Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Quantitative Easing Explained

The content of the following video is common knowledge among a growing number of people. Reporters are doing stories, people are making movies, and there are even children's books about this (including mine). But, no matter how much we are educated, most Americans don't take this seriously. They don't believe it. Why? I have observed a dangerous dichotomy:
  1. The thoughtless and uninformed simply don't care and don't think about it.
  2. The thoughtful and informed are not confident enough in their understanding given the huge scope, number of factors, and unknowns. This is reasonable.
This leaves an interesting situation. Because of this easy-to-identify dichotomy, a small number of folks at Goldman Sachs and the Fed have popular support in their practice of overtly and legally robbing the general population. It's brilliant. Our collective silence gives their individual consent. The few who see the racket are watching Ben and his buddies shovel our money from the bank into their money bin while most of everyone we know–our friends and family–are part of the bucket brigade. Hell, we are letting them get away with it by doing things like voting for their robber friends like Mark Dayton. He has openly revealed that he doesn't get it, will (at least implicitly) attempt to help them, and we still vote him into office because people think the candidate who does get it killed a woman's son while driving drunk because of some disingenuous attack ad!

The sad (and dangerous) thing is: I don't blame Goldman Sachs. I don't think folks like me blame Goldman Sachs either. In fact, I think some who are watching this think there is some sick justice in the fact that all of the willfully ignorant people around us are quietly being robbed and exploited. Some think it is almost worth being robbed themselves to know that the idiots all around them are looking the other direction while the community's bank accounts are being looted. This is the dark side. It is filled with apathy and disgust at the nature of man. I choose not to consider the robbery justice. It is a crime, and something worth writing about.

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