Friday 27 October 2017

THE PERVERTED MATHEMATICS OF ECONOMICS



There is something so desperately warped about our collective common cognitive construction.  Or, to put it another way, our culture is fucked.

To start with many people will have heard various explanations of how money is debt and therefore not what we think it is but few really understand that.  A simplified explanation is that what it all boils down to is that someone writes an IOU note and gives it to you.  Now they have the real wealth, the potatoes or whatever, and you have a piece of paper.  We call that piece of paper 'money'.  It is the person holding the money that is 'without' something.  Of course it has the potential to 'buy' some strawberries so on that level it works.  But because we think of money as something in itself and as representing wealth there is the correlate that if you have more money you have more 'wealth' and the possibility of more strawberries and this seems like a good thing.

So why do pirates bury their treasure?  It seems an anomaly to bury treasure.  The only purpose of treasure is what it can acquire for you.  By burying it you remove the only value it has.  And yet, in the most bizarre twist of perception, that is exactly what the wealthy elite do.  Why are there all these tax havens created, supported, and defended by what I call right wing thugs but others call the Tories?  They are the desert islands where they bury their treasure.  Their 'treasure' is debt.  They are accumulating and hiding all the 'debt', all the negative aspect of our existence.  In their minds it makes them better off.  This is exactly what is described in other dimensions of our conceptualisation of reality as 'sanctimonious hypocrisy'.  People who wish to paint themselves to look good on the outside, hiding all the detritus on the inside.

Now consider a graph for a moment.  Think of the cross hairs in front of you with little tick marks along the X (left to right) and Y (up and down) axes (that's not the "more than one axe" 'axes' but the "more than one" axis 'axes' - so when I say I need many axes to deal with the Tory government it may appear ambiguous to some) ... anyway, back to the axes of the graph.  In the top right quadrant imagine a sales chart zigzag line but on average travelling horizontally.  This represents the fluctuating 'money' through time (the X axis).  Capitalists need this line to be going up rather than flat or going down.  If the natural state of the universe is horizontal they don't like that and they use a little trick of rotating the axes slightly clockwise without moving the line.  Now, if you tilt your head to the right, and squint a bit, you can see that, relative to the axes, the zigzag is going 'up'.  So now you can put the graph back but bring the new offset zigzag with it.  Now your business is doing well.  Now put a sustainable zigzag where you had the original and rotate the graph clockwise to see where your 'sustainable' line has gone relative to the actual framework that existed prior to the bending of reality by the capitalist to make their 'sustainable' line look 'profitable' to them.  You have suddenly gone into decline.

Now rub all that out and consider another revealing aspect of the graphical representation of 'wealth'.  Instead of a zigzag we'll use a straight line this time.  So a horizontal line from left to right indicates the natural state of sustainable progress.  If the line is heading downwards as it crosses the X axis it takes a sudden turn for the worse.  It starts heading downwards faster.  We all know this symptom of 'getting into debt'.  There are various factors that play into it and they are not relevant here except to note that the reduction of interest rates by the IMF etc. are attempts to limit the damage caused by this crossing over into 'negative equity'.  The problem with that is that by rotating the graph (changing interest rates in this case) they are reducing the decline of those in debt but the effect on those who are increasing their wealth is to make it go up more sharply.  As they panic and attempt to nudge the rotation such that they increase interest rates to hold down the escalating wealth at the top they plunge those in debt back into a steeper down turn.  (They have run into some fundamental and profound problems.)

And here is the thing: with all this manipulating of our perception of reality via our back to front interpretation of money two things become evident.  The first thing is that people who are maintaining a steady line in debt are actually making good headway except for the problem of where the "zero" line is placed.  In other words, if you simply took the X-axis and put it further down, the people maintaining a horizontal line would now be in the positive region without the dragging effect of the 'debt' and would be making a 'profit'.  The other notable point is that we have already established our 'positive' representation of money is up-side-down which translates to the top of the graph being the negative area and the bottom being the positive numbers.  So if you flip the graph upside down you can see that all the rules still apply as before except that it is the 'wealthy' who are plunging this world, or our existence in it, into spiralling debt, whilst the rest of us poor buggers are actually doing perfectly fine.

These effects can so easily be seen with issues like the ecological costs of industry which are not accounted for in their 'profit making' models.  We are becoming so indebted to nature that it is simply unsustainable.  Although people seem to 'know' this they also seem to have an incredibly hard time trying to either explain it to someone else or even to themselves.  Hence works like Naomi Klein's "This changes everything" and Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century".  Both are essentially correct in their postulations but both find it hard to resolve the conundrum because they are accidentally trapped in a linguistic construct which is paradoxically incorrect.

And I have a lot to say about this fuckwit idea spawned from the hideous demonic minds of the Tories to put 'bed-blocking' patients in people's homes to alleviate the pressure on the NHS.  This is as stupid as their private finance initiative (PFI) which is now costing the NHS in excess of £4,000 every minute (and that is from the 'official' figures).  The problem with putting patients in people's homes, (yes - ordinary people's homes - the idea is to effectively 'rent' spare rooms from people!) is that you have to ask the question "Why is it cheaper to rent rooms in houses than to keep people in a bed in hospital?"  The first response might be that there is a lot of expensive equipment and staff and stuff in hospitals.  But this is spurious because a bed on a ward is not using all that expensive equipment etc.  That notion is gleaned from averaging the overall hospital costs and dividing it by the number of beds.  That is stupid precisely because it leads the numbskull into thinking that each patient costs the same and allows such stupidity as to perceive the expensive act of privately renting someone's room as 'cheaper'.  But it couldn't be cheaper.  It is far more efficient on resources to have your 20 patients in a ward than to have 20 private accommodation bills.  But this is EXACTLY the stupidity of the Tory mindset.

I hate these fuckers with a vengeance because they are full of shit and pathologically driven to puke it all up over the rest of us.  The weird thing is they are not even evil.  They haven't the fucking intelligence to be evil.  They are so fucking dead from the neck up they can't even be considered human.  They are criminally insane.  That is pretty well a scientifically provable fact.  Stuff all this post truth alternative fact shit and let's look at reality.  The lunatics, the exceptionally malicious warped demonic fuckheads, are running the show.

And that's me just trying to wake up in the morning because I can't sleep.