Wonder economics
by Jerry Bannon
Yesterday I saw some projections on television of United States historic debt/GDP ratios. Intrigued, I decided to do some web research of just what this multi-trillion dollar budget/deficit might have upon the future. What I found was far from reassuring. Did anyone had a valid idea of what all this all meant?
First, things look much different depending upon whether you put your ratios in dollars or in percentages. Things look much better in percentages because you divide everything by 100, which has a tendency to level out the graphs.
Then it really gets complicated because you find out that all the reports are generated by people with vested interests to promote a specific economic worldview. Hence conservative economists state that the current deficits are binding our children with debts they cannot hope to repay. The more liberal spin is that these deficits are basically inconsequential when we look at long term future liabilities related to future entitlements.
There are gems of truth in it all; it is just that all the findings get buried in the noise of the rhetoric. So both sides are really trying to raise or suppress the fears of specific interest groups that pay their bills. Which verifies the effects of the natural law of the stasis of present reality over an unknown future.
In similar light, leadership from each side promotes the findings to foster their present economic self-interest and the noise again increases accompanied with an increased probability of chaos or entropy. What this does is to increase the certainty that we always overestimate the best and underestimate the worst. This all dependent upon our primary presuppositions.
What all these numbers quantify, is that numbers are incapable of imagination. Imagination is the one quality of the human personality that has allowed for the rise of all human civilization. In short, the imaginative rule and prosper, the unimaginative are eliminated from the gene pool.
When imagination triumphs it produces wonder. Wonder Springs from the impossible becoming not just possible, but reality. From that Wonder a new vision of reality then becomes a path forward.
Putting that into some sort of a cognizant understanding of the reality of humanity we can envision a more hopeful – less noisy plan for the present. In these practical terms we can see:
Private investment can create some infrastructure, but in order to do that, risk needs to be reduced, or potential for rewards need to be sufficient to induce investment. The rise of the Internet and wireless technologies fit that niche.
Some infrastructure will not fit that risk – reward scenario. Building roads, bridges, power grids, national defense, are some of those. Those types of infrastructure need to be built by efficient government with tax revenues.
Bureaucracies, both based on private capital and government taxes find imagination a fatal disease from which they cannot survive. Hence we see big government, big business, and big labor trying to maintain their hold on a collapsing energetic infrastructure, which they created by manipulating everything to the betterment of their own power through the access to capital. Hence entitlements, pork barrel spending, targeted tax loopholes, and such are hindrances to true market forces in both economics and energetics.
Those systems we are now seeing go bankrupt. All the money they can generate is not going to change that reality. What will replace that is innovative small business, and over time some of those small businesses will become big businesses. Those businesses will have specific niches in which they operate.
What we are seeing in the current world economic catastrophe is growth by mergers and acquisition, leverage, and debt is terminally ill. As of the present we have no means to replace that system. Until we have the imagination to look beyond the present in a new way, we will be shackled by the past, to repeat the failures of the present.
That new imaginative economic future will look at access to capital, and also how that capital can be utilized to promote a sustainable economic and energetic infrastructure for all civilization. That will mean, we more than anything look at how imaginative risk can be compensated, by removing regulations that kill innovation, but also creating a tax structure that truly allows for true creation of wealth rather than just playing with money.
Yesterday I saw some projections on television of United States historic debt/GDP ratios. Intrigued, I decided to do some web research of just what this multi-trillion dollar budget/deficit might have upon the future. What I found was far from reassuring. Did anyone had a valid idea of what all this all meant?
First, things look much different depending upon whether you put your ratios in dollars or in percentages. Things look much better in percentages because you divide everything by 100, which has a tendency to level out the graphs.
Then it really gets complicated because you find out that all the reports are generated by people with vested interests to promote a specific economic worldview. Hence conservative economists state that the current deficits are binding our children with debts they cannot hope to repay. The more liberal spin is that these deficits are basically inconsequential when we look at long term future liabilities related to future entitlements.
There are gems of truth in it all; it is just that all the findings get buried in the noise of the rhetoric. So both sides are really trying to raise or suppress the fears of specific interest groups that pay their bills. Which verifies the effects of the natural law of the stasis of present reality over an unknown future.
In similar light, leadership from each side promotes the findings to foster their present economic self-interest and the noise again increases accompanied with an increased probability of chaos or entropy. What this does is to increase the certainty that we always overestimate the best and underestimate the worst. This all dependent upon our primary presuppositions.
What all these numbers quantify, is that numbers are incapable of imagination. Imagination is the one quality of the human personality that has allowed for the rise of all human civilization. In short, the imaginative rule and prosper, the unimaginative are eliminated from the gene pool.
When imagination triumphs it produces wonder. Wonder Springs from the impossible becoming not just possible, but reality. From that Wonder a new vision of reality then becomes a path forward.
Putting that into some sort of a cognizant understanding of the reality of humanity we can envision a more hopeful – less noisy plan for the present. In these practical terms we can see:
Private investment can create some infrastructure, but in order to do that, risk needs to be reduced, or potential for rewards need to be sufficient to induce investment. The rise of the Internet and wireless technologies fit that niche.
Some infrastructure will not fit that risk – reward scenario. Building roads, bridges, power grids, national defense, are some of those. Those types of infrastructure need to be built by efficient government with tax revenues.
Bureaucracies, both based on private capital and government taxes find imagination a fatal disease from which they cannot survive. Hence we see big government, big business, and big labor trying to maintain their hold on a collapsing energetic infrastructure, which they created by manipulating everything to the betterment of their own power through the access to capital. Hence entitlements, pork barrel spending, targeted tax loopholes, and such are hindrances to true market forces in both economics and energetics.
Those systems we are now seeing go bankrupt. All the money they can generate is not going to change that reality. What will replace that is innovative small business, and over time some of those small businesses will become big businesses. Those businesses will have specific niches in which they operate.
What we are seeing in the current world economic catastrophe is growth by mergers and acquisition, leverage, and debt is terminally ill. As of the present we have no means to replace that system. Until we have the imagination to look beyond the present in a new way, we will be shackled by the past, to repeat the failures of the present.
That new imaginative economic future will look at access to capital, and also how that capital can be utilized to promote a sustainable economic and energetic infrastructure for all civilization. That will mean, we more than anything look at how imaginative risk can be compensated, by removing regulations that kill innovation, but also creating a tax structure that truly allows for true creation of wealth rather than just playing with money.