The Bullshit Bubble

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As the years have gone by in life (I am now firmly middle-aged), I have become struck by how much utter bullshit we have been fed by "The System (TM)" that exists around us. More and more, I am finding reason to disbelieve everything about the prevaling "truths" which regulate our society.

Maybe I'm just being bitter - or maybe I've always been bitter. In fact, I had a girl tell me so only a few years ago. It was right after she informed me that I hate women and children merely because I pointed out that I would be taking on a serious financial risk by living with a single mother, simply because of the nature of our legal system. I say that her knee-jerk accusations of misogyny, like so many other politically "correct" things around us, is bullshit. The fact is, beliefs and accusations that men are "naturally" misogynist - a blatant un-truth promoted by our esteemed academics from their ivory towers - can easily be disproved through biology, historical fact, and statistical analysis. Men love women and always have, up to and including sacrificing their own lives to better them. But another "truth" is that if we financially penalize men for loving women, less men will want to love women. After all, isn't that why the government gives out speeding tickets? To punish speeders so that less people will speed? Well, a truism is that if you wish to punish men to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars for daring to love a woman and failing, you will get less and less men daring to take the risk of loving a woman. It's not that men hate women but rather that laws passed to "protect" women have become so abusive towards men that naturally less men will want to (or can even afford to) allow themselves to share their lives and wealth with women. It's simple economics and psychology.
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Speaking of economics, let's get out our rubber boots and start shovelling more of the bullshit. Our governments constantly change the goal-posts of the very metrics used to monitor the economy. Everything is now about "MOPE" (Management of Perspective Economics) rather than basic, truthful, underlying economic factors - like the Law of Supply and Demand. Why does this feel like Dumbo holding a feather in his trunk as he jumps off the cliff? Is it true that if we believe, and I mean really, really believe that the economy is doing fine that it will magically be fine? Well, to a certain degree having a positive attitude about your financial position is a good thing, but when you trick yourself into spending like a millionaire when you in fact earn minimum wage, you are simply damaging yourself on a fundamental basis. Encouraging society as a whole to believe the economy is fine when in fact it isn't is just as much of a folly. Living off your credit card to trick yourself into thinking things are fine for one more day works no better on the macro-economic scale than it does on the micro-economic scale - despite what our academics pushing the Bullshit Bubble tell us.
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Can you trust what academia is telling you when the Gender Studies Department declares "Gender is a Social Construct" and peer-reviews it as "truth," but when you walk across the hall and take a course in Queer Theory you learn of the peer-reviewed "truth" that "People are born gay"? The two concepts are mutually exclusive and cannot possibly be true in the same way that one cannot travel east and west at the same time. One must be false, yet we are told both are true. In fact, these "truths" have been so strongly endorsed in society that one might receive social, professional and legal punishment for saying the obvious - that it simply can't be true. The little boy no longer points out the Emporer Has No Clothes because it is too damaging for him to do so. 

Can one believe the Theory of Evolution to be true while at the same time believing that Racial Inequality is a matter of Social (in)Justice rather than biological fact? You can add gender inequality into that equation as well - if the genders truly are the same except for externally imposed "social constructs" then you must argue that theories such as Evolution and Survival of the Fittest are false. Both cannot be true. Either one or both must be false - there is no other logical conclusion, especially not that both polar concepts can be "truth" at the same. Basic logic tells us that if 1 + 1 = 2 is correct, then 1 + 1 = 3 is false. To argue both are true is simply a big pile of bullshit.

With all that said, I am not a Social Justice Warrior. My name is Jeb - not Jesus Christ. It's not my destiny to save the world from itself.

A wise old man once told me the "secret" he had found to living in the world and summed it up into one simple phrase: "You are not God; Learn to observe without judging."
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I don't want to change the world - it is what it is and I am a mere bit-player on its stage. I want to survive and thrive, no matter what circumstances the world throws at me. In order to do this, one has to always keep his bullshit meter on. The Bullshit Bubble is building. Lies don't recreate reality into whatever we wish. The underlying Truth is always there, functioning as it always has. The trick in life is to wade through the bullshit, find the Truth, and use it to one's own advantage.
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Update: Simon Black from Sovereign Man discusses film-maker Adam Curtis, who seems to be asking the same kinds of questions as myself:
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"How is it, for example, that UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne can tell his nation that the economy is growing… but at the same time wages are going down?
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How is it possible that the deficit is going down… but the deficit is also going up?
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Why is the British government cutting spending by billions of pounds, but the central bank is pumping billions of pounds back in to the economy?
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How is it that those billions of pounds being pumped into the economy are only making their way into the hands of the wealthiest people?
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And how is it possible that no one seems to know? That no major mainstream media outlet is covering the story of the greatest transfer of wealth in history?"
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Read more here.
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The Internet - A Window Into the Ugly Soul of Humanity

We often hear of the benefits of the internet and how it has revolutionized the world - and there's little doubt that it truly has done this. It has brought limitless information to our fingertips - something which for someone like me, who used to read encyclopdias just for kicks, is a bonafide god-send. Usually the only down-sides we hear about the internet is how addicted we are to it - you know, the people that can't go on a camping trip anymore unless they can get service out there. (Gotta keep my Facebook page updated so everyone can see what a good time I'm having!). No doubt, I get a giggle out of those people too. But the internet has done something else - at least to me - it has opened a window into looking at how society is, and how it works... and I don't much like what I see. Maybe it's just me growing older (in my mid-forties now) and becoming more cagey and embittered... but also, one of the things that makes me so cynical is because my experiences now force me to admit certain "truths" exist that I would rather not acknowledge. It has had the effect of turning me into a misanthrope - not because I hate people so much, but more because I don't think "people" in the aggregate truly have the ability to "pull themselves up" in the pie-in-the-sky way we've been told would happen if we just followed the rules. The Boomertopian fantasy world we've been living in is about to come crashing down - it has to, because it is not based upon reality.

I don't think the "average" schmoe like myself has ever been able to process "society" like we are able to do today. Not too long ago, our interactions with the outside world was mostly limited to our friends, family and co-workers. The outside people were those in your neighbourhood - at the store and in the restaurants. Sure, we watched the news and read the papers which told us events that happened around the world, but mostly, our world was still pretty small and our window into examining "society" was mostly limited to those immediately around us - a pretty small sliver of a sample, and incredibly biased towards your own way of thinking. "Home" is always "right," isn't it?  But today, with the internet and the click of a button, everyone from lunatic social justice warriors to totalitarian political hacks to lying sleezeball financialists, is arguing in front of us by the thousands... by the millions!

And it's when you step back and look at it as such - in the whole - that we get a much broader view of "humanity" than we've ever had before. The internet has done that to me, and I suspect I am not the only one who has experienced this effect.

I no longer believe. I've lost the faith.

Democracy? I don't believe in it - or, at least, I don't have faith in the people's ability to choose entirely what's best for the nation. The phrase "The problem with democracy is it turns Statesmen into Politicians" comes to mind - and when it comes right down to it, that phrase indicates that the unwashed masses are truly not "smart enough" to choose the difficult things that must be done once in a while in order to keep civilization functioning. Democracy, at best, must be severely limited - by a Constitution, which is further evidence in and of itself that Democracy is an imperfect system that must be kept out of reach of "the people's" control.

And it must work this way too. And, in all of history, some form or other of "controlling the masses" has been in place. If there are no "rules" then there is also no civilization. Once we realize that, we are set upon a path of finding the best rules which give the most people a high quality of life. But this is now a totally different path than the average person would agree to without serious contemplation - it is politically incorrect to say that "the people" should not have all the power. And I've always considered myself to have a libertarian bent! But I also used to have more faith in people.

We live in a world that I refer to as "Boomer-topia."

It's a dream world in which we're told from every politically corner that if we only click our heels three time, close our eyes and believe really hard, we can create a heaven on earth filled with unicorns leaving their candy-cane crap for us to pick up and eat. It's so beautiful! You just gotta believe!

I think one of things I'm most struck by today is how much our world truly has been based on "un-truth." And I suspect that we're about to have a "correction" that brings it all crashing down. The Truth doesn't care about our politiallly correct feelings - it just carries on regardless.

For example - If the economy collapses, which innevitably it must, how much longer will we be able to believe in the pretty lies? Here's a politically incorrect thing to think about - if wages have stagnated since the 1970's to where it now takes two people working full-time to do what once could be done on a single income... and at the same time we are struggling with high-unemployment across the nation because we are becoming redundant in a global and mechanized world, then what we have is simply based upon the Law of Supply and Demand. As demand declines, supply will also lower itself until it meets its equilibrium. This is not rocket science, but it is a Law that has been well proven. Is it not, therefore, reasonable to say that over the next decades we will see women leave the workplace and return to the home in the same way they did the reverse 30 or 40 years ago? And it will be the men that keep working, not women, because no matter how you slice it into tiny politically correct little pieces, men are still far more efficient workers than women are. It's just how it IS and how it has always BEEN, and we will "revert to the mean" one way or another. It's simple economics, and I don't care how many Women's Studies Degrees laden with debt that you throw at me, it's simply the Truth. Complain to Mother Nature about it, not me.

People should not embrace multi-culturalism. Sure, we should accept others cultures, but there is also nothing wrong with accepting our own being as equally valid as theirs, and just as worth preserving! The reason people want to come to live in the West is because of what WE created... which they obviously think is better than what the culture they came from created. We can respect such people, but it is they that are guests in our house, and they have to adapt to our culture more than we should be expected to accomodate theirs. Do you think China should put up stop-signs in English so if you go to live there you don't have to learn Chinese? I don't. The onus is on the immigrant to accomodate the culture, not the other way around - which is literally a form of cultural suicide. We should stop this nonsense before it's too late... or the Truth will stop it for us one day when we "revert to the mean." And I don't care how many people with Ph D's in Ebonics throw their twisted facts at me about the value of diversity. It's crap, and deep down we all know it but don't dare to say it.

I hate Boomertopia. It's a house of lies. I remember reading once about what people who lived behind the Iron Curtain hated the most. Several people said that it wasn't the gulags or the secret police but rather, it was all of the lies they had to live with that they hated most. For example, I'm sure that the farmers who received their orders from Moscow to plant their crops on this day or that - regardless of whether the ground was still frozen or not - those farmers must've known it was all bullshit, but they were compelled to lie to themselves and everyone around them anyways. I understand how they must've felt because I think Boomertopia has given us something similar in the West. We are living in a world of pretty lies.

There's no doubt that our economy will get completely obliterated within my lifetime. Maybe it won't happen tomorrow (or maybe it will) and maybe it will take another 20 years, but we are on an unsustainable path. We have too much debt and too many obligations, and the demographic bottleneck that is coming as our retiring Baby-Boomers count on the much smaller subsequent generations to pay for their pensions is going to force us to discover that those people probably won't want to work very hard when 90% of their income goes to taxes to fund other people's lives instead of their own. Hell, I'd rather forage for berries and eat squirrel than live like that! Wouldn't you? A collapse is all but inevitable. We probably could have made it if we'd made some politically incorrect choices before the massive debt expansion of '08/09, but now the numbers are in and there's no doubt - we're screwed. The Laws of Nature are going to come and slap us up the side of the head until all those pretty lies come out the other side and makes us clean again.

Most of the PC Pretty Lies we believe in are only possible because of our wealth. Once the wealth is gone, the lies will leave too, and all that will be left is the exposed Truth beneath. This is a cycle that we've seen many times over history - it's like we're human lemmings jumping off a cliff, over and over again.

When we get wealthy, we specialize our labour. Since the Industrial Revolution really took hold about 150 years ago, we've left the "Jack of All Trades" lifestyle of the family farm and specialized in becoming accountants, or electricians, or financial manipulators, or professors who teach pretty lies to gullible youngsters who've already bought into more pretty lies in the form of student loans. What we have done in the process is removed ourselves from nature - we don't know where our food comes from anymore. The accountant in the city simply thinks Nature "should" work this way because he lives in an artificial world where his food is purchased at the grocery store. When we were all farmers we knew Nature didn't work according to our rules, but rather we worked according to it's schedule.

Boomertopia is going to collapse. All fairy tales must end... and the misanthrope in me can't wait for it to happen. I hate all the lies.

Everybody's a Bloody Activist Nowadays!

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Ever notice, with the rise of the internet, how everyone has suddenly gotten a lot more political? I have another blog, and good cripes if some asshat didn't swing on by and lecture me on my "cis-gender privilege." You know what I was trying to describe? How the fact that certain fungi and other simple organisms can change from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction in order to overcome biological adversity, and then change back to asexual reproduction after the adversity has passed, illustrates quite clearly that the point of having two sexes is to have differences, not sameness. I wasn't suggesting homosexuals be kicked out of the military or that wives be put into fancy new burquas and be shooed back into the kitchen, but merely that encouraging sameness between sexual opposites is, quite obviously, against nature. When the system of laws arose that the West was founded upon - the kinds that arose from the likes of John Locke - we had a system of interlocking truths we used to determine the validity of the laws & systems we were subjected to. They are, in order of importance, 1). God's Law (The Absolute) 2). Natural Law (Objective Truth) and finally, 3). Civil Law (Subjective Truth). If a Civil Law contradicts a Natural Law, then the Civil Law is false, and so forth. It makes sense, doesn't it? You can't dictate by Civil Law that the sun rise at precisely 6:00am each morning, but instead have to work it the other way around. Thus, my argument was that civil laws which try to force "sameness" upon the genders, are contradictory to Natural Law and therefore must be considered false.

Meh. Everyone's an activist. Including me!

My form of activism, however, has changed. I guess I see that everyone is screaming and hollering at the government to do this for them, or pass that law to make such and such circumstance happen, or steal this guy's money so that I can have something for free... well... the problem is that everyone seems to want a powerful government that can force others to do things against their will. If everyone was allowed to have their way, we would find ourselves living in a hell of totalitarianism like the world has never known. What I have found though, upon closer examination of these problems, is that the less government and corporate intervention in our lives, the better off we will be - in almost every case. "The System" itself is becoming the biggest threat, rather than the myriad of things people wish to get from the system. Everyone wants to change everyone else rather than do the simplest thing, which is change yourself. 

When I see government officials and their economic "experts" make reckless policies, such as low interest rates and "good" inflation to "stimulate" the economy, I read between the lines and hear, "Let's make it so saving money is detrimental to the average Joe, so he does something damaging to himself like spend his savings on things he doesn't need before it declines in value, so that Walmart's stock price doesn't decline," I know I'm hearing BS and these policies are not in my best interests. The Canadian government recently allowed our dollar to decline in value to stimulate trade by making our exports cheaper. Great! Exports are up! But you know what? Many of the goods I now have to buy are significantly more expensive... in other words, some big steel manufacturing corporation is getting a boost in profits directly at my expense as an individual citizen. Thus, our corporations' relationship with the government now supersedes the governments' mandate to do what is in my best interests as a citizen. Is there any clause in our constitutions that allow non-entities like corporations to supersede the Constitutional Rights of the citizenry? I don't think so, yet this is what is happening.

Of course, the government supports these kinds of policies because the more our trade increases - the more money that circulates - the more they can skim off the top. This is what funds all of the bureaucracies that pass a hundred new laws and policies a day: the circulation of money and the skimming off the top. Thus, the more that I circulate money, the more I am funding bureaucratic organizations to pass laws which I often find are detrimental to my well-being, and since I want less of these sorts of people sticking their nose into my life, the best form of activism I can possibly do is not donating $100/month to the cause-de-jour's lobby group, but to remove $500 or $1,000/month of my own resources permanently from the system. Then those operating against my best interests will go broke quicker, and I will be living a better, cheaper, more fulfilling life in the meantime. 

I think as individuals we are going to have to start to re-examine what is truly important in life again. Where do we get this idea that "we have to have it all?" There is certainly something to the principle of being prepared and self-sufficient, and planning for emergencies... but when is enough "enough?" I once read that the reason behind the US Founding Fathers putting their country's monetary coinage into the form of silver and gold and controlled by Congress, was because of George Washington's dream that a man should be able to plan out his monetary needs to suit his life, and retire once he achieves it. This can only be done in any reasonable fashion with a sound money supply, such as precious metals, which the government cannot manipulate for their own purposes, such as is being done today. Think about what happened back in the 1970's with the runaway inflation we experienced. It used to be that the lottery was $150,000 in the early 70's - enough to retire on for the rest of your life - until only a decade later, inflation had eroded the value of your lotto winnings to only a little more than the price of a house, while "being set for life" now became the benchmark of a million. Today, we know that a million is not enough to retire on, and the lotto is $5 million. Good Cripes! If you knew there would be no inflation, you would be able to say "this is enough money to last me, because it produces $X in income/purchasing power."

Of course, all of this leads back to my bone to pick with a consumerist mindset over a production one. Take people in Europe, for example, where they are further along in the socialist spectrum than we are. I have relatives from there that visited me a while back, and we got into the subject of taxation (they pay around 70% of their incomes back to the government, whereas in Canada we pay back around 50% - in the US, it was, at least until about a decade ago, only 30%). I was also amazed, although I didn't say anything to them, how it seems that despite these high tax rates, my European relatives seem to manage to have the money to travel all over the place and do things that we couldn't afford to here in Canada... and then it started to hit me: They were "in the system," and didn't need to do anything else than follow the rules. They didn't need to save capital to start their own businesses because they got paid a generous wage by government decree. They didn't need to save for retirement because by government decree there was a generous retirement system in place. And further, they didn't care about the economic validity of the system because as long as they "stay in the system" they are completely cared for... but they have to stay in the system or they are screwed. They have become willing slaves to rules they shouldn't have. They are forced by activists to declare truths that are untrue in order to keep their jobs.

I don't think it's worth it to sell your soul for that kind of security - that of a child to father corporation and mother government. It is unsustainable in the long run, and can only be fueled by the destruction of the ambitious and responsible.

Everything you can do that removes yourself from the system, in my opinion, is the best form of "activism" one can do. It's much easier to change yourself than it is to change the world.

Please Pay For Your Lunch At The Counter (Before You Slink Out the Back)

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I read a blurp over at I Own The World about a politician, Jennifer Wexton, comparing Tea Party Republicans to violent rapists. Then she went on to proclaim her own unquestionable virtue for defending a woman's "right" to choose.

"After describing women being assaulted and "traumatized again by facing the criminal in court," Wexton made this declaration: "...as a prosecutor I put violent offenders in prison. In the Virginia Senate, I'll fight just as hard against Tea Party Republicans who would take away a woman's healthcare and her right to choose, even in cases of rape and incest.""

Of course, the Tea Party doesn't really want to take away a woman's healthcare - they just want to make her pay for it herself rather than force others to pay. And nobody, I mean nobody, touches "a woman's right to choose" with a ten foot barge pole in the political arena. But, this got me to thinking about how often we hear lately that politicians are unwilling to make the difficult choices that will save the nation from future hardship - and it's not a problem solely found in the economy either.

Some day, feminists are going to have to be held responsible for abortion and its consequences. Not having children in society is a sure sign of an attempt to commit cultural suicide. I can't imagine history looking all too kindly at the likes of feminists such as Jennifer Wexton for being one of the enablers who supported forcing this pill of death down our throats.

Think of this. Over 50 million babies have been aborted in America since the 1970's - in general Western Civilization, who knows the number - but in all countries that have accepted and absorbed "feminist wisdom," the birthrate has plummeted, from 3.9 per couple in 1970 to 1.5 per couple today.

All of our system of expanding debt has worked over time because we had population growth, not decline. It is easier for 2 million people to pay off a billion dollar debt than it is for 1 million people. It's pretty simple math. But, when you genocide the following generations, you wind up with a bottle neck in demographics such as we have right now - a large, aging population of Boomers that cannot possibly be sustained through welfare by the smaller, younger (and genocided) generations. The "solution" progressives declare is "immigration," except, there are no Western Nations with positive birthrates, so, there is no pool of immigrants to draw from except impoverished, third-world shit-holes where people are completely foreign to our culture and our values... in other words, poor immigrants who need vast social services to educate them to even do menial tasks in society, and who will always be hostile to our general values.

Had we not aborted 1/3 of all the babies born in the past forty years, many of those 50 million aborted babies would now be adults who themselves would have reproduced... so, it is fair to say that there is around 75 million or more people missing from the American population - all homegrown, natural Americans who would be culturally in tune with greater society, and who would all be aiding in paying for the benefits the entitled Boomers voted for themselves.

Women can holler and screech about their "right" to abortion all they want... but Mother Nature doesn't care. If you want to kill your babies, don't be surprised when it comes back to haunt you with your own demise. We coulda used a good 75 million more people to help pay for all these entitlement programs, couldn't we?

We don't draft women for war and we place them on a special pedestal specifically because of their value in creating the next generation... because without the next generation, no society can survive. In fact, it makes very much sense to draft women to have babies, rather than to enable our destruction through abortion and other feminist, anti-reproduction policies. Here's something further to think about: In all of world history, not one civilization that has dropped below a birthrate of 1.9 per couple has ever reversed the situation. (Once it falls below 1.3 per couple, it is mathematically impossible to recover because of the generation gap/bottleneck). If 1/3 of all pregnancies end in abortion, then outlawing abortion would immediately sling-shot the birthrate from 1.5 per couple to 2.25 per couple, above replacement level (2.1/couple) and back on the path of life, rather than the path of cultural death.  

Probably more than anything else, feminism has been the darkest sickness of the West, because on a fundamental, it leads only to cultural death. As always, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
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Inflation and Your Mortgage

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I don't currently own my own home. I'm a renter, although I would like to be an owner of a small cottage or cabin on an acreage where I can express some "self-sustainability." Something I find confusing about the whole money-printing scheme our governments are involved with is, "why should I be mortgage/debt-free (which I am) during a hyper-inflationary period when I only have to pay back my mortgage in de-valued dollars?"

I have read before, about Wiemar Germany's inflation, that not everyone was destroyed by the devaluation of the currency. In fact, some people prospered from it - namely business owners and such, who owed large sums of money on assets and machinery but paid off their debts in devalued currency.

On the other hand, look at what happened with the high inflation (not hyperinflation) of the 1970's and early 1980's. Real-estate sky rocketed during the inflationary period of the late 70's, much as it has in the past decade, but when Paul Volcker raised interest rates into the 20%+ range to restore confidence in the dollar, people's mortgage payments sky-rocketed and home values plummeted, causing many to find themselves "under-water" to such a degree that they simply abandoned their homes altogether and declared bankruptcy.

I understand why this happened with the mortgage market. People don't actually buy the top-end valuation of a home, rather they buy a mortgage payment. It's the payment that represents the value of the home to a buyer. $1,500/month or $1,000/month, that's what really matters to the buyer. Well, if you can afford a $1,500 payment, it means that at today's interest rates, you can afford a mortgage of around $300,000. If interest rates were to rise to around 8%, a $1,500 payment would get you around a $190,000/mortgage. The payment on the house stays the same (affordable), while the "top price" fluctuates along with the interest rates - but always, it is the monthly payment that the home represents which really matters, not the top price.

Jim Sinclair, of Jim Sinclair's Mineset, had a reader recently write in with questions similar to my own:

Jim,

I have worked in the gold and silver industry since 1983.  I own a well-respected and successful precious metals firm.  I am very well versed in most areas related to my industry.  I have followed you for the last 11 years.  

I have an important question I would like you to address.  So far, I have never seen anyone discuss this topic.  It will affect many of your readers.

Assuming a major devaluation of the US dollar and a massive rise in the price of gold and silver, what will happen to dollar-denominated debt, such as a home mortgage, denominated in dollars. Will we be able to pay off the mortgage with the gold profits?  Assuming a million dollar mortgage, in today’s dollars, and the price of gold increases by 300%, will I be able to take those "profits" and pay up the mortgage?  How will the banks survive if people pay off their mortgage debt with watered-down "Weimar Republic" dollars? 

When I took out my mortgage in 2005, it took 2000 ounces of gold to pay it off.  When your target of $3500 (minimum) is reached, I can pay it off with 300 ounces.  The big loser will be the issuer of the mortgages.  Since the holder of the mortgages are the big banks and they usually come out on top, and lobby for legislation that favors them over the public, what do you expect will happen?

You urge your readers to pay off all debt now, including mortgages.  But why sell gold for $1350 now to pay off a mortgage when with a little patience, it could be paid up with gold at $3500 and require a liquidation of only one third of the ounces?

This is an important consideration.  What is the downside of holding onto gold and silver and paying up the dollar denominated debt with an asset that you and I expect to increase dramatically, against a constant dollar amount?  I own the gold and could easily sell enough to pay up the mortgage now.  

So far, waiting has served me well and the big gains (in dollars, not percentage) lies ahead. Many of your readers are no doubt in the same position.  What is the downside of continuing to wait for a much higher gold price so I can pay off the mortgage in watered down dollars?

Thank you for your consideration.

CIGA DMS

Dear DMS,

History indicates that loans will be reset to equal the depreciation in the dollar thereby leaving the debt at a similar value to what is was before the hyperinflation during the "Great Leveling," leading to the "Great Reset." The idea is that you will pay off your $50,000 mortgage with one maple leaf is historically fallacious.

This economic trick has the same chance of working as does your deposits of $250,000 in ten banks, and your expectation of being repaid by the FDIC $2,500,000 in a banking systemic failure. You will not be.

Respectfully,

Jim

Another post on this subject.
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When Money Becomes a Social Tool

Money is supposed to be a unit of measurement, to facilitate trade upon an expanded barter system. It's function is similar to a kilometer or a pound or a gram. "One dollar" is a universal measurement that represents X/Y the value of a portion of a bag of flour, or a pig, or a gallon of gas, or a labourer's production output. This universal measurement allows for the facilitation of trade on a large scale, rather by the simple barter system which we all know has its limitations.

But what happens when a unit of measurement is used by outside forces to manipulate the actions of a society? Is that measurement still valuable? What if, for example, most people walked five kilometers a day for exercise, and the government decided to "help" these people get even healthier by declaring that a kilometer is now 1100 meters instead of a thousand, and then next year, they increase it to 1200 meters, and so forth? The usefulness of a unit of measure decreases the more it can be manipulated. The more precise it remains, the more valuable it is. Imagine how screwed up things could get if a construction crew were building a house and the men working on the one side of the house were measuring with inches that were 10% longer than the workers on the other side of the house. Chaos would ensue. The more static and standardized a unit of measure is, the more useful it is.  

Money used to function in this fashion. Sure, prices did not always stay static, as the forces of supply and demand, along with others, still have a fluctuating force on the value of goods and services, but in the aggregate of available goods, the cost of living remained more or less the same over time. When money was more static in value, you could pretty much figure out exactly how much wealth you would need in order to survive for the rest of your life. If you knew that $30,000/yr would allow you to live comfortably in perpetuity, you'll know that when you have $600,000 invested at 5%/yr, you'll never have to worry about getting by again. Whatever your figure is, if you can rest assured that what it costs to get by today will be the same figure as it will be twenty years from now, you can start to do some real calculations and goal setting becomes much easier. 

The way money functions today, however, has nothing to do with money being a static unit of measure. Rather, it has become an instrument our governments are using to manipulate the actions of society. Take Japan where it was declared the Yen was going to be devalued by something like 40%. This was done intentionally to stimulate the economy by social means - to panic people out of their savings, either to spend it before its purchasing power is lost or to invest it elsewhere than "low-risk" savings (ie. in stocks or real estate) in an attempt to preserve its value. In America, money is being held at artificially low interest rates in part to stimulate the housing market higher, the intention being to motivate people to borrow against their home equity and spend it in the greater economy. In other words, the unit of measure known as "money" is being used as a social tool to manipulate people's actions. It's value is not objectively static, but rather subjective to the manipulations of government elites as they try to herd us into one direction or another.

Furthermore, this unit of measure is manipulated - at your expense - to fund the viability of corporations which do not benefit you directly. In Canada, for example, we often hear smug yackity-yack about how much better we made it through the 08/09 Financial Crisis than so many other countries in the world. It's like we have been lulled into a false sense of security. The Canadian dollar has been held at par with the US Dollar both before and after the Financial Crisis. While we sit here on top of the world, our mouths dropping at the amount of money the USA is printing, we scarcely seem to realize that if their dollar is losing power... then as our dollar remains at par with theirs, ours is losing power too! In a sense, we are unofficially "pegged" to the US Dollar, in order that our export industries won't lose their competitiveness in their respective markets. So, in order that a steel mill in Ontario is able to remain competitive in the American market, dear citizen in British Columbia, we are going to devalue the purchasing power of your personal savings at the same rate the Americans are devaluing their citizens' savings through reckless money printing. It may be bad for your personal savings, Mr. Citizen, but it's good for Canadian corporations... er, the Canadian economy! This is mere further distortion of the unit of measure known as money, and shows the uselessness of even considering it a valid tool for financial planning. 

I remember reading once, that during Germany's hyperinflation, some people tried to preserve their wealth by buying as many pianos as they could get their hands on and stuffing one into every room of the house. The logic being that a piano, even a used one, will maintain its value as a used piano, regardless of the monetary value of it today or tomorrow. A piano is not only worth $X, it is also worth "one piano." Similarly, a house has value besides its monetary value. It's a place where you live and raise a family. A house is worth "one house" on a different level than whether its monetary value is $50,000 or $750,000.

It's along these lines of thinking that I start to look at actual products on the market as having more value than others. Here is an example of what I mean: Recently my cordless phone went on the fritz. The battery no longer held a charge. It was a cheap phone worth no more than $30 and it lasted for two years. Aside from the monetary value of that particular phone, buying the phone also represented value in providing me with "phone service." In fact, the ability to communicate is really what I was buying. Before this phone, I had another cordless phone. An expensive one. I paid $200 for it - back in 1997. It lasted for 14 years without any trouble at all. Now, the monetary value, spread out over the years is not really that different between the two phones. (Electronics is perhaps a bad example to use since Chinese products have flooded the market). However, with the first phone, once I paid the price, I had secured "phone service" for a long time into the future, regardless of what the price of a phone is from one year to the next. The $30 phone might be $40 next year and $50 after that, and I will constantly have to pay more and more simply to keep buying phones so that I may maintain my "phone service." The more I am in the cycle, the more beholden I am to money manipulation. The more I can remove myself from the cycle, the more "real" my spent money becomes.

Investing in self-sufficiency therefore logically becomes "money well spent." Anything you own that self-sustains into the future is pretty much as good as savings. If you keep goats on your property that provide you with meat and milk for years to come, regardless of what the government does to money that affects the price of meat and milk at the grocery store, those goats become "as good as gold." They do not lose their true value, which is the value of having meat to eat and milk to drink, removed from valuing it in dollars and cents. Those goats directly protect you against manipulations of the monetary system that are felt through inflation at the grocery store. Anything you invest in which helps to provide for your needs outside of the monetary system gives you enormous "quality of life protection." Remember the movie "The Jerk"? Bernadette and Steve are newly wealthy and entertaining friends in their lavish mansion when they learn on the news that they have lost everything because of a class action suit. As their friends leave, realizing they are broke, Bernadette whines, "It's not the money that I'll miss. It's all of the stuff!"

Of course, you can never truly be removed from the monetary system and its manipulations. As with my expensive phone, nothing lasts forever. You can live in a cabin in the woods and have all that you need without money, but eventually you'll need to buy a new axe or replace a broken window. Still, the more you can remove yourself from the monetary system, the better off you will be. If you could remove 50% of your needs by providing them outside of the monetary system, you are 50% less vulnerable to the social manipulations of money.