When language fails

 "Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might have been ’What’s the matter?’ ’I dreamt-’ he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put into words." - 1984, George Orwell

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!" - Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll

They have finally lost it

In the process of dementia it is common to experience verbal confusion ... the words just seem to jumble along in a stream that is only meaningful to the speaker ... and even then only momentarily as their echo quickly dies a modest death. But the word salad of the Senate Banking Committee Chairperson to the Federal Reserve Chairperson on the eve of a big announcement this week got printed and will live in infamy:

"As you know, the Federal Reserve is charged with the dual mandate of promoting maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates in the U.S. economy."

Employment, prices and interest rates ... hhmmmm ... that sounds like a triple mandate? Dual mandate? Really? Oh, this banking stuff is really confusing ... but maybe they count with a different numbering system than the rest of us. I wonder what the legal statute actually says? Maybe we should take a look at it? But surely they have done that? I'm so confused.

Language is natural

Language is, perhaps, the most fundamental medium of exchange in nature. It is usually species and even location specific. It spans great distances enabling subtleties as it establishes and refines relations ... avoiding [or at least enhancing] other blunt and easily misunderstood methods of intercourse. And so it is tragic when language [for whatever reason] fails.

There are many reasons why language fails. The most prevalent is simple and prolonged abuse. "I don't believe you" signals a breakdown in language. "Show me" also indicates a collapse in language. But some things just cannot be put into words ... they are too complex. They require their own language.

Currency is the language of markets ... and governments

The common currency is the language of markets. To function properly, it must convey clear and reliable information efficiently across a wide network of specialized and interdependent exchanges. Indeed, the Coinage Act of 1792, Section 19 established a penalty of death for debasing the gold or silver coins authorized by the Act ... I guess they thought the currency was important ... huh?

Redefining voter fraud

Mises went even further to claim that the currency is the foundation for democracy.

• The ultimate aim of human government is to facilitate the division of labor
• so that economic [and political] power can be vested in the hands of the "buying public"
• via "the market as a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote."

Perhaps, we need to rethink what voter fraud really is ... and who is guilty of that crime against the people.

Macbeth got it right after all

The US federal government and the US Federal Reserve are poor players strutting and fretting their hour on the stage ... idiots ... full of sound and fury ... signifying nothing. They have destroyed the language of markets and governments ... they are the enemies of democracy ... but, on the bright side, the ensuing collapse of civilization will hopefully rid us of them ... for awhile at least.

There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Myth twisting

The solitary wisdom of a leader

Odysseus at the Mast
They lashed him halfway up the mast
And he screamed above the silent oarsmen
As they rowed him relentlessly away
From the bone-cluttered island shore of the Sirens
Sitting in the flowers singing unearthly promise.
…
His anxious men, blessed with the silence
Of the blind, saw only the soundless agony
As he fought the bonds of the rigid mast.
Gerald Barrax

Kitco reports that last week, U.S. House Representative Alex Mooney (R-WV) introduced HR 9157, the Gold Standard Restoration Act. The bill would finally

• confess and confront the Nixon Shock and
• begin to restore the constitutional mandate for Congressional pegging of the US currency to something REAL
• in order to address rapidly cascading global deficits, debts, inflation and instability arising from a corrupted and contagious US fiat money and credit system.

"The gold standard would protect [the entire universe] against Washington's irresponsible spending habits and the creation of money out of thin air."

Mooney is a true leader … like Homer’s Odysseus … who understands the limits and frailties of humanity and the civilizing need for the rule of law in the form of impartial restraints rigidly grounded in tangible [and, to the profligate, terrible] reality.

The shared delusion of fools

“Son, if you really want something in this life, you have to work for it. Now quiet! They're about to announce the lottery numbers.” ― Homer Simpson

 

But, of course, the only Homer known to Americans is Homer Simpson … and, in America, leaders only watch the crowd then run around it to try to get in front. This is the sycophancy of a leaderless democracy that results in the not-so-subtle abandonment of the rule of law and the ruthless rise of authoritarianism in its place … witness the new forms of fascism appearing all around us.

And so, no sooner was HR 9157 introduced than the familiar voices from Wallstreet and its fawning  sycophant elites [political and academic alike] began to more or less calmly shout it down [or just ignore it] … the voices, that is, that are not already screaming bloody murder [eg. the UN, Ray Dalio and Cathie Wood] about the suddenly desperate central bank threats [as yet unaccompanied by any substantial and sustained action] to limit Wallstreet's and Washington's access to the NON-REAL, purely financial narcotic known as Quantitative Easing.

What we have in the world today is a perversion of Homer’s tale of Odysseus and the sirens in which the true leaders [like Rep. Mooney] must now disregard the cries of the financial sirens, their accomplices and the hopelessly deluded public while they work [with little help] in a final attempt to steer the ship of state away from certain destruction if it continues its current course.

Making sure there are enough "masts and crosses" to go around

So when some confused populist or aspiring dictator cries out against reestablishing the uncivilized and brutal practice of crucifying people on a monetary cross of gold, remind them that it was not the crucifixion of man’s carnality by the rule of law to which William Jennings Bryan [an ardent bimetalist] objected in 1896 … merely the limitation of the material for that cross to gold when the world is full of equally valuable REAL resources … from metal to millet and from cattle to calories … which we can use in addition to gold to construct the REAL masts, crosses, currencies and credit to which we must be lashed and nailed if we are to escape the certain destruction of finance’s unearthly promises.

 

Then comes Scylla and Charybdis

But even if Rep. Mooney is able to find the courage and support in Congress to deliver us from the financial sirens, the twin monsters of currency collapse and sovereign debt default still lie ahead. How so?

Let's assume Congress finally obeys the Constitution and begins to regulate the value of the US$ in REAL goods such as gold and silver. What is to prevent them from adjusting the price of gold higher every Monday ... in effect continuing the monetary inflation? Nothing. And if they do continue the inflation, the US currency [in which the common laboring people receive income and hold wealth] will be slowly destroyed ... Scylla.

But what if they don't continue the inflation? What if they don't continue to decrease the value of the currency [raise the price of gold and silver]? What happens then? The federal government collapses in a sea of unpayable sovereign debt ... Charybdis.

In the Odyssey, Odyseus chooses to sail closer to Scylla as the lesser of two evils and sacrifice some sailors to Scylla. I suspect this is the fate that awaits us ... the powers that control us will continue the inflation and sacrifice the working poor and their families to the beast of inflation ... but preserve their power and control over the federal government ... at all costs ... for as long as possible.

As you can see, what lies ahead for America is dire in every scenario. Many of us will never make it "home" alive.

Reductio ad absurdum

"If a proposition and its negation can both be derived logically from a premise, it can be concluded that the premise is false." ― Aristotle

 

"Every philosophical school in the course of its history requires two presiding philosophers. One of them under the influence of the main doctrines of the school should survey experience with some ade­quacy, but inconsistently. The other philosopher should reduce the doc­trines of the  school to a rigid consistency; he will thereby effect a reductio ad absurdum. No school of thought has performed its full service to philosophy until these men have appeared." ― Whitehead, 1929

"Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. ... what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying." ― Camus

The end of logic

In futility and desperation, BOJ has announced the government will issue and it will buy INFINITE AMOUNTS of 10 year bonds [aka fiat credit] in an effort to simultaneously stimulate the economy and suppress interest rates ... while the value of the Yen crashes to existential meaningless ... and stagflation haunts the world. When questioned about BOJ's strategy and tactics, Takafumi Yamawaki, head of Japan fixed income research at JPMorgan Securities, said:

"The Bank of Japan has no other choice ..."

What we are seeing is nothing less than the absurd ending of Keynesian logic ... which, as Whitehead prophetically noted just about the time Keynes was proposing it, was experience surveyed with "some adequacy but inconsistently". Now ... nearly 100 years later ... central bankers around the world ... from Draghi's boastful "whatever it takes" to BOJ's act of financial harakiri ... are finally reducing it to absurdity with the rigid consistency only orthodox believers can muster.

 

The fruit of evil

When "the road ends here" events happen in history, it is never without the irony that always accompanies acts of evil. Surveying her world in 1920, Simone Weil expressed it this way:

"We experience good only by doing it. We experience evil only by refusing to allow ourselves to do it, or, if we do it, by repenting of it. When we do evil we do not know it, because evil flies from the light. ... Does not the evil that we do seem to be something simple and natural which compels us? Is not evil analogous to illusion? When we are the victims of an illusion we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty."

The BOJ is merely doing its "duty" ... the Japanese culture values duty and honor ... we have seen this movie and know its ending.

 

The lie of violence

But if you prefer not to "judge" BOJ because the Japanese are a sincere and well-intended people like most groups of laboring humans everywhere, perhaps, you will concede that there are other global elites who are not so innocent ... who operate under the totalitarian scheme exposed in Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel prize speech in 1970:

"Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood."

Does this sound more like the relationship between the global elites and those who do their bidding either by bowing as shameless supplicants, by lusting as adulterous partners or by lending the credulity of dialogue as the loyal opposition?

 

The liberty of finite nature

The entire basis for justice arises from the finitude of natural resources. If God was the originator of "fiat", He had the power to back it up with natural creation. Central bankers engage in fiat impotence ... they can create nothing real ... they traffic only in evil, illusions, lies and violence. Those who are willing to see this can do so. The sooner we rid ourselves of these destroyers, the sooner mankind can attend to justice again ... according to nature's adequate finitude ... and in submission to nature's justice find liberty from this financial slavery in which we find ourselves:

"THE natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.

The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the commonwealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact, according to the trust put in it.

Freedom then is not ... a liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws: but freedom of men under government is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man: as freedom of nature is, to be under no other restraint but the law of nature." Locke, Of Slavery

Further reading

Law of Noncontradiction

Fiscal and Monetary Incoherence

US debt IS in default

 

“[Credit is a system whereby] a person who can't pay [the federal government], gets another person who can't pay [the central bank], to guarantee that he can pay.” ― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

“Now a promise made is a debt unpaid,
and the trail has its own stern code.” ― Robert W. Service, The Cremation of Sam McGee 

Cannot be repaid but never in default ... really?

The US national debt has reached another tragic milestone: $1T in 1981, $10T in 2008, $20T in 2017, $25T in 2020 and $30T in 2022. No sane person still believes this debt CAN ever be repaid. But our leaders continue to assure us it CAN never go into “default” because the Federal Reserve CAN always “monetize” [ie. print money to fund] it. Even otherwise sound thinkers claim this debt is not hurting us NOW but could hurt somebody [our children] in the FUTURE. But are these seemingly paradoxical assurances truthful or just carefully/carelessly worded deceptions/misconceptions?

Clear and present default

In her recent article titled “Does the National Debt Matter?”, Lyn Alden easily debunks the seeming paradox:

Major countries like the United States ... issue their own currency, and all or most of their sovereign debt is also issued in their own currency. This makes the possibility of actual default nearly impossible, because if push comes to shove, they can force the central bank to print new base money and "monetize" the government bond issuance. ... However, government debt still matters, but in a different way. ... [The] process [of central bank] “debt monetization” ... lead[s] to currency debasement ... [which means that] rather than default in nominal terms, [the] “default” [occurs in the forms of] inflation and financial repression: bondholders get paid back [with ZERO or NEGATIVE  interest] in a weakened currency [that has lost] its purchasing power.

Clear and present side effects

It would be unjust if the government bondholders were the ONLY ones who suffered from this stealth default, but they are not its only victims. ANYONE [domestic or foreign] who earns income or saves in the debased common currency [eg. anyone with a checking or savings account] loses the same interest and suffers the same loss of purchasing power … which is nothing less than a present, regressive INCOME and WEALTH TAX that falls mainly on LABOR ... the largest, longest, non-legislated and most pernicious tax in the history of the planet ... and it is being collected worldwide right NOW in every household that directly or indirectly uses the US$ as its common currency.

Stop the BS and get real

Through debt monetization the government and banking elites plunder working families worldwide in the name of social welfare … when nothing could be further from promoting the welfare of the average working family. So next time somebody tells you the US national debt no longer matters, tell them

• they're full of "--it" ...
  
• that the national debt has ALWAYS mattered,
• that $30T of it is ALREADY in default with much more coming fast and
• that WORKING PEOPLE and FAMILIES worldwide are being forced to bear the brunt of the cost of over 50 years of government and banks conspiring to plunder the Republic, its citizens and even non-citizens by monetizing the US$ federal debt.