For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs

Government operated through coercion, clumsiness, and deceptive intention; the invisible hand of the market, however, was the realm of freedom, choice, and possibility.

The dominant regime of political economy in the West since 1971, and particularly acute since 2009, has been built on a set of related economic fallacies: There are no adverse consequences to manipulating the price and supply of money; economic well-being can be measured by increases in flows of revenue rather than the growth rate of profit over ca

The “boom,” then, is actually a period of wasteful misinvestment. It is the time when errors are made, due to bank credit’s tampering with the free market. The “crisis” arrives when the consumers come to reestablish their desired proportions. The “depression” is actually the process by which the economy adjusts to the wastes and errors of the boom,

In short, continually expanded bank credit can keep the borrowers one step ahead of consumer retribution. For this, we have seen, is what the crisis and depression are: the restoration by consumers of an efficient economy, and the ending of the distortions of the boom.