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Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [150]

By Root 2017 0
an increasingly alienated middle class to choose between debt-serfdom, insolvency or opting out.

The great irony is that the Savior State cannot save itself.

The reason is the very actions which the State deploys to stave off the threat of insolvency virtually guarantee that insolvency.

The State's reaction to yawning budget deficits is to borrow vast sums of money by issuing debt (bonds) and to expand the money supply by debauching or devaluing the money supply. In the old days, this required issuing new metal coinage which contained less silver and more base metal, and then attempting to pass off the new currency as equal in value to the old. But bad money drives out good money (which disappears via hoarding/saving) and the currency's true value is quickly realized.

As State borrowing crowds out productive private borrowing, then interest rates steadily rise, further raising the costs of servicing the old State debt. This increase in costs must be offset by increased borrowing, and so a positive feedback is established--higher debt pushes up interest rates which then increases the need for even more debt, and so on.

The "solution" of borrowing ever-greater sums is thus self-destructive: that feedback loop alone will bring the State to its fiscally insolvent knees.

But just as destructively, this spiraling-ever-higher cost of interest payments crowds out State spending, and the choices of what to cut are bleak indeed: imposing any additional tax burdens on the Plutocracy is highly dangerous, as the State is doomed once the Plutocracy senses it is now an enemy rather than a partner. Cutting off bread and circuses to the unproductive class raises the possibility of chaotic mass insurrection; as the Bob Marley song noted, "A hungry mob is an angry mob."

Given these dreadful choices, the State finds the least risky option is to lean ever more heavily on the middle class for tax revenue and other sacrifices. But this too is self-destructive, as the State Elites are also doomed once they push the middle class past "the tipping point"/phase shift where opting out becomes visibly less painful than attempting to labor on as a debt-serf, attempting to stay afloat in a sea of rising FEW costs, interest rates and taxes/junk fees.

The State's increasingly desperate plundering of the productive class via taxes and junk fees sets up another positive feedback whose destructive consequences are strangely invisible to the State's Elites/upper-caste: the more they squeeze the middle class, the more reasons they give the middle class to opt out--especially small business owners and entrepreneurs who are the engines of economic vitality and growth.

Those middle class citizenry who still believe the system enables real change will soon be disillusioned of this naive faith, as the State's Elites and fiefdoms will undermine, suppress, co-opt or otherwise eviscerate all real reforms in order to protect their perquisites. This suppression will be another Pyrrhic victory for the State, as the resulting alienation/divergence will only further erode middle class "belief in the system."

Rising interest rates due to massive State borrowing not only cuts State spending, it also raises the cost of doing business and owning real estate for the middle class. Even as they struggle they will note that behind the propaganda/facsimile reforms, the State upper-caste Elites and the financial Plutocracy continue their unrestrained looting of the system via their well-concealed independent, parallel structure of exclusive enrichment.

The question will eventually arise: why bother working this hard?

At a certain point of pain, enlightenment will dawn, and middle class households will awaken to their untenable predicament: complacent belief in a failing system is clearly not a guarantee of security and wealth, yet they fear the consequences of protest and have lost faith in the political process as all legitimate efforts at authentic reform are suppressed, compromised or co-opted.

The fatalism of their underclass brethren is also unappealing, as a life

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