"What is being stimulated [by QE and credit]? Stock prices, certainly, but that is not wealth. Stock prices are just prices. They are no different than apple prices, coffee prices, and gas prices. When these go up, do we say, fantastic news, we are wealthier? Of course not. The belief that a rising stock price is great news remains one of the most wicked of all economic myths."
-Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr. "The Coming QE3"
Fizzy comment: People don't know what wealth IS so they don't recognize when it is being taken away. They certainly don't recognize when policies are being introduced which will be long term DESTRUCTIVE of wealth. In the aftermath they may notice, of course, IF they have a long term memory of reasonable fidelity. But suspecting that something has been taken away after years or decades of decline doesn't make it any more likely that they will know WHY the wealth changed. Indeed, in the aftermath of a gradual looting they are probably more likely than ever to incorrectly affix their retribution on some non causal agent which catches their attention. Propaganda is largely about government institutions purposefully directing peoples' attention to a scapegoat and away from the real causes ... which are generally still in place and almost always the creation of the government itself. A two party Democracy is a particularly insidious source of this sort of misdirection as every four years people a new game of "TweedleDEM - TweedleRE" can be played with the previous devil being recast as the new savior and the old savior temporarily disgraced. But the question you have to ask yourself is whether, in the supposed four year house cleaning cycle, if old laws and old government employees and politicians have largely been left to stand. The answer is almost always that nothing substantial has changed, so the evisceration of wealth can continue.
I have come to realize that men are not born to be free. Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. -Napoleon
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