The Individual Mind

Governments around the world (local, state and national) carry debt loads that can never be repaid. These numbers may combine into the $200 Trillion range – levels that cannot even be imagined, much less dealt with economically. (See IMF, McKinsey, and Bloomberg sources.) Per the IMF source, this translates into about $86,000 of debt for every person on the planet. (How many people are there around the globe who will never even make a cumulative $86,000 of income throughout their entire lifetimes, I wonder.) On top of these numbers, governments have made promises to the public for social and welfare spending (like Social Security and health care) that cannot be fulfilled. In the US alone, these unfunded liabilities promised to the public exceed $100T.

To worsen the picture, every year, the annual deficits grow, just adding to the public debt loads as money is borrowed (primarily through various forms of bond sales, e.g. US Treasuries) to keep the lights on, in a sense. There is no hope that even an annual budget could ever break even to pay current liabilities, despite the fact that tax confiscations from the public are ever-increasing and perpetually break previous collections records. Much less is there hope that any real progress could be made to paying down the principal on the many trillions of dollars of debt held by so many individual governments, like that of the US (to the tune of $22 trillion in national debt). City and state governments in the US have their own unsustainable debt paths, unpayable liabilities, bankrupt pension schemes, etc. Additionally, global private debt and derivatives are separate topics that add their own risk to economies.

To keep the shell games going, governments have to find ways to carry the debt year-over-year, convince the taxpayers to keep participating in the Ponzi scheme, and to create new money sources. Of course, the main form of government income is tax takings from the public. These never suffice. They cannot keep up with politicians’ appetites to grow programs, spending and wars – often as a payment to the public for their votes.

Another form of creating money is that of inflation – the hidden tax on the public. This is a very old practice by which governments dilute the money supply. Thousands of years ago, the Roman government did this by cutting corners into round coins, taking the gold and silver shaved corners to melt down into new, smaller coins that held the same face value, but obviously less real value. Thus the money and its value were diluted, and ultimately prices would rise in response. Today, governments do the same thing with the aid of their central banks (e.g. the Federal Reserve in the US). They sell government debt/bonds to the public and to other governments and use that borrowed income to fund current government liabilities. Thus, the money supply is expanded with that infusion into government coffers, the value of the currency is devalued, and ultimately prices increase on goods and services to balance that change. That is inflation. It isn’t natural. Ever-rising prices don’t just occur. It is the direct result of government theft of the value of taxpayers’ money and savings.

A recently published interview with Doug Casey, a contrarian investor and founder of Casey Research, highlighted some aspects of Modern Monetary Theory. He points out that governments are incapable of controlling currencies and points to the illustrative failures of Venezuela, Argentina and Zimbabwe. I would add the Weimar Republic to the list. Neither governments nor any individuals have the capability to understand the billions of moving persons, parts, decisions and interactions that influence economies and determine the values of goods and services. Manipulating values, especially those of currencies and interest rates, has far-reaching and typically unintended consequences. Casey says, “MMT is about radically increased government control. The argument shouldn’t be over whether MMT will ‘work’ or not. (Which he clearly points out multiple times throughout the interview that it does not.) The argument should be about whether it’s moral and proper for people in the government – whether elected or appointed – to print money to change the economy into something that suits them better.”

A few excerpts from Casey’s interview:

“Money represents the hours of your life that you spent earning it. That’s the basic principle here. It represents concentrated life – all the things you want to have and do for yourself, and provide for others in the future. When these people destroy the value of money, they’re destroying part of your life.”

Regarding the broad spectrum of politicians – “They’re all dangerous megalomaniacs. But the chimpanzees listen to them, choose teams, hang on to their every word, support them, and are easily incited to hoot and pant at each other. The American public is going to get exactly what it deserves.”

“They’re going to try every cockamamie idea they can to keep the ball rolling. Lots more controls of all types. More debt. More inflation. MMT is just going to be part of it.”

“I know I’ve been saying this for years. But the idea of America has gradually degraded since about the time of Teddy Roosevelt, and the original Progressives. Then faster with World War I, faster yet with the New Deal, faster yet with World War II, the Great Society, the Nixon devaluation, the Reagan deficits, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror. The only good news – and it’s super good news – is that science and technology have advanced as well. That’s maintained the general standard of living. Unfortunately, the State always gets first dibs on tech developments, and uses them against society. This long-term trend is now going hyperbolic.”

MMT is nothing new that hasn’t been perpetrated on the public countless times before. It’s a newer term for the ancient practice of governments fleecing the citizenry. A slick name aids the deception. As MMT and other forms of economic trickery are promoted by the political and ruling classes as solutions to the ills that they themselves caused, realize that it’s all been done before. And failed. Maybe consider trying something new… like free markets – unencumbered by so many controls, regulations, road blocks, manipulations, thefts, purchased privileges, subsidized failures, and corporo-gov collusions that benefit the few at the expense of the many. Those free markets, they’ve never been tried.

My wife and I both began visiting Spanish speaking countries in our younger days, over 20 years ago, on mission trips. Now, with both of us working in health related fields, we look to continue trips to some of the poorest areas of the western hemisphere in order to potentially support local health initiatives. We also view these under-served parts of the world as frequent vacation destinations – not in the secluded resorts of poor countries, but relatively immersed within the local populations. We enjoy improving our language skills, better understanding local cultures, sharing ideas and observations with native peoples, finding less common paths, dialing down consumption and expense, and ultimately returning home with improved and broadened perspectives.

We had never visited Guatemala nor knew much of its history until recent weeks. As I was searching for potential vacation spots in Central America leading up to this recent vacation, I wanted to explore somewhere we’d never been. (We’ve travelled several times to areas of Mexico, Costa Rica, and Honduras.) Other considerations: (1) cost, (2) with only one week available, airport and road travel needed to be relatively smooth for a same-day arrival to our destination, (3) safety – an admittedly subjective judgment that can be aided with some travel and government websites, (4) points of interest for vistas, learning, hiking, exploring.

Our preference for vacation accommodations is usually a rented house, rather than a hotel. That option tends to be more affordable while offering amenities for cooking at home, as well as being more culturally immersed. I started a few months ago by looking at VRBO.com (vacation rental by owner) offerings in Panama, Nicaragua and Guatemala – countries new to us. While there are many great options (across the gamut of affordable to luxurious), once I hit upon some spots at Lago de Atitlán in western Guatemala, it quickly became a preferred destination. And when we told my Mom about it, she joined up with us for the experience.

We rented a gated home with lake view in Jaibalito for a week at well under $100/day. We flew into Guatemala City (a 3-hour flight from Houston), had reserved a car at US-based Alamo just outside the airport terminal, and started an adventure. Guatemala City has a population of about 3.5 million people, is well-developed, bustling, and traffic-congested. The primary destination for the day was Panajachel (the town on the northeastern shore of the lake, where we would park the car and take a water taxi to Jaibalito). It is about 140 km, less than 90 miles, from Guatemala City. However, with congestion, mountainous roads, meanderings through small towns and construction, that 90 mile trip took 5 hours. (On return, it took six!) NB: if you decide to do something similar, I highly recommend that you arrange a private shuttle/driver. They are apparently plentiful. You do not need a car for this trip.

We arrived to Panajachel after 6pm, and just after dark, but had a destination in mind. Los Cayucos is a marina/parking lot that was recommended by the rental house property manager. With help from a local, self-appointed tour guide on a bicycle (at least his shirt said “tourism”), we found the lot. I had been quoted an approximate price of 30-50 Quetzals ($5-7) per night by the property manager, but on arrival the 24-hour parking attendant wanted 100Q per night. After a little haggling, we settled at 60Q. Then our “tour guide” showed us where to catch a water taxi.

Usually these run pretty frequently between the 5-6 little towns around the lake at 15-25Q ($2-4 per person), but after dark, you need to find a “private” boat. We ended up paying about 10 times that amount because it was after hours,… we were tourists,… and haggling in the dark in an unfamiliar setting in a foreign country with lots of poor locals standing around watching isn’t the wisest move. Fork it over, and keep moving. (My personal opinion: when traveling in unknown and/or potentially dangerous spots, keep as low a profile as possible and always stay in motion.)

Despite some uncertainty (my wife was convinced we were being taken to a drug lord’s house), the 20 minute boat ride was speedy and uneventful. We docked in Jaibalito, found our property manager’s house within 100 yards of the landing, and walked with her to the rental house a few hundred yards away. The house was among the most elaborate structures in the village: 2 story, 3,000 square feet, sitting on about a 1/2 acre of manicured garden, surrounded by a mostly concrete wall, perhaps 20 feet tall at it highest point. Outside the wall were much poorer huts, relatively tightly spaced, made of various makeshift materials, like tin sheets and pieces of wood slab, often with dirt floors and without doors, surrounded by their own fencing of makeshift materials and barbed wire, typically with a constantly-lit wood-burning fire upon which meals are cooked and which at mealtimes can fill the valley with a haze. A minority of the housing in the village looked better established with concrete structures and floors. A few homes looked to be on par with the quality of our rental house: gated, architecturally pleasing, full household amenities (refrigerator, indoor plumbing, gas stove, well-tended yards), tile floors, professionally crafted furniture. These also tended to be owned by ex pats that we met from Germany, Iran and Belgium.

The town of Jaibalito has a population of about 900 people, lies on the northern lake shore, surrounded on all other sides by mountains, and occupies an area of probably 1 square mile total within this small valley. There is no road access to the town whatsoever. The main lane through the village is a roughly 5-feet wide concrete sidewalk with side trenches for runoff (and potentially some human waste). The only vehicles in the village are two small 3-wheeled, motorized carriages, known as tuk-tuks. There are a few small stores (tiendas) that offer some dried goods, fresh food items and select sundries. Also, there are a few open air restaurants – both locally and ex pat owned. There are also some rooms to rent via hostel, a hotel and perhaps other private options (like our VRBO). Just outside of Jaibalito, within 10 minutes walk are a few other tourist hotels and restaurants. Around the lake’s perimeter are small towns, hotels, resorts, restaurants – some of very high quality and price – all accessible by water taxi.

Throughout our week long stay, we ate and shopped locally, cooked at home some, hiked and explored several of the lake’s towns, enjoyed the views, read, took advantage of several of the documentary DVDs at the rental house (see below), spoke to the locals and ex pats, and came away with a better education and perspective regarding Guatemala (especially in comparison/contrast with our own lives, culture, traditions, government,….).

In preparation for our trip, I read Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala in order to better understand that country’s 40-year civil war that ended in the 1990s, its US-supported death squads, the genocide (I don’t think that’s an excessive term) of 200,000+ Mayan natives, and their very tenuous democracy that many have died attempting to establish amidst purposefully destabilizing and powerful external forces. (If you choose to read this well-documented, Harvard University associated book, you will never see your government – or likely any government – in the same light. As a corollary, you might also explore the 1953 CIA-led coup d’etat which overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh.)

Additionally, we watched the documentaries: When the Mountains Tremble (excerpted from Wikipedia’s description):  “a 1983 documentary film … about the war between the Guatemalan Military and the Mayan Indigenous population of Guatemala.^[2][3] …Footage from this film was used as forensic evidence in the Guatemalan court for crimes against humanity, in the genocide case against Efraín Ríos Montt.^[4][5] The film centers on the experiences of Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, a Quiché indigenous woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992….”

Another documentary at the house was Haunted Land: “Two paths cross on a descent into Guatemala’s past: that of Mateo Pablo, a Maya survivor of one of many massacres committed by local government troops, and Daniel Hernández-Salazar, a concerned Guatemalan artist and photographer. Together they travel to a remote site in the highlands where the community of Petanac once stood. The bones found there by archaeologists tell a mute story of agony.”

In summary, it was a great vacation: educational, fun, at once exhausting but rejuvenating of mind/spirit/perspective. The big lesson – take the shuttle.

 I came across this presentation that I made a few years ago at the national AAPS conference and wanted to save it for future reference and the interested. For those that are not familiar with Certificate of Need (CON) laws, many states have created legislation which restricts the purchase, ownership or operation of certain medically-related capital goods, services or businesses. This .pdf format of a PowerPoint presentation is a primer.

My interest in CON laws was piqued when I began considering potential future ownership of a surgery center, but realized that depending on the state in which I reside, that may not be my decision. If politicians (and even my established medical competition, like the Big Hospital Corporations in town) decide that there is not a public “need” for my services, then I can be denied permission to purchase, operate, practice, compete.

The general trend has been towards a peeling back of such laws in many states, but in others, you might not be able to buy a simple x-ray machine for your practice without a politicized agreement of public “need.” If approved, THEN you get to jump through the regulatory and licensing hoops involved with the actual purchase and operation of said machine. But without the CON approval, you do not pass “Go.”

CNBC published an article last week: “The Amazon effect could potentially leave all Americans neighborless.”

The author continues the long-lived and broadly-shared concern that online purchasing and social media are gutting traditional American commerce and interpersonal relationships, leaving us socially isolated amidst a ghost town of dead, bankrupted local businesses. It does sound ominous on the surface. What’s to be done with all of the empty malls and store fronts? What replaces those lost jobs? How do we stay connected to live human beings when we don’t get to see them as our sales people, cashiers and fellow neighbors that we bump into at the hardware store down the street?

The online trends are definitely disruptive. In my opinion, those disruptions are cumulatively positive for economy and quality of life. As consumer goods are supplied at lower costs, with lower overhead and greater efficiency, we are generally better off as a society – although there will be individuals and groups who are forced to adapt to the loss of their less efficient or demanded jobs and business models. These trends are deflationary – driving down prices generally (of goods and commercial real estate), which makes more available to those who could not have earlier afforded as much. That increases quality of life.

While many worry that we will become inseparable from a virtual world, stuck in our electronic devices, divorced from reality and personal interaction, I think we may have reached peak social media tolerance, or are near. People tend to be looking for ways to engage socially – some of which are facilitated and vastly expanded via internet tools. These connections are arguably superior to bumping into Bob and Susie at the hardware store, as we all search among a limited selection of goods priced significantly higher than what Amazon or Costco.com or Facebook Neighborhood Market offers.

As a social example, our local brewhouses in St Louis, are at or approach standing room only on busier evenings – filled with hipsters and professionals and families with children. Sociality proceeds, albeit somewhat differently than in decades past,… which was different from centuries past before telephone or telegram or postal services or a written language. I wonder if people in the early 1900s fretted that visits to friends and family would be curtailed because one now merely needed to pick up the phone to stay in touch.

Article on ZeroHedge today: 1 In 4 Millennials Rely On Their Parents To Pay Some Bills – Even While Working Full Time.

It’s easy for the older generations to blame Millennials for being lazy, overly idealistic, out of touch, or constantly triggered, but they’ve been dealt a really sh*tty upbringing of an entire youth wasted on Government Education and Work Avoidance which prepare them to do nothing but move on to the next 4+ years of bankrupting University – which also fails to prepare them to think critically, provide a valuable service to society or an employer, or to feed and manage themselves. (At this point we could discuss the value of working as a teen, alternative schooling options, trade schools, the rare college degree that delivers a positive cost/benefit analysis, other routes to acquiring marketable skills and experience, alternative methods of “signaling” to employers and the public one’s competencies and reliability other than a piece of paper from an “accredited” school, the opportunity costs of where and how else that time and money could have been spent,…)

Government, Society, Culture, and Zombie Parents have created a perpetual, protected adolescence for this generation(s?) of many hundreds of thousands of young persons, doing them no favors. At the end of that prolonged adolescence (if it ends) lies debt, disappointment, poverty, broken dreams. These youth were lied to in potentially every conceivable way: economically, psychologically, historically, politically, religiously. The moment they become conscious of the deceptions, when they have that awakening of disenchantment and anger, is when adulthood begins. How much better to wake them up in their early teens, so they can prepare, work, adapt, think, survive – rather than set them up for decades of debt and discouragement that they may never be able to overcome? The moral duty seems clear to me.

An informative podcast on this topic can be found at TomWoods.com (as well as many other good ones on related issues). Harvard-trained psychologist, Robert Epstein, guests and explains how “… adolescence is an artificial construct of recent vintage, unknown in earlier times or indeed in many parts of the world today. The creation of this category, and the assumptions that inform it (by state and society alike) have harmed young people, he argues, and are responsible for the anxiety and angst we associate with the teenage years.”

It would be difficult to find a topic of greater importance than the treatment of current adolescence. For their own health, for their financial well-being, for the influence and direction that they will give to their own families and to Society in the coming decades, it is not hyperbole to say that our future depends upon the youth of today. Unfortunately, their problems are primarily the fault of their predecessors – parents, teachers, politicians, clergy,… – those whose duty it was to guide them well. Instead, these Life Guides have abdicated their duties, at best, and at worst, they have purposefully manipulated and parasitized humanity’s youth for their own motives of profit and power (e.g. mammoth tuition schemes, tax justification, war fodder, votes, marketing for consumption and profits, perpetuating myths and failed ideas,…). The “Adults” have directed those for whom they have stewardship down faulty, expensive and deceptive paths. Stop setting them up for failure. And stop blaming them for that failure,… which is really your own.

As I sit down on New Year’s Eve day to run through end-of-year personal financials, to make sure Gov has gotten its requisite pounds of flesh, and to see that all the tax-related donations and contributions have been allocated (charities, HSA, 529K, etc), I also run a quick review of where we’ve been financially in 2017 (as an economy) and where we might be headed in 2018. Since the financial crisis of 2008, and its decade-long “recovery,” I’ve long-anticipated the next financial correction. Careful to not become too taken in by the doomsayers, I have to admit an affinity for their significant caution. My personal savings and investment approach has been increasingly cautious and conservative as the un-deserved and unsustainable nose-bleed valuations in financial markets (my personal opinion) continue to march upward.

This year has witnessed ever-climbing stock market valuations (with the Dow over 24,000 – after a low in the 7,000 range in 2009) – without any recognizable rise in productivity or demonstrable wealth that would justify it. We’ve seen blockchain cryptocurrencies take off with Bitcoin rising from the few hundred dollars per BTC, to $18,000 or so, and today back in the $13,000 range. Debt and derivative exposures continue to climb. Some estimates place total global derivative exposure as high as $1.2 Quadrillion USD – about 20 times global GDP. As I wrote about a few months ago on this site, the Too Big To Fail Banks that required bailouts in 2008 are more consolidated and risky than ever.

Economic cycles are unavoidable (despite extreme and distorting Gov interventionism to the contrary) and historically well-documented. The unknowns are: when and how big the correction. Inescapably (and thankfully so, IMO), change and disruption occur. In our current times and with growing technologies, however, these arrive at a more rapid pace and to potentially greater degrees. How will the current financial system weather the disruptions? After the creation of the US Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, and the dominance of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency after WWII via the Bretton-Woods agreement, one might wonder if these monetary systems will be sustainable for another century, and just when they will go the way of previous global currency systems. With major systemic monetary challenges, like the rise of government decentralized cyryptocurrenices, and non-US currency/non-petro-dollar currencies (e.g. Sino-Russian currency alliance), it is unlikely that the US dollar will maintain its 20th century global dominance going forward. (How this will all play into US global military hegemony and funding is the topic for another article,… as is the mass of future debt-dependent, unfunded liabilities to the American public, e.g. Medicare, Social Security, government pensions – which stretch into the $200 Trillion range, in the setting of a current national debt of $20 Trillion.)

After clicking around on some articles today, I’ll share some that expand on related topics. Doug Casey shared some thoughts in an interview this week discussing central banking, the historic errors of economic “experts,” the economic interventions that make the market distortions (and eventual correction) much worse than they could have become without central bank and government interference. One excerpt:

“… the Fed has dropped interest rates to near zero. I used to think it was metaphysically impossible for rates to drop below zero. But the European and Japanese central banks have done it.

“The other thing they did was create megatons of money out of thin air. This hasn’t just happened in the U.S., either. Central banks around the world have printed up trillions of currency units.

“How many more can they print at this point? I guess we’ll find out. Plus, it’s not like these dollars have gone to the retail economy the way they did during the “great inflation” of the ’70s. This time they went straight into the financial system. They’ve created bubbles everywhere.

“That’s why the next crisis is going to be far more serious than what we saw a decade ago.”

Charles Hugh Smith wrote an article at Peak Prosperity entitled “The Inescapable Reason Why the Financial System Will Fail: Credit cannot expand faster than fundamentals forever.” He describes the fundamentals of debt creation via credit, and the global central banks’ efforts to goose the economy by making credit almost free with near-zero interest rates. However, this has had extreme consequences, which few are willing to recognize.

“By lowering interest rates and bond yields to near-zero, central banks deprived institutional owners who rely on stable, high-yielding safe investment income—insurers, pension funds, individual retirement accounts, and so on—of exactly what they need: safe, stable, high-yield returns.

“In this ‘do whatever it takes’ environment, the only way to earn a high return is to buy risk assets—assets such as stocks and junk bonds that are intrinsically riskier than Treasury bonds and other low-risk investments.”

If you wonder why the stock market looks like it’s doing so great, and the economy seems to be humming along by some measures, Mr. Smith just described to you the rot upon which those numbers are predicated. Once interest rates were artificially driven into the floor by central banks in order to juice the economy, there was no longer any return on “safe” investments. In order to seek out a return, the majority of the trillions of dollars that have been created by the central banks has been ploughed into the stock market in order to chase returns. That is just another form of “inflation,” currency devaluation, monetary expansion. The Dow doesn’t sit at 25,000 because it’s worth it. It’s “valued” at ridiculous levels because it’s been the last refuge for those who need to make a return on their investments,… and for those who fear LOSING money on their deposits because of zero and even negative interest rates on deposits. This is not a normal, market environment. This is the consequence of distorting interventionism. The misallocation of those savings and investments, which would not be there otherwise, will become obvious once assessments correct down to accurate values. When that happens, those that sought return at the expense of safety, will experience significant losses.

The third of the articles I’ll share today was written by David Stockman, a former (and repentant) US Treasury official, who offers uncommon insights into decades of economic interventions and cycles. (Check out his excellent book which summarizes his experience in and perspective on the US economy: The Great Deformation.) He considers our current situation The Greatest Bubble Ever and reinforces what has been described above. He points out that personal savings rates are at near historic lows, asset valuations at record highs, and there is no dry powder left in the Fed’s armory to deal with the next correction. This time will be a doozy.

“Valuation levels have never been higher relative to income and forward prospects. Central banks have never been on the precipice of a multi-trillion cash extraction and pivot to QT (qualitative tightening). And nine years of central bank fostered bubble inflation and fake recovery have never rendered the casino so complacent. In all, we’d say Wall Street is calling the sheep to the final slaughter.”

In summary, 2018 will bring significant challenges and change. But that’s good – although not painless. True valuations need to be found. Sustainable paths set upon. The unsustainable and the failing exposed and purged. Preparing appropriately and anticipating disruptions will make the transitions smoother, perhaps even profitable for the prepared. Alternatively, entrenching oneself in traditional asset classes, long-established systems, misguided nationalism, and poorly-founded economic beliefs may bring more discomfort than many are prepared to deal with. Stay nimble, challenge everything, live well beneath your means, and enjoy the innovations and change that the future holds.

And have a Happy New Year!

Zerohedge ran an article this past week in which a former economist of a big financial corporation referenced the financial crisis of 2007, when the “Too Big To Fail” banks were bailed out by the US Government in order avoid a supposed nation-wide (if not global) financial meltdown. Regardless of what the outcome of a financial system allowed to fail might have meant in reality (true chaos and catastrophe versus a return to actual and appropriate values), the point of the article is that the TBTFs remain TBTF. The system has not been fixed. These institutions should not be protected to the point of an oligopoly of massive corporations that can threaten to take down an economy. For some that have interest in and understand the business cycle, allowing businesses to fail (before they become artificially massive and de-stabilizing) is healthy and proper.

I add the opinion that it is not only banks that must be allowed to fail, but also governments,… and businesses,… and people. Failure is a mandatory part of improvement, finding efficiencies, making progress. The costs, distortions, and energies that are wasted in denying necessary failures (and propping up the individuals and entities that should be allowed to return to their sustainable baselines) are infinitely greater than the costs of the failures and adjustments would be. But people (voters) LOVE to keep those wealthy and powerful ensconced in their protected and well-entrenched positions, boots securely anchored on their necks, via bailouts, corporate welfare, perpetual re-election, etc.

Even more broadly, it seems clear to me just how important a universal principle “allowed failure” is. Aside from the economic and political, the principle is vitally important in our personal endeavors, child rearing, relationships, and employment. Some pain and discomfort are very useful as reality checks and appropriate motivators. Removing uncertainty and noise in order to find the true, base value of the things, people, and goals in our lives provides necessary insight to make best decisions and improvement plans. There is some degree of pain involved in any of the above. But is not pain that is experienced in order to find growth actually an investment – a useful cost? In contrast, self-imposed pain that is suffered in the attempt to avoid a much-needed reckoning and return to true value is pure waste, procrastination, and wishful thinking. Embrace the failure. Own it. Learn from it. Traverse the pain. Let us hold our chins high and move forward with better plans and approaches. Let us not only adopt the principle of allowed failure for our own growth, but demand it from those that live at our expense and make decisions which significantly affect our lives.

With the recent shootings in Las Vegas, there has been an endless stream of commentary and opinion about gun violence and shootings in the U.S. An article by John Whitehead spurred some thoughts on root causes. While many will blame guns and gun laws, I think that the culture of violence in this country may be the most causative issue. Some of the points below are shared by Mr. Whitehead, others are my own, synthesized from observations over the past decade and more.

It seems to me that the U.S. is a very violent nation at baseline. This country has a hyper militaristic, nationalistic, and law enforcement culture of violence. It is the only country in the world that has a global military empire that gets away with drone bombing the planet, overthrowing autonomous regimes, interfering with everyone else’s country – all to the applause of the American masses. The associated mindset of force permeates everything. The PTSD’d soldiers return to become cops that use force to drive every component of people’s lives in our hyper-legislated society – where every infraction is ultimately enforced at the point of a gun. They shoot people’s dogs like they were cockroaches – estimated at 10,000 dogs per year per some sources. The Drug War (which I’ve written about and shared to these pages) is at the center of racist, family-destroying, life-altering, unemployment-causing, hyper-violence which is the result of both (1) government’s failed and impossible enforcement, and (2) from the violent drug supply side of dealing and trafficking that only exists because of the distorted economics of Prohibition.

Catalonians in the street this week to protest efforts by Spain to suppress their secession. (picture from Krieger’s site).

Michael Krieger wrote a great piece this week about the global, human trends toward decentralization – in contrast to the centralized, authoritarian approaches that governments use to coerce cooperations and impose controls. He hits a number of enlightening topics: economics, crypto currencies, China, US politics, corporate cronyism, media’s waning control of the minds of the masses,…. Do yourself a favor and expose your mind to his perspectives. Well worth your time, in my opinion. An excerpt:

“Decentralization is an idea whose time has come. As I write this, conscious people across the world are creating systems of human empowerment, while powers of centralization desperately fight to preserve control. We aren’t the ones reacting to them, they are reacting to us. That’s not a fight they can easily win– the only question is how much are they willing to destroy in a futile quest to stymie human progress?

“Strategically, much of the current battle is about exposing power structures for what they really are by making them reveal their true thuggish natures. We must do this by creating systems that are transparently superior and more ethical than existing systems, which will then force their hands. If governments insist on thwarting human progress merely to retain control, it’ll be clear to all that they don’t work for the people, but rather, for themselves.”

(Victor Hugo, well-renowned author, poet, artist of 19th century France)

“A film from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, adapted from the 1958 essay [I, Pencil] by Leonard E. Read.” Mr. Read was a grocery chain owner and in the 1940s, he founded the Foundation for Economic Education in response to market-distorting New Deal interventionism.

This video is a 6 minute adaptation based on his essay.  The existence of a “simple” pencil illustrates and is the culmination of the cooperation and interaction of millions of people across the globe, interacting in a decentralized, spontaneous, mutually-beneficial way.

“I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding!”