A Note for Ye and We Doom'nGloomers...

...  I for one have found it very difficult to grasp until recently why this house of cards has not fallen sooner. People much smarter and more informed than me expected it to crash around 2006. When the economy crashed in 2008, we were amazed at how willing the Powers That Be (in this case primarily the Fed) were to do terrible things, like print money at a hyper-inflationary rate, or -- in order to forestall that hyper-inflation while guaranteeing it would eventually appear and be that much worse for being postponed -- bomb any nation that wouldn't accept that increasingly debased currency called the US (petro)dollar, in order to avoid taking genuine responsibility for their actions much less help us fix our problems.

It has taken me awhile to realize that balance applies here like everywhere else. In this case, the balance is that the Powers That Be have to do something with that energy they don't put into making things better, and since they won't work to make things better, they have to -- consciously or unconsciously, by design or by incompetence -- work to make things worse.

We try to explain this phenomenon by the histories/ideologies of this or that political faction but it's really that simple. Just as resignedly voting for the lesser evil usually lowers the general good, so does always taking the Easy Way Out necessarily result in Making Things Harder.

Line of Least Resistance