perfidy

I hear that there's some debt shenanigans going on.  If I weren't so appallingly cynical, I'd be shocked at the apparent inability of politicians and professional economists and Wall Street pimps to understand what's happening.  I mean, it's pretty simple, as Reddit demonstrated the other day.

I see only a few possibilities:

• mendaciousness - the individuals in question really do know what's happening, and are lying to us for their own gain.
• cluelessness - they really are that stupid, and don't see that they're spending us right off the cliff.
• unjustified arrogance - along the lines of what Oxford Sovietologist Ronald Hingely once said, noting that basic misapprehensions about the nature of the Soviet Union were rare among really serious scholars, and also among ordinary people.  Those who didn't get it were those of fair intelligence, the "educated elite."  Hingely commented: "For it is surely true, if not generally recognized, that real prowess in wrong-headedness, as in most other fields of human endeavor, presupposes considerable education, character,  sophistication, knowledge, and will to succeed."

It seems to me that each of the three groups most responsible for our current predicament fits one of those descriptions.  I will allow that there is some possibility of overlap...

I'd say that reading the economic news is like watching a train derailing, except that you can't exactly watch a train derailing from the inside, so its not a perfect analogy.  I have this terrible sense that inexorable doom is coming toward us.  You look at the similarities between the first great depression and our current situation (banking crisis, pause, soveriegn debt crisis...  who will be the Creditanstalt for our times?).  You look at the results of debasing the currency in Imperial Rome, in pre-Industrial England, in dozens of countries from Weimar Germany to Zombabwe in the last century and wonder how we can be different, except in scale. You look at the disingenuousness of the economic statistics - Q1 revised down to .4% growth? G is a component of GDP. Take that out, subtract that from next to zero, and what do you have? And let's not mention the unemployment numbers.

In this environment, people like Ron Paul are made to look like the crazed radical for pointing out the obvious. Well, maybe the food, gold, ammo approach is less unreasonable and paranoid than it once was.