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Subject:
Armstrong's fundamental myopia: Top-down (fungible) can't beget bottom-up (non-fungible)From: wearefucked
Date: Sun, April 5, 2015 9:47 am
To: "Armstrong Economics" <
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Armstrong is correct that we are headed into a very impoverishing outcome for those can't make the transition to the Knowledge Age, and especially those who have relied on a society where they will be taken care of by pensions and government.
That bankrupt society is going to expropriate all the stored monetary capital it can find under the guise of providing what was promised by society, but along the way the corruption of this top-down, collectivism is going to waste all those expropriated resources.
Armstrong proposes that the only way we can prosper in a Knowledge Age is to share our production with those who fucked themselves, by doing a debt-to-equity swap and let collective society ride on the back of Knowledge Age productivity in terms of the ROI on equity.
To understand why this can't work, refer to the "Financiability of Knowledge" in my seminal essays linked from the opening post of this thread. Armstrong has a fundamental error, which is that knowledge capital (unlike stored monetary capital) is not fungible! Knowledge production will be generated from the grassroots, not by large publicly traded companies. There is no way to subsidize the Industrial Age economy! It can't be done. That sector is bankrupt and it is impossible to extract value from the Knowledge Age and transfer it to that bankrupt sector.
There is no way to expropriate the Knowledge Age workers. We will (by necessity) move into a parallel economy with an anonymous, crypto-currency and we will continue to transact even if the brick&mortar economy collapses into riots and looting.
Indeed Armstrong is correct that the brick&mortar economy will fall into a Dark Age. They will eventually do some sort of monetary reset with a one-world reserve currency, but it won't decentralize that monetary system to be compatible with the Knowledge Age. Instead it will simply be a eugenics system for those who stay in that "mainstream" economy. The Knowledge Age economy will be growing while the mainstream economy is withering.
There is no other possibility. Sorry. Wish there was.
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/04/05/trying-to-take-the-next-step-forward-in-economic-evolution/Trying to Take the Next Step Forward in Economic Evolution
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We either back out of this mess with a restructuring to end federal debt and taxes restoring our liberty or this turns into the bloodbath. There is really no choice because you have so many people who believed in government who have no savings to sustain their retirement for they counted on some program or their pension fund has 40%+ government bonds. We have the evolution process of the economy to technology that is a wave of Creative Destruction rendering a large chunk or society unable to make the transition to a different skill set, and the typical way such waves are resolved has been with war which thins the herd.
Robots will eventually replace the military and police right down to Uber Drivers. This is extremely DEFLATIONARY which is part of the current trend as low skill jobs vanish to the peripheral economies. A reset in diminishing the numbers within the herd may be part of the cycle if we are not careful here.
The danger that is on the horizon becomes the control-alt-delete event. That is when one portion of the global economy advances too fast that it loses touch with the basic fundamentals and the whole thing implodes into a Dark Age. Look at it this way. If there was a massive civil unrest to the point normal commerce ceases to move, NYC has 7 days worth of food. Those people will have to leave the cities and rob the suburbs or starve. They lost the knowledge of how to even grow food.
This is the risk placed on the table with Marxism for it handed power to government and justified its new role as the manipulator. In the process, the majority of people just assume everything tomorrow will be as it is today for government will protect us.
The Private Wave that peaked in 1929.75 justified the shift to government with the new deal beginning with the low in that wave 1934.05. Gold was confiscated right with that turn. The the CONFIDENCE moved back to government and that Public Wave peaked precisely with the peak in interest rate 1981.35. The low of 1985.65 was the birth of G5 and the Plaza Accord. Government has been fighting to regain control during the Private Wave and the world economy will end with a shift to Asia for 2032.95. There is a huge risk that we will NOT have a new age of technology in the West, but this may be akin to the fall of Rome which our advancements have moved too far too fast like the NSA.
Theories of transitions to new eras abound, but lack the research of such events. When jets were introduced, the bulk of pilots who flew prop planes could not make the transition just as others could not make the transition to computers. The same took place in trading. When screens came out, many old traders left for they could not get use to trading over screens. Changes in technology displace jobs and have typically been marked with DEFLATIONARY trends. Unions overpriced themselves at the docks in NYC and today no ships dock there at all. The unions destroyed their own jobs by their greed.
There was an elderly woman in her late 50s who made a comment in the hallway about my staff – Marty and the girls. From her perspective, I hired only young girls, from my perspective they could handle technology she could not. She would rather characterize this as an age bias rather than admit she lacked the skill set necessary for the computer age.
So indeed, welcome to the obsolete world where Marxism is destroying everything for government assumes it is justified to manipulate society. This is the risk we may not make the next step in the evolutionary process to some world of technology marvels. We cannot make this next transition with government simultaneously chasing loose change. For in their pursuit of money and taxes, they destroy the synergy that is critical to bind society into civilization. Cut those silver cords that bind us together turning everyone against one another (see something say something), and we may not make it to the future.
This is why the most critical step here is to remove government from the aggressor mode. We cannot reach a new age as slaves. So this is a full-blow control-alt-delete which you need to get off the grid, or we can reduce the amplitude of the crash and burn to make it to the next step. You will not get to that next step without addressing government.
