"The Forgotten Man"
by Be Water
Excerpt: "For most of America, the headlines trumpeting a “strong economy” and “stocks at record highs” land like a cruel joke. Michael W. Green’s recent series "My Life Is A Lie" attempted to quantify the economic devastation felt by the majority of the country these many years. This carnage has been sanctified by our technocrats - an Aztec priesthood invoking sacred economic statistics as celestial omens to justify the ritual sacrifice of society on the altars of GDP and the S&P 500.
Green, an investment industry insider, gave voice to the Forgotten Man: Predictably, the priesthood declared heresy. Economists, journalists, thought leaders, think tanks, and other fellow travelers circled the wagons, tearing apart Green’s numbers, splitting hairs, and nitpicking his methodology. That is a grave mistake.
Fiddling While Rome Burns: "How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?" - "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Alexander Solzhenitsyn
This sort of wonkish debate - whether the poverty line is $30k or $140k, whether CPI is 2% or 4% - exemplifies the scientism enabling our national dissolution: the religious belief that the statistical map is more real than the economic territory. Perhaps such effete technocratic sophistry could be tolerated - even indulged - were the body politic unified. But it is a fatal conceit in such a Balkanized powder keg of a nation.
Into this highly combustible environment, Green’s essays landed like an errant spark. If nothing else, Green forced a long-overdue reckoning with a reality that the credentialed class has steadfastly refused to acknowledge: that they themselves have spent decades drowning the American Dream in a flood of ruinous policy, even as they now insist that the water level is perfectly fine and that Americans are simply bad swimmers.
Such an acknowledgment, however, would be tantamount to confessing that their entire worldview - the long Postwar Consensus - rests on a meticulously constructed lie. That the intellectual facade of modern finance and economics, the modern monetary system and central banking, fiscal and monetary policy, financialization, globalism - all of it - has strip-mined the nation and fracked the American bedrock, leaving behind a slag heap of poverty, misery, and rage in place of the prosperity it promised. That their own lives have been a lie."
Full article is here:
No comments:
Post a Comment