{"id":54804,"date":"2020-08-25T06:20:23","date_gmt":"2020-08-25T11:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54804"},"modified":"2020-08-25T06:20:23","modified_gmt":"2020-08-25T11:20:23","slug":"central-planners-at-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54804","title":{"rendered":"Central Planners At Work"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Central Planners At Work<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Consumption without Production<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cEvery\u00a0man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer\u201d<\/em>,\u00a0observed 19th century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cHe is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 \u2013 April 27, 1882), who\u00a0inter alia<\/em>\u00a0opined on consumers and the need to not only consume, but also produce. The latter activity has recently become even more severely hampered than it already was. And yet, government is spending like a drunken sailor. [PT]<\/p>\n

These days Emerson\u2019s critical insight is being taken to its extreme.\u00a0 Consumers, many whom lost their jobs due to government lockdown orders, no longer produce.\u00a0 Yet they still consume.\u00a0 They are expensive.\u00a0 Not rich.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, this consumption is not funded through personal savings.\u00a0 Nor is it funded through government transfer payments.\u00a0 Rather, it is funded via the printing press.<\/p>\n

Emerson, no doubt, was lacking in the unique perspective we are presently granted. \u00a0He did not have the special opportunity to watch his government destroy the economy in short order.\u00a0 Perhaps if he had, he would have penned a neat axiom to distill the essence of what happened.<\/p>\n

The world today looks nothing like Emerson\u2019s day.\u00a0 The 19th<\/sup>\u00a0 century was an age of honest money.\u00a0 Central bankers did not roam the land.<\/p>\n

Printing money to buy bonds and stocks, and to sprinkle on people, would have been quickly dismissed.\u00a0 The experience of the Continental Congress during the American Revolution, and their over-issuance of paper \u201ccontinentals\u201d, had shown that resorting to the printing press was an act of suicide.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Promises, promises\u2026 \u201cnot worth a continental\u201d became a saying after this early experience with paper money. [PT]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Currently, printing press money is considered enlightened central banking policy.\u00a0 Inflation targets, zero interest rate policy (ZIRP), direct bond purchases, twisting the yield curve, unlimited credit.\u00a0 This is merely a partial list of the trouble central bankers are up to.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Central Planners At Work Consumption without Production \u201cEvery\u00a0man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer\u201d,\u00a0observed 19th century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cHe is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.\u201d Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 \u2013 April 27, 1882), who\u00a0inter alia\u00a0opined on consumers and the need to not only consume, but also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24143,124,125,162,309,379,11763,536,24047,3978,30220,8816],"class_list":["post-54804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-acting-man-2","tag-central-banks","tag-central-planning","tag-consumption","tag-fiat-currency","tag-government","tag-mn-gordon","tag-money","tag-personal-savings","tag-production","tag-ralph-waldo-emerson","tag-sound-money"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54804"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54805,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54804\/revisions\/54805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}