March 2, 2012
By Brandon Smith
Alt-Market.com
As Americans, we live in two worlds; the world of mainstream fantasy, and the world of day-to-day reality right outside our front doors. One disappears the moment we shut off our television. The other, does not.
When dealing with the economy, it is the foundation blocks that remain when the proverbial house of cards flutters away in the wind, and these basic roots are what we should be most concerned about. While much of what we see in terms of economic news is awash in a sticky gray cloud of disinformation and uneducated opinion, there are still certain constants that we can always rely on to give us a sense of our general financial environment. Two of these constants are supply and demand. Central banks like the private Federal Reserve may have the ability to flood markets with fiat liquidity to skew indexes and stocks, and our government certainly has the ability to interpret employment numbers in such a way as to paint the rosiest picture possible, but ultimately, these entities cannot artificially manipulate the public into a state of demand when they are, for all intents and purposes, dead broke.
In contrast, the establishment does have the ability to make specific demands or necessities illegal to possess, and can even attempt to restrict their supply. Though, in most cases this leads not to the control they seek, but a sudden and sharp loss of regulation through the growth of covert trade. The people need what the people need, and no government, no matter how titanic, can stop them from getting these commodities when demand is strong enough.
This process of removing necessary or desirable items from a trade environment leads inevitably to counter-prohibition often in the form of strict cash transactions, barter markets, or “black markets” as they are normally derided by those in power. The problem for economic totalitarians is that the harder they squeeze the masses, the more intricate the rebellion becomes, especially when all they want is to participate in free markets the way our forefathers intended. Read More
