08-24-2019, 08:33 AM
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dsho...ays-market
I use that graph often to demonstrate
(1) how dangerous the Panic of 2008 was
(2) the economic consequences of doing the right thing (backing the banks and thus their depositors -- because the deposits include payrolls, the means of paying suppliers and taxes, and as a result the ability of the economy to avoid further meltdowns).
If hollow people who live only for corrupt gain find themselves ruined and jump out of windows when their paper profits vanish -- so what. The world can do well enough without them and their illusory but exploitative gain. When workers find themselves not getting paid because the payroll has disappeared during a bank run, commercial creditors find themselves unable to collect their receivables, and governments retrench because they can no longer collect taxes, then we all have big trouble. Most of us must satisfy ourselves with something other than getting showy gain that becomes public only when a speculative investor cashes out for a mansion, expensive vehicles, art, or jewelry.
Work (especially if it allows one to see tangible output or create human happiness), family life, some occasional hedonism... that is fine. Meaning in life rarely connects to the ownership of things. Not feeling oneself in gross need is a positive; poverty is misery for the shady compromises that it mandates. Driving a car with bald tires? Being stuck with unreliable or restrained services of phone and internet? Having to buy necessities on the never-never and paying only the minimum amount on the Master Card that becomes one's master? Putting off medical care for oneself or veterinary care for a beloved pet? Getting into heated arguments over money because one lacks it?
We have economic elites who believe that they have an entitlement to live like sultans yet impose poverty on everyone else, yet we have the means that can make poverty completely unnecessary. What Mohandas Gandhi said in a far poorer country and with far-less-sophisticated technology applies arguably even more in America today:
"Man can meet all human need, but cannot meet all human greed"
The means of producing what we need have themselves become far more efficient and effective. Our technologies have become far more sophisticated. Even so, "our" economic elites act as if poverty is just another means of creating a passive, compliant, and scared workforce that it can treat badly just to maximize profits. Monopolization, gouging, union-breaking, and corruption create maximal profits at the price of mass suffering. The economic elites do not want small-business competing with it; it wants small-scale competition ruined so that it can proletarize what has been a middle class characteristic of America at its best.
Add to this -- those elites use entertainment as a narcotic, a dubious commodity to dull the psychic pain of modern life and to destroy conscience while breaking any solidarity. 200 channels of bilge on cable TV is not worth the atomization of public life. I question whether the fellow who goes heavily in debt buying the latest marvels of technology as entertainment devices and their software or their streams of entertainment is really happier than the typical Old Order Amish kid of like age who has no such entertainments but lives in a culture that offers structure and meaning. (The world of the Old Order Amish is far from ideal for educated people, as Amish education ends at eighth grade and the mandatory age for the end of formal schooling, which is OK for an agrarian culture stuck in the 19th century but not for someone who loves book-learning and has a curiosity about a world other than the community in which he lives).
The economic elites who impose their will upon the rest of us are at best narcissistic -- as Christopher Lasch put it in The Culture of Narcissism, the bureaucratic-commercial organizations who now monopolize the economy and exploit the common man severely could not better and more exclusively fit narcissistic personalities -- if not promoting the sociopath as a hero so long as the sociopath does nothing too shameful (like the late Jeffrey Ep-swine did, flying underage girls on his "Lolita Express" for molestation in his mad pseudoscience in which they were to dedicate their wombs to bearing the children of 'genetic' leaders -- one of which was himself). I consider Donald Trump on the borderline between narcissism and sociopathy, much as influenza and double pneumonia.
Bad as the Great Depression was, it had its salubrious effects. It made people less materialistic; it promoted solidarity and community; it promoted small business as an alternative to entities that in 1929 were too big to fail yet did fail; it focused economic attention to meeting basic human needs of the masses instead of elite indulgence. Although securities prices long failed to recover in nominal, let alone real terms, most people were better off in 1939 than in 1929 -- at least if one thinks of such things as cars, telephones, radios, stoves, clothing, and refrigerators. People were making higher pay in shorter work hours. Teenagers were now being encouraged to attend and complete high school education, which itself paid off well in the soldiers and sailors necessary for dealing with the greatest menace that America and Americans ever faced -- the demonic Axis Powers.
...Could it be that Donald Trump is the Crisis of this time? We have never had a mad leader who sees nothing rightly restraining him -- not the Constitution, not religious values, not philosophical morality, not caution, not two centuries of precedent, and not even advice that can contradict his whim. Such is the way of the dictator or the despot, and not the Presidency as our Founding Fathers designed it.
![[Image: trump-washington-photoshop-720x444.jpg]](https://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/trump-washington-photoshop-720x444.jpg)
It is a viral image. The Presidency was made for George Washington, who established what the Presidency is through his behavior. Donald Trump is a mockery.
I use that graph often to demonstrate
(1) how dangerous the Panic of 2008 was
(2) the economic consequences of doing the right thing (backing the banks and thus their depositors -- because the deposits include payrolls, the means of paying suppliers and taxes, and as a result the ability of the economy to avoid further meltdowns).
If hollow people who live only for corrupt gain find themselves ruined and jump out of windows when their paper profits vanish -- so what. The world can do well enough without them and their illusory but exploitative gain. When workers find themselves not getting paid because the payroll has disappeared during a bank run, commercial creditors find themselves unable to collect their receivables, and governments retrench because they can no longer collect taxes, then we all have big trouble. Most of us must satisfy ourselves with something other than getting showy gain that becomes public only when a speculative investor cashes out for a mansion, expensive vehicles, art, or jewelry.
Work (especially if it allows one to see tangible output or create human happiness), family life, some occasional hedonism... that is fine. Meaning in life rarely connects to the ownership of things. Not feeling oneself in gross need is a positive; poverty is misery for the shady compromises that it mandates. Driving a car with bald tires? Being stuck with unreliable or restrained services of phone and internet? Having to buy necessities on the never-never and paying only the minimum amount on the Master Card that becomes one's master? Putting off medical care for oneself or veterinary care for a beloved pet? Getting into heated arguments over money because one lacks it?
We have economic elites who believe that they have an entitlement to live like sultans yet impose poverty on everyone else, yet we have the means that can make poverty completely unnecessary. What Mohandas Gandhi said in a far poorer country and with far-less-sophisticated technology applies arguably even more in America today:
"Man can meet all human need, but cannot meet all human greed"
The means of producing what we need have themselves become far more efficient and effective. Our technologies have become far more sophisticated. Even so, "our" economic elites act as if poverty is just another means of creating a passive, compliant, and scared workforce that it can treat badly just to maximize profits. Monopolization, gouging, union-breaking, and corruption create maximal profits at the price of mass suffering. The economic elites do not want small-business competing with it; it wants small-scale competition ruined so that it can proletarize what has been a middle class characteristic of America at its best.
Add to this -- those elites use entertainment as a narcotic, a dubious commodity to dull the psychic pain of modern life and to destroy conscience while breaking any solidarity. 200 channels of bilge on cable TV is not worth the atomization of public life. I question whether the fellow who goes heavily in debt buying the latest marvels of technology as entertainment devices and their software or their streams of entertainment is really happier than the typical Old Order Amish kid of like age who has no such entertainments but lives in a culture that offers structure and meaning. (The world of the Old Order Amish is far from ideal for educated people, as Amish education ends at eighth grade and the mandatory age for the end of formal schooling, which is OK for an agrarian culture stuck in the 19th century but not for someone who loves book-learning and has a curiosity about a world other than the community in which he lives).
The economic elites who impose their will upon the rest of us are at best narcissistic -- as Christopher Lasch put it in The Culture of Narcissism, the bureaucratic-commercial organizations who now monopolize the economy and exploit the common man severely could not better and more exclusively fit narcissistic personalities -- if not promoting the sociopath as a hero so long as the sociopath does nothing too shameful (like the late Jeffrey Ep-swine did, flying underage girls on his "Lolita Express" for molestation in his mad pseudoscience in which they were to dedicate their wombs to bearing the children of 'genetic' leaders -- one of which was himself). I consider Donald Trump on the borderline between narcissism and sociopathy, much as influenza and double pneumonia.
Bad as the Great Depression was, it had its salubrious effects. It made people less materialistic; it promoted solidarity and community; it promoted small business as an alternative to entities that in 1929 were too big to fail yet did fail; it focused economic attention to meeting basic human needs of the masses instead of elite indulgence. Although securities prices long failed to recover in nominal, let alone real terms, most people were better off in 1939 than in 1929 -- at least if one thinks of such things as cars, telephones, radios, stoves, clothing, and refrigerators. People were making higher pay in shorter work hours. Teenagers were now being encouraged to attend and complete high school education, which itself paid off well in the soldiers and sailors necessary for dealing with the greatest menace that America and Americans ever faced -- the demonic Axis Powers.
...Could it be that Donald Trump is the Crisis of this time? We have never had a mad leader who sees nothing rightly restraining him -- not the Constitution, not religious values, not philosophical morality, not caution, not two centuries of precedent, and not even advice that can contradict his whim. Such is the way of the dictator or the despot, and not the Presidency as our Founding Fathers designed it.
It is a viral image. The Presidency was made for George Washington, who established what the Presidency is through his behavior. Donald Trump is a mockery.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
