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"The only vice that cannot be
forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself
hypocrisy."
Gold and silver were pushed back to their
assigned round numbers, with gold barely holding above 1200 and silver pushed
well below the 17 handle.
Ted Butler has a rather striking piece about
the rigging in the silver market which you can read here.
Speaking of silver it appears that Turkey
had record imports of silver bullion in March. You can read about that here. I am not sure how significant that is. We can certainly keep an
eye on it to see if this is a one time thing or a trend.
Thoughts of silver drachmas and
dirhams come to mind, but it is most likely improbably premature. Still, this
is a currency war and things seem to be building to a reckoning of
sorts. Who can say what desperate people might do to end repression?
Nothing really happened at the Bucket
Shop on the Hudson. A few contracts of silver were claimed, and
inventory was shoved around the plate in the warehouses. The real
action is taking place in the Mideast and Asia.
We have become a coarse and careless
people, smugly confident in our 'Exceptionalism.' We are no
longer shocked about lies, but instead critique the style and performance of
the liars, and try to emulate them in our own professions.
How can we
not cringe at some of the more shocking abuses that pass for
generally acceptable behavior in public figures these days?
And we encourage it, by both our silence and our acceptance.
Oh yes, we recoil in horror at any kind
of sex, at the human form, with great puritanical umbrage, but stealing and
cheating, and abusing the poor and the defenseless in even the most
petty and vicious ways is looked upon with admiration, because we are in love
with power.
Power is our new golden calf.
Even some so-called 'reformers' are falling all over themselves at a chance
to move near the circles of power, to have influence, to be seen as
connected. All we seem to want is to get paid, to get ahead, to
'win.'
And the example of our cultural and
societal icons are certainly leading to a general corrosion of all
morals and civilities. And that is a shame, which
eventually will have significant repercussions and consequences for us as
a people and a society.
Where will we finally draw the line and
come to our senses? How far are we willing to go? How many crimes
and abuses, how much theft and torture are we willing to
overlook? Why do we allow our society to be defined by sociopaths?
When will we finally look about, and see
that we too, despite all our smug superiority, have created our own garden of beasts?
 
"Hobbes had argued the need for a
despot because men were like beasts; Townsend insisted that they (people) were actually beasts and that, precisely for that
reason, only a minimum of government was required. From this novel point
of view, a free society could be regarded as consisting of two
races: property owners and laborers. The number of the latter was limited by
the amount of food; and as long as property was safe, hunger would drive them
to work. No magistrates were necessary, for hunger was a better
disciplinarian than the magistrate...
The paradigm of the goats and the dogs
seemed to offer an answer. The biological nature of man appeared as the given
foundation of a society that was not of a political order. Thus it came to
pass that economists presently relinquished Adam Smith's humanistic
foundations, and incorporated those of Townsend...Economic society
had emerged as distinct from the political state...
To the politician and administrator
laissez-faire was simply a principle of the insurance of law and order, with
the minimum cost and effort. Let the market be given charge of
the poor, and things will look after themselves...
What induced orthodox economics to seek
its foundations in naturalism was the otherwise inexplicable
misery of the great mass of the producers which, as we know today, could
never have been deduced from the laws of the old market. But the facts as
they appeared to contemporaries were roughly these: in times past the
laboring people had habitually lived on the brink of indigence (at least, if
one accounted for changing levels of customary standards); since the coming
of the machine they had certainly never risen above subsistence level; and
now that the economic society was finally taking shape, it was an
indubitable fact that decade after decade the material level of existence of
the laboring poor was not improving a jot, if, indeed, it was not becoming
worse...
 The acceptance of near-indigency of the mass of the citizens as
the price to be paid for the highest stage of prosperity was accompanied by very different human attitudes. Townsend
righted his emotional balance by indulging in prejudice and sentimentalism.
The improvidence (lacking personal responsibility) of
the poor was a law of nature, for servile, sordid, and ignoble
work would otherwise not be done. (born to be vile?) Also
what would become of the fatherland unless we could rely on the poor? "For what is it but distress and poverty which can prevail upon the
lower classes of the people to encounter all the horrors which await them on
the tempestuous ocean or on the field of battle?"...
Robert Owen, in 1817, described the
course on which Western man had entered and his words summed up the problem
of the coming century...The organization of the whole of society
on the principle of gain and profit must have far-reaching results. He
formulated these results in terms of human character. For the most obvious
effect of the new institutional system was the destruction of the traditional
character of settled populations and their transmutation into a new type of
people, migratory, nomadic, lacking in self-respect and discipline—crude,
callous beings...
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
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