How to deal with a Problem? First recognize it for its true nature, namely decay and rot, and its true danger, specifically an all-encompassing implosion with massive splash damage. Read the WSJ, NY Times and Washington Post, but only for comfortable words and for what is not happening, and then act accordingly, but decisively.
Now for the drama, intrigue, and politics, saving the explosion and sex for later …
Chapter One - How to recognize Communism:
The finely groomed and well-spoken comrades get themselves in office by crook or hook, propagandize and make the rules requiring private utility company shareholders, widows and orphans, to execute a coerced fire sale of private power plant assets accumulate over the ages. They then set up and operate regulated and monitored centralized market to buy and sell vitally necessary power to the proletariats at whatever the cost, only to then on sell at determined fixed prices.
Adding death to injury, they now intend to issue bonds into the stakeholders’ hard earned pension plans, even as they degrade the wealth of earlier bondholders, divert power needed for productive activities in neighboring territories, raise taxes on the stakeholders’ fast diminishing income, use the ill-gotten proceeds to steal the shareholders’ transmission line assets at dictated and distressed prices, and, as a final kick in the head and shovel in the throat, boost the prices of utility passing through the stolen lines into the stakeholders dining rooms, comfortable in the knowledge that they have done brilliantly, without fuss, regret and without the need for Japanese style apologies.
The Hammer and Sickle flag, no longer needed in the USSR, is flying very high over the dusk calm of Nasdaq Valley.
Chapter Two - How to recognize State Manipulation and Unfair Play:
Little Billy, raised on base ball and apple pie, decided to take a chance, skip school and realize his dream of providing the best and least expensive software, as judged by the market and conceded by the competition, so that people across all lands can use with joy a seamless, robust and ever improving machine to work, study, communicate and entertain.
Sam, the faceless, tasteless, heartless and visionless, having not been properly greased by Billy’s largess, colludes with ruthless but presentable Scot and mean but stealthy Larry to bring Billy down. Their selfish desires left no room for the common Nasdaq good.
The sense of fair play is no more, left as so much crumpled rags on the steps of state dictated “industrial policy by default”, and together, to an Internet Horseman, they all fall.
Chapter Three - How to recognize Japan:
A country where government infrastructure spending replaces private venture formation, interest rate trends toward zero, rewarding the debtors, taxes are raised then cut, deficit rises, entrenched and self-interested interests rule, markets are propped up, pensioners robbed, and yet, still nothing good happens because hope has been taken away, followed by faith and confidence.
Chapter Four - How to recognize Brazil:
A country that makes good music, parties a lot, makes less, prints money, relishes inflation for its apparent curative power over “debtly” sin, and is held up as the prime example of how not to behave as an third world emerging banana republic.
Chapter Five - How to recognize John Law:
He was an obscure man in the shadow of great man, arising out of nowhere to claim the podium of the maestro during a time of great technological change. Sponsored and supported by self-interested financial intermediaries, coddled by kings requiring a constant fix of monetary species, sweet words pour forth from forked tongue, followed by sweeter liquidity gushing from official springs that begot still more liquidity from private wells, mesmerizing the crowds, energizing the markets, leaving a light dream of a heavy bubble in their midst.
Chapter Six - How to deal with a Revolution:
A revolution has taken place, life’s blood has been let, wealth has been transferred, lesser scapegoat culprits have been lined against the wall, propaganda machine is on full volume, and, as in the aftermath of all revolutions, new rules will be made, but not before the currency of the land is debased. Finally realizing that the emperor on the street has no cloths on, we are, together with our loved ones, left to fend for ourselves, scrambling for solutions before the reckoning of retirement.
This is a view from the Island of the Free on the Problems in the Land of the Rights. I do not mean to scare the children with this movie. For the folks chancing upon the solution(s), the ending should be economically uplifting. |
