We're supposed to keep posts here classic tweet-length, so 150 characters or less, so they aren't tldr.So here goes. Depression functions and evolved to reduce risky behavior, and an economic depression functions and exists as a necessary curative process in economic cycles to dissuade future frenzied risk-taking by severely punishing a preceding period of frenzied risk-taking, so people who experience the economic depression get a lesson that sinks in deep.And letting a depression follow the 2008 crash rather than committing the US to the now mandatory multitrillion dollar bailouts that follow each recession (lest it become a depression -- we haven't had a regular recession since 2001) would have been a better course to take in the long run.Yep, we avoided a depression, but our national finances look doomed as a result. And moral hazard runs amok threatening new meltdowns.And if we'd taken our sour medicine starting in 2008 we'd be emerging from the depression about now with clean finances, real prices (not artificially jiggered ones), a bunch of new business running better than the dinosaurs that led to 2008 and were saved instead of letting them go extinct when the comet they summoned hit us, and our politics would be much more functional, since existential crises like economic depressions force a choice: unify and learn to cooperate, or continue infighting and fall apart.We should have let the banks and the corporations dependent on frequent bank loans (rather than keeping a good savings) just fail, like after 1929 and in every other historical period before 2008, and now we'd be back to health and recovering strongly.Hard times make real men and all that. Wouldn't you rather be a real man?We wouldn't even have most of today's political hysteria in its endless varieties if 2008 had been handled differently -- i.e. just not handled, taking the "hands off" laissez faire approach of shrugging at the problem and letting the fire burn itself out.
Hard times are coming either way. My hope is that there's an ark in the coming days that will survive following which we'll have a period of renewall. My hope is that the apocolypse is actually still far off.
>>522107046To put it another way, what did we really get from bailing out the BIGS and saving the system?We bought time, but for what? If we'd bought time with a goal in mind to fix the fundamentals, that could have been worth it. But look at the situation today. The fundamentals are broken, from the debt to house prices to gender relations and dating to everything else in society, even people's sour attitudes. I guess we got 17 years now without a meltdown (and it took another $5 trillion+ bailout in 2020 to keep this up), but we're coming to a reckoning anyway. It's like how procrastinating gives relief for a time but then the problem is here again and now the situation is worse. When we procrastinate, we discount the future, like literally ignore that the future will be here, as real as the present, eventually, and then the present that we get to enjoy while procrastinating will be in the past and no longer available to have enjoyment in, since it's locked back in that region wherever past events go. We'd do better to learn the future is just as real as the present and not discount it, especially to the extent of just disregarding it or treating it like it's fake. Long time horizons are a major piece of intelligence, so discounting the future to enjoy the present at the cost of worse future outcomes is unintelligent behavior, like "stupid is as stupid does." The continued fun of kicking the can down the road is long gone now. We haven't reached the reckoning of our society's morally hazardous decision to bail out and save rotten institutions, but life for most people got worse anyway shortly after the bailouts saved the system, like especially after around 2013. So what was all this effort and expense for? We'd have done better to suffer the hard times, endure, and then arrive at a good new place at the journey's end, a place we could stay in and that would last for quite a while of prosperity and peace and, ultimately, hope. People in 1950, scarred as
>>522107801they were by the last 20 years, were hopeful in a way that almost no one feels today besides some hyped up super-investors believing AI is about to create the singularity or whatever it is they have in the back of their minds that may be under the influence of uppers (legal or illegal) anyway. (I really suspect our elites are using upper drugs to elevate their moods, boost their energy way beyond ordinary levels, even give them periods of euphoria, and their decision making functions are misfiring as a result of altered mental states and we beneath them are suffering the consequences of an elite that refuses to "come down" from their artificial high, get back on planet Earth, and be realistic.) Now we still have the main crisis ahead of us instead of behind us, and that's not a joyful prospect. We have a decayed society. Hardly anyone has a sense of some higher social purpose worth making a significant personal sacrifice to realize. It's the age of nihilism.If Nietzsche was right, we'll have to deal with the nihilism until enough overmen invent the new worldview that restores our faith and propounds a new purpose that is fresh and exciting and gets people on the same page again to pursue a shared goal with a vision, and even in our dark hours the new understanding of things will provide genuine consolation lacking in the world today.
>>522107046So what you're say is that the Federal Reserve's main fuction does is destroy the long term health of capitalist economies by encouraging risky and stupid behavior?And the Andrew Jackson was RIGHT all along?Who woulda' thunk...
>>522107046OP:>We're supposed to keep posts here classic tweet-length, so 150 characters or less, so they aren't tldr.Also OP:>>522107046>>522107801>>522108220...
