I’m in the mood for positive pronouncements on New Year’s Day and not negative ones. I can’t say that I’ve read a single positive set of predictions on-line for 2024. A fake journalist recently stated that she expected a black swan catastrophe is in the works for sometime this year. That’s the strange flavor of most 2024 predictions. 

  Western Society is one that relies on the rule of law to maintain order and prosperity and the dire flavor of 2024’s predictions is linked to the rule of law not being enforced in the West since the Great Recession when the derivatives markets imploded. It makes us Westerners feel that death is near us. 

 Be that as it may, we can return to the rule of law and the way that it helps people get along better.  Rules that are enforced equally create more instead of less prosperity. Abandoning the rule of law and embracing limitlessness causes chaos to ensue. Order comes when people agree on a set of rules that applies to everyone. Usually the rule of law allows prosperity to flourish because it prevents the raiding of wealth that everyone associates with banditry. 

  There’s a longer tradition of rule of law in the West than there is of banditry, though completely getting rid of bandits is probably impossible. Bandits are encouraged to stop being bandits when a rule based society offers ways to make money that don’t require murder and mayhem. Murder and mayhem lead to terrible unhappiness that spreads. Prosperity spreads when people work together and rules help us all to work towards a fairer society where there’s room for excellence and merit. A meritocracy allows people to win at what they are best at doing.

Deregulation has failed. It was an experiment that was promised to offer the greatest prosperity. It has been tried in energy, banking, communication and transportation. None of those areas show good prospects of growing and supporting society in their best way right now. 

 Energy and transportation have been linked with crazy regulations that make cars too expensive to buy or to use. Trucking has been harmed by gas and diesel cost increases. Carbon credits are a get rich quick scheme to centralize energy profits and penalize people’s everyday energy use. It offers fantasy catastrophe scenarios that are just another tax on prosperity…one that would stop prosperity altogether. 

The banking deregulation led to global financialization which transformed the way that wealth moved across the globe. But deregulated banks have come up with a new scheme to digitize money and control what people would buy and spend. That would end financial freedoms that most people associate with the use of money. Whereas collectivist societies desire to steal money from producers to give to non-productive people and uses, CBDC would end ordinary value that money represents altogether. That would be a disaster. The social credit system isn’t money. It would end the exchange value that money has represented and substitute slavery. Why would anyone want a part of that?

Communication deregulation first led to infotainment, then Fake news and now censorship. None of these encourage news to be shared or topics to be understood. There’s no point in watching news that has no authentic verifiable information. The Covid scenario was a test to see whether people would follow bad advice and many were scared enough that they did. I don’t think that trick will work again. People eventually learn from their mistakes and the Covid Emergency has damaged and killed people. We learn more about it everyday.

Ending deregulation and reinstituting the rule of law would go a long way to fixing the problems that beset us and that have led many to predict bad outcomes for 2024. Think about it. 

If you want to see how we got here to this place in politics and economics, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.