As I sit upon the Stoa and sip my coffee, listening to the Gulls wheel about overhead, I am drawn again to the idea that most adults are just grown up children.
No adult likes to be caught in the truth, or a lie. They want problems to just "go away" when they wish them to, bending reality to suit their needs.
I am thinking, of course, of the latest Federal Reserve commercial-making appearance before a committee of Congress the other day. Of course, the Democrats were asking slanted, self-serving questions to shore up their lies at home and to create sound-bites for the elections next year, and of course, the Republicans were doing the same thing.
With, I think, at least one notable exception. Representative Ron Paul (R-TX). He asked the most devastating question all session and received the most technically correct answer Bernanke could have given without lying. He knew the spirit of the question, yet gave his technically correct answer anyhow.
He was asked by Rep. Paul if gold was money. At $1,580/oz my first response to that t-ball question would have been an emphatic, "YES". However, Mr. Bernanke, pausing, emotions rippling across his face, answered very correctly, "no". He is correct. Technically correct. And as Bureaucrat #1 from Futurama once said, "It is the best kind of correct."
In this day and year, you can not walk into a bank and convert paper money into gold. You have not been able to do this for many decades. You can not go to the local Walmart and plunk down a few grains of gold for your purchase. Bernanke correctly stated that gold was a, "valuable commodity, and asset". Again, correct. People convert their paper money into the asset called "gold", but it is not, in itself, money.
That is so technically correct as to be preposterous. Quite technically, anything is money, or Currency. My work is currency, the whole, "will work for food" sign seen from time to time on the highway. How about, "Time is money". In that more acceptable, non-nuanced discussion, gold is most certainly money, the BEST kind of money.
Chickens and goats are even money in a barter system, so Mr. Bernanke had best take his questions literally because the American people are not going to notice or care whether his response was "Intellectually Nuanced". They will simply put their palm to his face and shove him down as they step over (or on) his suit to get at the gold.
The ongoing discussion about the national debt and taxes is another item I am following with some interest. We get the government we deserve, not want. This is playing out according to history. Americans get lazy and we get Obama. Has the Tea Party jump started our interest in national politics? Guess this will show us.
I'm waiting for Obama to simply abolish the S&P and Moody's rating companies. He took GM and Chrysler and gave back the share holders squat. What is to keep him from looking at the world and saying, "Look what THOSE people are doing to Europe and Greece. THEY are tanking those economies with their scare tactics...and just to enrich BOND HOLDERS. IGNORE them." Just you wait. He will feel that there is no reason what so ever to listen them. In my mind's eye I can almost see and hear the meetings going on over at Treasury and the WH.
Sooner or later one of his eager, ambitious, Marxist minions will speak (squeak) up in a meeting about just ignoring the rating companies. That will then spark a legal discussion, which will be shouted down. A political discussion will then kick off that will go on for quite some time looking at all the angles. Propaganda and spin will be developed and a scape goat targeted, fixed, and polarized. In short order we will all know who the managing directors of those agencies are and how much money they make. They will be demonized and destroyed. The TV coverage, sit-ins at their homes, and media anal probes will be epic.
The rating agencies will be ignored since their realistic rating is an inconvenient reality. THEY know what is best for us and if we ALL believe the way they do then reality can be manufactured. It CAN be what they wish it to be...we just all have to believe! NOT.
I don't remember who said it, but I like the saying anyhow, "You can ignore reality all you want, but you can not ignore the consequences." Maybe it was Ayn Rand. I'll have to look it up.
Think I'll wander down to the shoreline and watch crabs battle for territory in the mud.
Live well.
--Zavost
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