NH Jobless Rate Now Lower Than Inauguration Day

The purpose of deprivation? (0.00 / 0)

The purpose of deprivation -- i.e. restricting a person's access to the necessities of life (clean air, water, nutrition and security in one's person) -- is to send the message that obedience is a precondition to survival.  For the bi-polar conservative authoritarian it's the stick which is preferred to the carrot or bribe.

"Political economy" is the term academics use for the strategy of using access to resources as a tool to manage the polis.  They justify the impulse to manage the polis, rather than manage the environment to satisfy human needs, with the premise that

"man prefers leisure and must be bribed to worked"  

Bribery, of course, is morally suspect.  So, if man can be made to work without offering bribes, that's a moral success.  As I've said before, it all depends on your pre-conceived notions.

I suspect that, in addition to the rational desire (the will to power) to cause deprivation and impose dominion on the globe's populations by, most recently, trying to monopolize the tokens we use to facilitate trade and exchange (money), there's the complication of the impulse to hoard, which targets money just like anything else.  

What I mean by that is that there may be more than one population siphoning money out of the world's economies, the hoarders and the deprivators (scavengers and parasites).  Neither behavior can be reined in or reversed by simply throwing more money out.  Which is why more "stimulus" won't work at this point.  (Think of it as comparable on a larger scale to the nine billion dollars we flew into Iraq and which apparently "disappeared without a trace" -- i.e. the priming of normal trade and exchange wasn't effective).  Besides, it's not possible to stimulate people who are paralyzed by fright, especially not if they've put the scare into themselves.  

Why are the deprivators scared?  Because, like that nine billion which "disappeared" in Iraq, there's a good chunk of money which has escaped their clutches.  The hoarders don't have it all and neither do the deprivators.  How can we tell?  First of all, by the gradual up-tick in the volume of trade and exchange we can trace via the data collected by the Federal Reserve and secondly by the continued swelling of the so-called "underground economy" or black market. In Italy and Greece, which are smaller populations and insular, the phenomenon is easier to estimate and seems to be running at 25-30% of the known (accountable) economy.  Before 2000, it was estimated that the U.S. shadow economy was perhaps as much as 10% of that tracked in the GDP.  It's likely larger now, as evidenced by the increasing number of people who are "unbanked"  (My new tenants don't use checks or credit cards.  They either use cash or Western Union money orders.  And, no, they are not foreign transients.  They do have savings accounts to receive direct deposits from which they withdraw cash for daily expenses.  Which leads me to wonder how much of the antagonism towards Social Security pensions is fueled by the fact that the money is flowing into savings accounts (demand deposits) which the banks are precluded from using for speculative investment.  Which would explain the low interest rates being paid on savings and the apparent failure to dampen that behavior (the U.S. savings rate has increased substantially, but that's not been in the news, has it?  Instead we hear stories about consumers not spending).

Bottom line -- the bad guys are not winning and they're getting desperate.

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by: hannah @ Fri Sep 03, 2010 at 02:10:51 AM CDT

when examining the jobless rate (0.00 / 0)

it's important to realize that only the people who have filed for unemployment benefits are counted. Those who are not eligible (independent contractors, for example) and those whose benefits have expired are not counted.


member of the professional left  

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by: susanthe @ Fri Sep 03, 2010 at 15:04:36 PM CDT