When I listened to Federal Reserve head economists Jerome Powell and Ben Bernanke being interviewed on CNBC about monetary policies yesterday, I was reminded of how stupid the leadership of humanity is. Not because these blokes are stupid but because we put them in the honorable position of being a rebel without a cause.
Rebels Without A Cause
A rebel without a cause is a person who becomes the expert of consequence, unwilling or incapable of solving causation. We have many in a society that is normalized to two-hundred-year-old dogmas, with the evolution of downstream consequences, today’s problems from yesterday’s solutions, multiplying into unending complexity.
I never hide my specific disgust for the practice of economics, which in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, systemically confounds cause and consequence. And when it cannot come up with answers throws its hands up in the air and blames the “invisible hand” of uncertainty.
Voodoo Economics
Indeed, an economist is like a car driver who, from looking in the rearview mirror, must decide how and where to drive. Data from the past does not extrapolate to foresight, new guidance in economic parlance, that breaks the norm. Only a higher normalization of truth can produce foresight beyond the proximal development of the current normalization.
The problem, of course, is that the proudest free country in the world tinkers extensively with economic dials to compensate for bulging, compounding, and congruent amplitudes of laissez-faire market catastrophes. Let’s not forget how former Fed chief Paul Volcker called economists “Useless.”
I have expounded on economics for quite a while and made my point that the future of humanity cannot be held hostage by the regurgitation of our hindsight.
The Games We Play
For the uninitiated, economics is akin to trying to influence the outcome of a soccer game.
Shelve, for a moment, that the theory of soccer is well-defined, and the theory of humanity is not. The gameplay of soccer relies on the freedom to play freely within the boundaries of the paradoxical rules of soccer. Economics operates under that same assumption to facilitate free-market mechanisms. So, play along with me.
Powell and Bernanke have the power to adjust the game of soccer as the game is being played. Their interest rate adjustments are akin to changing the size of the goal when offensive players are approaching. Their monetary policies affect how many people get to play and who sits on the bench.
Tinker Mania
The Open Market Operations allows the Fed to add players from their roster to the game and to trade them for others. Price stability is like not allowing some players to earn more than others, regardless of performance. The discount window and rate are like borrowing and loaning FIFA money to deal with fluctuations in soccer viewership. I can go on and have fun with parlaying the other tools in the Fed’s toolbox to save us from ourselves.
The Fed’s constant tinkering to achieve a desired outcome yields the opposite of a free-market mechanism. And all this tinkering and its past effects, the regurgitation of hindsight, are used to determine future results that are supposed to break the norm. This is ancient lunacy.
We must ask the question, what is the guiding theory of humanity that, in the words of Albert Einstein, determines what economists can discover?
Wrong Vector
I cannot blame Powell or Bernanke for abiding by what Congress told them to do. As the only institution in America that can write law, Congress has failed to realize that without a theory for humanity, that determines the systems and rules of our gameplay, we are lost in the woods of ignorant solipsism.
In a society that does not systemically improve human adaptability to nature’s entropy, more jobs expand humanity in a direction incompatible with human excellence as defined by nature. We are broken at the top by not implementing a guiding theory for humanity that determines what can be discovered.
Freedom
The game of soccer is played with the knowledge that the merit and freedom of gameplay are defined by the theory of gameplay, the systems to enable it, and the rules that protect the vile maxim of individual interests from harming the collective interest in the game.
We must begin to define and implement a theory for humanity that will free us from the claws of economists who can never deliver a future for humanity different from our past.
