Some political systems are based on beliefs and identity. The American congress is built on spending money. The spoils system long ago became the spoiled system with money as the lubricant of politics. The legacy of a leader used to be measured by his accomplishments, today it’s measured by how much money he managed to extract from the collective pool of real and imaginary money held in the sweaty hands of the legislatures.
Much of the money is imaginary, but in the minds of the politicians it’s all imaginary. Unreality is an elementary tool of price inflation. The more outrageous the markup, the more the merchant works to create an atmosphere where money does not seem to exist and reality bends at the seams. It’s not a new game of a particularly clever one, but the unreality bubble now covers much of Washington D.C.
In the unreality bubble, numbers don’t really mean anything. 2 + 2 does not equal 4, sometimes it equals 1, sometimes a 100, sometimes any number you want it to be. Philosophers have spent thousands of years proving that nothing is real, but until recently they were not being employed as economists.
The clever are particularly adept at deception and at self-deception, treating reality as if it were as malleable as language. Objective reality can’t be manipulated with language, but subjective reality easily is. And each manipulation only increases the perception of unreality as the reality gap widens between the out of touch, who also happen to be in power.
Spending is momentum. It’s also privilege. Wealth is power and the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money is rather disturbingly close to absolute power. And absolute power not only corrupts, it also blinds and distorts.
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Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield
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