Just in case you missed what's
going on in France: the status quo in Europe is doomed.
The status quo has a simple fix
for every crisis and systemic problem:
1. create
currency out of thin air
2. give it
to super-wealthy banks, financiers and corporations to boost their wealth and
income.
One way these entities increase
their wealth and income is to lend this nearly free money to
commoners at much higher rates of interest. I borrow from central banks at 1%
and lend it to you at 4.5%, 7% or even 19% or more. What's not to like?
If a bank is insolvent, it can
borrow money at 1% from central banks. If Joe Blow is insolvent, the only loan he can get is at
23%, if he can get any credit at all.
3. China has a variant fix for
every financial crisis: build tens of millions of empty flats only the wealthy
can afford as second or third "investment" flats. If the
empty flats start dropping in price, government entities start secretly buying
flats to support the market.
4. Empty malls, bridges to
nowhere and ghost cities are also a standard-issue fix in China. Built it and
they will come, until they don't. But who cares, the developers and local
governments (i.e. corrupt officials) already pocketed the dough.
You see the problem: making rich people richer doesn't actually fix
what's broken, it only makes the problems worse. So why can't we fix what's broken?
It's a question that deserves
an answer, and the answer has six parts:
1. Any meaningful
systemic reform threatens an entrenched, self-serving interest/elite which has
a tremendous incentive to squash, co-opt or water down any reform that
threatens their monopoly, benefits, etc.
2. It's far
cheaper in cash and political capital to block something than it is to push
through a reform that reduces the skims and scams of entrenched, self-serving
interests.
3.
Entrenched, self-serving elites are disconnected from the real world of the
commoners; they live in protective bubbles, from you-can't-fire-me job security to gold-plated healthcare
to generous pensions to access to central bank credit lines-- all of which is
unavailable to the commoners wearing yellow vests. As a result, their grasp of
the real problems is unrealistic, as the real-world experience of the bottom
90% is an abstraction.
4.
Entrenched, self-serving elites are protected from the disastrous consequences
of their policies and self-serving greed. In Taleb's terminology, they
have no
skin in the game: policies can be complete failures but nobody's fired, and
nobody's pay is cut.
5. The
Neofeudal "fix" to all crises, and social and financial
problems--enriching the already rich and empowering the already
powerful--signals the entrenched elites that the system is working just fine: if it's working great for me
and my cronies, so clearly it's working great for everyone.
6. The
corporate media and the social media giants are entrenched interests, and so it
serves their interests to ceaselessly promote the status quo Neofeudalism as the
cat's meow and marginalize dissenters, skeptics and reformers.
Just in case you missed what's
going on in France: the status quo in Europe is doomed. The status quo
fixes of enriching the already rich as the solution to every problem have
gutted the social contract and destabilized the economy. Giving more nearly free money to banks,
financiers and corporations is only going to speed the dissolution of the
Eurozone and the existing social order.
What's broken? Nothing, from the perspective of
those at the top of the wealth-power pyramid:
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