Ben Hunt: Prepare To Get Burned
Society is pretending its actions don’t have consequences. It’s badly mistaken.
History teaches us that there is no free lunch, reminds Dr. Ben Hunt, publisher of EpsilonTheory.com.
And science informs us that even the most simple systems become nearly impossible to predict or control with 100% precision as time and variables change.
But our society today is ignoring these lessons. It’s betting that the increasingly excessive distortions required to keep the status quo continuing will succeed, and come at no cost.
That’s a losing bet, warns Hunt:
Society burns itself on a really hot stove every three or four generations.
I think we’re at that point where the Millennials coming of age who are having to wrestle with what the Baby Boomers have done to the world. They’re going to end up burning themselves on this hot stove. The hot stove of looking to government as the answer for everything that ails you. Of looking towards your political leaders as somehow able to provide never-ending exponential growth in comfort and standard of living.
And ultimately, they’ll burn themselves — there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You’ve got pay for these things in one way or another — in terms of resource extraction, in terms of taxation, in the form of sacrifice of individual liberties.
There’s a price to be paid, though. That’s the hot stove that I’m talking about. That hot stove can manifest itself in war. That’s certainly happened in the past. It could manifest itself in the subordination or forfeit of individual liberties. That’s certainly happened in the past.
There are any number of ways in which that burning on the hot stove could happen.
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