Vietnam War and Great Society programs but as long as the US could maintain the dollar’s fixed price to gold the appearance of inflation could be managed, meaning the US could
- continue to run deficits
- have foreigners buy the debt
- and redeem the debt in inflated dollars later
But the world was wise to the game. When push came to shove, President Nixon closed the gold window and let the [tooltip keyword=’dollar’s value be set in relationship to other currencies’ content=’this is called a floating exchange rate’]. Americans would have to buy local currencies like Marks, Pounds and Yen to buy goods from overseas.
“You promised a magic trick!”
so I did.
Here it is:
The US Government went to Saudi Arabia (the world’s largest oil producer) and said “Nice place you have here. It sure would be a shame if something happened to it. You know, Israel’s only two doors down and they’re likely to go off the handle at any minute and wreck the neighborhood.”
“But if you agree to take dollars-and only dollars-for your oil then we’ll guarantee nothing bad happens.”
“That sounds like a shakedown”
DING DING DING
And here’s the magic: EVERYONE NEEDS OIL. So the US prints as many dollars as they want and everyone takes those dollars no matter what because oil is priced in dollars and EVERYONE NEEDS OIL.
You like magic, here’s a trick: create a computer entry in a bank account that’s denominated in dollars. Send those electrons to a bank in another country and buy WHATEVER YOU WANT WITH IT. Magic dollars backed by nothing other than a mafia-like shakedown agreement with a family of corrupt Arabians!
Some good things… get betterer
As we learn in part 2.
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