Metrics

We do not have an economic crisis. We have a crisis in leadership. The ‘bad’ economy is merely a symptom of the crisis in leadership world-wide. The economy is not fragile. It is not failing. It is telling us precisely about the state the world finds itself in.

If you use a thermometer to check your child’s temperature and find he has a fever, a reasonable response should not be to blame the thermometer; to pack it in ice or throw it down in a rage. Yet this is exactly what we’re doing. The economy is merely a metric - a tool - a device to measure the relative health of a nation(’s overall policies). A tool can never exceed its function. As policy is always contingent on mercurial political demands, the economy can be said to reflect the relative soundness of political realities as well.

In an effort to build (false) constituencies, politicians have taken the value out of work. They’ve taken winning out of the game. They’ve taken the truth out of history. They’re taking the killing out of war. They’re taking the people out of governance. In doing all that, they’ve taken hope out of the future. What they’re attempting here amounts to no less than a man-made contingency operation; attempting to change the world into what it has never been before – into what it can never be. It’s no wonder alarm bells are going off everywhere you look.

If it were merely theft, it might be a blessing. The thief is caught and punished. The victim either writes off his loss and begins again, or he is in some way compensated. Either way, there is closure. What we’re witnessing at the G8 summit in Toronto is not theft. It is trying to change the way things actually work; it is trying to upend the laws of gravity. It is going against nature without the temperance of conscience, without an understanding of trespass onto the sacred ground of reality.

You don’t go about building a machine in which every module is wholly dependent on every other. You build it so that failing modules can be easily swapped out. You don’t build an oil tanker (or submarine) without breaking it up in to compartments. If one should be breached, it can be sealed off and the rest of the ship survives. “Too big to fail” spells disaster and worse. In fact, if “too big to fail” should become the norm, we will no longer be able to tell what is disaster and what is not. There will no longer be anything to compare. Every traditional standard loses its meaning. What is is. No further argument is possible. This, plain and simple, is the definition of tyranny.

The reason America’s economic metrics are bad is not because of some vague notion of the failure as relates some equally vague academic construct. (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”) It is a failure that originates and is maintained by the people themselves. In our set-up it is the result of people rebelling against a self-serving, wrong-headed, oppressive, ruling class. The people themselves produce all the metrics needed. Governments ultimately serve at the will of the people. Without their acquiescence, government is illegitimate. The metrics tell us that this has now become the case.