Prescient

Know that expression, “the truth is stranger than fiction”? Well, sometimes the truth is just as strange as fiction, especially when it’s bad truth. *

Read this yesterday and my jaw just dropped. It’s found on page 40 of F. Paul Wilson’s An Enemy of the State, an SF hardcover I picked up at a library on a whim. It was published in 1980.


The duplicators at the Imperial Mint are working overtime these days, turning out new mark notes at an alarming rate. The idea is to give our sagging economy a “shot in the arm,” which is what deliberate inflation of the money supply is called in Bureaucratese. The theory holds that the extra marks in circulation will increase consumer buying power, which will in turn increase production, which will lead to greater employment, resulting in a further increase in buying power, and so on.

Sounds good, but it doesn’t work that way. With more marks suddenly available to buy existing goods, the prices of those goods go up. And stay up, which means more marks are needed.

Let’s continue the medical analogy: it’s like treating a steadily weakening patient who’s bleeding internally by giving him a shot of Zemmelar and nothing else. True, he feels better for a while, but he’s still bleeding. After the Zemmelar wears off, he’s weaker than before. So you give him another jolt of Zem and he feel better again, but for a briefer period this time. He continues to weaken. Before long, he’s lost. Even if the internal bleeding halts spontaneously, he’s too weak to respond .. and he’s now a hopeless Zemmelar addict anyway.


Now, let me just state for the record – which I always do in posts like these – that economics is not my forte by choice, primarily based on a lack of interest. ** But, this was written 30 years ago – and it was written with an almost mocking and derisive tone. Is this not, at least in part, what the Obama Administration is trying to do to stimulate our economy (unsuccessfully, I have to add) over the past twenty-two months?

I guess economic theory doesn’t change over the years. But surely observation and analysis can tell us by now what will work and what won’t! Right?


* I’m not exactly sure what this opening paragraph means. It didn’t quite say what I wanted to say, at least in an obvious-sort-of-way, and I’m too brain-fried at the moment to sift it through.

** I really, really need to read a good, short book on economic theory in ’11.