” Ars longa, vita brevis…”
— Hippocrates, Aphorisms
“Paradox though it may seem… Life imitates art far more often than art imitates life.”
Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying: An Observation
VISA, not too long ago, started an ad campaign to intimidate everyone into using plastic, because real money is so passe. In these mildly [and I'm being liberal with the praise here] humorous commercials, people are gaily greasing the wheels of commerce while dancing around a toy store (or other place of business) to some happy-funky choreographed music, merrily zapping pieces of their souls away to Big Money as they slide their brightly colored Visa cards to pay for their purchases.
Then some mouth-breather from the shallow end of the gene pool has to come along with his “real” [more or less, as in, not Monopoly] money (perhaps digging in his pockets for spare change and wadded-up singles), and brings the whole house of cards crashing down affair grinding to a halt. The fool and his money are soon parted, and the dance goes on….
So why the Wilde quote? What’s the significance?
Well, I’ll tell ya’!
Ron Paul believes in hard money. The Greenbacks in your wallet – and the electrons in your bank account – should be backed by something other than the promise of the Beast.
[Intermission for a brief lesson on monetary policy, by a layman:
Both "fiat" money and credit are inherently inflationary. This is because they both practices create money (without creating wealth) where there was previously nothing.
Fiat. A basic high school economics analysis of supply vsdemand would show us that as the number of available dollars skyrockets (allowing the "gummint" to pay for its irresponsible spending by printing more paper money), the actual value (as opposed to the face value) of those dollars will drop... like a rock. Congress has to print more money, because it hasn't realized yet that gross expenditures greater than gross receipts means the money will evaporate; the irony is, they're still short, because all they've done is divide their pie into smaller portions, rather than adding to the size of the pie.
Credit. The same thing applies to debt (and, by derivation, fractional-reserve banking). Long gone are the days when a bank or individual would issue a personal letter of credit to travelers, backed by actual money, so that the traveler didn't have to worry about being set upon by brigands on the highways and byways of unsettled Europe, Asia, and North America. Nowadays, banks have made a huge industry of personal debt and sell it as a product – and it is a booming industry, with the average American having upwards of 10 credit accounts, between mortgages, cars, and credit cards. It's bad enough on a personal scale, but transferred to the immense scale of the sole superpower economy, the effect of credit is devastating. Credit becomes a proxy for growth, making financial reports look artificially healthy, while they're actually just riding a bubble of... nothing. Artificial growth can only be sustained for a certain amount of time; but the charade cannot be maintained indefinitely (though, it could easily be decades). And that doesn't even bring into the conversation the problem with foreign creditors holding the US economy by the gonads.
In short, inflationary money practices cause things like oil at $100 a barrel, with production and demand remaining relatively constant, or milk at over $4 a gallon, absent a decimation of the cow population.
Intermission over.]
Between the banking industry – who puts out ads like the one above, and ridicules anyone who doesn’t drink their consumptionist Kool-Aid – and the tarnished example of the Congressional spending orgy of the last several decades, there has somehow been lost an intelligent understanding of the dangers of debt. What was once considered the last refuge of a two-time loser [I've read of people who bemoaned their inability to "go West" to settle or pan for gold due to the overwhelming shame of having a mortgage on their eastern homes – to the tune of about $5 – in earlier centuries.] has now somehow become the first choice of the “savvy” consumer. And the “easy money” drones have been dancing their way around the US economy for years, willfully ignorant of the rot that sustains their fiscal practices.
Enter Dr. Ron Paul, stage right, preaching an Austrian sermon of freedom and personal responsibility. He’s immediately sidelined by the media branch of the US government, painted as the knuckle-dragging troglodyte reaching into his pockets to fish for loose change. But the change in his pocket jingles with the sound of “gold, red gold, and good.” His personable approach to responsibility writ large threatens the shaky foundations of conventional wisdom, and seeks to bring their fatally faulty paradigm crashing down about their ears, along with their ivory towers.
So the anti-Paul movement becomes about one thing: survival. Both the Establishmentistas and their shills (the somnolent consumers) among the proles have a real vestment in the current Ponzi money scheme strategy. Occam’s Butterknife in their hands becomes the Sword of Damocles, assaulting their entrenched use of OPM in pursuit of their dissolute wampeter. They don’t want Paul to win; they can’t let Paul win.
It’s time we stop the Fed from playing with our economy like it came from Milton-Bradley, time to “give up childish ways.” A vote for Ron Paul is a vote against the illusion of wealth, and for actual wealth.
