[CS-FSLUG] [OT] I believe in fairies! (yes I do)

[Yama Ploskonka]

munching through the fiscal cliff and all that noise, it came to me ever 
so strongly how much more our "system" of government and economy and 
such is faith-based.

faith

on fairies.

or a suitable such.

It works this way. As long as we all hold hands really tight, and shout 
out loud "I. BELIEVE. IN. FAIRIES", the system keeps working, disbelief 
has not set in, we keep to have this make-believe economy. Other places, 
that do not manage to sound as convincing, stay poor and backward.

Fact is, taxes don't really matter. Debt is an illusion.

Not at the individual level. If I owe one loaf of bread, I owe one loaf 
of bread. When the country owes trillions of dollars, that is gone 
beyond any reasonable sense of proportion.

Fact is, the country can print as much money as it cares. Anyway, is ALL 
is just ink on paper. How come there is a "right" amount of the stuff? 
because of faith, that if we keep tight, hold hands, etc., one greenback 
is worth 7 of the pieces of paper or some other nation.

What happened with Greece is that they did not hold tight - printing 
money made them easy going.

Not we, no siree. WE hold tight, and shout, shout shout, that the sky is 
falling, that the debt is crushing, that we can't allow more of it. It 
would be overdoing to say we intend to pay it, so, to keep the 
suspension of disbelief, we don't - we knows silly has a limit.
EVERYONE knows it will never, ever be paid. But the fiction that we CARE 
to honor our debt has to be kept alive, the show must go on. So we 
pretend. We have this two-ring circus (and the subsidiary in the West 
Wing) where we have very expensive actors that, in the name of us all, 
make a big ado about the fiscal cliff, debt and taxes.
Those who doubt get dropped from the fairy protection.

If our polits manage to keep the faith in fairies alive, then we all get 
a respite, and keep doing business as usual, with incredible amounts of 
subsidies, overprices contracts, unions, pork, maybe a little bit of 
production to make it seem real. Fact is, the "service economy" is just 
fairies by another name. How come people who code video games get paid 
each one more than several teachers? and how come any one of our 
teachers gets paid like 10 times what a teacher is paid in Indonesia?

We got fairies, that's why. Good ones, better that theirs at least. Have 
you seen the Cuban or North Korean fairies? pitiful!

Worst that could happen is that those big powers up there notice the 
faith is wavering. That people notice that make-believe money, now 
replaced by even less real electronic blips, just happens not to be, uh, 
really anything useful. (forget gold, another well-known fairy object. 
Have you ever tried to eat gold or wear it or use it to warm your house 
or cure a toothache?).

As long as we are in the world I guess we have to play the game - after 
all, that is why I here have AC and central heat and 28 Mbps and a car, 
while my sister has none of those. Weak fairies in Bolivia.

So, on with it, I do!, I do!

(I just had to get this out of my system. I am aware that talking openly 
about this is not what fairies like, so I thought this audience might 
make some sense of this, keep me out of trouble)

Keep the faith in treasure that does not rust. Fairies ain't it.

Yama