Change is good
Right now, in early April of 2019, the U.S. economy seems to be in great shape.
Inflation is minimal. Money is cheap. Unemployment is down. Wages are rising.
Here is why I think this is all going to collapse, and that right soon.
Deflation.
As I have said here many times, technology creates deflation. Deflation is the primary subject of my Moore’s Law book, which I’m getting ready to rewrite for 2020.
To understand deflation in action, look in your hand.
Regulations are the guardrails of corporate law.
They kick in before people are hurt. They’re usually aimed at corporations, not individuals. Everyone is punished by the paperwork. The penalties come in the form of fines.
Regulation is the best protection business can have.
When regulation isn’t imposed by government, it comes in other forms. It comes in insurance requirements. It comes from the plaintiff’s bar. Fines come in the form of differing rates to protect truck fleets, different prices for handling transactions, and in jury awards.
World War III is an Internet war. It has been ongoing for over a decade.
When the conflict was between countries like Pakistan and Ireland, or Ukraine and Russia, we could afford to ignore it.
Then it came to our own shores. November 8, 2016 was this war’s Pearl Harbor.
Yet we still haven’t reacted, because once the enemy is in the tent the media thinks going after them is friendly fire.
There’s nothing friendly about it.
Sure, there are efforts underway at Google and Facebook to boost “real news” and dissuade “fake news.” Yes, there are efforts underway in Congress to control online political spending. Yes, there is the Mueller probe.
But these are nothing. We still see the Internet War as something we can stop with higher firewalls, or bigger budgets.
We can’t.
My adult millennial children are both conservative, but in the nicest possible way.
They have ethics. They expect correct behavior from authority. When they don’t see it, they want it punished, not with a wrist slap, but with jail time.
I agree, and 2019 will mark the start of a process toward getting it. Justice is slow, but it is certain.
If 2018 was the year when crime was stripped naked, with the MeToo movement, the Trump treason, and corporate theft, 2019 will be the first year of retribution.
This becomes certain when you look at the economy. The next year may be the most readily predicted, indeed eagerly anticipated, recession of my lifetime.
One of my big gripes with the present time, with freedom and democracy on the line, is that it delays consideration of other important issues.
Like that of nature in the city.
We like to pretend that nature has been tamed in the city, that it has no place save what we carve out for it. This is false.
During this century, as exurbs have extended their tentacles to the deepest woods and the tallest mountains, we have seen an unprecedented, seldom remarked-upon, rush of animals to American cities. When I was raising chickens 20 years ago I only had to worry about opossums and raccoons. Now we have coyotes, hawks and falcons. We also have bunny rabbits, deer, armadillo and feral hogs roaming the local landscape.
The Greatest Progressive of American history was J.P. Morgan. But he wouldn’t be one today.
Let me explain.
Businesses have always talked up the idea of progress, of change. It’s at the heart of the progressive idea, a constant, incremental improvement. Progressives believe in things getting better, and the way they usually get better is by something better coming along. Better products, better services, and better ways of doing things. Today these are all byproducts of competition.
They weren’t always.
Morgan was active from the Civil War through the first decade of the 20th century. He is usually portrayed as either a colossus or an octopus. He was the man behind the “trusts.” Trusts were evil. He was Teddy Roosevelt’s great nemesis.
But was he? We know the men were close. Morgan and Roosevelt were both Republicans.
What is undeniably true is that, during Morgan’s time, America and the world were short on capital and on basic infrastructure. We couldn’t afford to have several rail lines serving the same point, or several telegraph wires serving the same office. That would mean other points and other offices got no service.
If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you no doubt believe that I’m a radical. A liberal. A fanatical criminal.
In some ways this is true. On foreign policy I’m an internationalist who believes in peace. On social policy I believe people should be free to love who and what they want, and to kill themselves in any way that suits them.
This is not true in economic policy. I still consider myself a liberal here, but business was always a liberal force before the Nixon era. Progress is a business word, still often used in advertisements to denote the aims of oil companies and manufacturers, as well as tech outfits.
My economic beliefs are based on those of Adam Smith, who saw wealth inclining the wealthy toward the common good. I consider Trump and his acolytes to be Nietzscheites. (Ayn Rand is just Nietzsche in a skirt.)
More to the point, I consider them Fascists, and resent that I can’t use the word in public without being condemned.
So, when it comes to the subject of net neutrality, I’m sure you’re thinking, Dana is going to tell us that the FCC is wrong, that Democrats are right.
I’m not.
There has always been an intimate connection between market cycles and political cycles in American politics.
The 2008 crash brought in Barack Obama, and the age we’re now living in. But like most people (including me), he thought the crash and his election meant the end of the crisis, not its beginning.
We’ve all learned better now.
One reason is that the 2008 collapse, and its quick resolution, didn’t drive home the lesson about speculation, and how man-made bubbles can cause enormous hurt when they pop, as they always do. The “Helicopter Ben” Bernanke solution of dropping money on the banks, replacing the losses, then regulating the banks’ use of the funds, only took the banks out of the equation during the next bubble.
The cycle of crisis, recovery, anti-thesis, and excess accelerated, as change does in the age of Moore’s Law. By 2016 the markets were ready for a new period of excess.
Continue reading "The Creative Destruction of Moore’s Law Trumps the Age of Trump. " »
Before this era is over there will be a global demand to “eat the rich,” at which point the Kochs, the Mercers, the little Trumps and Peter Thiel expect this nation’s intellectuals to save them from the guillotine.
The rich do have their purpose. Wealthy people supply capital for opportunities that create jobs. They stand by the banks that provide liquidity to the system. But they were amply paid for these services before they launched all-out war on the poor (and middle class), starting with Nixon, accelerating with Reagan, becoming obvious under Bush and climaxing under Trump.
At Christmas 2017, the day of victory over these forces seems far off. The rich and their castles of money seem as impregnable as the castles of stone were for their 14th century forebears. Everywhere you look, it seems, fascism reigns supreme. Russia has taken down America, China is “communist” only in name, the Middle East is ruled by the Saud Kings, and throughout the developing world absolute rulers of all stripes know the great powers have their back.
The world is much like it was in 1942, except that democracy and capitalism are being squeezed from above, not from the sides.
But victory is in sight.
The long-running scam on which this blog was originally based was the AT&T monopoly.
Since the 1984 Bell break-up, AT&T has been recreating itself, like the brooms of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence in Fantasia. What were originally 7 regional Bell companies merged into 2 regional Bells, then those two bought the long-distance operators with big market share in the Internet core. AT&T is descended from Southwestern Bell, one of the original 7, and changed names when it bought the long-distance operation.
AT&T has spent most of its corporate life grifting off government. It won huge subsidies to create “universal service” over a century ago, and it eventually won the end of price regulation on the service. It continued its grifting on the Internet. A “universal service fund,” derided as a “Gore Tax” by opponents, was a subsidy, crafted mainly for AT&T, aimed at delivering broadband service to rural areas and urban ghettoes.
Continue reading "Monopoly, Market Advantage, and Mouthpieces" »
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