As I ponder this notion of price derangement, the vision comes to me of setting small fires all over the economy, whose source no one can determine. Some of them–like the housing bubble–become quite large. Always there are these autonomous entities wandering our economic landscape and disrupting everything that is stable.
There are many examples, but let’s pick Davis-Bacon wages as an example. This scheme was enacted under Hoover, and stipulates, in effect, that any project involving labor pay above market wages. This is great for those who get those wages. It is bad for all the people who could have underbid them, and gotten work, but who couldn’t, by law. It is bad for taxpayers, who of course get more money siphoned out of their pockets. And to the point here it is a price derangement scheme, in which the proper value of labor is disrupted.
Mad genius that he was, he could clearly see that, in good times and bad, the constant prevention of the achievement and maintenance of rational pricing would over time cause recurring crises–of the sort Marx predicted, but which never occurred, forcing Leftists to “validate” him by causing disasters intentionally–and if the “solution” was always further price derangement, sooner or later the whole house of cards would collapse. This was his goal.
A further thought occurred to me today. I was sitting in a hipster bar, where everyone has long hair, beards of various sorts, where some of the women look like mannequins and others pincushions, and where everybody has a scooter. Somewhat incongruously, there was a very good bluegrass band playing. Bluegrass is real music.
Obviously, this is the sort of place where artwork of various sorts is on display. I looked at a crudely rendered painting of a women, where her breasts physically emerged from the canvas. Oi: not really that clever. Then I realized they were skulls. The skull theme again. It’s all around you if you pay attention. Death and aggression.
Anyway, it occurred to me that moral relativism is consonant with, resonates with, is systemically connected with, the abandonment of the gold standard. Eradicating the gold standard was a virtual obsession with Keynes, and was accomplished early in FDR’s first term.
What does abandoning the gold standard do? It makes price derangement easier. Unbacked currencies can be inflated and deflated almost at will.
One gets the sense that there he was, in Paris for the WW1 negotiations, furious at the terms imposed on the Germans. He writes a scathing condemnation of the Versailles Treaty in the work that made him famous: “Economic Consequences of the Peace”, where among other things he points out that inflation is a means of wealth confiscation, and that it had been lauded by Lenin as the best means of undermining Capitalism”.
Lightbulb moment, somewhere in the early 20’s, perhaps a bit later: inflation AND deflation derange prices, and the two combined at the same time will create an invisible and damaging wave that will cause problems that can always be claimed to be curable by government. This allows a gradual take-over of all economic sectors that will ACCEPTED by the people, since they will be in crisis, and the consequences of which will only gradually dawn on them, after it is too late.
This was the task he set himself, and the “intellectual” underpinning of which he clearly accomplished.
Moral relativism: in what does this consist? Does it not consist, practically and empirically, in condemnation of specific practices, but never an affirmation of actually universal values. We can judge racism in this country, but not in other nations.
What gold does is anchor value. What moral systems–meaning systems, in my rendering–do is anchor meaning. If values are allowed to float, then they become unclear, do they not? A sense of right and wrong becomes diffused, then gone. You have the commands of the leaders, but that does not work on a sacral level. There is no sublimation of pain into meaning. All you have is pain.
So I watch these people who poke thick rods through their noses, and eyebrows, and get tattoos all over their body. What they are doing is functional for them, useful for them, but only based upon defective starting points.
One last thought, then VOB: I was watching something like Jackass, but different. Guys driving camper trucks over ramps and getting 20′ air, then crashing. Flipping go-carts in water pools. Boys being boys.
This is male masochism. I have said for years that most boys are lucky to make it to physical adulthood. Males just take risks, and enjoy taking risks, well knowing what the possible results are. In olden days, this was the impulse behind war. The goal is to win, but many men just want to get it on, and see who prevails. You have energy, and you want to walk into a wall and knock it over.
We have reached a point in our cultural history where we can begin asking general questions about what sort of life we want in the future. There are many correct answers to this question, and as I have often argued, I expect the best ones to be local. Meaning, like investment, is best deployed locally, using local information and intelligence.
We can and should ask questions, though, like “what POSITIVE role has and does war play, and how can it be replaced?” What sorts of pain are desirable, and how best should we pursue them consciously?