Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Some Weird Sin (I mean, Topics)

The piece below is up high on google search: dallas, money. (dallasfed...) Something called "everyday economics" on the Dallas Fed site is going to have what scholars of the counterculture call "orthodox" or "mainstream" delusions. These are all the delusions concerning the nature of economics and capitalism. Such delusions have become institutionalized, and this occurs as a process, over time, and it can be traced through literary sources (like the 1919 Encyclopedia Brit). There seems to be a massive human project to come up with something that sounds good. These persons need something that "seems" to make sense - that is what they are looking for, appearances, not the truth. This is their lack of integrity. And these persons are like pressers in the laundry: they go over and over and over it. This is their pet project. You can observe it over history. The "capitalism" entry in the 1919 Encyclopedia Brittanica seems not at all to have been overtaken by these processes. In the ensuing history these phony intellectual figures devoted to "economics" have gone over and over this ideological cloth until they get a wrinkle-free cloth. That is the nature of the project. But this is not human sincerity. It is not intellectual integrity. But, as we said, that is not the project. The project is completely insane, psychotic.  It is a psychotic project. It is there to protect a few selfish persons. These kinds of psychotics have always been very prominent in Western history. Here is the original text, mentioned just above:

Everyday Economics
Money, Banking and Monetary Policy
Money, the banking system and monetary policy must work together smoothly for the economy to run well. Money makes it possible for people to exchange goods and services without having to rely on a system of bartering. Banking provides a means for savers to lend their money to borrowers and earn interest in the process, and it gives borrowers a place to go for loans. The aim of monetary policy is to ensure that there is sufficient money in the economy to keep it growing, but not so much that the economy overheats. When the economy overheats, the result is inflation. Inflation—too much money chasing too few goods—creates an inefficient price system. It also distorts decision-making, reduces productivity and lowers the economy's long-term rate of growth. This results in lower living standards for everyone.

First, notice how they tell the readers what "must" be the case. They have to dictate as the utter, final authorities. Actually, that is what "dictation" means, to the stenographer. ha ha ha. Anyways the next three sentences are pretty good. The whole thing will eventually revert to ideology, since that is their project. Of course. In fact, to do otherwise in this kind of psycho-culture or this cultural atmosphere is not so easy, so maybe it is good to start here. Sentence number six is interesting for this emergent slant. They could also have gone on to discuss productivity. Inflation is merely the quantity of an abstract: 100 units of money is not in the real sense different from 200 units of money. Money is an abstraction that is then divided into parts, this further division of an abstraction being the money-units, to which no real concept of size applies. On the day of the origination of money, whether the issuing authority issues one hundred dollars that are then broken up into ten thousand pennies, or issues ten thousand "dollars" that are then multiplied into units of one hundred "mega-dollars" amounts to the same thing. Get it? Obviously a unit of money is a convention, whatever the convention is. Someone thinks this up. All this is obvious of course. (But maybe not to these weirdos who has spent their entire lifetime in monetary delusions?)
     At this point the text could have mentioned increased productivity, instead of increased units of money, since the latter discussion gets a little bit. (Ah, NOW I get it. A weird discussion is exactly what these persons are all about. NOW I get it?)  So, instead of writing about a two, three or ten-fold increase in units of money out there, an interesting but conceptually problematic topic, they could have mentioned productivity and they could have done so directly instead of working it into the subsequent discussion. But first they choose to discuss money quantity. This is the weird topic, the topic of how an abstraction is measured. The quantity of money "chasing goods" is "inflation," so what they mention is money to goods: a ration. That's cute: "—too much money chasing too few goods—". My take is that they knew this would be a cute phrase, one that is known to catch the mind. So, a good publicity job. Good for you. That is what you are about. Instead of too much money, why not talk about too little? No, because that would not properly trick up the reader's little mind. So, my point was to point out that in this same period, as capitalism developed, and as a program of ideology developed alongside it (making us a dumber nation, a J. Z. Nation, which is in the next post), there was an increase in productivity of something like 200-fold.
     This is a major, major factor, which we are overlooking. A two-hundred fold increase in productivity means we are already rich, but we just aren't receiving it. All of that wealth is misdirected, wasted. It becomes fabulous wealth for the one per-cent, and arrogance --- for Texas State troopers and cops

p.s. b.t.w., when I use "courier" font to reproduce the imported textual material, that is to increase clarity, not decrease like the opposition wants to do.  -J.S.

1 comment:

  1. Above, I tried to use "courier" font. I hope it came out that way. That was for the imported economists' text from the Dallas Fed. It helps us read it in an objective way, with less bias.

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