Of Two Minds

Better not to risk any radical evolution that might fail, and so failure is thus assured. When times are good, modest reforms are all that’s needed to maintain the ship’s course. By “good times,” I mean eras of rising prosperity which generate bigger budgets, profits, tax revenues, paychecks, etc., eras characterized by high levels of stability and predictability.

In the hyper-real casino, everyone has access to the terrors of losing, but only a few know the joys of the rigged games that guarantee a few big winners by design.

And so we face the ultimate irony: ‘bailing-out-everything’ destroys the entire rotten system.

We are woefully unprepared for a long run of bad luck.

Long-term cycles escape our notice because they play out over many years or even decades; few noticed the decreasing rainfall in the Mediterranean region in 150 A.D. but this gradual decline in rainfall slowly but surely reduced the grain harvests of the Roman Empire, which coupled with rising populations resulted in a reduced caloric intake for many people.

The status quo is about to discover that it can’t stop the hard rain or protect its fragile sandcastles.

You’ll recognize A Hard Rain Is Going to Fall as a cleaned-up rendition of Bob Dylan’s classic “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”. Since the world had just avoided a nuclear conflict in the Cuban Missile Crisis, commentators reckoned Dylan was referencing a nuclear rain. But he denied this connection in a radio interview, stating: “…it’s just a hard rain. It isn’t the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that’s just gotta happen….”

Quite a lot of things can go wrong, especially if the mainstream’s rose-tinted sunglasses induce a delusional confidence in fantasy.

The conventional assumptions are remarkably rosy: the “recovery” is V-shaped in all the ways that count (i.e. the top 10% are once again doing well), the Federal Reserve will never let stocks go down or interest rates rise ever again (never never ever!), and the Federal government will borrow and blow endless trillions in stimulus ($2 trillion every six months seems about right, but since there’s no limit, we’ll double it if that’s needed to bail out every zombie corporation, bloated bureaucracy, skim and scam in the land).