Reread my post from yesterday and started to think that I sounded like a person arguing for a planned economy, but that’s not at all what I mean. The craziness in the stock market, now also the housing market and bond market and lumber prices and the stimulus, have changed how I look at the economy. When will the stock market come back to any sort of normal relationship between earnings and share prices? Never because the Fed will continue some form of easing forever? And if nothing lasts forever, then what does the change look like? Well, what it looks like is assets getting assigned to new owners. However that happens, through money printing and stimulus checks to individuals (and previously through bailouts for banks) or through currency collapse, or wealth confiscation, assets are getting reallocated all the time, that’s what society is, assets getting allocated. And when society goes through a transformation what happens is that the assets get reallocated. That’s really what happens, the mechanisms and beliefs which cause the reallocation to happen may vary, but reallocation is always the result.

I’m perplexed about how fundamental economic forces like resource scarcity, supply and demand, productivity factor in to my new way of looking at things. They seem to be the reality. What’s not real is the idea that there is any sort of natural system. The natural system of natural selection and competition for resources, as modeled by nature, is precisely not our system because of civilization. What civilization is, in the end, is a complicated system for unequal sharing. Nature, as we understand it, is a system in which creatures compete for scarce resources. Civilization is a system for dividing the excess resources, sporadic or constant, yielded by technology.