Default, Devaluation, Or What?
Is there anything more to say about Greece? Actually, I think so.
Krugman goes on to comment on the loveliness of more debt. Why? Because debt causes two systemic changes. First, it transfers power to the banking class and the state. Second, it replaces law, custom, and religion, as a means of social management. We have evolved three systems so far for managing society: first phase: religion and shared labor, second phase: law and taxation, and third phase: credit and debt. My Krugman wants us to enter the third phase without understanding the first: concentration of resources, the second: trade routes and markets, or escaping it’s claws. Debt SlaveryMr. Krugman your world view is full of debt slavery. The truth is that we must keep each of these systems of social organization. Religion is a means by which we establish general goals for concentrating effort and resources. Soldiery and market making allow us to control land, trade routes, and to build markets and a division of labor. Credit and Debt let us build a more complex world of incentives and regulations on a more granular individual basis so that we may increase the division of knowledge and labor. But none of these systems is sufficient alone.
A reader comments to this effect on Mr Krugman’s blog:
Konstantin, New York, N.Y. May 4th, 2010
Mr. Krugman your world view is full of debt slavery. Greece should leave the tyrannical European Union and then if it wishes can devalue their currency but not too much.
To which I responded:
“Mr. Krugman your world view is full of debt slavery.”
Quite true.
But this strategy suit’s Mr Krugman’s desire to move society from upper class military control over trade routes for the purpose of creating markets, to working class bureaucratic control over individual lives for the purpose of creating the illusion of psychological certainty. In other words, from a growing to a dying society.
Since we possess too little information to predict the future, we invariably make our judgements about the future according to our class and cultural metaphysical assumptions. We confuse these assumptions or ‘preferences’ for truths. But they are just ‘silly ideas’ writ large, whose silliness is obscured by ignorance, time and complexity.
And unfortunately, it would be a full time job to criticize Mr Krugman’s silly logic. He complains elsewhere that the volume of criticism has increased of late, and that it’s from the Crazies. Crazies simply include a vast number of people in and out of the profession that see him as not an economists but a political hack.
But I’m not sure that there is any better way of illustrating the foolishness of the left than to build a body of work that articulates one’s position by showing the consistency of errors in one’s opposition. And it’s entertaining as well as utilitarian.
Unfortunately, I dislike the man.