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How to impoverish the whole world
One carbon conscious, dollar destroying, virtue signaling step at a time...
(Source: Getty Images)
Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Geneva, Switzerland...
Prices rising. Shelves empty. This is a ‘good thing,’ isn’t it? It will mean less consumption, less production, less CO2 in the atmosphere, lower standards of living, people will get less of what they want… and they will be poorer. But it will save the planet, right?
Right.
Friday, we made some suggestions about how you personally can enjoy your indigence with a sniffy, superior air.
Today, we focus on the bigger picture, the whole economy. How can we impoverish other people too? And here we connect some big, fat dots.
Let’s look first at the basics.
Home to Hovel
You don’t have to do anything to be poor. In fact, for an individual, the less you do, ceteris paribus, the more poverty you get. Poverty is easy. It gives you plenty of time to read The New Yorker magazine, update your Facebook page or watch CNN.
Prosperity, on the other hand, takes work, self-discipline, investment, learning, savings, innovation – and a few rules. Respect for each others’ property is one of them. If you can’t hold onto your stuff, it won’t work.
A rich man’s house, for example, is the product of many generations’ worth of trial and error… and a multitude of inputs by skilled artisans and engineers – with HVAC systems and stylish moldings… and carefully laid tile work… expert carpentry… and all the other things that go into a modern, expensive house.
Nobody would bother to build such a house if he thought it might be taken away from him.
The poor man’s house, by contrast, is a hovel, little changed in the last 2,000 years. In our area of Argentina, for example, people still live in mud huts. Mud on the floor. Mud on the walls. Mud on the roof. Few inputs. And those few are rude, rustic and unskilled. Doors are made of wooden planks held together with rawhide strips. There is no plumbing (and until recently), no electricity.
Poverty is a natural condition. But it’s also natural for people not to want to be poor.
The human species was barely better off than orangutans for the first 290,000 years of its existence. People lived in small family or tribal groups, with little change from one generation to the next. It’s only in the last 10,000 years or so that it has made much material progress.
And now, people can get ahead in life… and live in comfort, with the satisfaction of getting richer than their brothers-in-law. They innovate, work hard, go to college, etc. As if by an ‘invisible hand,’ are they guided to win-win deals, giving to others so that they get from them what they want too. One learns how to treat cataracts. Another builds tree-houses. Progress is made.
Left alone, in other words, growth happens. Wealth increases. And ‘the people’ are better off.
From Riches to Rags
So, if we want to move the meter in the opposite direction – towards poverty – we are going to have to backtrack; we’ll need to get control of ‘the people.’ We can’t allow them to do what they want… live their lives the way they want, trying to get what they want by working, saving, building, learning, inventing and so forth.
Prosperity depends on letting ‘the people’ do their thing. But de-growth and poverty depend on stopping them. And that’s what the feds are for. If they’re going to make us poorer, they’ll have to step up to the plate… and whack us with the bat.
And they have plenty of models and ‘five year plans’ to guide them. North Korea, for example. Cuba. The Soviet Union. Baltimore.
There’s a reason South Korea is a lot richer than North Korea. The difference is public policy. The latter is a society tightly controlled by a political elite, swinging a big stick. The former is a ‘light touch’ society, with much more individual freedom.
So if poverty is the new prosperity, we will have to imitate North Korea, not South Korea. The North Korean deciders know how to stimulate poverty; and they’re good at it. And the North Korean people are model citizens for the Brave New World of planet-savers. No Hyundai for them. No Samsung. No Korean barbecue. No Squid Game. No passports; if they were let out of the country, they may not come back.
Few of them have cars. They eat little… and very little meat. Their clothes are drab. They travel rarely… almost never leaving the country. In short, they use little fossil fuel. The Davos elite applaud their tiny carbon footprints. And some are even virtuous enough to starve to death.
The 8-fold Path… to Poverty
Right. So let’s get into it. How can we make America more like North Korea?
Less power to ‘the people.’ More power to the Fed; it has cut the GDP growth rate in half since the end of the 20th century. Soon, it will have the country in a more or less permanent depression.
Repeal the First Amendment. Some malcontents and deplorables are never satisfied, no matter how much of the planet you save. They’ll reject the ‘poverty is the new prosperity’ mantra, kvetch about short rations and spread misinformation about the whole program. We have to put a stop to that!
Repeal the Second Amendment. Guns kill people. But only if they are in the hands of ‘the people.’ Firepower – including automatic rifles, tanks and infernal, buzzing drones – must be used only by the deciders… to control the voters. It will be easier if ‘the people’ are unarmed.
Repeal the rest of the Bill of Rights, too. The Constitution makes it clear that those ‘rights’ were meant to protect ‘the people’ from their elite. But that is clearly no longer necessary. Besides, if ‘the people’ are allowed to do what they want… they will quickly backslide into creating wealth for one another.
Print more dollars. Give them out in trivial amounts to the masses… and huge amounts (by buying stocks and bonds) to the rich. Then, when the dollar approaches worthlessness, replace it with a digital currency that the feds can more completely control.
Connect the new digital dollar to a ‘personal carbon footprint tracker,’ as promised by one of the honchos at Davos. If a person exceeds his allowable foot size, cut him off at the knees by shutting down his bank account.
Increase federal deficits…more gimmie/stimmies…more sanctions…more aid for Ukraine (to keep the war going)…more jackass programs.
As prices rise, shortages appear, chaos amplifies and the economy declines, call it an ‘emergency.’ Then do more of the things that caused the emergency – goofy spending… moneyprinting… rate riggings… and so forth.
Oh… and why no go all the way? Design a new emblem for the country. Forget the stars and stripes – depicting independent, sovereign states. A picture of a dead sheep would be more appropriate. Like the Brooks Bros. logo, with the sheep upside down, its legs sticking up, it can be emblazoned on sweaters or jackets, marking wearers as obedient comrades… loyal dimwits… and reliable stooges.
Make wearing it obligatory.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Joel’s Note: Got a few more suggestions for how to upend centuries of hard-won progress, some ideas for how to send us all back to the Dark, Iron… or maybe even Stone Age?
We’d say “write your Congressman,” but no doubt he’s already hard on the case.
Instead, maybe drop ‘em in the comments section, below, so we can all add them to the NOT to-do list.
Then, on the to-do list, you can add “Join Bonner Private Research while it’s still $2/week (hint, hint…)” Or, maybe just go ahead and check it off today, right here…
How to impoverish the whole world
Every Democrat presidential nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate – Biden was at the bottom of his class). Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school. Barack Obama was a lawyer. Michelle Obama was a lawyer. Hillary Clinton was a lawyer. Bill Clinton was a lawyer. John Edwards is a lawyer. Elizabeth Edwards was a lawyer. Look at leaders of the Democrat Party in Congress: Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is a lawyer. Former Senator Harry Reid was a lawyer.
The Republican Party is different. President Trump is a businessman. President Bush 1 and 2 were businessmen. Vice President Cheney was a businessman. President Eisenhower was a 5 star General.
The leaders of the Republican Revolution: Newt Gingrich was a history professor. Tom Delay was an exterminator. Dick Armey was an economist. Ex-House Minority Leader John Boehner was a plastics manufacturer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon. Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against actor Ronald Reagan in 1976. The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work, who are often the targets of lawyers. This is very interesting. I had never thought about it this way before.
The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers. Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Trump, Bush, and Cheney, or who heal the sick like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history like Gingrich. The Lawyers Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America . And, so, in the eyes of the Lawyers Party, we have seen the procession of official enemies grow. Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation. This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers.
Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, which, in this case should be the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side.
Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation. When politicians, as lawyers, begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all-consuming. Some Americans become adverse parties of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit. We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.
Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked. When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big. When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.
Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.
The United States has 5% of the world's population and 66% of the world's lawyers! Tort (Legal) reform legislation has been introduced in congress several times in the last several years to limit punitive damages in ridiculous lawsuits such as spilling hot coffee on yourself and suing the establishment that sold it to you and also to limit punitive damages in huge medical malpractice lawsuits. This legislation has continually been blocked from even being voted on by the Democrat Party. When you see that 97% of the political contributions from the American Trial Lawyers Association go to the Democrat Party, then you realize who is responsible for our medical and product costs being so high.
Having scared the masses witless over a bad cold virus & suspended their rights & freedoms, ‘for their safety’. Then scare them witless over a fictional climate catastrophe, now we’ll have to suspend national sovereignty ‘for their own good’ because otherwise the worlds going to end.
Then with the one world govt in place we’ll have to ask them to accept a digital currency & social credits system - ‘for their own good’.