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The Pot of Rainbows At the End of the Gold
At Rainbows End
There comes a time when you have borrowed the last dime. There is a day of reckoning.
There comes a day when printing one more dollar will make all your existing dollars worth less than toilet paper. After all, sufficiently devalued currency isn't even useful.
Even now, some still manufacture fables about that time we saw the handwriting on the wall. Remember when the economy almost collapsed and government supposedly--or so we are told-- stopped the collapse by taking a big pile of money and flushing it down the crapper until the toilet stopped up?
Yeah, and when the toilet got stopped up because it was full of cash, we were told to be grateful because a stopped up toilet meant we were all saved!
What Really Happened
I heard some simpleton opine that suddenly folks the world over either forgot what paper money was or realized that it was just paper and therefore valueless.
Dear Nimrod, only you are confused about money. The rest of us are quite comfortable with money as a medium of exchange and store of goods, value or services.
What really happened was this. Some communists, Marxists, socialists, progressives and what's worse, democrats decided that lots, and lots and lots of people who simply could not afford to pay for houses should have them anyway. So these--I will call all these commies democrats for short--these democrats passed legislation and created government and semi, quasi government agencies to hand out "free" houses to people who could never afford to pay for the houses.
Well, the bills for all those "free" houses finally came due. And none of those people who got "free" houses could afford to pay for them. And so they went bankrupt , or walked away from houses they could not afford, or wrecked and ruined the houses, or found themselves underwater or begged the government to help them.
And so some unscrupulous greedy businessmen, call them republicans for short, packaged up a bunch of worthless housing loans that were never going to get paid and some houses that were no longer worth much either because there was a glut of worthless houses and no body wanted them. Then these greedy republicans sold all these worthless assets to morons all over the world. Well, maybe the buyers weren't exactly morons. It might be more accurate to say that many of them were ignorant. The didn't know, and some deliberately did not want to know that what they bought was worthless. After all, the clever ones, the ones who suspected that something might be up where playing a game of musical chairs. As long as they they managed to unload that sack of crap housing loans before the music stopped, they were golden!
The music stopped and a lot of people, especially governments were caught holding millions of sacks of crap and there where no more of those music chairs. There were no more useful idiots to buy the crap. Now that the music stopped, everyone knew it was all crap.
So many governments, corporations, companies and individuals had bought so much useless crap and were caught holding so much useless paper that there was a fear that the system would collapse. If the only thing you have of value has no value, how do you buy anything?
This does not mean that the cash the average person had was useless. Rather this meant that people who we have been told all our lives know more than us or whom we should trust to govern our countries and economies, had out of greed, stupidity, ignorance, and a good dash of progressive liberalism, reduced themselves and their institutions to near bankruptcy.
And here is where the corruption of our own government came into play, We were made to bail out the stupid with our tax money. We paid for their sins.
Architect of Woe
And so it is that we see the democrats are the architects of all our woes. Their weird, pseudo commie schemes to give way money that is not theirs in order to give it to people who have either no concept of handling said money or who have no intention of properly handling money always goes awry.
Republicans, who admittedly are not nearly as good at building monuments to stupidity as democrats are, are nevertheless very clever about stealing money and diverting money to their friends.
So democrats build it and republicans steal it. And unless you think the Soviet Union, North Korea, or the economy of Zimbabwe are good models, then the monuments to stupidity that the democrats build should never have been built in the first place. A government built on funny money can't last. Something has to give. You can't keep printing and borrowing the way democrats do. You can't keep giving away other people's money to bums and thieves. It's not sustainable. If you subsidize sloth, greed, stupidity, ignorance and laziness, you get more of it.
Post Debt Economy
It is true that most of the fault for one of the worst economic debacles in recent memory can be laid at the feet of the democrats and their liberal, progressive governments.
Nevertheless, some fundamental change may have been wrought by all this needless economic suffering.
It appears that the economic facts on the ground may have changed. Consumers do not seem to be as ready as they have been in the past to support a debt driven economy.
The whole idea of "Black Friday" for instance is prefaced on the notion that an entire year of indebtedness on the part of retail stores--an entire year of being in the red--is replaced by a brief holiday season of being in the black. Essentially, consumers would go into debt and in an orgy of spending, bring retailers into the black. Some observers might observe that our debt driven economy was like one giant ponzy scheme. All we were doing was transferring debt around.
But what if consumers are less willing to buy? What happens then?
Post Inflation Economy
If you ever study how banking works you will see:
1) People creating money out of thin air
2) People who created money from nothing demanding you pay them with labor for money they created from nothing.
Not everyone agrees that fractional reserve banking is a good idea--even when they benefit from it. If people borrow less money or if lenders are less willing to lend money, the economy generated from the creation of money will dry up. What then?
Post Industrial Economy
What happens when all the smokestack industries of the west get transferred over to the third world? Will we in the west serve each other burgers and wash each others cars? We can't do that because Obama is giving all the service industry jobs to foreign criminals.
Since the democrats are encouraging foreign criminals to come in and steal all the service jobs and vote illegally, and all the industrial jobs are being sent overseas, what's left?
Can all of us sit around programming computers? Surely there aren't enough IT jobs to go around.
Well, we could all work for the government I suppose.
Post Consumer Economy
Some think that with an economy no longer based on debt and getting people to buy crap they don't need, we may move to a barter economy. The problem is: What if you don't have anything anyone wants and you can't do anything any one wants? What do we call you then: Food?
You Gonna Pay For That Rainbow?
When at last the politicians have gone through the gold and spent every last dime.
Now we have only a pot of bright promises for all their "efforts."
Can we live off rainbows?