Whoa! Hey! Economics? Fella, these are the guys who are going to save your world. This is Master of the Universe Stuff. This is a quarter of a million dollars worth of student loans just to get in the same room with them. These are the financial wonder bras who make it all look so good, who trickle it down to you, who get on the shows and lay it all out there in pseudo superiority speak. Hell yeah, you just sit back and relax and let the big dogs do their stuff, patch the leaks, shore it up, paint it, and invent retarded analogies to describe it as anything other than what it is. It's a convoluted form of Voodoo that is twisted, manipulated, and contorted for the soul purpose of concentrating wealth in the hands of people who didn't work for it.
There's a lot of money involved. So much so that there isn't any meaningful denomination to put on it. A quadrillion dollars? What is that really, other than a lot of rolls of green toilet paper spooling out of a printing press, a bazillion, gazillion, a big ass pile, a shitload of moolah that these guys are all earnestly trying to explain like a weatherman describing what red wine tastes like. It might as well be spoken Mongolian for all the guy on the block knows. So the name of the game has always been to sell him on it. To convince him, Joe Shmuckatelli, that you know what you are doing, that you have a firm grip on the situation, that this is after all, just science.
Only the science has long gone from one of labor, capital, resources and entrepreneurship to the vested interest of the state, the system, and all the leeches they attract. Their viability and interests are paramount to everything and everyone. The people, the environment, the future in any healthy and sustainable sense, these are just anomalies, unscientific data to be massaged out of the equation. That's because for this particular crap game to work, you have to rig the dice. You don't want them falling on the mortgage crisis, the decimated resource base, the increasing numbers of people walking away from the electoral process, from organized religion, and from traditional family structures. This is supposed to be the richest country in the world, the greatest economy driving the finest democracy and instead you have a burgeoning underclass that has no hope of ever reintegrating into the American dream. Their best option is coexistence in a dual society where two sets of values, of justice, and economic principals prevail.
Hey, this is science bub! This is real ivory tower shit. The big men on campus have the facts and figures right here at their fingertips. Demand and production and reduction and market adjustments and derivative assets and it will all trickle down. You bail out the mortgage lenders or it could be a catastrophe and that would definitely hurt the homeless and the poor and the disenfranchised. Science baby!
Only in your science, in anybody's pin factory, wealth flows from labor. That labor could be in a coal mine or an auto plant or in a plastics factory in China, but somewhere, somebody has to pick up a tool. A good scientific mind will immediately try and minimize his labor costs. Automation, specialization, computerization, whatever it takes to economize, to maximize production, to achieve the best bottom line, the most viable form of production to meet demand. That is unless the demands are changing. What about demands on the environment, demands on a finite source of fossil fuels, demands of emerging nations, demands of young people in a educational system that doesn't work, that hasn't worked? Forget about any unseen demands around the corner, say, water resources, health concerns, population growth, loss of species, climate change, and whatever else comes our way. The best economists can do is cook the books, hopelessly simplify, and wail for another bailout using the rhetoric of weapons of mass financial crisis.
In the end it will come down to right livelihood. To man's ability to do something wholly uneconomic, to throw out the book, to boot the pinhead economist in the ass and stand up for a sustainable future based on anything but raping the land, exploiting the labor, and hording the capital. The beauty of a crisis is the option to choose other solutions, never before tried. The beauty of history is being able to visit the ruins of the civilizations that didn't.
