In our previous lesson, I introduced you to the concept of the Market as a woman. She is; she has to be. Now, some may consider this rather an antiquated notion. After all, we’re no longer allowed to feminize ships and other things. Asserting the masculinity or the femininity of an object is particularly offensive to the Feminist Set. After all, asserting masculinity is chauvinistic, and asserting femininity is derogatory, isn’t it?
All Feminists should become Free-Market capitalists when they discover the truth about how the Republican and Democratic chauvinist pigs in politics have tried to keep Miss. Market pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen. They collectively knock up our lady Market by creating artificial booms, and when she delivers her octuplets, she is stricken with intense post-partum depression for years—all while the Political Class fails to pay child-support while they’re out carousing with the blonde-dumb-and-hot Eurotrash Miss. Socialista and her Italian cousin Fascista.
What the chauvinists don’t realize is that Miss Market has all the attitude, skill, and awesomeness of Uma Thurman in her role in Kill Bill, only as a red-head instead of as a blonde. She is someone with whom you do not fuck. She has this calm and sometimes demur surface. She used to be fairly happy with life, but at times like this, she has this seething rage which comes out when she has been pushed too far, and Heaven help us, this time she’s been pushed way too far.
It was a Scotsman—that old Adam Smith—who first saw the Invisible Hand, and if the phrase “Man-Hands” had been coined by Jerry Seinfeld in the 1700s rather than in modern times, Smith would have remarked that Miss. Market’s hands were indeed not “Man-Hands” but perfectly feminine. Since she was first seen in Scotland, we can assume she is Scottish, and I’ll tell you from personal experience that Scottish red-heads are just as hot as their more-famous Irish counterparts.
We in the West have spent the past two centuries benefiting from her many skills – she in her innovative, brilliant, economic-freedom-loving glory has given us everything from Air Conditioning to Zouave rifles. Unfortunately, we have become a society of narcissists from the top down, and when you pair an otherwise independent woman with a narcissistic control freak, one of two things happen: she is broken, or she gets revenge.
In our narcissism, we’ve continued our society’s dalliances with the two European bimos while keeping Miss Market firmly under our thumb. We still want Miss Market to provide us with prosperity, we still want her to cook up new ideas, but we want to have our affairs with the bimbos as well—by adopting policies that are repugnant to Miss Market’s infinite sensibility.
She’s not one to be taken advantage of. Twelve years after Woodrow Wilson’s income tax and Federal Reserve were created, causing a massive and unsustainable economic boom, she warned the people in the 1920s that you can’t leverage your investments that much. She warned that you can’t have central bankers in charge of the economy, she wants to handle it. We didn’t listen. She warned that a 90% tax on the investment class is not conducive to economic prosperity. She got fed up with having to deal with us like we’re children, and left for 15 years while Hoover and Roosevelt pilfered their joint-account, and then lucked out by having a destructive global war that “restored’ prosperity under the Broken Window Fallacy espoused by Military Keynesians. The difference between Roosevelt’s economy policies and Adolf Hitler’s was purely academic: both wanted State control but private ownership of the means of production via the Italian system, and used every means in their power to create that. Long before he became the reviled madman we all know today, Adolf Hitler expressed his support for Roosevelt’s New Deal, as the New York Times reported in 1933: “There is at least one official voice in Europe that expresses understanding of the method and motives of President Roosevelt. This voice is that of Germany, as represented by Chancellor Adolf Hitler.”
After the war, Truman and Eisenhower pleaded for Miss Market to return. Kennedy, being the sweet-talker he was, finally got her to come back after his administration insisted that Congress lower the top tax rates. For a brief period in the 1960s, it looked like America really had changed, especially as Kennedy listened to Miss Market’s entreaties and signed an executive order commanding the U.S. Treasury to immediately resume coining money from silver, and printing money with silver-backing, just as the Constitution commands (Article I Section 10.) Shortly after his executive order 11110, Kennedy was gunned down. (At this point, your author ought to mention that he’s not a Kennedy conspiracy nut, and does not imply a correlation between the executive order and the assassination: to do so would not be insane, but your author has the humility to say “I don’t know why they shot him.”) When Lyndon Johnson took over, he began abusing Miss Market just as the others had before, and instituted the Great Society while receiving certain favors from the aforementioned European bimbos.
Miss Market got fed up again when Nixon closed the “gold window” and abrogated Bretton Woods, the post-war agreement that the U.S. dollar would remain fixed in price to gold, if the world used the dollar as the international currency. When Bretton Woods vanished and the dollar was unpegged from gold, Miss Market packed her bags again and the rest of the 1970s were characterized by Disco and stagflation (unlike the Kennedy assassination in the previous paragraph, your author believes there is a direct correlation between those horrible clothes and stagflation.)
It took another sweet-talker, this time from Hollywood, the ever-charming Ronald Reagan to bring Miss Market back. As disco dancers became coke-fiend stock traders, Reagan’s administration cut taxes and embarked on a massive military buildup. Miss Market is not a huge fan of the Military Industrial Complex, but she knew where Reagan was going with the arms race to bankrupt the USSR. Little did Reagan realize that Miss Market had a plan herself this time: she knew something would have to fill the vacuum when Communism collapsed. She knew, back in the 80s, she was going to be leaving for good, so she played along with Ronnie’s Borrow and Spend for Defense policy and kept up with her national housekeeping as if we were enjoying a truly free market economy rather than a Guns and Butter economy. After the election of George H.W. Bush and his “no-new-taxes” lie was made evident, she kind of let the economy enter a recession towards the end of the only Bush Sr. term. She stuck around for Clinton, since she has a soft-spot for sweet-talkers it seems. When Bush arrived, despite his efforts to imitate Reagan before 9/11 happened, she was packing her bags. She saw in Vladimir Putin everything she could ever want in a man: strength, rock hard abs, Judo skills, stability, genuine Orthodox faith, a daring and enterprising nature: he was the ultimate bad-ass and now that fat-ass Yeltsin was long gone, she saw Russia as the new land of opportunity. America was too far gone down its narcissistic, passive-aggressive abuse towards her, not to mention the humiliating affair with the cousins Socialista and Fascista. America had come to take Miss Market for granted, and if there’s anything a woman like her doesn’t like, it’s being taken for granted. Sure, Putin has his bad points, and isn’t a pure Capitalist by any stretch, but he is manly, and Miss Market tends to eschew feminized, decadent males who fear risk and seek social safety nets.
Miss Market has left America. She’s given us technology, wealth, and all manner of gifts. She is an industrious, beautiful woman. Proverbs 31 was probably written just for her. Yet America has this fascination with blondes, and Obama may be no different. He just proposed marriage to the sexy, pseudointellectual bimbo Socialista as America declines into a non-innovative, stagnant state like Japan in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, Miss Market is sharing all her brilliance with the former sworn-enemies of Freedom, and her children are grown up and speak Russian, Mandarin, Polish, Estonian and Latvian and other former Warsaw-Pact languages fluently.
Despite what Republicans and Democrats would have you believe as they talk smack about the ex who made them, Miss Market doesn’t give a damn about politics. She cares only about economics: the hard-and-fast rules that govern human nature as we innovate and exchange one thing for another. She made America, but American politicians (and their corrupt corporatist cronies) abused her for the past hundred years—every time she left, they begged her to come back and she did: not out of stupidity or battered-wife-syndrome, but out of her supreme, Divinely-inspired virtues of wishing to see good people prosper despite what their elected officials do, with all due respect to efficiency in the process. Now she’s through with us and you can thank the politicians and corporatists for that, not to mention the people who kept electing them. She’s a strong, fiery, educated, classy woman: she’ll fit right in over in Russia. They respect her achievements over here, and genuinely want her help.
America’s biggest mistake was not treating Miss Market as a true equal to the government; perhaps even as superior, with her remarkable, efficient, intuitive hands weaving this magnificent tapestry of transaction and prosperity that we now see being torn apart from the very highest levels in government. We should have praised the order out of chaos she creates. Instead, we’ve slapped her around because she’s “unfair.”
It’s not just the government’s fault she left, though: it’s your fault, America. Instead of heaping praise on her for allowing us to have the most efficient, innovative economy in the world—an economy where people on Food Stamps live better than Kings 200 years ago—we said she was unfair: “She cared more for fat-cats than for us.” Miss Market favors no one over another, it’s just that some are more adept at adapting to her ways than others. Those who do adapt, succeed—but even then it’s not easy. People who work harder and smarter get rich (it is very rarely that anyone lucks their way into prosperity.) People who don’t work harder and smarter, don’t. Ever met a millionaire? I’ve met several. If you’re willing to pull 80 hours a week for 5-10 years, risking everything and pouring your sweat, blood, and tears into something that may or may not work out, it’s extremely easy to become a millionaire. I know people who gripe about a 40 hour week as being much too long. No one ever got rich in a 40 hour work week. Then, because these rich people want better lives for their children so their children don’t have to work 80 hour weeks to be prosperous, their children receive these large inheritances and become millionaires. After a couple more generations, you have Old Money, and the people working 80 hours a week until their idea finally takes off are the Noveau Riche.
Yet, all this wealth in exchange for hard work is “unfair.”
Miss Market thinks we’re full of shit for hating harder-working and smarter-working people. So she’s left us to wallow in a mire of stagflation which will lead to at least a decade of civil unrest, increasing joblessness, and possibly the end of America as we know it.
Miss Market is not coming back any time soon, because America chose a stupid path: The Road to Serfdom. (Note the irony: this cartoon pamphlet version of Nobel Prize winning economist F.A. Hayek’s masterpiece was published by GM in the 1950s. How the mighty have fallen.)
Class is dismissed. No quiz this time. Our next lesson will be entitled: “What Money Is and What It Ain’t,” which ought to be a self-explanatory title, but Bob will return. The lesson after that will conclude the first “semester” of Economics for Fun and Not Much Profit, with a discussion of The Road to Serfdom, what mile-marker we’ve reached in the past 8 years on this autobahn to poverty, and how the pedal is now to the metal.
Tags: Civics 101
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