So what is the true rate of inflation?

There is no one true rate of inflation, since to estimate inflation, one has to compare apples and oranges, and there is no one valid way of doing this.

But if inflation is substantially less than ten percent a year, we are consuming substantially more goods this year than last year.  Do you think we are consuming substantially more goods this year than last year?

But whatever the true rate of inflation might be, it is increasing.  It is not increasing fast as I expected, not increasing very fast at all.  It is increasing at about two percent a year, so if this year inflation was not ten percent, but eight percent, next year it will be ten percent a year, and the year after that, twelve percent a year.  The rate at which prices increase, is itself increasing.

This does not sound all that terrifying, but recall that hyperinflation begins as the collapse of a paper bubble.  Everyone wakes up one morning realizing that inflation is a lot higher than they thought and will only get worse, so they all try to unload their paper at the same time for tangibles:  Land in productive use, gold, ammo, guns, non perishable food items, alcohol,  and suchlike, also overseas non tangible assets, paper assets regulated by solvent governments.

Only to discover that they cannot all unload their paper money at the same time.

If the rate of inflation is high and increasing, sooner or later, it suddenly starts to increase a lot faster.  Suppose inflation this year was seven percent, then next year it will nine percent, which is not imminent doom.  If people are not panicking today, they are unlikely to panic tomorrow. The end is not nigh.  But the end, nonetheless, is in sight.

I don’t quite know what you’d call these rituals, but the term “private health-care system” doesn’t seem the most obvious fit. Indeed, as in so many other areas of American life — the Fannie-Freddied mortgage market, the six-figure college education — the main purpose of these dysfunctional labyrinths ever more disconnected from any genuinely free market seems to be to discredit the very concept of a “private” system and thus soften up the electorate for statist fixes.

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In free, functioning societies, it ought to be easy to buy a bottle of pills. The fact that it isn’t is one reason why America has a real bad headache.

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if you price your time, even if you price it at kind of minimum wage, the amount of time it takes, this is my problem, that everywhere you look now, you’re seeing a remorseless transfer of time, and time is money, of time and money from the productive class to the kind of bureaucratic sclerosis class.

In a previous post of mine, I observe that the US health care system is socialism without a central plan, and capitalism without markets or prices. Obama is not socializing it. He is making it more socialist than it was.

This is not riot control, it is a manufactured photo opportunity

Manufacturing the appearance of significance

Observe the hand motion.  He is tossing a smoke grenade just in front, not at the protestors.  If you are wondering how heavily outnumbered protestors accomplished their goal  of occupying the city hall, despite announcing it at least a day in advance, the above photo explains the inexplicable.

And here are the protestors are in occupation, burning the vandalized and stolen city hall flag.  Although the photo does not show it, police are watching a short distance away.

Another photo opportunity while police watch

There were amply sufficient police watching to have seriously cramped their style, and yet, they did not.  First the photo opportunity, then the police intervene.  When the police finally intervene, the protestors yield without any resistance or fuss, revealing police complicity in this photo opp.

This post placed in the economics category, as well as the politics, being an example of your tax dollars at work, the government funding agitation for more government funding.

From 2009 May to 2011 November total business sales in dollars rose twenty six percent, ten percent a year, which to me, though not to Bernanke, looks like good reason to scream panic and hit the brakes, to raise real interest rates to at least normal levels, and arguably higher.

The reason Bernanke is not panicking is that from 2008 July to 2009 May, total sales fell by the same amount, so, Bernanke presumably figures, we are just getting back to normal, and indeed still have not gotten to back to anything like the old normal, because these are inflated dollars.  Continue at this rate for a a year and a bit, then we will be back to the old normal, in terms of real value of goods sold,

So he proposes to continue at this rate for another year and a bit, to early 2014.

Which makes perfect sense if you think the US economy is still as capable of producing wealth as ever it was.

I don’t think we can get back to the old normal without fundamental political change, and by fundamental change, I don’t mean any of the current crowd of Obama look alikes that the Republican party is offering.

In a year and a bit, early 2014, it will become apparent whether I was right or Bernanke was right.

“The low level of inflation is a validation,” Bernanke said. “There are some who were very concerned that our balance-sheet policies and the like would lead to high inflation. There’s certainly no sign of that yet.”

Really?  Sales have gone up ten percent in nominal value, which only makes sense if the real rate of inflation is seven to ten percent.  The US economy is on fire, and Bernanke pledges to continue throwing gasoline on the flames.

Why the madness? Well, reading human souls is a chancy business, but here is my reading:

For political reasons the left, aka the United States Government, aka the guys who cannot be fired or lose their jobs no matter how badly they screw up, has been hurling great gobs of money at political insiders, such as favored bankers and financiers, and also great gobs of money at favored voting blocks, in particular Mexicans.

Therefore, everyone has to believe that these policies are not a matter of throwing America over the cliff for short term political and financial gain, even though the US economy appears to be falling off a cliff, but rather are sound and principled actions dictated by sound economic reasoning, and the reasoning is, um, ah, err, uh – Oh yes. Vitally needed Keynesian stimulus!

And if Keynesian stimulus is vitally needed, then we must be suffering serious deflation.

So everyone who knows how to get ahead convinces himself that we are suffering serious deflation, or at least that inflation is a very minor problem. And of course these guys don’t do any shopping, and they don’t know anyone who does their own shopping, so there is no inconvenient risk of reality butting its head in where it is not wanted. The Bureau of labor statistics notes that computers are greatly improving in value, televisions are significantly improving in value, and blithely closes its eyes to the fact that everything you need to live is getting more expensive.

And now, something even chancier than reading human souls: Reading the future: I think we are nine to eighteen months from an “Oh $#!%” moment when everyone except the ruling elite recognizes that the US economy is in total meltdown, and about three years to five years or so for the ruling elite to catch on.

There is a lot of ruin in a nation, and I still predict ruin around 2020-2025 or so, but this disturbing statement by Bernanke, and everyone’s calm acceptance that it is perfectly reasonable, and that there is nothing even faintly suggestive of madness and evil about it, leads me to predict interesting times arriving sooner than that.

A lot of people think that the ruling elite is cynically aware of what it is doing, but seems to me that everyone knew of the mortgage meltdown in 2005 November, whereas Goldman and Sach did not start unloading their mortgage exposure onto their customers until 2007. In the mortgage crisis, the elite from Harvard were the last to know.  That is why they needed to be bailed out.

Similarly, when the Soviet Union was falling, after 1985 lots of people knew the fall was imminent, yet the left, aka the government, was still in denial well after it had fallen.

We are not ruled by an elite selected for intelligence, but rather for the ability to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Leading climate scientist Michael Mann and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman are really smart guys? The guys who write the New York Times are really smart?

A university selects for diligence, intelligence, ability to follow orders, and willingness to follow orders, thus a degree signals these things to employers, and a high degree from an elite university signals more of these things to employers. It also, however, selects for political correctness, or the well simulated appearance of political correctness, and as the left has become ever lefter, political correctness has increasingly become a signal of stupidity, real or pretended.

Who is the most influential scientist?

Michael Mann, a Yale PhD, who does not have enough brains to know when he is telling lies with statistics, and who has his students and employees perform any task that is intellectually demanding.

Once upon a time, the left position was arguably clever and sophisticated. By and by, it became more a collection of elaborate and extremely clever rationalizations for propositions that were quite stupid. Galbraith, Gould,and Chomsky were great rationalizers for obviously stupid propositions. Quote any of Chomsky’s conclusions without the very clever lead up, he sounds like a monkey flinging $#!%. But there was a very clever lead up.

However, as leftism has become increasingly stupid, barefaced assertion has replaced clever rationalization. This transition is visible in the career of Paul Krugman, his Nobel prize winning work being clever rationalizations for politically desired stupid conclusions, his recent work being mere proclamations of holy dogma.

Observe the response by the KOS tribe to some guy making the point that Muslims have all the characteristics that the left attribute to Christians:   It is a troop of monkeys flinging their $#!% from the trees.

OK, that troop of monkeys is merely the rank and file leftists, not necessarily Harvard PhDs, (though chances are that quite a lot of them are Harvard PhDs, with advanced degrees in education and victim studies). Surely the leadership is, however, a lot smarter?

Well yes, the leadership is smarter, but that does not actually make them smart. Here is one of the top monkeys flinging his $#!% from his tree.

This is the cognitive elite?

There is a lot of ruin in a nation.  I have been predicting that we will probably not see hyperinflationary collapse for several years.  I find this data surprising and confusing. Either we are booming, or we are inflating, and it does not feel like we are booming.

While Google is wonderfully politically correct, and would never dream of suggesting that black people are stupid, the scam service they are selling in Kenya is predicated on the assumption that black people are stupid.

Mocality is a Kenyan business whose main asset is a database of Kenyan businesses, and a web service for looking up those businesses.  It creates, for every Kenyan business it can find, a short web page, directly competing with Google advertising.  Kenyans look up Mocality when they want to find a business, rather than googling.

Google call centers would look up businesses listed by Mocality, cold call them, and try to telemarket them Googles hosting service.

Very few Kenyan businesses have the skills to create a web page, nor any compelling reason to acquire such skills when Mocality creates a web page free of charge for every Kenyan business, so they had no use for the hosting service that Google was selling.

So, part of the Google telemarketer script was that Mocality was supposedly going to charge businesses some extravagant fee for their listing, and that is why Kenyan businesses supposedly needed their own host and their own web page.

This destruction allows a new past to be written, a demonized and hate filled past.

Now one might suppose that this destruction is unintentional, a mere result of perverse incentives, though what is the incentive that compels people to destroy books that would bring high prices on Amazon? But that Google gives limited access to our past, and that books are becoming lefter and lefter makes this destruction suspicious.  For example the disturbingly politically incorrect Hakayit Abdullah by Munshi Abdullah is available on google only in snippet view.  Why only snippet view?  The translation was published in 1874, which makes it well and truly out of copyright everywhere in the world.   Google only gives full access to a tiny handful of past texts.  One can get around this by looking up texts on google book search, then downloading them from the internet archive.  Accessing our past is not criminalized, nor even particularly difficult, but it is systematically discouraged.

This restriction is not obviously politically selective.  It is more of a wholesale restriction on the past.  Both “Froudacity”, the left wing, politically correct view on decolonization by a black man affirmative actioned to prominence, and “The Bow of Ulysses”, a eulogy and funeral speech for colonialism that looked back to the good old days when colonialists were free to be pirates and brigands, are available only in preview, though of course, one can get them from the Internet Archive.

The author of “Froudacity” is also the originator of what we now call Ebonics – the idea that black speech is not inferior, not less capable of communicating ideas and instructions, but merely different – a proposal that merely has to be stated for its absurdity to be apparent, and merely has to be contradicted to create the most astonishing outrage, for to contradict it implies that blacks are, on average, not merely less literate but less verbal, less capable of human speech, and therefore, on average, significantly less human, speech being the defining human characteristic.

“The Bow of Ulysses”, on the other hand, endorses the old colonialism, nostalgically recalling the days when Britain was not an empire, but rather British colonialists were pirates and brigands, who robbed, conquered and eventually ruled, gradually making the transition from mobile banditry to stationary banditry without the British government paying much attention.  In “The Bow of Ulysses” Froude condemns nineteenth century imperialism as unworkably left wing, and inevitably leading the destruction of the British empire, and thus the ruin of the subjects of the British empire, all of which ensued as he envisaged, while the author of “Froudacity” endorsed imperialism.

(Since I posted this, people have reported to me that they can access “The Bow of Ulysses” through Google, but I cannot, even when using Tor, or using a Singaporean proxy)

If we read “Froudacity” and “the Bow of Ulysses”, we discover the remarkable and surprising fact that the imperialists, the ones that upgraded Queen Victoria from Queen to empress, were the same bunch as those then and now preaching ebonics.  The imperialists, those advocating British Empire, were the left, and the colonialists were the right.  And the colonialists correctly predicted that  if this were to go on, we would get the left that we now have – one of the many strange facts one encounters if one reads old books.  Reading the works of and about Garnet Wolsely we find that when the British subjugated the Boers, this was the left conquering the right, with a view to eventually producing today’s black ruled South Africa, which the right predicted would be the way that it is in fact turning out to be.

The Google suppression of the past is not in itself directly politically biased, old left texts are not obviously privileged above old right texts, but it is politically biased in that the texts of the past are all non left by modern standards, and tend to discredit the politically correct version of history, so if you suppress old books on the basis of age without regard to their political content, you are suppressing the non left, since old books are mostly non left, and new books are mostly left.

Kim Standley Robinson, moves from far left in 1992 to frothing at the mouth insane left in 1997:

In his 1992 fiction book “Red Mars”, regrettably over-idealistic environmentalists harm people who are trying to develop and settle Mars, harm people who are trying to make it habitable to humans.

In his 1997 fiction book, “Antarctica”, evil developers seeking to develop and settle Antarctica harm idealistic environmentalists

In “Lucifer’s Hammer”, written in 1978  by Niven and Pournelle, civilization collapses, there is famine, and people start eating people  The cannibals are not especially black, even though realistically, it is likely that the cannibals would be disproportionately black.  The only guy who suggest that there might be a correlation between cannibalism and blackness is the horribly prejudiced ignorant hick.

In Lucifer’s hammer the authors are careful to make the proportion of blacks among the cannibal army exactly and precisely the same proportion as blacks are a percentage of the US population, nonetheless today the book is deemed utterly outrageous and horribly reactionary for having any black cannibals whatsoever.  Observe that in today’s collapse of civilization books, all cannibals are white.

“Clone High” 2002-2003 is a cartoon series.  It ridicules political correctness.  In episode 11, “Snowflake Day; A very special holiday” Christmas has been banned, replaced by a silly made up festival “Snowflake day”.  Snowflake Day is celebrated in large part by telling everyone how hate filled and exclusionary Christmas was – which of course reveals that Snowflake day, not Christmas, is hate filled and exclusionary, reveals the intolerance of “tolerance”.   Again, I don’t see any recent mainstream works making such criticism.

All the clones in Clone High have foster parents instead of real parents.  Clone JFK has two daddies, which family, consisting of a teenage heterosexual boy, and two male homosexuals, is presented as vile, disgusting, ugly, perverse, unnatural, and disturbing, ridiculing the political correctness of “Heather has two mommies”.  His two daddies  display stereotypical gay behavior, which stereotypes these days would be deemed hateful and hurtful.

Kage Baker’s company series, for example “The Life of the World To Come”, supposes that over the next three hundred years, political correctness will become ever more severe and oppressive – the background is “If this goes on”.  In 2004 it was possible for novelists to condemn political correctness as oppressive and still get published by mainstream publishers.  No longer.

The science fiction writer John Ringo is pretty far right, as is obvious in his earlier books.  In “The Last Centurion” published in 2008 by a mainstream publisher, a military coup saves the US from the excesses of democracy.  Like Sulla, though with considerably less bloodshed, the military officers then restore the old republic and resign.  The book optimistically promises that this restoration, unlike Sulla’s, will last.  Could he publish that today?  Let us look at what he is publishing today:

In “Live Free or Die”, published 2010, he tries very hard to contain his right wing slant, and play straight down the middle with obligatory bows to political correctness, piously endorsing the official line with amusingly transparent insincerity.  Unfortunately, he committed the unpardonable sin of a few lines about stereotypical blondes.

So, alas, the sequel (“Citadel”, published 2011) has to have as its main character a counter stereotypical blonde female.   In the sequel, the rhetoric about freedom mysteriously mutates into anticolonialist, or decolonist, rhetoric, perhaps because merely having a counter stereotypical blonde as main character is insufficient penance  for making a joke about blondes.

Writers are steadily moving left – each writer as time passes by produces works that are far the left of his previous works, reflecting what is politically acceptable at that time.  The early Keith Laumer ridiculed democracy.  The later Keith Laumer did not.  In “The Governor of Glave”, published 1963, he seems to take it for granted that everyone knows that democracy is a corrupt system run by people who are foolish, ignorant and evil.  The planet Glave is what we would now call a terraformed planet. Earthlike conditions are maintained by some big high technology superscience machinery.  The elite rules over their inferiors, but are  getting tired of providing their inferiors with bread, circuses, and earthlike conditions.  Most of the elite has left for a frontier world  less infested with inferior welfare parasites.  There is a democratic coup against the remaining elite.  Finding  democracy even less attractive, most of the remaining elite attempt to leave and/or go on Galt strike.  The evil democrats refuse to let them  leave, and force them to work under armed guard.

The heroic Retief arranges for their escape.  As they escape, we see terraforming collapsing and the planet starting to revert to its natural inhospitable condition.

Similarly, in Keith Laumer’s “The prince and pirate” 1964, the Prime minister and his party are vile treacherous cowardly scum.  The prince is kingly and the pirate is bold and martial.  Retief makes a deal between the prince and the pirate, which results in the prime minister being killed, something unpleasant happening to his party, and the prince becoming an absolute monarch.

The nearest thing to an anti democratic novel in recent times is “The Last Centurion”, where the military restrain the excesses of democracy – but they then, like Sulla, leave politics so that democracy can continue, whereas the prince in “The prince and pirate” permanently ends democratic politics by killing quite a lot of politicians.  We just don’t see novels that unashamedly support technocracy, monarchy, or aristocracy any more.

“The Last Centurion” is far to the left of “The prince and the Pirate”,  “Live Free or Die” far to the left of “The Last Centurion”, and “Citadel” far to the left of “Live Free or Die”.   I am pretty sure that anything written by John Ringo is as right wing as anything a major author dare publish, and what he publishes indicates that the rightmost thing that a major author can publish gets further left every year.

In the general election I’ll be pointing out that the president took the reins at General Motors and Chrysler – closed factories, closed dealerships laid off thousands and thousands of workers – he did it to try to save the business.

Now that is an unusual strategy for winning elections.

This shows us why a Republican Party socialist can never beat a Democratic Party socialist in an election. If you are going to oppose a Democratic Party socialist, have to oppose socialism.

This is politics 101. If you tell the voters that your opponent’s policies are so wonderful that you will be just the same, only better, they are not going to be impressed.

Whatever it is that is most characteristic, distinctive, and controversial about your incumbent opponent, you have to say that that prominent and controversial characteristic stinks mightily. You have to say that your opponent is no damn good because his most prominent and distinctive controversial characteristic is no damn good, that Obama’s socialism is destroying this country. Instead, Governor Romneycare sounds like the conspicuously fake opposition that communist parties would sometimes run against themselves, which fake opponents would not only lose by 0.1% to 99.9% but would quite genuinely lose by almost as much.

Paraphrasing: Oh, no I am not a greedy selfish capitalist, I am almost as kindly and benevolent as the great Obamessiah himself.  I save jobs just like the benevolent Obamessiah does.

The right answer, of course, would have been that Bain Capital took care of the destruction side of capitalism’s creative destruction, that for well run firms like Apple to exist, badly run firms have to be shut down and their assets sold to the highest bidder – which story would sound a whole lot better coming from someone responsible for the creative side of capitalism’s creative destruction.

If a presidential candidate cannot say that Obama’s socialism is ruining lives and destroying jobs, that candidate is not going to win against Obama.