Shutting down capitalism almost worldwide may prove to be the grandest disaster of all time. Folks on the margin of poverty in poor countries are already starving. Though scads of people seem to think we could ride out a lockdown indefinitely just by cashing government checks, the problem is that if we don’t produce, we cannot buy and consume products.
It’s not about money, or profits as such: “It’s the productivity, stupid!”
Elon Musk put it this way: “If you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff.”
A “universal basic income” won’t help if the re-distributed money chases few-to-no goods.
So how did we come to believe that we can just shut down most business activity and still survive?
Maybe the idea seems plausible because many people already do not work to survive. As their numbers have increased, our civilization has forgotten that they survive upon the work of others.
We guffaw at young children who, when their parents say something they want is too expensive, they innocently respond, ‘well, just go to the cash machine!’ But the more people rely upon checks and bank deposits from the government — for any reason — the harder it is to remember that the power to buy stuff doesn’t ultimately come from government. With taxation, redistribution and inflation thrown into the mix, even adults think of government as Cash Machine.
And the Cash Machine as a model for the economy.
To fight a virus, the world has shut down production — as if we do not survive by producing goods in order to consume them.
Government has reduced capitalism — and us — to absurdity.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “Cash Machine Cachet”
How long before cash transactions are forbidden, because the virus might exist on the currency? Then the cash machine will be obsolete.
I remember when our oldest son was about young he wanted to buy his neighbor friends motorcycle. We said we did not have the money. Josh just said, well can you just write a check…
Pat makes a good point. Paul got that cash machine metaphor in under the wire. There are indeed discussions about getting paper currency and metal tokens out of circulation and using digital currency instead. This will be safer, they say. Right up until a solar flare destroys electronic technology and we are plummeted back to early industrial times, only without money!
It is my opinion that, at the moment they get rid of physical currency, that is the moment any hope for freedom dies. For digital currency can be centrally controlled.
Getting rid of cash gives control over whoever (I’ll guess it’s the government) has control over whatever takes its place. It does nothing whatsoever to address to fundamental problem “what is there to buy?”
While I usually cite Bastiat in my classes, Kipling summed it up rather succinctly:
“In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘If you don’t work you die.’”