The Mises Institute’s put this out a while ago, but I just stumbled across it; it’s worth reading the whole thing. Excerpts, with my comments, follow.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned about the optimistic estimates for 2023, stating that it will likely be a much more difficult year than 2022.
Why would that be? Most strategists and commentators are cheering the recent decline in price inflation as a good signal of recovery. However, there is much more to the outlook than just a moderate decline in price inflation rates.
Price inflation is accumulative, and the estimates for 2023 and 2024 still show a very elevated level of core and headline inflation in most economies. The longer it remains this way, the worse the economic outcome. Citizens have been living on savings and borrowing to maintain current levels of real spending. But this cannot last for many years.
Politicians all over the world are trying to convince us that an annual inflation rate of 5 percent is a success, when it is a calamity.
The slight reduction in the inflation rate to 5% is being ballyhooed by the Biden(‘s handlers) Administration and the political Left as some kind of victory, which strikes me as a sick joke. The middle class is being pinched worse of all – too prosperous to get on the Free Shit gravy train, but without the resources to comfortably sit out a significant economic downturn.
The outlook for 2023 is widespread impoverishment while governments continue to spend and raise taxes, which means an even worse destruction of real disposable income.
What is happening in the so-called recovery from the pandemic is nothing else but a global destruction of the middle class at an unprecedented speed.
The worst policies have been implemented and all have decimated real savings and wages. Money printing and tax hikes have not made the rich poorer and they have certainly not damaged the wealthy. The entire negative impact of the widespread increase in taxes has fallen, yet again, on the shoulders of the middle class.
To which I would ask: “What are the odds that this is deliberate?” Now, you might say, “Animal, that’s just a little paranoid, isn’t it?”
But is it, really?
Anyone who has read these virtual pages for any length of time knows that I have little patience for nutbar conspiracy theories, but it’s worth reflection that the recent Davos conference that we just discussed last week saw none other than Jane Goodall advocating for a dramatic reduction in Earth’s human population. While that is perhaps extreme even for the Davos crowd, is it hard to imagine that some of the “elites” would find an impoverished population much easier to control, to coerce, to force into the kind of “green” rabbit warrens they are advocating.
Even if we set aside the hypocritical elites at Davos, it’s easy enough to see how the political Left in the United States has worked for decades to increase the population’s dependency on government, which gives the government more power, which enables them to place further controls on our behavior, which increases dependence still more… It’s an evil, self-perpetuating cycle, and we may be seeing it come to a head in 2023. The question is: Will the citizenry of the USA figure it out and chuck the bastards out? I’m skeptical; the siren song of Free Shit is very seductive, and plenty of people will react to any serious downturn by buying into that guarantee for comfort, even at the expense of their liberty.
Here’s the onion:
When you demand more government, this is what you get. An extractive and confiscatory view that always blames those who invest and create jobs for the problems yet creates a larger bureaucracy to administer the so-called benefits you never get.
On this point the late Robert Heinlein was prescient when he wrote these words:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
Amen.
