Tag: 2:6

October 21, 2022 – Atlas Shrugged 2:6

October 21, 2022 /

As I said last week, it seems now that we have passed the high tide line for hope. In fact, in this chapter Dabny quits her job as Vice President for the railroad. It isn’t written explicitly, but it has to do with the outcome of a special council of industrialists and government have produced. I am going to talk about that today.

By Executive Order and declaring a State of Emergency, it is officially titled directive 10-289. Below is a synopsis of the contents.

  1. No wage earner is allowed to leave their job nor be terminated under penalty of jail.
  2. No business owner is allowed to fail and cease to exist or to transfer the entity in any means.
  3. All patents, trademarks or intellectual property will be surrendered to the government for the free use by all.
  4. Nothing new is to be invented or marketed or even investigated
  5. All manufacturing is to maintain the exact same output year over year.
  6. Prices will remain the same from this point forward.
  7. Wages will remain the same from this point forward.
  8. Any disputes of edge cases will be overseen by an entity called the Unification Board.

To me, this is clearly a larger than life framing of the transition from free market to communism. Not being a total expert, I assume that all of these things are an exaggeration of state controlled economic system. Will prices never change? I don’t think so, but they wouldn’t change without governmental review. Will nothing ever be invented? I doubt that is even desirable. At the very least, new military technology was invented but I think that science was highly valued in the USSR (granted it was probably state generated).

There is nothing like doubling down on failed policy to make things fail harder. If we look at our current financial system we can see the madness of it all. At a high level, this is how it works.

Banks qualify someone for a loan and they create a ledger entry. That loan then creates money into existence because they don’t actually have the cash liquid in the bank. This is the entire concept of fractional reserve banking. The US government borrows that money from the bank (also creates money), which they are charged a fee. They then raise money to cover the debts by issuing the bonds, which largely the banks purchase. So the banks make money ‘selling’ it to the government and they also make money by buying the debt. This is a Ponzi scheme.

When we have inflation, we have too much money in the system. Interest rates are raised to slow down some of the borrowing and additional creation of money. Inflation devalues the currency and while a small amount of continuous inflation is desirable (from a monetary policy standpoint), a large amount is not.

I suppose that you might be asking what does failure and our current financial system have to do with each other? Well, it hasn’t failed yet, but it will because there is no possible way that it will not. We cannot create money from loaning it to someone else and charge for it both ways as any sort of rational logic. The relative strength of the US Dollar is only backed by force.

What is the Petrodollar? Did you know that all oil transactions from everywhere in the world needs to be done with the US Dollar? This means that every country needs to convert their currency into USD to perform the transaction. That activity keeps the value of the dollar relatively high compared to most. This is the activity that requires force to maintain. Why do you think we are in the middle east in the first place? It is certainly not to promote freedom and liberty.

Bringing this all back around now. The central economic control of communism like the USSR, the move to communism in Atlas Shrugged and the US financial policy are all flavors of the same thing. They are all attempts to manipulate a systems for goals. The goals may not all be the same but the results are. There are too many variables and inputs for this to ever work in perpetuity.

End Your Programming Routine: At this point, I am not sure that there is a perfect economic system. I want to say free market is the best, but that has a lot of issues itself. You cannot predict boom/bust risk free. Who knew that Beanie Babies was going to be a thing? So, when you invest your entire retirement in those things and they become worthless on the whim of a trend, things go south in the entire economy. It is looking like an un-manipulatable currency like Bitcoin is looking like the way to go, but it still wont avoid the Beanie Baby crash. So, emulate the people doing well; make money and build wealth within the framework available but keep your eyes and options open.

June 18, 2021 – 1984 2:6-7

June 18, 2021 /

So this week I read two chapters…what? That is right, two; primarily because the first one was only three pages long and the second one was six pages. Since we are gone today I am writing this in a hurry without a lot of time to really analyze what I wanted to say. I have kept this one pretty close to the facts without wandering around too much.

It may not have been one of the more impactful analysis I have performed, but there are some pretty powerful quotes particularly in chapter 7. These two chapters work nicely together. Chapter 6 has Winston finally meeting O’brien and arranging a meetup. Chapter 7 is his thoughts about and the consequences of that meetup.

Be aware of the deliberate action- When O’brien met with Winston, it was the first time that they had ever spoken in earnest. O’brien’s deliberate actions of speaking and writing his address was described in a theatrical manner. The conversation was innocent enough and in line with all expectations but the circumstances were not. As a result, Winston is aware that this is the beginning of the end.

Winston suspects that taking this step of meeting O’brien is going to result in his demise. He also knows that he is going to do it. It seems that the only thing that is not entirely clear is what side O’brien is really on. The implications of such is the duration before Winston disappears.

“The terrible thing the party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference.”

Talk about a powerful quote from chapter 7. This is the quintessential description of the left/right dichotomy. It doesn’t matter which side you choose, playing the game is a losing proposition because either choice lands you in the system of control. This transitions into the second concept of the post.

To simply live is to be dead- In multiple places in the chapter, Winston references freedom over life. He says that the ‘Proles are alive, we are dead’ and ‘the object is not to live but to be human’. There is a strong connection being drawn between personal choice and freedom. This is why Winston is getting the feeling that the end is near because he is making those connection and realizes that he will never have the choices.

There are many anecdotal supporting stories from refugee camps or soldiers in battle or drug addiction where the people are alive but the circumstantial trauma has them devoid of emotion. I suppose that is my way of trying to relate something other that the post apocalyptical world of 1984.

End Your Programming Routine: 1984 is turning out to be a complicated work that is more than a bastion of liberty. That being said, these two chapters play right back into the cautionary tale of totalitarianisms. As much as I am not an emotional person, emotion is essential to humanity and by proxy life, buying Orwell’s Kool-aid.