*Transcendental *Logic

If this really is the end of the (at least American) economy as we know it, what’s going to change if it all falls down? 

Well, here’s a novel idea — what if the Big Scary that everyone’s crying about is actually a change that will benefit the lower and middle classes in the long run?  …It’s an odd idea, but ask yourself this:  If that were true, if the mega-rich down to the somewhat-rich would take a terrible hit from this but casualties outside their demographic would be low, do you think we’d hear it put that way in the media?

And wouldn’t you totally expect the government to leap into action as its puppet-strings were violently jerked by every fatcat and major corporation in the country, and beyond?  Wouldn’t you totally expect them to immediately get to work drafting the fastest and biggest check to themselves from the taxpaying public that they could possibly get away with?  (The extremely high negative response from said demographic will affect some politicians and put a kink in this process, naturally…but you know it’ll happen anyway.  It might, however, not be enough, and then we’re back to asking, "What happens then?")

The oddest news I’ve absorbed all day is the last line of the front-page article at the BBC about Congress’ reaction to the OBB (the Oo-Big Bailout).  Here’s the line:

"News of the plan late last week led to a rally, but this week has seen further falls amid concern that [the OBB] could be delayed or watered down."

The entire piece preceding this statement is solidly cautionary of the OBB, showcasing a series of reasonable concerns by eminent persons (as is often the style in BBC articles, I’ve noticed).  It’s not an inclusive list; for one thing it ignores what this path the Head Moneyers are proposing means for America — will we officially have a socialized financial system after this?  Under what principles should we operate it?  Are we really saying here that government takeover is a valid, free-market response to the threat of an industry’s collapse?

Many people argue that "banking" isn’t just an industry — okay, I see the point there; it’s sort of meta and got its fingers in everything.  But what’s in trouble in this case is still just part of the economy — the credit part.  As they were discussing this morning on The Diane Rehm Show (where the stand-in interviewer was very good, but gods he sounded SO much like Dustin Hoffman it was really eerie), the worst-case scenario here is that the process of issuing and managing credit — that’s the imaginary money, remember — slows way down, maybe (but not likely) even temporarily grinds to a halt.  This would:

-  make buying a house a pain the a$$ for a short while (it should remain possible, especially now that the government owns Fannie & Freddie outright; but the process may take longer)
-  make buying a car on a finance plan slightly more difficult
-  may interrupt payroll temporarily at companies who use a "rolling line of credit" for their payroll accounts — this would probably be a mess at first, but it would get ironed out, as companies remembered/learned how to pay people without putting it all on credit
-  make getting credit cards difficult or temporarily impossible
-  may interfere with using credit cards, if the banks the cards are backed on run out of money or fail 
-  may throw a monkey-wrench in some very large corporations who exist more as credit entities than real businesses anymore.

Ignore the freaking-out media for a moment:  What we’re talking about there isn’t a depression – it doesn’t involve food shortages, 25% unemployment, or ridiculous inflation, for one thing.  All it involves is credit getting massively f’d up for a little while, and the result of that, on the ground, is simply that people  have to adjust to using less credit.  We know this can be done because, um, our parents and grandparents could do it.

So why is that a bad thing, in the long run?

Oh, wait.  It’s a bad thing if you’re RICH, or if you’re a HUGE CORPORATION, because if you’re either of those things then most of your money at any given time is imaginary. 

And why is most of your money imaginary?  Ooh, right — because the Imaginary Money Game is heavily tilted in your favor!  Nobody making twenty-five grand a year can make a dime on your specially-designed "stock market" or in the business of, say, selling "paper" (which, in spite of bearing the name of a physical object, is really just the imagined location of a sum of money at imprecise times in the future — oh, and "a sum" is actually any group of small sums that you decide to refer to when you call it "paper", so theoretically it can include any of the money in the whole system, because it actually includes none of them…right?). 

But you, the Rich and the Big Co, can’t make enough money for yourself to support your grotesque lifestyle / business practices by using the real economy.  There simply isn’t a way to get that kind of return on real work, real services, real products, especially now that you’re not allowed to keep slaves or have serfdoms.  So you invented a shadow-economy, a whole category of business that’s only tentatively tied to the real world and because of that, where the numbers can be nearly infinite and, weighing nothing, can be slid around by pure will and the natural slime of your kind.  …I’d actually be fine with it, mind you, except that like your former ideas for supporting your ways of life, it comes with too much cruelty.  Sweatshops and environmental damage and debt for future generations, oh my.

Sorry.

Anyway, I get it now, thanks to that single line in the BBC.  Did you notice what it was really saying?  It was saying that the Ticker which tracks the health of the Shadow Economy reports that it reacts negatively to any mention of it not getting a fast, unfettered infusion of free money.  It’s hit a wall now, is what that’s saying, and it needs a hand from the Real Economy.  The rich need the rest of us to give them money to keep playing their game, because they just lost at the Big Slots and they might actually end up not so rich after this!  The humanity!

There’s another funny thing:  We’re looking, I think, at the kind of economic collapse that the poor can weather more easily than the rich.  I’m not saying there won’t be casualties — there will, and many will be (and have already been) innocent, though many more will be people who played with Imaginary Money too much for their own good.  But what will pull our economy, and our country, through this time of trouble is skills like these, seriously.  Gardening, fixing things, and being an active citizen of the real economy are the answer to surviving without (or with less of) the shadow economy.  It may mean we do without some of our gadgets, probably temporarily while the market adjusts to the new limits on what people are willing to pay (and it could stand to; you know we’re being gouged in the current market).  But we could use a break from all this materialism and greed anyway, and we know it.  Plus, the new restrictions we experience will be just the opportunity we need to do better by the environment, pay more attention to our kids and lose some freaking weight.

I want to see some bankers laying mulch.  That would be worth all the stock I ever could have bought…

This entry was posted 2 months, 1 week ago on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 11:11 pm and is filed under consumer warfare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.