Where Are The Statesmen (& Women) Who Can "JUST SAY NO!" ?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

An ex-senator, a former CIA officer, and an Iraqi mogul lobby Congress for a private army, led by Saddam’s officers, to take on the terrorists that have trampled America’s proxies.

What could go wrong?

Wasn't ISIS started by, and is still led by, Saddam's officers? You can't make this up.

Create 2 sides, & sell weapons to both? That sounds rather familiar.

Twerks fur mi!

Where indeed are the Statesmen who can "Just Say No!" ?

And, ahem, the Stateswomen?

What happened to an ounce of prevention? Not profitable enough? Just think how little a microgram of prevention would have cost, back when we had the options of not overthrowing yet another government, to, you know, prevent an audit of some corporations shady bookkeeping.

Revolutions are always justified, but invasions and rebellions alike are always betrayed ... before they're even finished?

A reminder: Fiat currency operations are NOT about individuals making personal gains in the stock market. It's about making people aware of aggregate options worth exploring.

"How do you get people to explore their options."

Personal or aggregate.

In a conversation years ago, Warren Mosler asked me: "How do you get people to explore their options."  That was a killer question that stopped me in my tracks, and honestly, I've been researching it ever since. And, the answer is: that much is actually known, most of it is actively ignored, it's not formally taught in K-12 schools, and the task gets bigger every year ... and harder, every day that we neglect it. What is known is subtle, trivially easy, not immediately profitable, but is the actual key to sustaining short term, medium term and long term cultural evolution. It's all about an ounce of preventive preparation avoiding the spiraling repair costs associated with narrow, get-rich-quick schemes.

To repeat an old message. MMT is not economics. Rather, it is a description of pragmatic fiat currency operations, which COULD be applied to fiscal and monetary policy, if there were even a few more pragmatic people left in the USA.

Missing the Prevention Options for the Repair Costs

Steve Hansen lets the data speak for itself. Yes, he is NOT an economist.

Health Care Expenditures Have Not Stopped Increasing

There are other options for addressing this dilemma. Why aren't citizens smart enough to explore those options? Don't tell me ... they're a product of our vaunted education system.

Longplayer Letters? Maybe JM Keynes Should Have Corresponded Even More With CH Douglas!

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Longplayer Letters is a commendable initiative to draw attention to long-term, prepatory thinking and ounces-of-prevention, rather than our current over-focus on quarterly returns. Please write to the LongNow Foundation and ask them to sponsor Kilkenomics Festivals too! Both efforts help increase the proportional feedback in play between the increasing numbers and subtypes of our national, human-network. More feedback would help now, as it would have in the past.

In retrospect, it sure seems like the Marriner Eccles revolution would have had a more lasting impact if people like Keynes had had the courage to "do" what's right, instead of "being" a successfully rewarded acolyte & junior member of the aristocracy. The few recorded exchanges between, for example, CH Douglas and JM Keynes - who was "knighted" and awarded a hereditary title, "Baron of Tilton" - are fascinating examples of commoners and aristocrats drily trying to discuss what they presume "must" occur if the actions of an entire electorate are to be understood and "managed" by managers!

Looking back, their entire discussions and competing careers can be quickly summarized from the paradigm of maintaining either an agile, pass-through society, or one whose net options are arbitrarily constrained by elites excessively hoarding static assets. No subgroup can possibly hope to wield static assets as well as a fully communicating, full electorate can. None of us is smarter than all of us. No general hoarding all the weapons can outperform an army where all weapons are distributed to all available, fully trained and practiced hands.

The only way for elites to justify excessive hoarding of static assets is to purposely limit the training and practice received by those declared non-elites. It just doesn't work. Letting elites buy officer positions in military armies, undertrained or not, was not a competitive strategy. Neither is letting elites buy access to political office, regardless of any and all efforts to keep serfs, sharecroppers and/or voters uninformed, untrained, and unemployed. It's a losing stratey wherever attempted. Elitism falls into the category of over adapting to any transient situation. That approach lessons both subgroup and national survival odds in unpredictaly changing situations, which always arrive an unpredictable intervals.

The bestknown adaptive strategy is to build national resiliency, precisely by removing any arbitrary - e.g., hereditary - barriers between supposedly elite and supposedly non-elite classes of people. We pursue sexual, cultural and option-recombination precisely so that we can generate, select from and leverage diversity - NOT to forego our ability to use that diversity at a second's notice.