The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Stupendous Debt and the demise of enlightenment supremacy

4 February 2009

Volume 11, Issue 5

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The oldest tale in The Book is about a couple that made the wrong choice. That choice was between the perceived understanding of present security compared to the uncertainty of passing time. This choice was precipitated by another created being, who had made a similar choice and now was seeking company for his loneliness.

Following along in that Book of myths and stories we find a time when people thought that they could find eternal happiness by developing mechanisms by which through their intelligence and wisdom they could have it all. The reason given in The Book for that failure was the confusion of languages. I suppose people got so engrossed in doing things their own way, they failed to communicate.

Some may say this was a religious phenomenon, true, for I once heard a leader in the secular Christian TV community using this Book discussion to promote his idea, which if his followers all worked together, they could do what Babylon failed to accomplish. Now if that isn’t a concept rooted in the demise of enlightenment thinking, I have not heard a better.

Finishing up with our brief survey of The Book we find in the last compendium a similar story where in the Babylon of that time, the people of all lands ceased to buy all the things the great leaders of the world provided, for a variety of allegorical reasons. The interesting thing about this Babylon was that the normal ordinary folks were not sad to see the whole thing collapse even though it meant more personal hardship.

There is a whole lot of other wisdom in The Book that is probably applicable to our day and age, but it is just a book, and as we know books are filled with words, just words. To think that words have transcendent meaning to convey something called Absolute Truth is just fiction, maybe interesting fiction, but nothing more. After all reality beyond the concept of man’s own understanding just does not happen in our enlightened age.

The basis for our current enlightened culture is that everything is natural, and the prime purpose of all humanity is to possess natural things. The fundamental presupposition of this concept is, if a few material things will make our sorry life a little more secure, a little more comfortable, then the more things we secure should make us more comfortable, and happier, whatever happy is?

To make all these things and to get them into the hands of not people, but consumers, we need to make it easier for the consumers to obtain the stuff. The first step along this long route was the creation of something called money. Money came about after trading stuff for other stuff became burdensome. Moving all that stuff from place to place to trade for other stuff tended to suck the profit out of the whole scheme. So we began to move money rather than stuff, and as long as consumers perceived that money had intrinsic value it worked quite well.

As the material stuff got more complex, it tended to get more expensive. Simply put, consumers could not buy this stuff, with the money they earned from their people jobs, so bankers decided to create a form of financing they called credit. That meant simply you could fulfill your current desire for some item of commerce, by paying for it over time, later.

In this material concept over time the thought that demand creates supply was changed to supply creates demand. In old-fashioned terms, if we build it, they will buy. Hence to watch last Sunday’s Super Bowl on a flat screen television you had a choice of probably several hundred models, between 32 inches and 42 inches, varying in price from roughly $500 - $1000. The choice, like the choice at this article’s beginning, was present security versus long-term stress (of making the credit card payments).

This choice was made that much easier because the American government decided to convert the analog television signals to digital, thereby again creating more choice in television channels, for the sake of doing it because we can. Just because we can, doesn’t make television programs any better, probably worse. The money needed to create good programs, by any relative definition, is spread over broader literal spectrums of bandwidth and talent. Bigness for the sake of itself is not really sound choice, but rather a disease, more like cancer rather than a cold.

In a world of increasing supply of stuff, well beyond the needs of any human, eventually the supply exceeded the demand of even consumers. If people were not buying enough on credit something needed to be done. People after all really are not ideal consumers, they react emotionally many times, and when they are overwhelmed by choice they withdraw into themselves and become deliberate even in their self serving present serving nature.

What was needed is a way to make money, without interactions with the complex human personality. The best way to do this is to create debt that only indirectly relates to the real world. The plan was to bundle gargantuan amounts of debt into tradable commercial securities. In the interest of full disclosure they shall be called derivatives and they will be traded worldwide with unregulated highly leveraged debt money called hedge funds. If these derivatives are too complex for anyone to understand, it really doesn’t matter, perhaps even a bonus.

This completes, or rather improves upon the whole scheme of that Book, because money now can be created ex nihilo, essentially out of nothing, at least nothing tangible and real. A whole world can be created out of real estate and energy without any risk associated with real energy or real-real estate. As long as somebody thinks these insecure securities are really secure why burden them with some thought of external truth, or an external real world for that matter.

Now the way to pull off this illusion is to market these securities to other financial professionals around the world. They then sell them to somebody else and buy something other. Not only is money created ex nihilo, money is made as the world goes round and round, just like a perpetual motion money machine. Thus through human ingenuity alone we have created the Stupendous Debt Adventure.

Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland the general consensus was that now that worldwide economic stimuli are needed to keep the whole Babylonian monetary system from being sucked into an economic Black Hole. If these stimuli, led by the continuing monetary fallouts of the bailouts in the United States do not produce stabilizing results, there are no other plans. The Stupendous Debt Adventure now must save the world, a world it was designed to avoid.

This brings us back to those developmental schemes in The Book reports. In the first Babylonian instance people got so engrossed in doing things their own way, they failed to communicate. That communication is that the whole exercise was a sham-scam, concocted to keep American prosperity continuing, until such time the whole process runs out of process energy, it simply runs out of gas.

In the second Book instance, the economic Babylonian sham-scam, people no longer fulfilled their role as consumers, because all sham-scam international games sucked up all the money, including debt money, so that people could no longer live the consumer game even if they wanted to continue.

What the world needs now is not love, sweet love, but money, real sound money. It really should not be all that complicated.

To further spell it out more simply, what the world needs now is less debt and more real asset wealth. It isn’t rocket science it really isn’t science at all, but simply common sense. Let’s see common sense: sound judgment in practical matters, native wit, discernment, insight, level headedness.

However when you build your world in the clouds of your own dreams of making a lot of money, without any risk, or any real world gifts or talents, it is a long way to the real ground. A hot air balloon, purchased with a credit card, or a corporate jet, purchased with taxpayer bailout funds may bring about hopeful hope, but sometime, in the real world, someone has to pay the bill, and either pay the Creator, or crash and burn.

The end?

From the closing of the writings in The Book until this very hour, life on earth has continued to develop, or evolve, or slouch toward destruction. Somewhere in there is some real truth, but in fairness of political correctness, it’s your choice.

About 500 years ago there happened in Europe a time known as The Reformation. That drastic change in the way the world worked was brought about by the fact that in the whole world at that time, both civil and religious administrations were so confused no one could really tell who, if anyone was in charge of anything.

As The Reformation unfolded, a transcendent reality materialized. That reality was that out of the chaos of society, the reality of God appeared, both through specific grace working within the church, but also through common grace reforming all of society. All of culture and human civilization was transformed almost as a miracle, if such a thing might exist, other than in myths and legends.

Following the truth of the overriding human tendency to choose his own immediate security over insecurity of a future they might not control, men and women began to think, by some tangible work and effort they had brought this new freedom upon themselves. This was not all that much different than the myths in The Book, but it did require a new name. That name was The Enlightenment.

Freedom and liberty are wonderful. Soon the concept of free to choose, could mean who lives and who dies, at least if it doesn’t apply directly to the enlightened. The wonderful thing about those enlightened, they were never consumers, nor were they just simple people, they were the elite, the intellectually superior, not the politicians, not the bourgeoisie, nor the proletariat.

Reality never effects the enlightened because they create reality with their minds and their enterprise. Just as an occult shaman appears to bend spoons with their minds, the enlightened can bend reality just as Don Quixote de la Mancha slays windmills from the back of his trusty steed. But just as with the original Quixote character the melancholy cannot be conquered, for mankind was not made of simple material, but was created by the Author of The Book.

We neglect the Author, not because he will chastise us as the unworthy and ungrateful creations we really are. No, we bring this all on ourselves, by being wise in our own eyes, playing with creation like we were all knowing gods, rather than completely outclassed by the overwhelming complexity of the visual unity in diversity in all of life that surrounds us.

The utopian vision of the enlightened elite is quickly vanishing from the land. In two short weeks since the inauguration of the greatly enlightened, the now proposed economic stimulus plan has little to do with economics and even less to do with enterprise stimulus. The real goal is to spin more debt and hopefully jobs will be created for consumers, and the real people be damned, or some more politically correct curse.

We wrote last week about a difference skill set required to be a leader of the establishment rather than a confronting community organizer. The President has thus far followed his Chicago, Saul Alinsky community confronting organizing manuals, just as written.

His late tax paying Treasury Secretary precipitated a huff with the Chinese and their monetary policy. It seems that the Chinese don’t allow their money to float sufficiently, compared to all the other Central Bank money supplies in the debt-sinking west. That should really get the Chinese to line up to purchase a few more trillion dollars in economic stimulus debt. In the ocean of non-energetic debt money, when, not if the ship goes down, we all need to be passengers.

On Tuesday Nancy Killerfer withdrew her candidacy to be the first chief performance officer of the federal government, all that just for failing to pay a year and a half of employment taxes for her household help.

Shortly thereafter followed the exit of Tom Daschle, the designate Secretary of Health and Human Services. Just as we found with the Treasury’s Geithner, Daschle couldn’t use TurboTax either and was also too poor to hire a real tax accountant. In Daschle’s case it was just about a hundred grand more that the Treasury Dude’s kerfuffle. It really didn’t matter at all that Daschle made millions while consulting and speaking to groups of the $2.3 trillion health care industry he was proposed to oversee. Just think, not all that long ago, Senator Daschle was just the lowly US Senate Majority Leader.

Ain’t change for the sake of change a grand proposal? No more politics as usual coming from inside the Washington, DC, Beltway.

So enlightened readers of the Wonder Springs Chronicle, keep or get your debt in check for it may be a while, a long while until we, in the USA and those in the other enlightened countries of the western world learn that the purpose of money is to facilitate commerce and free trade, not to hinder, confront, or abscond with all the money. In the mean time watch as the most recent folly of human choice recycles the demise of politically correct enlightenment supremacy.