Tea Party

The aroma of Hegel’s huckleberry, President Obama extends the tea leaf of his Alma Mata, King George III. In an effort to sail into the future on the existential express, the White House merchant of change is summoning the ghost of Jacob Marley’s merchantilian England. Once again, the torch bearer of Saul Alinsky, the south side shuffle changes the notes on an old tune. In crisis act accordingly, put existence before essence, absolute relativity before Don Quixote’s horse.

Do you put the water before the tea or the tea before the water? William James stated, “The truth of a statement lies in its practical consequences.” Epistemological pragmatism, perhaps, maybe, but when does choosing ones truth based on what it will accomplish in practice, relate to empiricism. What are you talking about, as some might say, what does this all mean, in a pragmatic existential way? It is assumed that Keynesian economic patterns, empirically speaking, are looked at as a solution for the neoclassic pragmatic verification system, that all solutions are the same for any and all economic uncertainties.

Remember Irving Fisher, the Greenspan of the 1920s, he likened market forces as the changing velocity in monetary policy could indeed be a factor in producing artificial highs and lows in the markets. He wrote of these possibilities in his work entitled, “The purchasing power of money,” in 1911. Enjoying his ride to prosperity, he boldly predicted in 1929, that the stock market had reached a permanent perch upon the shoulders of Zeus, so to speak. Instead, the market tumbled from Olympus, taking what is known today, as a deflationary spiral. Fisher did compose a theory on debt-deflation in 1933 and wrote an article about it in Econometrica, essentially adding to the then debate on the empirical need for the gold standard for currency.

Fisher, led the way for Keynes to insert some of his ideas into Keynes’s format for government intervention in to the markets of the 1930s, in doing so; this laid the foundation for today’s monetary economic practices. Let us for a moment, return to how epistemology is homogenized into the political policies of the economic reigns of capitalism. Kant stated in his critique on reason, that reason has two components, the analytic and synthetic. Making statements based on reason in of its existence, is analytic and basing reason with a sensory objectiveness of the world around us, would be synthetic in nature.

In complete compliance with the ideas of the thinker; that timed his walks to the rhythm of his neighbor’s clocks. It would seem to believe, that the economic risk takers have based their plan on a theory, that more control of monetary policy, is above the law. Natural law, collectively the experts in cause and effect, will indeed cause an effect by trying to implement a plan in Kant’s words, a priori or an analytical statement, a plan is a plan a perfect plan based on the plan. Instead of a posteriori or synthetic statement, that in the course of eighty years, history has observed that confusing the natural risks inherent in the markets, and instilling government policies that reduce the natural arc of the laffer curve, tend to stifle the flow of capital into longer Keynesian curves.

Politicizing economics in order to benefit the middle class and thereby tending to the basic monetary needs of the masses, more overly the American public is a recipe for Hegel’s huckleberry. So soothing in its allure, draped in fairness and sprinkled with utopian aftertastes. Disguised as optimism and hope, it fills the empty glass of change, packaged as progress, it is chained to Marley’s woes and Marx’s ramblings of a new proletariat on the shining hills of collective individualism.

Progress; there is no stinking progress in such a collective consensus, it is more like Plato’s Republic, where such discussion of what to do with the masses whom are ignorant and wanting, is not a concern of the elitist thinker of soft science. Inequality is the voice of the town crier, renouncing individual responsibility and self reliance for the dream of “designer babies” a generation or two away from compliance and order.

It is now tea time, a time for a sip along the Left Bank, so relax and float down stream ever changing and dialectical. Change instead of initiative, lay down your liberty for peace, and give up your individualism for the clanging of conformity, trade morality for relevance, cast away common sense for Alice’s wonderland and drink the wine of a Teutonic Twit, cloaked in progress and hope for all. Long live the king, the saint of deliverance, the piranha of Platonic platitudes. Here lies George III, as it is time for tea, just George and me.