Nobody Wins Elections Promising to Trim Waste/Fraud and Simplify Regulations

The problem in representative democracy is that every instance of waste, graft, fraud and monopolistic racket is somebody's fat paycheck or government contract.

Promising good governance guarantees a losing campaign for public office. The central irony of representative democracy is similar to the central irony of capitalism: the relentless pursuit of narrow self-interest ends up eroding the shared foundations every self-interested participant relies upon.

The problem in representative democracy is that every instance of waste, graft, fraud and monopolistic racket is somebody's fat paycheck or government contract. Those few who see the systemic damage wrought by unproductive skimming, scamming and churn are motivated by a concern for the foundations of the entire system, while those fighting to retain their share of the swag are driven by a fierce cornered-animal desire to keep their share of the loot regardless of the consequences to the system.

Who wins such conflicts? The people fighting tooth and nail to defend their share of the swag, even if it is unproductive, wasteful churn with high opportunity costs for society as a whole: for example, what else could we do with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on tax preparation and avoidance were the thousands of pages of tax regulations radically simplified?

Nobody wins elections promising to trim waste/fraud/monopolies and simplify the churn of complex regulations because any such good governance threatens somebody's fat paycheck/contract, and those fearing banishment from the state's feeding trough will go to any lengths necessary to defeat the "good governance" candidate.

The winning candidate promises not good governance for the benefit of all but more swag for enough voters to win the election. Grabbing the lucrative reins of power is the ultimate in private aggrandizement within representative democracy, and as a result there will always be a large pool of individuals willing to promise the moon to get elected and a vanishingly small pool of people concerned enough about systemic risks to suffer the slings and arrows of campaign politics for the common good.

Capitalism shares a similar irony: the relentless pursuit of narrow self-interest (personal profit) drives the stripmining of the seas for high-value fish, killing vast numbers of "worthless" sea life in the process. When the ocean ecosystem has been destroyed, the theory is that a substitute will be found, such as farm fishing.

But farm fishing does not replace the lost ecosystem, any more than planting rows of monoculture trees for paper pulping replaces a native forest. Just as markets do not have any mechanisms to value ecosystems, representative democracy has no mechanism to counteract the systemic consequences of individual aggrandizement within the system.

Once the number of participants in the system drawing politically-protected benefits and paychecks exceeds the number of those paying taxes to fund the swag, the system destabilizes. Since the state is ultimately run to benefit the individuals drawing paychecks, benefits and contracts paid by the state, nobody cares about the systemic consequences of this imbalance or the heavy opportunity costs of supporting innumerable skims, scams and unproductive churn.

To avoid the political pain that would result from trimming waste/fraud/ rackets, the state prints money to keep the swag flowing. Since the state can't create real wealth, it prints claims on wealth and passes off the paper as "money."

As long as the state is judicious in its printing, the resulting inflation is modest enough that participants are more than happy to accept a small decline in purchasing power in return for keeping their share of the swag intact.

But this monetary gaming has systemic dynamics and limits. The hubris of the state, regardless of its ideological basis, is that central planners can tweak the monetary gaming to keep the swag flowing without creating any uncontrollable risk.

But risk cannot be eliminated, it can only be transferred. In representative democracy, the risks are transferred from individuals drawing swag to the system and state itself. The state appears so vast and powerful that it can absorb essentially infinite amounts of systemic risk. But the state is like any other system: its ability to sustain monetary games is finite, as is its ability to fund unproductive churn indefinitely and its control of destabilizing risk.

The only thing that is infinite about the state is the hubris of those at the controls and the narrow self-interest of those at its capacious feeding trough.

---

Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy(Kindle, $9.95)(print, $20)

Are you like me? 

Ever since my first summer job decades ago, I've been chasing financial security. Not win-the-lottery, Bill Gates riches (although it would be nice!), but simply a feeling of financial control. I want my financial worries to if not disappear at least be manageable and comprehensible.

And like most of you, the way I've moved toward my goal has always hinged not just on having a job but a career.

You don't have to be a financial blogger to know that "having a job" and "having a career" do not mean the same thing today as they did when I first started swinging a hammer for a paycheck.

Even the basic concept "getting a job" has changed so radically that jobs--getting and keeping them, and the perceived lack of them--is the number one financial topic among friends, family and for that matter, complete strangers.

So I sat down and wrote this book: Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

It details everything I've verified about employment and the economy, and lays out an action plan to get you employed.

I am proud of this book. It is the culmination of both my practical work experiences and my financial analysis, and it is a useful, practical, and clarifying read.

Test drive the first section and see for yourself.     Kindle, $9.95     print, $20
"I want to thank you for creating your book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. It is rare to find a person with a mind like yours, who can take a holistic systems view of things without being captured by specific perspectives or agendas. Your contribution to humanity is much appreciated."
Laura Y. 

---

Thank you, Thomas B. ($100), for your outrageously generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.

Thank you, Bud W. ($50), for your superbly generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your longstanding support and readership.

Read more...

"Buying Time" Doesn't Fix Financial Crises, It Makes the Next One Worse

The strategy of "buying time so the financial system can heal itself" by protecting a systemically destabilizing financial sector has failed because it could only fail.

The core strategy of central states and banks to fix the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008 was to buy time: take extraordinary emergency monetary and regulatory measures to save the parasitic too big to fail banking sector and the rest of the crony-capitalist Wall Street parasites, and initiate an unprecedented transfer of wealth from savers and Main Street to the banks and Wall Street via zero-interest rates and credit funneled to the very players who caused the crisis.

The idea was that the system would "heal itself" if authorities simply "bought time" by saving the financial sector from its own predation. The second phase of "buying time so the financial system can heal itself" was to institute policies (ZIRP, etc.) that restored the financial sector's obscene profits and socialized its losses by transferring them to the taxpayers.

The terrible irony in the official strategy of "buying time so the financial system can heal itself" is the policies prohibit healing and guarantee the next financial crisis will be greater in magnitude than the last one.

There is only one way for any financial system to heal itself: enable the open market to discover the price of capital, credit, assets, collateral and risk. When participants finally discover the market price of their assets and collateral are much lower than the valuations claimed in credit bubbles, the market clears itself of bad credit and overvalued collateral in a market-clearing event in which overpriced assets are marked down, firms that overleveraged weak collateral are declared insolvent and liquidated, and creditors who can no longer afford their loans are declared bankrupt and their remaining assets liquidated to pay their creditors.

There is no other healing process but this one: enable transparent, open markets to discover the price of capital, credit, assets, collateral and risk and let those firms and individuals who overleveraged and made bets that blew up go bankrupt.

What "buying time" has done is destroy the market's ability to price capital, credit, assets, collateral and risk, stripping the system of the essential information participants need to make rational, informed decisions. By crushing the market's ability to generate accurate pricing information, central state and banking authorities have insured the system cannot possibly heal itself while maintaining perverse incentives that guarantee the next financial crisis will dwarf the previous one.

The official policy of "buying time" has another fatal flaw: it maintains a parasitic financial sector that expanded to a structurally unhealthy dominance over both the political and economic sectors. Once financial profits ballooned from a modest share of corporate profits to dominance, this enabled financiers and bankers to buy political protection of their skimming and scamming:

The strategy of "buying time so the financial system can heal itself" by protecting a systemically destabilizing financial sector has failed because it could only fail.The policies that "saved the financial system" only saved it from the healing process of the market discovering the price of capital, credit, assets, collateral and risk. 

---

Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy(Kindle, $9.95)(print, $20)

Are you like me? Ever since my first summer job decades ago, I've been chasing financial security. Not win-the-lottery, Bill Gates riches (although it would be nice!), but simply a feeling of financial control. I want my financial worries to if not disappear at least be manageable and comprehensible.

And like most of you, the way I've moved toward my goal has always hinged not just on having a job but a career.
You don't have to be a financial blogger to know that "having a job" and "having a career" do not mean the same thing today as they did when I first started swinging a hammer for a paycheck.

Even the basic concept "getting a job" has changed so radically that jobs--getting and keeping them, and the perceived lack of them--is the number one financial topic among friends, family and for that matter, complete strangers.

So I sat down and wrote this book: Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

It details everything I've verified about employment and the economy, and lays out an action plan to get you employed.
I am proud of this book. It is the culmination of both my practical work experiences and my financial analysis, and it is a useful, practical, and clarifying read.

Test drive the first section and see for yourself.     Kindle, $9.95     print, $20

"I want to thank you for creating your book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. It is rare to find a person with a mind like yours, who can take a holistic systems view of things without being captured by specific perspectives or agendas. Your contribution to humanity is much appreciated."
Laura Y. 

---

Thank you, Lisa P. ($50), for your splendidly generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Michael G. ($10/month), for your outrageously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...

The Destroyer of Fake "Recoveries": Unintended Consequences

Destroy the market's ability to price assets, risk and credit, and you take away the essential information participants need to make rational, informed decisions.

A correspondent recently summarized why unintended consequences eventually destroy all politically expedient strategies that temporarily prop up a systemically unsustainable Status Quo:

"Unintended consequences almost always equal or exceed the benefits of whatever your temporary gains were in a complex system. We see this over and over again, in all sorts of different complex systems."

In other words, all the "kick the can down the road" strategies being deployed across the globe by central states and banks will inevitably backfire because central planning fixes always trigger systemic consequences that were unintended by the planners, who are fixated on minimizing the political pain of powerful constituencies, not understanding or repairing the real problems.

Example #1: The Federal Reserve "saves the Status Quo" by lowering interest rates to zero, eliminating mark-to-market valuations of collateral and opening the credit spigot to banks and financiers.

Intended consequences: A) transfer wealth from savers who once earned substantial interest on their savings to the banks, which can borrow money for near-zero and loan it out to businesses and consumers at fat spreads, reaping billions of dollars that once flowed to savers.

B) By making cash into trash (i.e. it earns no interest, effectively losing value in a 2% inflation environment), the Fed intended to push everyone with cash and/or credit to put their money in risk assets such as stocks and real estate.

Unintended consequences: A) Now that everyone has been pushed into stocks and real estate, valuations are once again at bubble heights--and bubbles always pop, destroying every participant who has been lulled into believing this bubble will never pop because "the Fed has my back."

B) By allowing mark-to-fantasy valuations of collateral, the Fed hasn't cleared the credit system of impaired debt: it has enabled an expansion of bad debt and eroded the fundamental credibility of the system.

C) By enabling the wealthiest slice of America to borrow essentially limitless sums for free, the Fed has fueled wealth disparity, as the super-wealthy can buy rentier assets for nearly free with Fed-created credit, outbidding everyone in the 99.5%.

D) In becoming the buyer of last resort for Treasury bonds and home mortgages, the Fed has destabilized the bond and mortgage markets and undermined the U.S. dollar. As a result, the Fed has to taper its buying lest it end up owning the entire short-term Treasury market.

E) By buying $2 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, the Fed (in conjunction with Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac and the Federal housing agencies such as FHA) has essentially socialized the mortgage market in the U.S.-- virtually all home mortgages are now backed or issued by the government. less than 5% of all mortgages are privately issued and not guaranteed or owned by the government.

Destroy the market's ability to price assets, risk and credit, and you take away the essential information participants need to make rational, informed decisions. By crushing the market's ability to generate accurate pricing information to save the Status Quo from necessary repricing and reforms, the Fed and the Federal government have generated enormously destructive unintended consequences that will not respond to additional politically expedient fixes.

All the other central planning fixes around the world share the same fatal flaw. 

---

Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy(Kindle, $9.95)(print, $20)
Are you like me? Ever since my first summer job decades ago, I've been chasing financial security. Not win-the-lottery, Bill Gates riches (although it would be nice!), but simply a feeling of financial control. I want my financial worries to if not disappear at least be manageable and comprehensible.

And like most of you, the way I've moved toward my goal has always hinged not just on having a job but a career.
You don't have to be a financial blogger to know that "having a job" and "having a career" do not mean the same thing today as they did when I first started swinging a hammer for a paycheck.

Even the basic concept "getting a job" has changed so radically that jobs--getting and keeping them, and the perceived lack of them--is the number one financial topic among friends, family and for that matter, complete strangers.

So I sat down and wrote this book: Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

It details everything I've verified about employment and the economy, and lays out an action plan to get you employed.
I am proud of this book. It is the culmination of both my practical work experiences and my financial analysis, and it is a useful, practical, and clarifying read.

Test drive the first section and see for yourself.     Kindle, $9.95     print, $20

"I want to thank you for creating your book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. It is rare to find a person with a mind like yours, who can take a holistic systems view of things without being captured by specific perspectives or agendas. Your contribution to humanity is much appreciated."
Laura Y.

---

Thank you, Howard R. ($25), for your exceedingly generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Jerzy W. ($10/month), for your outrageously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...

This Is What's Wrong with the Legal System in America

What else could we have done with the billions of dollars squandered on regulatory friction and the pursuit of questionable claims of damage?

Behind the public-relations facade of "advocacy" and "justice," much of the American legal system is unproductive regulatory friction and the pursuit of extortionist rentier skims. I recently received an email that reflects many aspects of this systemic reality.

The letter blares legal threat in its upper-case title: TRADEMARK VIOLATION. Not possible trademark violation or alleged trademark violation, but a declaration of the unquestioned guilt of the recipient.

The email then proceeds to the accusation:

We recently visited your website and discovered that you are using the phase “From the Garden to the Table” on your website.

This is not an accurate statement. I used the phrase once within a longer string of words: from the garden to the table in 20 minutes. I am not "using the phrase on my website," I wrote those words once as a description of my individual actions, i.e. harvesting vegetables from my garden and preparing a meal with them in 20 minutes.

Next, the email lists the URL to the offending page on my site, but when I clicked on the link, it led to some other website:

This URL http://www.oftwominds.com/blogfeb14/chard2-14.html led tohttp://experimentalstation.org/garden-to-plate-for-carnegie-elementary-school-students-woodlawn-chicago, a page of the Chicago-based organization experimental station.

In other words, this threatening legal letter was filled with errors both subtle and egregious. Anecdotally, such sloppiness is hardly unique in American law--especially when it comes to issuing veiled threats and enforcing rentier skims. The basic approach in America is unleash a tsunami of questionable threats and demands and then see what sticks.

The email then declared: Please take formal and Legal notice that the phrase “From the Garden to the Table” is a TRADEMARKED NAME of a California based non-profit organization. This registration is listed under #3118945 in the US Patent and trademark office.

At this juncture, we have reason to believe that your utilization of the trademark may be an oversight, and as such, we are sending you this notice to request that you immediately remove this phrase from your website. (emphasis in the email)

Would any judge declare my single use of this phrase in the context of a longer phrase a violation of trademark law? It's difficult to see how my writing the plain English descriptive phrase from the garden to the table in 20 minutes harms the trademark or the holder of the trademark, from the garden to the table, a non-profit organization whose slogan is Eat & Live Green.

Perhaps the organization has trademarked that phrase as well, so please be cautious in your use of eat & live green as well as from the garden to the table.

You see the Orwellian absurdity of a non-profit promoting growing and eating healthy food devoting resources to threatening individuals and other organizations that share these same goals with unproductive and nonsensical accusations of trademark violation.

If I were a donor of from the garden to the table, I would be wondering if devoting scarce resources to absurd attacks on obviously innocent uses of a trademarked phrase was really a good use of my money.

I would also wonder if such poorly executed "enforcement of trademark" is really the best possible use of the money I donated to further the goal of Eating & Living Green. Wouldn't donors' funds be better spent reaching out to these individuals and organizations, rather than harassing them with bogus accusations of TRADEMARK VIOLATION?

But none of this--the sloppiness, the scattershot accusations, the threatening tone of presumed guilt, the money squandered that could have been spent on something productive--is unique: it is standard practice in America.

We might also ask: why is it even possible to trademark such a phrase? What possible benefit is created by enabling the trademarking of virtually any common phrase, or the patenting of practices such as "photography against a white background"?

The practice of law in America boils down to two activities: enforcing extortionist rentier skims (for example, patent trolls who buy broad patents and then threaten everyone under the sun with questionable patent violations) or seeking extortionist compensation for alleged damages from anyone or any entity with insurance and/or cash to plunder.

The rest of the nation's unproductive legal churn is devoted to complying with the tens of thousands of conflicting and overlapping regulations imposed by layer upon layer of government. Common sense suggests some regulations benefit the broad public, but much of what is passed as "protecting the public" is actually designed to protect established businesses from competition and hide parasitic skims behind complexity fortresses.

All this generates two kinds of extortion: you need to pay legal firms to protect you from frivolous claims of damage (or else bad things happen), and you also have to pay them to "vigorously defend" whatever intellectual property you might own, lest the circling legal sharks snatch it all away (i.e. bad things happen).

This unproductive edifice of legalized extortion, threats, scattershot claims of damage and regulatory friction has a very high opportunity cost to society and the economy. How many potential entrepreneurs decide not to start a business once they see the horrendous costs of complying with overlapping regulatory complexities, and how many close down rather than face the uncertainties and high costs of legal jousting with attorneys whose own costs of filing accusations and threats is near-zero?

What else could we have done with the billions of dollars squandered on regulatory friction and the pursuit of questionable claims of damage? Some estimate the cost of legal extortion and regulatory compliance at $1.9 trillion a year--roughly 12% of the nation's GDP. There is no question we could have done something productive with all this treasure. Instead we have a system of parasitic make-work that incentivizes legalized extortion.

Yes, there are plenty of honest, hard-working attorneys. The problem is not the individuals trapped in the system, the problem is the system itself.

---

Want to give an enduringly practical graduation gift? Then give my new book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy, a mere $9.95 for the Kindle ebook edition and $17.76 for the print edition. 


Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy(Kindle, $9.95)(print, $20)
Are you like me? Ever since my first summer job decades ago, I've been chasing financial security. Not win-the-lottery, Bill Gates riches (although it would be nice!), but simply a feeling of financial control. I want my financial worries to if not disappear at least be manageable and comprehensible.

And like most of you, the way I've moved toward my goal has always hinged not just on having a job but a career.

You don't have to be a financial blogger to know that "having a job" and "having a career" do not mean the same thing today as they did when I first started swinging a hammer for a paycheck.

Even the basic concept "getting a job" has changed so radically that jobs--getting and keeping them, and the perceived lack of them--is the number one financial topic among friends, family and for that matter, complete strangers.

So I sat down and wrote this book: Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

It details everything I've verified about employment and the economy, and lays out an action plan to get you employed.

I am proud of this book. It is the culmination of both my practical work experiences and my financial analysis, and it is a useful, practical, and clarifying read.

Test drive the first section and see for yourself.     Kindle, $9.95     print, $20

"I want to thank you for creating your book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. It is rare to find a person with a mind like yours, who can take a holistic systems view of things without being captured by specific perspectives or agendas. Your contribution to humanity is much appreciated."
Laura Y.

---

Thank you, Craig M. ($20), for your exceedingly generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, David C. ($10), for your most generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your longstanding support and readership.

Read more...

Still Think the Fed Isn't Fueling Inflation? Check Out This Chart

Just as we can't eat iPods, we can't subsist on official reassurances that the Fed and inflation are both benign.

There is a great divergence between the conventional financial media and the public who goes to the supermarket: the financial media swallows whole the official artifice that inflation is near-zero while J.Q. Public sees his/her grocery costs, health insurance, etc. rising by leaps and bounds.

Many observers finger the Federal Reserve as the villain in the inflation story: it's all well and good to conjure up a few trillion dollars to pass out to your banker buddies, but there are always costs, recognized or not, to every action, and the Fed's credit creation and numerous quantitative easing operations have greatly expanded money supply.

All else being equal, a massive expansion of money typically causes inflation, as the flood of new money starts chasing goods and services that haven't expanded at the same high rate as money supply.

One camp reckons the reason why inflation is muted is that the Fed largesse has flowed into asset bubbles rather than goods and services, and proponents of this view make a good point: since little of the Fed largesse has trickled down to the to bottom 99.5%, it can't exerting much pressure on consumer prices. In effect, the price pressure is all in equities and rentier assets such as real estate rather than in goods and services.

But demand from consumers flush with cash is only one facet of inflation, as this chart of oil and Fed operations from Fine Charts (courtesy of Petr Fiala) reveals. Recall the charts I posted a few days ago showed a tight correlation between the price of oil and food: Why Are Food Prices so High? Because We're Eating Oil.

In other words, if the price of oil goes up, so does the price of food, and everything else that must be transported or that consumes oil in its manufacture.

Now examine this chart of Fed operations and the price of oil: when the Fed is actively expanding credit/money, oil goes up in price.

If little of the Fed's largesse is ending up in consumer's wallets, why should oil go up as the Fed shovels money into financiers' accounts? The answer is somewhat speculative, but there are two avenues of price pressure other than consumer demand:

1. Financial speculation in oil futures contracts, which fuels non-consumer demand

2. Fed credit/money creation weakens the U.S. dollar (USD), pushing the cost of oil priced in USD higher.

This is how the Fed fuels inflation, even when little of its largesse ends up in consumers' wallets. Recall that the price of tradable commodities such as grains and oil are set on the global marketplace. That means that grain harvested in the U.S. and oil extracted in the U.S. is not priced solely by domestic demand: as the Fed has weakened our currency with its various manipulations to favor financiers and bankers, oil and everything that uses oil rises in price in the U.S.

Sellers of grain and oil have a fiduciary obligation to get the best price they can, and in a Fed-engineered weak-dollar environment, the best price is not in domestic markets but in overseas markets.

This chart shows the Fed is indeed fueling inflation by driving oil higher. Official denials are to be expected, as are ginned-up inflation statistics; but just as we can't eat iPods, we also can't subsist on official reassurances that the Fed and inflation are both benign.

---

Want to give an enduringly practical graduation gift? Then give my new book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy, a mere $9.95 for the Kindle ebook edition and $17.76 for the print edition. 



Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy(Kindle, $9.95)(print, $20)

Are you like me? Ever since my first summer job decades ago, I've been chasing financial security. Not win-the-lottery, Bill Gates riches (although it would be nice!), but simply a feeling of financial control. I want my financial worries to if not disappear at least be manageable and comprehensible.

And like most of you, the way I've moved toward my goal has always hinged not just on having a job but a career.

You don't have to be a financial blogger to know that "having a job" and "having a career" do not mean the same thing today as they did when I first started swinging a hammer for a paycheck.

Even the basic concept "getting a job" has changed so radically that jobs--getting and keeping them, and the perceived lack of them--is the number one financial topic among friends, family and for that matter, complete strangers.

So I sat down and wrote this book: Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

It details everything I've verified about employment and the economy, and lays out an action plan to get you employed.

I am proud of this book. It is the culmination of both my practical work experiences and my financial analysis, and it is a useful, practical, and clarifying read.

Test drive the first section and see for yourself.     Kindle, $9.95     print, $20

"I want to thank you for creating your book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. It is rare to find a person with a mind like yours, who can take a holistic systems view of things without being captured by specific perspectives or agendas. Your contribution to humanity is much appreciated."
Laura Y. 

---

Thank you, Robert C. ($20), for your most generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, George F. ($5/month), for your outstandingly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...