It occurs to me as we watch the slow and painful spectacle of European disintegration unfolding that ultimately the productive members of society will have to pay back every penny of that squandered and borrowed by the unproductive and that the only way to separate the productive from the unproductive is with markets. Those wizards of smart, our social, political and financial elite, in their vainglorious attempts to subvert and manipulate markets, ultimately will have no choice but to numbly stand by and watch as the irrepressible economic tsunami of the previously sublimated fiscal reckoning engulfs all the western democracies and beyond.* Markets can never be truly subverted, only diverted. The books will be balanced and the 'unseen hand' cares little about the morality of whom it chooses to be injured or spared in a crisis. Markets operate consciously and unconsciously, manipulated and non-manipulated, ethically and non-ethically ... whether anyone recognizes them or not. And as petty as it might sound, our economic future is by-in-large determined, disproportionately and unfortunately, by those other than whom we have in almost every historical instance, collectively chosen to blame.
*How many cans are there at the end of the road?
M.D.T.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Yes, true. In the end, nothing can prevent the consequences of central mismanagement. The intractable and real logic of markets and human behavior are always the same. The lessons are in plain sight: Central planning and misallocations; crony capitalism and stagnation; cheap money and no growth; entitlement socialism and unemployment; German style hyperinflation and economic collapse -- on and on. The unseen hand is plainly what people rationally will and will not do in response to economic circumstances. You can lie to the television, radio and internet - but you cannot lie to the inner man.
ReplyDelete