4/20/14

"The Merger of State and Commerce"

"...There are now few truly free markets left within 21st Century Western capitalism.

...The newly-invented powers of the central banks to buy anything, to fund any bailout, can reach into any area of the economy, either to grant large favors or to inflict great pain.

...In one of the Fed’s generous ways the second US housing bubble has been inflated from a river of counterfeit money and a wet-blanket of [low to artificially imposed inflation adjusted] negative interest rates.

The QE Forever giveaway ...through buying toxic mortgages at full price charges on.

...Adam Smith’s Lassie Faire capitalism has become the ancient, barbaric relic in our modern fiat money Western world economy.

The US has now what is called a “mixed economy” involving many “public-private partnerships” and “professional self-regulation” and “social programs”. These are modern phrases that explain the slow return to feudal ways.

Monopolies of political power or of markets yield huge profits for the few over generations without much. Monopoly power is a distant mirror of feudal nobility. It operates in both the public and the private sector and so often in direct combination with each other.

...Most economic transactions, at their base, rely on a large element of trust. Deceit punishes trust to self-advantage. Deceit harms the economic market itself, beyond the impact of the con-jobs in play. A marketplace chocked with deceit is a fraud itself, the absence of the rule of law.

...Counterfeiting by central banks now affects almost every investment decision.

...it is little different than the peasants always giving a one-third share of their crops to the royal duke just because the King says so [via currency debasement, which is taxation via inflation without representation].

...The same general form of corruption permeates an increasing number of professions and businesses.

...The national health-care industry seems to have become almost a single cartel empowered by federal spending.

...A mix of public and private institutions rule US higher education as a single-minded oligarchy. This cartel is primarily empowered by federal spending in the form of student loans. The younger generations are saddled now with a trillion dollar in debt to repay college tuition and fees that no longer deliver a good job.

...the ultimate overarching rigged system in the US is the effective monopoly by two private political cartels sharing the same basic agenda, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. ...The success in keeping the “two-party system” in place has had far more to do with the special privileges granted by law to Democratic and Republican candidates than to any good reason for a lack of meaningful political competition.

...Today’s economic model was best summed up by dictator Benito Mussolini in one short sentence: “Fascism … is the perfect merger of power between the corporations and the state”.

But tyranny also has its life-cycle within the balance between the past and the future. Once the past becomes far too much of a millstone for the future generations to carry any longer, governments fall and debt and servitude recede [via a deflationary spiral of mass defaults of payment commitments, and simultaneous widespread loss of confidence]."

Stephen Merrill

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