The consequences of our own decisions…

One of the nagging difficulties we have with trying to communicate our view of things is in conveying to others that actions and decisions have consequences.

Our society has avoided reducing hours of work, and is now suffering the latest in string of such consequences, which we will try to detail below. This is only a first attempt, so criticisms are welcome.

1. The first consequence of a too many hours of work was the Great Depression;

2. The second, which was made unavoidable by the first, was the debasing of money from gold;

3. The third was the growth of government, in the form of the New Deal, to cope with the massive unemployment produced by the Great Depression, and which was made possible by the debasement of money;

4. There followed the massive preparations for World War II, and the outbreak of the conflict, which was made possible by massive pool of labor made available by the unemployment created by the Great Depression;

5. The above was followed by the implementation of National Security Memorandum 68, and the creation of the Cordon Militaire to contain the Soviet Union and establish the American Empire, made possible by the great pool of untapped superfluous labor which caused the Great Depression;

6. Which was followed by monetary instability, as the United States began pulling in global resources in the context of fixed exchanged rates;

7. Which finally forced the United States to abandon the dollar’s peg to gold, and a decade of monetary instabilty;

8. Which triggered the de-industrialization of the Rust Belt, and produced an unbroken string of trade deficits to this day;

9. Which forced permanent fiscal deficits, and the beginning of the consumer debt crisis;

10. Which, to control high interests rates, led to the manipulation of markets for various commodities – most importantly gold – by the American government;

11. Which led Washington to deregulate the derivatives market, even as those markets had nearly killed the global economy, and produced the Asian Meltdown, the Russian Financial Crisis, and the Argentina Crisis;

12. Which led to the monstrous overhang of CDS and other financial instruments of mass destruction;

13. Which led to last year’s Wall Street Meltdown, and the emergence of the greatest economic crisis since;

14. The Great Depression, which is not really a depression, but merely Mister Market’s way of saying you are working too hard…