Amerika

¡TRIGGER ALERT! This post contains what may resemble a math-like substance. Should this induce anxiety, breathe deeply into a fast food bag that smells like French fry grease. You can then once more relax.

So let’s say you miss the good old days when a king was a king and peasants knew they’d better kowtow properly lest they be shortened by a head, I’ve got nothing but good news. We’ve got a way to keep those little people exactly in the muddy ditch where they belong. You keep their wages essentially stagnant and you make it very expensive for them to improve themselves or put a roof over their heads. What Charles Hugh Smith sees as a problem, I see as a mechanism. One that our betters seem to find very useful.

It starts by undercutting the value of an hour’s hard work. If I build up the cardio-respiratory endurance to withstand the work-a-day treadmill, I could get uppity and develop some serious delusions of adequacy. What you need is a nice effective algorithm to slap these suck-weasels down hard before they get all full of themselves. According to the Economic Policy Institute, we’ve got just the weapon. The table below shows the changes in income by level of education between 2007 and 2014. It assumes a standard wage of $100, develops an exponential function based on the wage change and then projects what that $100 would be worth if earned twenty years hence.

What jumps out immediately is that somebody that straps on the student loan debt to matriculate at Old Ivy and then fails to get the sheepskin is worse off in terms of wage value over time than people I knew who were already cannabis-baked by the 7th grade. How’s that for some Dark Enlightenment?

Then you can press down on them further by steepening the cost of educational credentials so that villains remain villains and the elitists at Yale will never suffer breathing the same air. Here’s what has happened to the cost of college in the last 15 years. The cost of tuition in 2035 will be 7.5 times as much as it was 2000. Ask yourself whether our overlords are going to be 7.5 times as wise and perspicacious.

If people manage to squirrel away money and don’t blow it on the college experience, you can make it impossible to keep a sound, dry roof over your head. Ceteris paribus, the monthly rent will be 2.82 times as much as it was back in Y2K. Will the apartment be 2.82 times as spacious and luxurious?

So if the people get too uppity, we can thank our stellar economic overlords for knowing how to put up-jumped upstarts back in their places. You can’t have these types thinking they can bend the blades of grass on Mark Zuckerberg’s elegant lawn. This is why our current Federal Reserve policies are truly brilliant and those cracker-jack geniuses we keep sending to Washington, DC have our economy humming along on 200 cylinders. Keeping people poor, miserable and locked out of any hope of ever advancing prevents them from worrying their pretty little heads over the direction that their society and culture are heading in. Especially if these elites know good and bloody well that it is ultimately a highway to hell.

Tags: control, deflation, feudalism, inflation