Thus, this very concept of a central authority being able to bend and twist the rules, even when the result is illogical, has implications that extend way beyond daily economic activities. In fact, it ultimately divides society into two classes: those who profit from this arbitrary and unilateral re-writing of the rules, and those who are forced to pay the price, even though they never agreed to it; in fact, they weren’t even asked.
So far, total credit on a global scale stands around $240 trillion. It’s hard to conceive of such number, but if you consider that 1 trillion seconds are equal to 31’709 years, you might begin to wrap your head around just how leveraged the system has become.
As Ludwig von Mises described this a long time ago: “There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved”.
It is thus clear that the current path that governments and central bankers have selected is utterly unsustainable and their attempts at short-term “patches” have little hope of stopping the inevitable implosion, that has already been decades in the making. Pretending otherwise is as futile as it is naive. As Ayn Rand would have it: “We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”
The masses are trained and forced to consume and spend money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need. Our monetary system in combination with this kind of public policy is therefore the cause for mass-overconsumption, the destruction of wealth, capital consumption and the destruction and exploitation of nature.
Thus, what is at stake is not only the world economy, but the accelerating decline of western culture...This dangerous decline is nothing new either, as it began after WWI, when Europe turned towards a more centralized approach, with all sorts of collectivist ideas causing all kinds of schisms that we still see today in modern societies. Today, we see a rapid acceleration of this decline, as our economic system can barely remain standing and as our politics and our societies devolve even faster into tribal or more precisely into “political identity” groups, fighting each other over meaningless feuds. All the while, they are distracted from the real threat, the one that governments and central banks pose to their future and to their children’s future.
As long as people are afraid of liberty and falsely delegate their self-responsibility to a central authority, hope is dim. It’s time to think independently about whether today’s centralized system really makes sense, if it is sustainable and for how much longer. If the answers to these questions scare you, it is pointless to expect solutions to come from above. It is then time to act directly and responsibly, with a solid plan, hard physical assets privately owned and long-term strategy that does not depend on the whims and caprices of those in charge.
“It is easier for governments to control the spending of people in debt than those with savings. A person with financial resources is free, while debtors are hostage to their creditors.” – H.S.H. Prince Michael of Liechtenstein, President of the Foundation Board of the Liechtenstein think tank European Center of Austrian Economics Foundation (ECAEF)
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