To: Maurice Winn who wrote (53666 ) 8/16/2009 7:21:34 PM From: TobagoJack 5 Recommendations Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217896 just in in-tray, from australia meant to save your soul, per privateer goldSafety In Numbers If you have seen any of David Attenborough's excellent nature series, you have seen this phenomenon repeatedly occurring in the animal world. Wildebeest crossing a river in huge numbers while the crocodiles literally lie in wait. A huge ball of herring or sardines all striving to get into the middle while predators attack the periphery. A ring of elephants with their babies in the middle staring down a hungry pride of lions. Safety in numbers is real, and in many facets of existence, it works. If there is only one of you surrounded by three hungry predators who want their dinner, you're in trouble. If there are one thousand of you, your individual chance of not ending up on the menu is greatly enhanced. But safety in numbers doesn't work in a situation in which the numbers are imaginary, although the danger is all too real. It doesn't matter how many people "believe", or pretend to "believe", what they are told about a given situation. It doesn't matter whether that situation is literally putting their lives at risk or if it is "merely" putting what they have spent their lives working towards at risk. If the false information is accepted, either out of ignorance or (much more often) because it seems "safer" to believe it (because everybody else seems to believe it), the situation is MUCH more dangerous than it otherwise would be. When it comes to political or economic phenomena in the human realm as opposed to real, immediate and direct threats to life itself, the majority is almost always WRONG. They are wrong because it is a tragic fact of history that most people would rather go along with what they think others think than make the unpopular and lonely effort to think for themselves. Charles Mackay described this in the title of his famous work "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". But the sad fact is that popular delusions are by no means "extraordinary". They are much more the rule than the exception. There are large numbers of knowledgable, erudite and undeluded commentators both on the internet and even in the mass media who are starting to become pretty strident in their denunciation of the fabrications being trotted out in front of the "electorate" by those in political power. "Nobody believes Bernanke's 'green shoots'!" "The US employment numbers for July are delusional on purpose!" "Wall Street is living in a dream world!" All true enough, but beside the point. A person who truly believes that all that is necessary to procure a prosperous and "growing" economy is to borrow and spend cannot be helped by any rational argument. Neither can a person who truly believes that in the unlikely event that such an economy should experience a "liquidity crisis", the solution is to borrow and spend multiples of what was borrowed and spend in the past. The fact is that this is the essence of modern economics, the essence of what has been taught - as gospel – to three generations. Politically and economically, it is holy writ. To question such economic and political orthodoxy is heresy. We who do so are heretics. The ones who do so by ridiculing the entire situation by exposing its essence are the worst of all. If you want to expose a folly, take it literally. The most devastating exposure of the Bush Administration's absurd search for "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq was a one liner by a US comedian: "They don't need to look for them, they've got the invoices!" If you want evidence of the fact that such heresy is spreading, in the US and elsewhere, consider the current attempts by the Democrats and Mr Obama himself to deflect cogent criticism of their "health care" policy by attributing it to the "lunatic fringe". Heretics are lunatics. The REAL ones go much further than attacking a patently absurd policy with an even more absurd "price tag" as calculated by government. The REAL ones challenge the basic premise upon which the entire tottering edifice is constructed. The financial crisis is and always has been inevitable. No financial system can be built on quicksand. Without viable money, it cannot stand. There is no viable money in the world today. There are no unencumbered markets in the world today. There are no unbreachable safeguards to individual freedom and liberty in the world today. Economic and political orthodoxy does not recognise the concept of a sovereign adult individual human being who owns his or her life and accepts responsibility for his or her actions. Those of us who ARE adults, be we 9 or 90, must be heretics today. That means preserving, protecting and defending our right to our own individual lives and everything that is precious to us in living our own individual lives. We will say it as long as we have the breath to get it out. Gold (as money), Freedom, Liberty, Prosperity. These are indivisible. Outlaw one and you outlaw all.