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I am dealing with a large corporation that has applied a zero defect manufacturing mentality to the construction process. Although this would seem to make sense in principle, the reality is that machines can’t be stupid, but humans can and often are. If you are tired and hot, you sometimes get sloppy. This does not mean you don’t know what you ought to be doing–most of this is common sense–but that you momentarily forget. Then an accident happens.

This got me to thinking, though, about the difference in mindset between the farmer and the industrialist. Not all seeds sprout. Not very year sees enough rain, or enough sunshine. There is a great deal that you can’t control directly, making it foolish to even contemplate a zero defect strategy. Instead, you develop emotional tenacity, and quite often a strong religious faith. Prayers for the success of crops–or livestock–were very important in almost all known religions, and may well have played a role in the development of formal religious traditions.

The image of the manufacturer, though, is one of an endless series of perfectly conjoined wheels, all operating with perfect precision.

When we say that talents blossom, or speak of something flowering, we are acknowledging that living systems move, and that they have stages. You have the planting in the Spring, the growth in the summer, the harvesting in the Fall, and the surviving in the winter. “To everything there is a season.” (Ecclesiastes, by the way, is my favorite book of the Bible).

There are no seasons in manufacturing. There are production schedules, that can be rationally planned out far in advance, in theory for decades, although of course market demands cannot be mapped out that far, so cycles are likely closer to the year interval or so.

I think this basic metaphor, though, can accurately be mapped on to the difference between true Liberalism, and Leftism, or what I have at times called “gradualism” and “catastrophism”.

One can readily admit that a given social order warrants improvement, without thereby granting that the solution can be planned and imposed.

Leftism is nothing other than the idea that the ideas and methods of manufacturing can be applied to social “engineering”. The use of that word makes this abundantly obvious. The man who began the massive government interference in the economy that has characterized the last 80 years or so of anti-Liberal politics–Herbert Hoover–was nicknamed either “The Great engineer”, or perhaps just the “engineer”.

What is the word we see continually applied by Central Planners of the Nationalistic Fascist and Internationalistic Fascist sort? Rationalization. They assume that human systems can be made to operate like mechanical systems. They even apply manufacturing methods to their repressions. The Nazis developed the poison gas suggested by George Bernard Shaw to efficiently kill their opponents. The Soviets–being Russians–were much less efficient, but no less dedicated to the basic idea. They separated out “ingredients”–dissidents–who did not fit into the slots alloted them in the great machine they were trying to build. They put them in massive camps.

But people are like seeds. They have seasons. They alter as they grow. True, deep rooted social change comes about gradually. The attempt, for example, to impose “equality” on black people has been enormously counter-productive. They tried to erase hundreds of years of tradition overnight. They tried to give money to people to make amends for past wrongs, rather than simply allow them to continue incorporating themselves into the community on their own. The “War On Poverty” not only failed, but it made things much, much worse.

It failed because it used a manufacturing metaphor. As I have said before, Leftism is nothing but the application of the metaphor of the Procrustrean Bed to actual living societies. If you don’t fit, you will be made to fit.

True Liberalism is the antithesis of this, in that we all build our own beds. This is the way of kindness, decency, and moral sustainability.

This is apparently a band, a movie, an Army Fort, and who knows what else.

It is also a name I like for the unconcious/subconscious realm of our selves, obviously referencing the Alpha brainwave state. To my mind the “unconscious” is best understood as a sort of drama containing many characters, all of them the residue of imprints of various sorts. Our consciousness listens to all these characters, and chooses which ones to listen to. Perhaps what a principle does is create a perfect character–instead of the many imperfect ones who constituted our family and friends and strangers and enemies. You create a voice for yourself that is unchanging and unsusceptible to moods.

I’m thinking out loud here.

At times, when I meditate (and I have found, by the way, that some of my most useful reveries are sitting still in the darkness drinking whiskey, and simply watching my emotions flow by like a stream; I do not think I am rationalizing when I say this has been enormously therapeutic), I feel the presence of this universe, where things really don’t change. It is not perhaps an altered state of consciousness, but a focused one, where I have removed all need for problem solving, all need for purposive action, and most external stimuli.

Talking about feelings is not therapeutic, but feeling them flowing is. Things that flow tend to move, and blocks can disappear that way. First, you have to see the blocks, which is to say to feel them.

Returning to the stage metaphor, it is perhaps like you–I, as should be obvious, but this is hopefully tranlatable to the experience of any readers I may have–have been hearing a cacophony of conflicting voices from a dark playhouse, where you can’t see the stage, and now you are putting a spotlight on each character and asking them what role they play, and giving them the room and time to speak in their own voice.

Most all people have multiple “frequencies”. This was perhaps the only useful insight I retained from my study of Neuro-Linguistic Programming years ago. This is another way of saying that everyone has multiple “personalities”, multiple selves, some of which contradict one another, but which can be speaking at the same time.

One simple example is someone saying “I love you” when they don’t mean it. There is what Freud called the ego–and what I might call the “presenting self”–saying rationally comprehensible words that are understood by the listener.

Yet, these words have referents. We all have some idea what love is supposed to feel like, and if that feeling is not there, then the stage is set for cognitive dissonance. It is my feeling that we all have profoundly accurate intuitive understandings as latent capacities, but that many people–men, particularly–tend not to express them, consciously.

So we get a mixed message. Which one do we listen to? Actions speak louder than words, but one can always rationalize the actions of others, so there is always a choice.

This is the behavioral equivalent to those quizzes many will have seen, where you have to choose the color of a word quickly, but in which is typed a different word. For example, the word “red”, but typed in the color blue.

Persistent incongruities of this sort amount in my view to a sort of qualitative assault, in that you are demanding of people to choose between what is said and what is done.

To the point here, the only part that enters “Alphaville” is the reality, and to the extent we are not able to consciously separate the reality from the facade, then confusion enters the picture.

A good example of this would be beating children and claiming it was for their own good, when in reality it was an outlet for the anger of the parent. That child will internalize that anger, and not know why it is there.

We see a lot of anger in our culture today. There are no doubt many reasons for that, but among them are, I think, a heightened sense of entitlement/expectation, and the de facto qualitative assaults of the modern, retrogressive American family.

First, if you expect more, if you think “life” owes you something, if you think you ought to be able to live an exciting, fulfilled life of the sort shown in commercials and peddled by Hollywood, then most people are going to experience a gap between fantasy and reality. This breeds self pity, and self pity breeds anger and resentment.

Second, though: what about the parent who abandons you to the media, who instead of creating a living culture of interaction with their children, lets them sit in front of the TV? Kids find TV (and, to be clear, video games, iPods, computers, cell phones and everything else) fascinating, but it cannot replace constant living human reinforcements. There is a frustration that builds for many, I think, that arises from a LACK that they can’t identify. They are “communicating” with others via Twitter perhaps dozens of times an hour, but they are still lonely and afraid of being alone.

I wonder how many kids today could stand sitting alone in a quiet room for an hour? I think five minutes would be pushing it for most of them.

They have been abandoned, without knowing it. Their parents have disappeared, and turned into automatons, incapable of nurturing. Everyone has their own TV, and their own channel. Time is scarce, and everyone wants more, more, more.

The kitchen table, of course, is the solution.

These are a few scattered thoughts. I have had a lot of ideas since I last had time to focus, so I’m going to move on.

I don’t put many boundaries on my reveries: I just sort of let them go. One I have from time to time is reimagining the actual history of Christ. In evaluating Christianity, we have to remember that the canon was not put together for several centuries after the death of Christ, and that when it was done, it was a politically important enterprise, since the Romans had embraced the faith.

In evaluating the history of Christianity, the intersection of the Roman Empire and the Roman Universal (Catholic) Church is pivotal. Roman never fell. Its institutions morphed into a political apparatus appropriated by the Catholic Church, with the most important being tax collection.

Here is a short summary from Wikipedia that jibes with my own understanding:

“In the later organization of the Roman Empire, the increasingly subdivided provinces were administratively associated in a larger unit, the diocese (Latin dioecesis, from the Greek term διοίκησις, meaning “administration”).

With the adoption of Christianity as the Empire’s official religion in the 4th century, the clergy assumed official positions of authority alongside the civil governors. A formal church hierarchy was set up, parallel to the civil administration, whose areas of responsibility often coincided.

With the collapse of the Western Empire in the 5th century, the bishops in Western Europe assumed a large part of the role of the former Roman governors. A similar, though less pronounced, development occurred in the East, where the Roman administrative apparatus was largely retained by the Byzantine Empire. In modern times, many diocese, though later subdivided, have preserved the boundaries of a long-vanished Roman administrative division. For Gaul, Bruce Eagles has observed that “it has long been an academic commonplace in France that the medieval dioceses, and their constituent pagi, were the direct territorial successors of the Roman civitates.”

The point here is that it a matter of historical accident that Christianity survived. One can, of course, posit God’s will, but if you look at what was actually done in the name of Christianity–the Cathar repressions, the Crusades, the Inquisition–it is hard to see the hand of God in those events; at least not if we posit a loving God.

Making a short story long, I wonder about key events in the Bible. What if Jesus washed his disciples feet because he realized he was getting too full of himself? What if that was for his own growth, as well as didactic purposes? What if he never actually intended to get crucified, but could not figure out how to avoid it without snuffing out the groundswell of social change he had catalyzed?

As far as miracles, everything Christ reportedly did is contained in formal writings from India (and other places) that predate him, and which have been reported many times since. These would include walking on water, healing the sick, resurrecting the dead, and producing objects from nothing. There is an Indian guru who lived recently who according to many witnesses could produce sacred ash from his hands. I have not investigated the details, but plainly the stories are there, some of them much more evidential, being recent, than those of the Bible.

Daniel Dunglas Home was seen by witnesses to levitate, whose word on any other matter would have been accepted without question. It was in regard to his case that the word “psychic” was coined.

To my mind, the conclusion to be reached in regards to formal Christianity is that to the extent it encourages people to live with pleasure, and to love one another, it is a life affirming doctrine; and to the extent it is used to separate people, and to render judgements, it is life denying.

I feel the world is much too interesting to be packaged within a single unchanging creed dedicated to the proposition that non-conformists are tortured forever, and that the only means to avoid this is a slavish (“But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life”) devotion to the creed.

What needs to be made clear here is that “God” is not speaking, as one human to another, to anyone. What are being expressed are intuitive understandings that are different between people, and a set of verbal teachings which were put down by MEN, not God. This was Muhammad’s innovation, to claim that his teachings were taken verbatim from Allah’s chosen spokesperson, in a direct connection with the larger universe.

I might put it this way: to the extent a creed encourages playfulness within a context of fidelity to core values of honesty, sincerity, thoughtfulness and personal responsibility, among others, it is valid. To the extent it fosters hate and unreasoning fear, it is in my view wrong.

Here is a nice poem from Rabindranath Tagore I have always liked, and not infrequently quoted:

On the Seashore

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.

The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.

They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds.

They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl-fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets.
The sea surges up with laughter, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby’s cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play.

On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

Life is pleasure in experience. One example was I hit the road very early one day last week, and was driving a windy, hilly road. On one turn, I could see just the top of a very red sun, and thought it beautiful. Then it “set”, as I went down a decline. For the next twenty minutes, it played peek-a-boo with me, rising and setting, always in different places. It made me happy.

Driving the same road in reverse yesterday, I came upon an opening in the clouds with a beam of light coming down, like heaven had opened. Behind me I saw a rainbow. It was amazingly beautiful. I really enjoy complex, moving skies, and the interplay of light and shadow.

To the point, though, it would in my mind be a sin to let the beauty in our world go unnoticed. There is so much ugliness, that we must be attentive to what is right and good and wonderful.

Jim Morrison–who really wasn’t very smart, but had the capacity to seem that way–once said “no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.” That seems clear enough: live in the moment. But he died as a drunk and likely as a heroin abuser. Somewhere along the way, he lost the dawn.

And his apparent distinction–between morality and experience–is a specious one. Why would Christ not want us up enjoying the dawn? He would be there with us.

In my mind, sin is a separation from the capacity for this sort of experience, from feeling deeply. You don’t die because you sin; you sin because you die, because you lose contact with some primal feeling of respect for yourself and others. The first thing you have to do to sin–say to cheat on your wife–is rationalize it. This can include getting drunk, but that is simply a rationalization through avoiding an adult and conscious decision.

I have a clear conscience. I have not always done what I ought to have done, but I have only rarely done something I ought not to have done. My sins are of omission, of for example drinking too much when I could be up and about exercising.

There is something about innocence and pleasure that go together. Our children express emotions spontaneously, but as we grow, we pull back, many of us because we have made conscious compromises with our own first principles. You can get that promotion, but only if you stab the other guy in the back. You can run a profitable business, keeping money for yourself that could and should go to the people doing most of the work.

Whatever the cause, people lose touch with the life within them. For myself, I am endlessly fascinated by everything around me. I never, ever, ever get bored. I enjoy looking at how elevator signs are put together. I always find it interesting that nobody ever has a 13th floor, even though 14 obviously IS 13 (I saw a 14A and 14B the other day, which normally means a front and back entrance, but in this case it was just a new solution to this old problem of triskaidekaphobia). I like watching small insects, and how trees move in the wind. Etc.

I am not bragging on myself, so much as suggesting a possible way–Tao–of interacting with life. I am not being excessively self-congratulatory, I don’t think, in saying that I am a creative person. That creativity comes from a largely unregulated and spontaneous, living, interaction with what I do all day every day.

What I do for money sometimes involves ladders, safety glasses, and a hard hat. If you’ve never worn a hard hat, you may not realize that it gets hot under those things. By law, they can’t have any ventilation holes, so you sweat a lot. Safety glasses trap heat, too, and the cheaper ones fog up a lot. It’s uncomfortable, and I get a bit grumpy at times, like most people who do manual labor.

Yet I was standing there the other day, and realized that you can do that work with love. Rather than looking at physical objects as intentionally retarding your progress–there’s always something in the way in the plenum–you can stop being so damn stupid, and realize they are just there, and that with gentleness and attentiveness you get more done faster anyway. After thinking this, the day went faster, and I left happy. Any work can be done like this. There’s always some pile of something–patients, legal briefs, emails, phone calls, lighting ballasts, walls to be painted, lawns to be mowed–and you can attack that pile as an enemy and be irritable; or you can realize that that work can have any meaning for you that you want, and that if you are mad, it is because you are being childish. Life is work. It cannot be anything else. You can work with love, though, and grow from it.

Growth creates life, which creates more growth. This is how we are meant to live.

Race is rarely something that pops to my mind in evaluating issues, since–even though it is invoked continually, on a loop, by the Left–it is rarely relevant.

I wonder, though, in the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He gets out of the shower, and sees a black, African, woman, and his first thought is that he can have his way with her with impunity, get on a plane, then attend some meeting dedicated to the demolition of the American and global economies.

Was it because she was black? I mentioned this earlier, but it literally seems like he emerged not from the shower, but from another age, when the man of the manor could do what he wanted with the “negro” slaves.

This from a man whose professed political beliefs reject all hatred but that of the wealthy (himself excluded, obviously), including explicit rejections of racism.

Socialists do not want “Justice”. They can’t even define it, other than “we are in power”. Power is what they really want, and the words they utter are purely cynically pragmatic towards achieving that aim. They want the world to be turned into whores, pimps, and a ruling class which uses them. DSK just jumped the gun. We aren’t quite there yet.

But what is the top cash economic activity in Cuba? Prostitution. This is the outcome of a revolution that aimed to “free” the Cuban people, and which has turned them into slaves and whores. North Korea, no doubt, would be a whore mecca, if they were not so worried about letting people in and out. Prostitution thrived in the old Soviet Union. You have to make money somehow, and if the economic system won’t feed you, then you have to figure something out.

Socialism, pure socialism, is a doctrine of evil. DSK merely drew the curtain back for a brief moment.

I think more of our thought workers need to take on the mindset of soldiers in the figurative and literal trenches. They fight, and they die. When they die, most of them are missed by only a few family members and members of their units. They die in unspectacular ways, often, including simple traffic accidents. Yet, they die serving their country, and I don’t think it is over-idealizing most of them to say they do it without complaint. Not by design, of course, not eagerly, but because they accept that possible outcome as part of their job. I was once told that explicitly by a man who did in fact later die in an IED explosion.

For my part, the writing I do is not intended to reflect on me in the slightest. I prefer to be in ths shadows, and let the words spark ideas in others. Nothing pleases me more than to be copied, and if I were to see something lifted verbatim from here or my other site, I would likely delete the original to prevent controversy.

My intent is to get ideas out there, and hopefully ones that are better than the ones currently in circulation. This means that if other people are mouthing them, then I am succeeding. That is the point and plan.

A motto of mine is Benjamin Franklin’s “There is no end to what you can accomplish, if you don’t care who gets credit.”

We are in a war, and a war in which many Americans have literally died. Surely the chattering class can content itself with getting useful work done, without self aggrandizement, and image-consciousness?

I got to thinking the other day, as I often do. I was thinking about this idea that God has a plan for our lives, that everything is unfolding the way it is supposed to. Me, my gut tends to reject this basic idea. I think the afterlife is highly ordered and just, but what happens here is a bit like going down a mogul slope. If you keep your balance and your strength, you can have a lot of fun, but most of us get knocked on our asses, and the main virtue of this is that you can grow from it. A random universe and this one, though, would look quite similar.

Anyway, though, there was at one time the “music of the spheres”. There was Thomas Aquinas explaining to us that science and religion are perfectly compatible, since all forms of order uncovered are simply manifest evidence of God’s presence. (I think that was Aquinas: I listen to Teaching Company stuff a lot, but I was not and never could have been a philosophy student formally).

Coincident with this order was a teaching, Christianity, that saw in life the possibility of transcendence, if lived correctly. To submit to Church teaching was not only to understand how the universe worked, but also the purpose of life.

If you deduct God–or any sort of transcendental order beyond mere physical “laws”–from this, though, you get order without meaning. You get math describing gravity, predicting chemical reactions, and creating smart machines. You do not get a reason to live.

Is it better to feel you understand the universe, and find life devoid of intrinsic meaning; or to fail to understand the universe, but feel empowered and vital? This is, I will note, a different question than “is it better to be sad and wise, or dumb and happy?” Ultimately, we all find ourselves submitting in the end to some version of the scientific myth and method, so the first question depends upon premises which can be questioned. For example, is any doctrine which rejects ANY, of many, possible explanations for any visible phenomena scientific? Of course not. Scientists are agnostice. They are not in the business of proving anything. They are in the business of describing and predicting.

What got me on this line of thought is that I think many people need, emotionally, answers, even bad answers, as to how things work. Free markets are intrinsically fear-inducing to a certain class of people, most particularly those who have spent their whole lives in the comfortable knowledge that the answer to Question 8 was C, and that it could not have been otherwise, for anyone who read the textbook, and did Exercise 17.1. Duh.

I was told the other day that the purpose of the Federal Reserve was to maintain the value of our money, to avoid inflation and deflation, and to create full employment. Something like that. The details don’t matter, since it is a patent lie. My thought was: and how does it actually work? You just regurgitated what you were carefully spoon fed by someone with an agenda–an “expert”–but have done so without a shred of understanding.

Socialism, for these people, serves the need for order. They want tyrants to be in charge, since that way, they think, the economic system will be orderly. They value order over freedom. They value order over meaning.

But even here, is that an accurate statement? Based on the historical record, it is virtually impossible to call any socialist experiment a success. They do not foster an engagement with life, but a disengagement. They do not foster hope, but rather a dull and dismal existence that shades into a welcome death after a shortened life.

What is order? How is it defined?

As I argue constantly, the order that matters is that of the formally chaotic system, from which order flows as an emergent property of a system in motion.

Consider Lao Tzu’s famous “uncarved block”. As I pointed out in my Goodness Sutra (on the other site) the language can probably be better translated as “unchopped forest”. This is a metaphor for a chaotic system.

Consider the difference between 100 trees planted in rows, ten by ten, and the same 100 trees allowed to plant themselves. What is the difference in order? Visibly, obviously, to the human eye the block is more orderly. But surely this looks like idiocy from the perspective of the plants? At a minimum, can we not assume that it is not necessary to assume that simply because that pattern appears orderly, that order is in fact present? Some of the sites may be unsuitable.

I’ve been debating this with myself all day, and it’s one of those things like Scandinavia. I can see both sides, and arguments for both sides.

I’m tired. This post is not finished, but it will have to do for now. I’m sure I’ll have more to say after a while.

It seems to me one of the hardest challenges to overcome in personal growth is seeing what could have been, and wasn’t–specifically, in accepting it.

As we grow as children and emerge into adulthood, we develop approximate set points, behavioral and cognitive tendencies, that tend to persist for long periods of time, often lifetimes. We reconcile ourselves, contextualize ourselves, with those around us. If we more or less fit the pattern, then absent major trauma, we never see any reason to change drastically.

Yet, there is always a gap between what is and what could be. I can’t say how large that gap is, since I can’t see that far into the darkness. I do think I can say, though, provisionally, that that is what the Buddha meant with the term Duhkha, generally translated as suffering. He meant that we are all falling so far short of what is possible that what we term happiness might as well be regarded suffering. Moreover, even happy lives end in old age and death.

As I think even an average mind could readily infer from reading this blog, I have my issues. We all have our crosses to bear, and one thing I’ve noticed is that carrying heavy weights for long distances makes you strong.

At the same time, what I am seeking is efficiency, and that is found traveling light, not weighted down. How do you release that weight?

What I have been seeing more clearly than ever in recent days is that to grow you have to see the gap between what was and what could (if you want to be morose about it, should) have been. There is a mourning process you have to go through, for a possible present that died long ago. To some greater or lesser extent, we are all victimized throughout our lives by human stupidity and greed, including our own. This is not how it should be: it is just how it is.

When we feel pain, I think often the tendency is to disown it, to push it away. You then create a new world, a new way of being, in which that pain is not present to your conscious awareness. But it is still there, and affecting you in ways not immediately obvious, but certainly including self sabotage and lessened effectiveness. The New You has wrapped a protective coating around that pain, but it is there in all your movements, everything you do. The longer you take to process it, the more effect it has over time.

To make it go away, you have to remember who you were, and who you should have been. When you do this, the coating comes off: this is what I think most people fear, and why so many countless hundreds of millions of people live lives of lessened joy.

On a related note, I will add that I saw yesterday something interesting. I was thinking about the process of sin, of breaking your own acknowledged rules. I think it is important, when you sin, to acknowledge it as sin. That way, you retain an uncorrupted primary ethical sense. The alternative is rationalization. If you rationalize, you change who you are and what you believe. I think this is why Lao Tzu counseled against trying to become a saint. Some of the most awful people out there profess themselves to be Christians. They are able to reconcile their professed creed with their actual behavior through rationalization. Once that process starts, there is no necessary end short of utter and complete depravity, as seen for example in the pedophile Catholic priests, or the rape and stoning of women in countries like Pakistan.

When I heard about this apparently attempted rape of a chamber-maid–can I call her that?–by the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, my first thought was that he was trying to exercise something like the Droit Du Seigneur, the right of the Lord of the estate to take anything he wanted. In our country, one can readily tell the difference between most American-born blacks and those from Africa. The difference results, largely, from affairs in the night between two people of very unequal power.

The hotel room was $3,000/night. This man is a Socialist. He claims to represent the interests of the poor and downtrodden. Yet, it is important to realize that the IMF was conceived as an agent of tyranny by a Fabian and a Communist agent, and that the people running it are no one’s friend but members of their own class. Their class status will not weaken as they take power: it will be the source of all power that matters.

It is beyond stupid to hope that giving power to those who promise “social justice” will result in anything but misery for most of those dumb enough to believe them. That is the unambiguous historical record. This event is merely an unfortunately accurate metaphor brought into literal being.

As I think about it, if we posit that inflation is wealth transfer, that it is gradual, and that it is in theory measurable, then the best logical analogy for it is compound interest.

As my money sits, in a condition of inflation (which can only truly be brought about by someone leveraging a privileged position to create money from nothing), it loses value. I see this called a hidden tax, but that only take into account the government. Most inflation does not benefit the government, except to the extent that it enables continued borrowing, and continued pursuit of nakedly opportunistic policies which win the votes of short-sighted, selfish, and stupid people.

In this country, on the contrary, we have a truly Alice in Wonderland system, in which the government has no control over our money supply, which has instead been entrusted to unelected, unaccountable bankers who operate in complete secrecy, even though their decisions affect all of us. This is lunacy.

The notion of inflation as interest income works, I think, to help make this more clear. Sometimes these bankers are charging us interest openly, and sometimes they are writing themselves checks that make the rest of our money worth less. Either way, in aggregate they win, always.