“We live in the dumbest of times and Democrats are truly led by the dumbest of all of us.” —Sean Davis, The Federalist
You can suppose the government will re-open this week, and then what? It could close back down in January when the latest funding patch runs out. And then what? Another shut-down and another continuing resolution? The nation hopscotches toward insolvency and breakdown.
The sorrows of Mr. Trump mount as his enemies devise ever-novel punishments for the people of this land. The mutual animus of the two parties spirals upward like the vortex of a developing superstorm.
It’s the nature of crisis that the outcome is uncertain and the possibilities seem mostly dire. And so it is the nature of heroic action to overcome all that and stick a landing in some safe place out of harm’s way. Can we convert the economy of financial chicanery to an economy of purposeful production without provoking a ruinous crash of assets and debt obligations? The most thoughtful observers doubt it. It’s really only a question of time when the floor you were standing on gives way and suddenly everything is in freefall.
The precious metals are sending out a distress signal in the futures charts this morning, even while the equities markets worldwide melt up. That’s got to be a bad combo. Something is going wrong with money everywhere. The overarching question is: will money continue to be money? (That is, will it be worth anything?) Money that is increasingly worthless leads to some of the worst social and political outcomes imaginable.
The authorities of the money world only pretend to be in control of the forces behind money and its movements. Money is subject to the laws of physics like everything else: actions and reactions. . . momentum / inertia . . . entropy. As economist Herb Stein sagely observed a half-century ago: “Things that can’t go on, stop.” An awful lot of things in our world need to stop if we want to continue the project of civilization. We can see, to our distress, that many things are actually stopping: Truck shipments of goods, idle freight trains, stores closing, closed down construction sites, restaurants empty. That tends toward rents, loans, mortgages not being paid. That leads to daisy-chains of broken obligations. Inflation reverses to deflation. Money starts to disappear.
In a deflation, money will stop losing its value. The catch is, people will have less money. There will be less of it around, chasing whatever goods get produced. Some people will have no money at all. The government will almost certainly attempt to counter that by giving them money created out of nothing. It will also give money to broke institutions like banks, and perhaps to businesses deemed “critical” to society. That will cycle back into money losing more value. We’ve been through this cycle a number of times in this young and turbulent century.
You’ve probably noticed that our country is seething with pissed-off citizens. All the machinations of the money authorities pretending to manage money have produced perversities, distortions, and spooky unintended consequences. Things manifest strangely. For instance, medical care is a godawful mess, namely, the ACA, Affordable Care Act. Got an acute problem like abdominal pain? We can give you an appointment three months from now, the HMO says when you call? Are they insane? Do they not hear themselves speaking? And you’re paying, like, $20-K-a-year for the family’s health insurance, so-called. (Hey, you can always go sit in the ER for eighteen hours with plenty of illegal aliens to keep you company.)
Mr. Trump just proffered a novel gambit: take away federal subsidies and tax credits from the ACA-linked insurance companies and send the money to US citizens to spend directly on doctors, drugs, and surgeries, or on private insurance outside the orbit of Obamacare. Nobody really knows how that might work, but you could allow that sometimes horrible problems call for far-out responses. Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) was a major plank in the president’s campaign platform. Everybody knows that Obamacare functions as an obstacle to being healthy. The entire purpose of it was to make medicine both unaffordable and unavailable. It’s been operating for going on fifteen years, failing spectacularly in plain sight.
The Democratic Party proposed to fix it, via their shut-down stunt, by enrolling onto Obamacare the millions of illegal aliens they ushered into the country at the cost of a trillion-plus dollars. Some fix. This is why they are known as the Party of Chaos. You can depend on the Democratic Party to always make a bad situation worse. The shut-down has even led to chaos within the Democratic Party itself as members now denounce their own leadership.
This would be a good time for President Trump to beat them with a stick as hard as possible. Ending the silent filibuster would be a good start — since the Democrats aim to do it anyway. Of course, that is up to Mr. Thune, the Senate Majority Leader. A fire needs to be lit under his well-tailored ass. Then, pass some really juicy legislation starting with election reform entailing proof-of-citizenship to vote, paper ballots, end of mail-in ballots (except for traditional absentee voting), and do away with the janky vote-counting machines. That would be an excellent start. Proceed from there.
As for those troubled financial markets and shaky money venues, they will do what they will do. If they wobble and crater, great opportunities will open up to decisively fix so much that has gone wrong in our country. You might not know it, considering the drift of recent years, but there are still a lot of capable people in this country ready to roll up their sleeves and go to work repairing what is broken.
I’ll be at Battenkill Books in Cambridge, New York, on Thursday this week, November 13, at 6:00 p.m. to talk with readers about my new book, Look, I’m Gone. Please drop in and say hello.
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