sad, but true

• ...just as democracy has not guaranteed rationality in economic policy, it will also be a poor protector of personal liberty. The democratic masses are now sufficiently conditioned to believe that politics and state action are the solution to every problem, and when the crisis intensifies and anxiety levels rise, the majority will happily sign away the remaining bits of individual freedom and property rights in a desperate but entirely counterproductive bid to stem the tide.

The quote above is from the latest in a fine series of posts subsequent to his book on Paper Money Collapse by Detlev Schlichter.  In contrast to the current US President, Schlichter appears to have a clear grasp on economics, capitalism and the basis for prosperity.

For example:

•  On the basis of economic theory and historical experience, the life expectancy of a societal model with 50 percent or more government control over the economy does therefore not look promising. The taxing, resources-consuming state-parasite must constantly weaken and sooner or later kill the productive and wealth-creating market-host. When does this happen? Well, we are about to find out, as we are now all part of some gigantic real-life experiment, bravely conducted by the current policy establishment in Europe and elsewhere at our own expense and that of our children. Across the EU, the share of government spending in the economy is already around 50 percent, depending whose numbers you believe. If we could account for regulation and interventionist legislation, the state’s grip on economic decision-making is certainly larger. To call such an economy capitalist is a joke, albeit perhaps not as cruel a joke as the one the economy itself, with its persistently anaemic performance, is playing on the Keynesian economists and their ridiculous clamour for ever more government spending to boost ‘aggregate demand’.
• Anybody with any knowledge of economics should feel uneasy at the sight of a country where half of recorded economic activity is conducted by the state.

Rather than a sense of unease, the mass herd of mainstream media appears to be doing its best effort to rationalize and legitimize the ideology of state control over the economy.  Find one example in all of human history where this has been a sustainable success.

When ever the answer is given as "state control over the economy", you know one of two things:

• the wrong questions have been asked, or
• someone is seeking to exert power and control using the state as their instrument of personal aggrandizement.

Sad but true.