'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict
Slave New World
The ‘Global Recession’ has hit many and others not at all. For some this is just a chance for asset repositioning, to ensure that they profit when the tide turns. In the meantime they live in their homes, drive their cars, send their kids to school, take vacations, eat out in restaurants and hire help to make their life just as easy, if not easier than it probably always was.
I have no quarrel with the fact that they are untouched by this financial meltdown. In fact the more of us who stay solvent, the better, but when the green shoots of recovery finally appear it is unthinkable that they should use their resources to reap the riches from the next upturn, thereby stretching the gap between the disadvantaged and the privileged even further.
This is not just a capitalist phenomenon. It is the same set of circumstances that keep the socialist/communist cadres in such tight control of their citizens, and promotes the concept that the only way out is to work, work, work. This is not the freedom that the human race has fought for.
One general statistic that that no one mentions at this time of industrial and domestic slowdown, is how much less, gas, oil, and coal is being used in the world and on the basis of the ‘global warming’ argument, what beneficial impact this is having? I suspect that this financial meltdown is having more effect on our fossil fuel usage than a dozen Kyoto Agreements would ever have had.
In other words, the forbidden question is would it not be better to retain these reduced rates of economic production, simply distributing the benefits more laterally and hopefully gaining a more of a life for us to all live in the process?
The present malaise comes from the Banks we are told. More specifically, what it comes from is financial gearing. As any ‘business’ person will tell you, the price of any given article is not crucial, it is the financing to buy it and whether that financing is ‘variable’ or not.
If, for instance you were to buy a house on a fixed 10% loan, it would be worth half as much as if you could buy it on a fixed 5% loan. Apart from whether the loan is fixed or variable, the only other factor is the amount of deposit you have to come up with. Variable, low interest, no deposit loans are the root cause of these troubles and what do we now see? We see the governments of the world asking the Banks to fuel the next global recovery by easing back down this road of ‘easy money’. The rich will see it coming, buy with cheap loans at the bottom, wait for the system to start to overheat, then sell and sail off into the sun-set. It is easy. I have done it myself.
Unless substantial deposits are required to buy big ticket items, and loan rates are fixed, thereby ensuring both the buyer’s and the lender’s true committment, we are living in a Never-Never Land. Without such rules, the present situation is bound to recur. Don’t be confused by what they say about the global uniqueness of this event. The thirties Depression was as global, and it started in Wall Street. Nothing has changed. Back then there were fewer global economies out there, but those that were there, were affected.
But what I am talking about here is not about boom and bust, it is about the way we live our lives. In the main, our lives should be richer, should be fuller in a personal sense. We must be given the opportunity to exploit the wealth within ourselves, not squander our lives on a hamster wheel trying to exploit the riches without.
This is a moment of great opportunity if we could only grasp that we can live with what we have, and get more from what we have. No one ever said it would be easy and it surely is not. But the stakes are high. As always, the question is whether we shall inherit the future or be enslaved by it.
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