Category Archives: Economics

Quote of the day—Fernando Ferfal Aguirre

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Survivalism … is mostly about attitude and skills, not shopping and stockpiling tons of products.

Having said that, neither attitude nor skill will materialize a gun when you need it, or create water when there’s none to be found.

Fernando Ferfal Aguirre
Page 63 in The Modern Survival Manual; surviving the Economic Collapse
2009
[I bought this book over three years ago and gave it to Brother Doug. He read it, gave me a synopsis, and gave it back a few months later. I just started reading it.

Aguirre lived through the economic collapse of Argentina in 2001 and tells us:

What finally convinced me that I had to something important to say was the huge, massive amount of misinformation with the survivalist and preparedness community, in particular regarding how to prepare for an economic collapse.

Unfortunately, many people take for granted concepts and ideas from movies or works of fiction that have little to do with reality.

The biggest take away I have after reading less than a quarter of the book is that good neighborhoods in cities and small towns may be safer than rural areas. In addition to other issues, in the city your neighbors are more likely to notice and help, or at least call the police, in the case where you are the victim of a home invasion. If your nearest neighbor is a half mile away they won’t hear your screams as you are tortured into giving up the combination to your safe.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Lord Jacob Rothschild

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The six months under review have seen central bankers continuing what is surely the greatest experiment in monetary policy in the history of the world.

We are therefore in uncharted waters and it is impossible to predict the unintended consequences of very low interest rates, with some 30 per cent of global government debt at negative yields, combined with quantitative easing on a massive scale.

In times like these, preservation of capital in real terms continues to be as important an objective as any in the management of your company’s assets.

Lord Jacob Rothschild
British investment banker
August 16, 2016
Rothchilds Buying Gold On “Greatest” Money “Experiment” In “History The of World”
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ed Driscoll

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Hillary’s entire career has been dedicated to taking things away from you “on behalf of the common good,” to borrow from her rare moment of candor in 2004. It’s the intellectual milieu she’s been steeped in for her entire adult life.

Ed Driscoll
July 18, 2016
HILLARY EMBRACES LIBERAL EXTREMISM
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Michael Krieger

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In my writings, when I first came out of Wall Street, I focused on debt, I focused on economics and I focused on financial markets. I did all of that stuff, but I stopped doing that for one simple reason. It was obvious to me . . . that this thing had only one way to go, which is a complete collapse of everything. We’re going to need to start over. There’s too much debt. There’s too much corruption. There’s too much BS. There’s too much war. There’s too much everything that is bad in this world, and debt is one aspect of it. Are we going to have to wipe out the debts one way or the other? Of course, we will. I guess the reason I have stopped talking about that and writing about that is because it is so obvious. So, what I have been doing over the last three years is getting people aware and engaged on everything, not just the economics, but the political corruption. Every single industry in this world is basically hitting peak corruption, peak shadiness, peak violence and peak everything. So, it’s not just the debt or the economies that are going to collapse, it’s everything, the political establishment and the social fabric. All of these things we have been living under our entire lives will be replaced by something else. . . . The only question is, are we going to get something better or are we going to get something worse?

Michael Krieger
July 3, 2016
Disintegration & Overthrow of Global Elite Regime-Michael Krieger
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Thomas Sowell

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Politics has sometimes been called “the art of the possible”. But that implies a level of constraint that simply does not exist in democratic politics.

As a noted economist has pointed out, “No voting system could prevent the California electorate from simultaneously demanding low electricity prices and no new generating plants while using ever increasing amounts of electricity.”

This is just one of many ways the impossible can win elections. Beliefs can trump facts in politics. And have repeatedly trumped facts throughout history.

Thomas Sowell
2008
Applied Economics, 2nd Edition
[Everything of Sowell’s which I have read is awesome. This book is no exception. I have three more QOTDs to pull from this book.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Bob Livingston

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Yes, there are winners and losers in capitalism. The winners are those who are honest, industrious, thoughtful, prudent, frugal, responsible, disciplined, and efficient. The losers are those who are shiftless, lazy, imprudent, extravagant, negligent, impractical, and inefficient.

Bob Livingston
May 9, 2016
Socialism is an immoral system
[There are also cases in capitalism where people just get lucky (both bad and good luck). These bad luck situations are what the critics of capitalism typically focus on but bad luck happens in any system. And the “bad luck” examples of socialism are far worse (see Venezuela) than the capitalist examples.

A system with free markets and free minds (capitalism) is not only the most moral system but also has the best overall results. Even with the evidence on display from the last 7+ years of a socialist president that we have openly and thinly veiled socialist candidates for public office let alone serious candidates for U.S. President is mindboggling to me.

I’ve been stockpiling food and precious metals (steel, copper, and lead) in preparation for the end game which I have done all I could to avoid. I’m pretty much all set as best I can now. I think I just need to add some popcorn to my food stores.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

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And now we arrive at a fourth and final group. This group is supremely rational, economically knowledgeable, and indispensable to economic stability. This group can override the foolish decisions of the others and keep the economy from falling into depressions or inflationary excess.

You probably won’t be shocked to learn that the far-seeing wizards who comprise Keynes’s fourth group are government officials.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
May 23, 2016
Keynes Must Die
[This reminds me of something I wrote almost four years ago:

The Communist Manifesto tells its readers that supporters of Communism are the intelligent people. They deserve, are destined to, and the good of all human kind depends on them, being in charge. That they “understand” the benefits of Communism to the bafflement of others is probably proof to them that they are the intellectual superiors of those that think Communism is, at best, prone to abuse.

And of course telling people in power they are the only ones who are “indispensable” and must “override the foolish decisions of the others” was a recipe for disaster. Henry David Thoreau wrote about that over 160 years ago.

We are now living the disaster of Keyne’s, narcissistic, economic folly.—Joe]

Heterogeneous cultures

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Reading through the comments on this post, which has a reference to a Fred blurb, I came across a very astute summary of the problem.

Reading Fred, I see by the very questions the culture shock.

Cargo culture shock. They want the cargo only produced by high-trust, long time preference, but not change their culture or virtue. DNA might deal them a bad hand, but human beings can bluff. Simply think a moment. So they build totem towers.

Both liberals and libertarians don’t realize the experiments in law will fail. The 55 page iPhone ToS isn’t read, and at some point Tim will be Cooked because law and force are the opposite of trust. The libertarians too design elaborate replacements – DROs, arbitration, etc. not realizing in a trust/posterity/K society they aren’t needed, and in a suspicion/me-now/r society they won’t work.

And that is the crux of the problem when trying to mix heterogeneous cultures. Cargo Cult culture cannot contribute to creation-of-cargo culture anything other than consumers. What is the term in biology for an organism that only consumes of its host and contributes nothing back?

The Gun State

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Interesting. Idaho is state most dependent on gun industry, report finds:

Idaho depends more on the gun industry than any other state, according to a study by the financial website WalletHub. Idaho ranked No. 1 among states and the District of Columbia based on firearms industry activity in the state, gun ownership and overall prevalence, and gun politics — specifically, contributions by gun control and gun rights groups to members of Congress.

Idaho, The Gun State*. I could live with that.

* Idaho’s official nickname is The Gem State.

Quote of the day—Louis Pasteur

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The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.

Louis Pasteur
[I can’t disagree with the conclusion. But I fear that particular derangement of the mind is so common that one would be hard pressed to prove it was abnormal. Hence my placing it in such a wide variety of blog post categories.—Joe]

Interesting times

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From here:

As the chart below shows – which is disturbing without any further context – the 40 million ounces of gold open interest and the record low 74 thousand ounces of registered gold imply that as of Monday’s close there was a whopping 542 ounces in potential paper claims to every ounces of physical gold. Call it a 0.2% dilution factor.

ComexGoldRatio

Sharing the wealth

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Being a software engineer for the last 30+ years means I have had opportunity to make a fair amount of money. I certainly didn’t do as well as I could have. I still regret declining the request for a job interview with Microsoft in 1985 but I’ve managed to do okay and with a little bit of income from Boomershoot I manage to adequately feed my gun, ammo, training, and explosives appetites. Currently I have a job I really like, I feel secure in (the last place I worked at just laid everyone off and is closing the Seattle office any day now), and am paid a comfortable amount. So for Christmas this year I decided I would share some of the wealth.

So it came to pass that it was with great pleasure I gave my three children, Barb, Barb’s two children, and Ry each fifty trillion dollars. Powerball winners have nothing to brag about when I get in a giving mood!

It was with great anticipation that I saw Barb select my present to her to open first:

FiftyTrillionDollars

But the first thing she said after looking at it was, “What am I going to do with this?”

Uh-oh! I didn’t have a good answer. I thought about, “Don’t spend it all in one place.” But decided that might not be wise in that context and told her there were other presents from me, maybe she would like one of them better.

Her children on the other hand thought they were awesome gifts and said they were going to take them to college and put them on their dorm room walls.

I was a little worried about my kids. What would they think? But they studied their gifts thoughtfully, considered their new status as multi-trillionaires and drew the appropriate conclusions about the hazards of hyperinflation, paper money, etc. Ry, of course, got it immediately and we drifted into a conversation about the worldwide economy, Europe, etc.

I don’t want you to think I gave away all my money last Christmas. I saved some for myself:

OneHundredTrillionDollars

Yes. I kept 100 trillion back for myself and a “rainy day”.

Inflation

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I was rearranging some things and came across this brick of .22 LR with only four boxes left in it. I decided to throw the bigger box away and just stack the four boxes (of 50 rounds each) on the shelf rather than taking up all the space with the bigger box they were in:

BlazerAmmoWeb

I don’t recall when I purchased this. It could have been 15 or more years ago. But the point is the price. $11.99 for 500 rounds. That’s $0.024 per round. These days I think it’s great deal if I can find any brand of .22LR for under $0.10 per round.

I think we can blame the high price of exercising our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms on the Democrats.

More on tightening threads

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This is a deep, serious discussion of mechanical esoterica, with implications to life in general, so if you’re not interested in mechanics or in life lessons, go back to doing your nails, watching TV or stressing over your made-up relationship drama.

If you get the clamp screws tight enough, you probably don’t need the Locktite. If you don’t get the screws tight enough, the Locktite won’t help.

Thank you for sticking it out all the way to the end of this post, though if you needed to read it, you probably didn’t, and if you didn’t need to read it, you most likely did. I’m preaching to the choir then. Still it must be said.

Quote – dustydog

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“One definition of a liberal, is someone who doesn’t understand the problem, or the history behind it, or the concept of consequences, but is arrogant enough to think that his off-the-cuff solution should be enforced with as much violence and as much of other peoples’ money as might be required.” — dustydog on August 30, 2015

Many years ago I heard that the definition of a “liberal” is “someone who’ll give you the shirt off of someone else’s back”, but this one is much better. It sums up all the horror and mass death of the 20th century in one, concise sentence. Collectivists (Progressives, Fascists, communists, et al) are either extremely evil or blind, or both. In any case they must be kept as far away from government positions as possible.

Who pays?

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Somebody always pays. ALWAYS. Maybe not now, maybe not in obvious ways with a bill in the mail, but there is always a cost when the government does something. Some spending is reasonable, the cost known, understood, and generally agreed to and agreed upon. We can quibble over particular programs or numbers or actions, but nearly all serious people agree that some government spending is a cost we should bear, and paying taxes for it is the way to get it done.

But virtually nobody in politics at the national level is addressing the big-picture elephant in the room. We have a huge official debt (national, state, municipal), staggering future obligations (SS, other retirement plans, etc), and are running an absurdly large annual federal deficit. Simple mathematics says it cannot continue. That which cannot continue, won’t. Continue reading →

Quote of the day—Daniel Greenfield

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These changes are a test of reason. If you can reason, you fail. If you can Doublethink, you pass.

Daniel Greenfield
June 30, 2015
No Truce With The Left
[Reason. I think of it as a test of someone trustworthiness. If they are unwilling or unable to reason I am uncomfortable being around them. I literally don’t have any idea what they might do or say next. Will they claim I attacked them when all I did was smile and say hello? Will they hit me in the head with a rock? I would rather be in the presence of a sociopath because I can model their behavior as looking out for their best interests and make it clear to them it would be irrational for them to cause me harm and in fact it would be in their best interests to have me as their ally.

But the irrational, non-reasoning, person is extremely dangerous. There is no loyalty. There is no mutual benefits. There is only unpredictability. There is only the prospect of chaos, suffering, and death.

Marxism, communism, socialism, whatever variety of leftism and you want to call it, has such a long proven history of poverty and death that only irrational people can support it. Venezuela is only of the most recent examples that went from an “economy was the strongest in South America” in the 1950s to the early 1980s to the massive shortages, unemployment, thriving black market, and the highest misery index score in 2013.

The USSR, mainland China, and many other countries learned their lesson the hard way with massive shortages, mind boggling corruption, and 10s of millions murdered by their own governments. Numerous experiments in the 20th century, on national scales, prove beyond any doubt the benefits of freedom and the hazards of adapting the ways of the leftists. How can anyone ignore the lessons of East versus West Germany? Or North Korea versus South Korea? China versus Hong Kong?

Freedom and capitalism has brought prosperity, and unbelievable technological advancement which benefits the entire world. Yet the political left continue to insist their way is “progress”. These are not rational people. They cannot be trusted. These people are incapable of rational thought and/or are evil. The correct diagnosis does not matter. Greenfield is right. There can be no truce with the left.—Joe]

It’s a symbol of responsibility

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That’s why they’re afraid of it.

A fire extinguisher is made as a tool to be used by someone who can cope, to protect his property and protect those who cannot cope.

The university educated, the entertainers, and media personalities, leftists in general, tend to wear their inability to cope as a badge of honor.

We’ve all see it; the guy well into adulthood who cannot drive a car, for example, and is clearly proud of the fact. Driving is what servants do, for me– It is not something I do. He has his nose in the air when he informs you he doesn’t drive.

If you gave him the gift of jumper cables and a nice floor jack, he’d be offended and maybe even a little scared. If you required him to demonstrate a fire extinguisher on a network TV show? Same thing.

Only icky people can build things, fix things, cope with unexpected dangers, and use guns or fire extinguishers. Eeew!

The Special Little Snowflake, or as I call him, “Fragile Little Flower” gains his identity through his weaknesses. He has learned that his weakness is his power over other people.

Those of us who can cope are to blame for this situation, through our failure to correct and through our capitulation. The FLFs are in charge of much of society and culture as a result.

Someone recently brought up The Lord of the Flies to describe the world, and it fits quite nicely. When the adults fail in their responsibilities to encourage and guide the “children” into becoming capable and responsible adults themselves, then all hell will break loose. That describes world politics for the last 100 years quite well.

Quote of the day—Jon Gabriel

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Instead of pointing fingers at the innumerates running Athens, they should consider our own situation.

…
Print

It’s an imperfect analogy, but imagine the green is your salary, the yellow is the amount you’re spending over your salary, and the red is your MasterCard statement.

Jon Gabriel
June 30, 2015
Athens on the Potomac
[I am not the only one wondering if we are watching a version our future play out in Greece.—Joe]

It is axiomatic…

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…among a certain personality type, that when faced with some problem serious enough to cause anxiety or other symptoms…how do I say this? The last place that person will go for help or advice is to those who are dealing with the same exact situation successfully and without stress.

Progressives, for example, behave that way all the time. They will not look to the more successful cities and states, to their policies and culture, seeking the path to the same success. Instead they’ll group up with other problem cities or states and impugn, malign and attack the successful ones.

This happens on a personal level, exactly the same way, because it is the same phenomenon.

I have two such people very close to me in my life, and it is getting to the point that something major (majorly bad, and expensive, and possibly worse) is going to happen. Things simply cannot continue as they are. It’s come to a head, as the personality type is always pushing for it. There is no talking to them about it either, because it causes a Ferguson/Baltimore type response. The resemblances are uncanny, actually.

It’s to the point where I’ll very likely be facing having my business (which I started) and my house (which I bought) taken away from me, or completely hijacked, which amounts to the same thing.

Beyond giving up the capital assets as the ransom my precious freedom I’m at a loss (and again, just like dealing with Progressives – such people are VERY dangerous). Maybe an answer will come along which, at the moment, I cannot see.