NP: No gov't; best gov't..from John Lanchester LRoB

[alice wellintown]

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The Non-Scenic Route to the Place We’re Going Anyway
John Lanchester on the global economy


The problem is in large part to do with the application of an
incorrect metaphor, the easy-to-understand idea that a household has
to live within its income. But governments are not households, and the
idea of cutting your way to prosperity cannot be read across from an
individual’s finances to those of the state. It’s a manifest fact that
these policies, and the refusal to embrace stimulus spending, are
causing economic slowdowns all over the world that are triggering the
current anxiety in the markets, which is in turn causing the
predicament of governments to intensify, as confidence sinks and the
self-fulfilling expectations of a second downturn take hold. This in
turn puts pressure on expectations about governments’ abilities to
repay their debts, which further lowers confidence, and so on.

An incorrect metaphor! Yes, governments, and as Lanchester observes,
the US Government is a very special one for several reasons including
the fact that it can print the reserve currency, are not households;
they needn't balance their checkbooks or pay their bills when they are
due. But when the confidence in this full faith and credit god we
trust in is shaken, markets begin to fall into blind ditches of
uncertainty. This uncertain, time-space of the subjunctive romance is
not the New England town or the global village of either Mumford or
McLuhan, but the land of IF, the land of maybe, the land of
inconvenient falls of horses (if S/P aul did fall from a horse) that
may have happened in places not on the map in books that, while
certainly not cannonical, are surely the works of forces mysterious.
But the invisible hand amde visible (Chandler) by American Managerical
Capitalism, built on steel rails and and driven by an iron will, has
approached a cul-de-sac, a dead zone, a land of thanatoids and
paranoids.