In older monarchical systems, only a tiny elite was privileged to steal from everyone else, and if they stole too much, people would get angry and overthrow them.
Democracy solved the problem by granting everyone the privilege once reserved to elites. Now we can all steal from each other, and even from ourselves. This way, it is no longer clear who the enemy is. We don’t know whom to blame when things get bad. There is no one to overthrow but ourselves.
Jeffrey Tucker
Even in the best of circumstances, the Federal Reserve Chairman is a professional price-fixer and market-rigger. The private sector manipulated prices opportunistically. The public sector rigs them on principal.
James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, on Ben Bernanke's admission that he knew as early as 2008 that large banks were posting fraudulent LIBOR postings.
Economists cannot know what is ‘better.’ They can only know what is ‘more.’ They have numbers. They can count. They can add up ‘more’. As for ‘better,’ they have no idea. So, in their little minds, more is better.
That is the thinking that has driven the profession...and much of the world economy...to absurdity. Throughout the last 50 years, more looked so much like better, no one worried too much about the difference. More cars. More houses. More food. More gadgets. What was not to like?
But the cost was more debt. And by the 21st century the burden of debt had become so great that the system could no longer move forward.
Bill Bonner on Too Much of a Good Thing.
By the late 20th century, economists — especially leading economists — had ceased being useful. They had become a nuisance. They closed their eyes to what an economy actually is…and to how it works…and focused on their own world — a make-believe world of numbers and theories, with little connection to the world that most people lived in. And now in the 21st century, they are up to mischief. And part of the mischief involves not noticing things that are right in front of their noses.
Bill Bonner on Economists
