It might seem somewhat odd at first. Crushing the economy? Whats this about? What can we do to salvage a blog post with such an outlandish title? Imagine for a second that you had to write a few pages on the topic. What would you write about? Pause the video.
Welcome back! Speaking personally, the “why” in the title is a much more difficult thing to justify, so let’s address that first, before we address the “how”. Why might we want to crush the economy? What even is crushing the economy?
We could go on and on about what really are important indices to gauge our general economic well being, but that is not the point which the title of this post attends to address. So let’s take a simple definition: The economy is some average income of the citizens which they can use towards feeding their family, providing shelter, education, charity, security, or other goals at their discretion. Why would we want to crush that? Here’s a brief list of reasons to crush the economy, to purposely impoverish our citizenry:
- Hurting other people is sometimes an instinct (see e.g. the Milgram experiment), so why not just make other people poor if we can? Better them than you, right? This is especially true for those of us who have taken positions of power, that we just want to make others poor if we can.
- We are angry and not good at forgiving those we feel have wronged us, therefore we wish to make other people suffer. We suffered, they should too. It’s like an economic hazing.
- Our wealth, especially as the elite, is determined by how much more we have than other people. Therefore, making other people poor is basically one and the same as making us rich. Keeping people poor keeps inflation down and makes us richer.
- The main role of government is to bring a boot down on the necks of the peasants. You might not agree that this should be the role of government but a quick glance at a history book will show you it is in fact the main role.
- Our toughness as a nation is only as strong as how little we have been spoiled. Making things easy for everyone will only make us weak, therefore we should make things as difficult as possible to avoid that weakness.
- Technological progress and infrastructure have enabled tremendous wealth. If we don’t work hard to fight this trend people will have lots of free time for music and arts, there will be nobody hungry, and people will work to protect their environment. Clearly as elite psychopathic governors we need to work very hard to crush this.
Well maybe these reasons aren’t well spoken, not great arguments, or maybe we just don’t agree with them. However, for the purposes of this post we are going to just assume that we want to Crush the Economy. In general we don’t really have to know why, we just have to see that other people are doing it and that of course it the best motivation of all. Follow! We are assuming someone knows the why, now lets get to the how!
It turns out that once we view actions of governmental organizations in the light of our new incentive, everything starts to make a lot more sense. So lets do a top five ways shall we?
1 Make the oldest source of income illegal
What is the oldest profession in the world? Well it’s an expression really, for providing touch and affection in exchange for something that will help you live another day. Obviously, this needs to be prevented if we are to crush the economy. Attacking and incarcerating people who might engage in this profession has the added benefit of preventing women who have been down on their luck to get back to their feet. This kind of social safety net work has to be eliminated, and so that’s what petty tyrants do.
- 2 Prevent physical motion of goods and services
Trade is good for the economy, at least in most cases, as people want to trade to improve and diversify their holdings. Therefore, we should make it as difficult as possible. A system of borders and tariffs is the simplest way to do this. Preventing people from physically traveling is a mainstay of modern government economy crushing. Take a look at the line at any embassy of people looking for visas so they could try to improve their economy, find jobs, feed their families, that kind of thing. Take a look at the expressions on their faces. It’s working isn’t it. Look at the trucks of goods waiting at borders, and the people considering to do business but deciding not to because of the dangerous result of potentially violating some interstate and international trade rulings in some jurisdictions.
- 3 Debase the currency
With a system of fiat currency, a little abuse can go a long way. Printing money slowly debases the purchasing power of the currency, and so makes economic life more difficult to anyone on a fixed wage (valued in that currency). But that’s not all! The Cantilon effect also means that the people getting the new money become rich and are ready to mismanage businesses and economic enterprises of all kinds. Think of it as removing the advantages of a free market; instead of economically viable activity rising to the top, printed money rises to the top while economically viable activity is crushed.
- 4 Bureaucracy and Licensure
In a free market, people might just open businesses and start doing what they can to improve the economic life of people who choose to patronize them! We couldn’t have that could we. Instead, we can crush this economy of small businesses with systems of licensure and beaurocracy, endlessly delaying and adding costs to those who would still try. Countless government agencies exist specifically for this reason, to make it impossible or at least more difficult for people to sell things to one another.
- 5 Copyrasty and Royalty
So called “intellectual property” law has proven to be an excellent way to crush economic innovation and competition, keeping products expensive and preventing businesses from competing with one another. Rewards are given to those who pay off the king for participating, so we also have the added benefit of the best economic actors being kept from their just rewards.
Yeah we could go on and on, but hey there’s economic activity out there which still needs to be crushed. Get to work people!