"The Fate of Our Species"
The stamp of our lowly origins and the true face of mankind...
by Bill Bonner
"Out of the crooked timber of mankind,
no straight thing has ever been made."
~ Immanuel Kant
Youghal, Ireland - "What a delight….what a stroke of luck…for the elite, that is. And for us. We beg Dear Readers to bear with us….as we peel back the layers of this prickly fruit…no doubt stabbing more than a few fingers as we go. We promise no ‘pay-off’…no takeaway…no call to action. Instead, like a condemned man looking in a mirror, maybe we can catch a glimpse of who we are. And here we see the future and the past…the face and fate of our whole species…of ourselves, who always were…and who we shall be forever.
We begin with ominous, but inevitable news. Barrons: "November’s last auction of Treasury notes ended with a whimper, rather than a bang. Nearly $40 billion of government debt that matures in seven years was up for sale on Tuesday. The highest yield accepted by investors was 4.399%, well above the average of 4.258% for the prior six such auctions. The government had to offer higher yields to entice investors to buy the debt. Treasury issuance through October this year is 32% higher than at this time in 2022."
Crooked Timber: How did we get in this situation – with $33.7 trillion of debt…annual interest payments of $1 trillion per year…and rising? Why did voters go along with so many crack-pot schemes and jackass programs?
We’ve seen that it’s not always easy for the ruling classes to get the square pegs of their subjects to go into the round holes they’ve prepared for them. Immigration, for example, may or may not be a good thing…but bring in too many immigrants and ‘The People’ won’t like it. Still, it is amazing what they will put up with. Yes, that is another characteristic of our kind: the crooked timber bends with the prevailing winds.
The masses are so gullible…so child-like; they are so ready to believe anything – even the evening news! Easily bamboozled, they can be formed into a lynch mob or convinced to heave a giant stone across the Egyptian desert. We saw Monday with what zest they went after protestants in France in the 16th century…and how they fought for 7 centuries to rid the Iberian peninsula of the moslems. But they often were held cowed and captive themselves….docile and dumb for generations.
Outnumbered, Outgunned: The rabble can be roused to heroic acts of sacrifice and absurdity. But they also make good slaves. Have you ever wondered why slaves remained slaves? Herodotus tells us there were 7 Helot slaves in Sparta for every Spartan soldier. They were treated worse than mere slaves…hunted and killed merely to keep their population down. Yes, the Spartans were armed and well trained. Still, why did the Helots never rise up? In the state of Mississippi, there were 450,000 slaves in 1860 – more than half the population. During the war almost all able bodied White men had left the state to fight against the Yankees. In Mississippi, slaves were valuable property, worth about as much as a new car today. Owners were eager to spare them, not to kill them. Why didn’t the slaves take advantage of the situation…while their masters were away at war?
The masses – Black or White…free or enslaved – can be convinced of almost anything. Easy to mislead, a piece of cake to embezzle or boss around…most play the roles given to them. But there are limits.
That is the ‘more to the story’ of the Dublin riots. The anger was not directed only at immigrants. There is rising anger (especially among the young) against the whole elite class…their wars…hypocrisy…double dealing…self-serving grifts...and a $308 trillion global debt pile that is to be loaded on the backs of the young.
A Greater Conspiracy: We’ve seen that immigration is a clear benefit to the elite. And here, we turn to Karl Marx for insight. Wrong about so many things, he was right about this: there is a difference between the people who work on assembly lines (the proletariat) and the people who own them (capitalists, bourgeois…investors). The former live on wages. The latter (grosso modo) live on the difference between wages paid and revenues received. The working class may rue the day the immigrants arrive; their wages will be held down by competition, while their housing costs go up. But asset owners rejoice; both sides of their ledgers improve. Their sales go up and their labor charges go down.
But it is not just immigration. Wars…trade barriers…sanctions…giveaways to favored groups…subsidies…regulations…fake money and fake interest rates – all benefit a subset of voters with political power. Rarely do they improve things for the majority of honest working stiffs.
In America, for the last 70 years, our revulsion at communism was so great, we missed the point. The interests of the sweating classes are not the same as those of the capitalists. Given an opportunity, the factory owners and politicians will conspire against the public, just as Adam Smith said they would. And then the public policies of the government twist towards the self-interest of the powerful few, at the cost of the powerless many.
Here at Bonner Private Research we are about as far from Marxism…or any sort of political activism…as you can get. But, culling the facts from the propaganda and noise, we can’t miss a kind of ‘class struggle’ going on right now. An arrogant and incompetent elite have rigged the system in their own favor. What’s surprising is that ‘The People’ have put up with it for so long."
No comments:
Post a Comment