I stopped by a career councillor’s site the other day to see what this career councilor had on offer. She had some testimonials about how people experienced help when they sought her out. I listened closely to a few stories and I noticed that her clients were pretending that we are all living in the same economy as the one that existed in the 1990’s. That’s not the case. This economy is battered, beaten and fake. Taxes and inflation are higher. What worked in the 1990’s won’t work now. Having nostalgia for that 1990’s economy won’t help you to get a job in today’s economy. So I left the website.

Pretending isn’t what I was after.

I hoped the councillor would tell me how to trust this economy of 2024. I got the answer that I expected. Pretending isn’t enough.

The interventionist economy is one where foolish people have imagined that our government can pick economic winners and losers. There are people working in government who try to do that and who believe that boosting on-paper economic performance with government help is a good political and economic strategy. (This won’t work economically because it doesn’t allow competition between political equals to decide the best economic winners by virtue of their economic performance).

The interventionist economy is also one where selfish people believe that MMT can fundamentally change an economy of scarcity (the most essential feature of a real economy) to one with never ending abundance (government money printing can’t produce real value to back the currency).

The interventionist and MMT economy has failed to produce widespread prosperity. It will continue to fail.

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Economies do better when they function in the context of beneficial optional exchanges between individuals under a system where rule of law applies the law to all people equally. As economic connection falls away from all of us because of rampant elite criminality in government and the private sector, the economy is becoming a place that excludes most Americans from earning a gainful existence through work.

That’s the trouble with non-prosecution of elite criminals in banking, in healthcare, in courts, in government. People who are in a protected class who can commit crimes that hurt ordinary people in order to get their hands on wealth that they didn’t earn ends the favorable connections present in a virtuous economy. That’s where we are today.

Fake elections similarly erode the beneficial network influence of representational politics.

When I hear about electronic money backing the U.S. dollar, when I imagine how electronic money demand is supposed to allow more dollar printing to keep the wheels of commerce spinning, I know that won’t work to restore economic connections that are virtuous. When I hear about splitting assets into smaller pieces so that the price can go up past what ordinary person can buy in total, I know that that won’t work either. Just more pretending.

Scarcity is a real feature of the real economy. Using MMT to pretend that scarcity doesn’t exist doesn’t change an economy into one with unlimited resources. The complex adaptive system that is an economy has a network of connections that are destroyed when criminals who harm our economy aren’t prosecuted.

As important as networks are in developing computers, it must be obvious to the IT world that these get-rich-quick systems will eventually fail. This will leave all of us who are excluded from the favored criminal network to live on without needful economic connections that will work for us. And the criminals escaping prosecution will not be able to help the economy to prosper either. Look closely. This economy is broken.