After my stint as Labor Czar during President Obama’s second term…
Sorry, had to wipe the tears of laughter out of my eyes. Not that our maniacal rulers’ actions are the least bit funny, just the notion that I would be invited, much less that I would accept such a job.
Liberty-minded people know the core tenet of the free market: Information is subjective, local, and time sensitive. No one can centrally plan because it is impossible to aggregate the necessary information.
This axiom is especially difficult for the modern citizen of the USA to swallow because everyone in the middle class has largely lived in a planned bubble of predictability for a lifetime.
Do well in high school, go to a good college, get good grades, graduate and work for a corporation that offers a pension, get an MBA at night (paid for by said employer), get promoted to middle management, be a team player, blah, blah, blah. Marry the hottie of your dreams, vacation in France this year, Greece the next, live in a 4,000 square foot house with a basketball court in the basement, have 2-1/2 kids and a nanny, a white picket fence, a Lexus SUV and a Mercedes.
It was all so simple, like the comfortable similarity of the homes and properties in a suburban subdivision. Who cared if colleges jacked their prices at twice the rate of monetary devaluation (AKA inflation)? A cottage industry existed to remind us that "college grads make millions of dollars more, during a lifetime, than do high school dropouts." Who cared if every second person was a salesman, an accountant, a journalist, a graphic designer, a "business major" or a "coms major" (whatever the heck that is)?
This lifelong illusion of predictability leaves us woefully unprepared for the abyss of reality. There is no book, blog, or Bozo who can produce a career path roadmap that, if leavened with hard work, will consistently and predictably yield a lifestyle to which we’ve all become accustomed. That’s not how reality works. Reality is complex and somewhat unpredictable.
Complexity is scary. That’s why most people prefer a predictable slavery to a "you’re on your own" freedom. The former offers the illusion of security; the inescapable reality of potential failure is undisguised in the latter. Paradoxically, a lifetime of that illusion of security has turned the market’s occasional, personal, decentralized failures into one vast mountain of inescapable, coordinated, catastrophic failure.
A weather analogy is useful: Normally it’s sunny in some places and rainy in others, with an occasional storm and a rare hurricane or tornado. The mental children ruling us thought they controlled the weather and made it sunny all the time, everywhere, but instead all they did was accumulate the storms, the hurricanes, and the tornadoes for the future. The longer they were held in abeyance, the more destructive energy was accumulated.
Now a massive, Biblical-proportion economic storm is washing over the U.S. (and other places, too). All the predictability of the past no longer applies. U.S. citizens got exactly the weather control (and weather controllers) they asked for. Citizens wanted certainty, and the scum who aspire to power rode that collective desire to their goal. They delivered exactly what "the people" demanded of them, the collective delusion of predictability.
Revolutionary Language
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Now that the storm has begun, people still demand predictability.
I don’t have a clue what you should do, occupation-wise. Anyone who claims such knowledge must be multiple times smarter than me; hopefully President Obama will appoint such a person as Labor Czar so they can tell me what to do, too. My fervent dream is to labor on the best of the available plantations under the whip of the most benevolent overseer. [Sorry…I paused to swallow some of the bitterness that backed up into my throat.]
I do expect that the unexpected will occur, that the best-laid plans will sometimes fail, that being five minutes late will really hurt, and that hindsight will rarely come with more "kicking yourself."
Paradoxes will be everywhere, and for a time the impossible may persist. Imagine a period when little pieces of mostly green colored paper, printable at nominal cost, surge in value against stocks, most bonds, commodities, real estate, and even precious metals.
It seems impossible, right?
Not if the ATMs stop working, banks drop like flies, and credit cards are declined when the credit/debt bubble’s deflation accelerates. FedGov managers already have plans to go underground in style and let tens of millions of U.S. citizens incinerate in a nuclear war. Will they hesitate to abandon picayune promises like the FDIC and Medicare when circling their wagons becomes necessary?
These are uncharted waters. If you decide to take a crash course in personal navigation, you’ll find me sitting next to you in class, desperately trying to figure it out as I go.
David Calderwood [send him mail] a businessman, artist, and author of the novel Revolutionary Language, selected January 2000 Freedom Book of the Month at Free-market.net.
