bombthrower | These days I’m reading Marco Papic’s Geopolitical Alpha, and in it, his core premise, is this:
“Preferences are optional and subject to constraints, whereas constraints are neither optional nor subject to preferences.”
By this he means: many investors factor their assumptions around how governments will impact their plans on what turn out to be policy preferences. But what actually happens, and what actually does impact their activities will be shaped by constraints, not preferences.
Said differently, a lot of capital gets allocated on what people think governments want to do, but what actually matters is what is preventing or constraining the government from doing what they want to do.
The five big constraints on governments are: political, economic, financial, geo-political and legal/constitutional.
Seen in this light, even if true, that governments wanted to impose a totalitarian communist regime globally, surely they are constrained from doing so. Right? RIGHT? They can’t just fscking do it.
But… all kinds of things I thought governments couldn’t just come out and do over the last year…. well they just came right out and did it. And just to really mess with my head, Papic added two wildcard constraints to his list: terrorism and pandemics.
The problem is, those wildcards, they aren’t wildcard constraints – they’re wildcard enablers. Those two wildcards seem to have the ability to trump all normal constraints. Every one of those constraints went out the window because of the wildcards.
Where does that leave us?
Speaking for myself, I’m losing my moorings as I no longer have any clear idea what, if any, policy constraints exist anymore.
So I have no grounding in the arena of what’s possible, how arbitrarily policy makers can act, what’s to stop them from simply confiscating my wealth (except for my crypto), or nationalizing the business I’ve built up over 22 years, and doing the same to everybody else. This is Canada. We’re generally meek as fuck here.
Second passport and expat strategies won’t work if, as per the “World Debt Reset Program” outlined in the conspiracy theory, this happens simultaneously everywhere. Granted that seems farfetched, but the boundaries of the word “farfetched” have shifted dramatically since all this began.
The question I keep coming back to is “What’s to stop them from trying it?” One of my first articles that I wrote on my old blog said that:
“The ultimate goal of the State is to cultivate absolute dependency on it by its subjects. This is because until this happens there is a real danger that those governed will one day wake up and realize that the State is not only entirely unnecessary but actually malignant; a malevolent force actively impoverishing society to the benefit of it’s elites”
I think nation states do know this, and that the continuous iteration of failed policies painted all of them into a corner vis-à-vis the global economy and the financial system as we know it. As Daniel Dimartino Booth observed in a recent George Gammon podcast, (paraphrasing) “The central banks were screwed. They needed something like COVID because the financial system was coming unglued”.
Understanding that there is a real incentive for nation states to move in a drastic direction, combined with a conspicuous absence of restraints, is taking a huge psychological toll on the populace. As hypernormalization runs wild, a type of mass psychosis sets in which has been manifesting in rabid polarization, hysterical cancel culture, Reddit-driven stonk manias and myriad tribes of neo-Flagellants.
Something’s gotta give, but at the same time, I’m really worried that something’s about to give.
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