changing your spots

CHANGING YOUR SPOTS


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I don’t know if I’ve repeated this fable to you before, but I like it so much I shall, and you shall like it and verily all will be well throughout the land. A scorpion wanted to cross a river, but of course he couldn’t swim. So when he spotted a frog he asked for a ride across. The frog, knowing the scorpion would sting him, refused. To which the scorpion replied that this couldn’t possibly happen, as if the frog was stung and died and sunk half way across the river, the scorpion also would die. It would not be in his best interest to sting the frog. Faced with this impeccable logic, the frog consented. Well, of course, half way across the scorpion just couldn’t resist temptation anymore and stung the frog. With its last breath, the frog implored, why? Now we must both die. To which the scorpion answered, hey, I’m a scorpion.

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Moral of the story, you can’t change your fundamental ways. Or, to use another competing fable ( because evidently even back then they were having competition in all occupations and everyone was throwing around fables like they were cowpies and only the best got repeated, and of course there were a few that tied for first place and you never again heard about the ones that lost, like the second place tale of the intestinal worm that took a ride in the ass crack of a baboon ) a leopard can’t change its spots. Personally, I like the scorpion tale better, because an animal not being able to change its appearance can be a bit confusing. I mean, without hair color or cosmic surgery, how can he. He doesn’t even have opposable thumbs to manipulate those tools if he could get them. But, the great thing about fables are, we’ve all heard them and it doesn’t have to make perfect sense, we are all just responding to the title or main theme tied to the moral or point of the story. We all know what “can’t change your spots” mean. It doesn’t mean, for instance, that since Monday’s blow you should act like an ass. You can force yourself to act nice to your coworkers. It means, for instance, that a women can’t lift a hundred pounds and a man can’t get pregnant, despite the best efforts of the FemiNazi’s. There is one bunch that has their heads up their asses. They think positive thinking or legislature can change your spots. Forcing police departments to accept females as beat cops doesn’t make them naturally aggressive or allow them to wrestle a two hundred pound man to the ground. A female firefighter can’t carry victims out of a burning building like her male counterpart can. And don’t even get me started on affirmative action hiring.

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A leopard isn’t going to turn into a vegetarian when meat gets scarce. He isn’t physically equipped for that change. He also won’t stop killing herbivores just because their numbers are dwindling. Here is the fundamental point I want you to take away today. Even if the predator only has a few prey left, he won’t go hungry to conserve the remainder. If he has to eat to survive, he does. Humans will do the same. We have more options, but the fundamentals don’t change. Bankers are like leopards. They are incapable of physical change. Growth is meat to bankers. It keeps them in business and alive. Growth is what makes interest possible, which are the bankers wages. True, obscenely profitable wages. But then, one could argue that a leopard doesn’t need that whole wildebeest either ( a banker does over profit in good times to survive the lean as a leopard overeats now for several meals ). Look, you all know I hate and despise bankers for the parasites that they are. But one thing I hate more is irrational thinking. I can admit that bankers serve a needed economic niche.

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In times of resource growth, you need bankers. If resources are increasing, you need increasing prices both to act as some sort of brake on consumption while also rewarding those who would continue to extract and process that resource. If you didn’t increase the money supply, you would run out of that resource ( the market would run out, regardless of the availability of it in nature ). If there was a finite amount of gold available as money, and an increasing supply of oil, the price of oil would fall. If that price decreased, everyone would use more and more, wasting it. At the same time, the wages of wildcatters and drillers would fall as the price of oil fell, and they would stop working. Vast pools of oil would lay underground untapped. Now, if you substituted gold with paper, and allowed the supply of paper to increase every year to roughly parallel that of the oil supply, people wouldn’t waste as much oil and the oil companies would try to find more to increase their profits ( which are just wages ). So, in essence, the bankers were needed to keep the energy flowing. Okay, bravo. But now, as oil supplies are diminishing, the whole paradigm has changed. No more growth due to oil. So, what must the banker do to keep eating? Instead of dinning on the baby wildebeest he must start going after the mothers, as they are the only meat left ( think of it as the grass supply dwindling, so there is less to eat so the females don‘t get pregnant ). Oil supply growth is substituted with bad inflation.

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Not inflation to keep pace with oil and pay the bankers profits. No, that is tame inflation. The kind we are used to and can live with ( I don’t like the illustration of how in a century a dollar is only worth five cents. That implies you wake up from a coma and discover your savings gone. In reality, folks used their houses to mostly cushion against inflations cost, plus got some kind of wage increase. The workers didn’t lose most of that 95 cents, just some ). No, now we are talking about hyperinflation. The kind you can’t keep up with. I don’t LIKE currency devaluation, but can see it as the necessity it is to control resource growth. But the downside of it is now hitting us. Now, without resource growth, we are still stuck with the bankers. Now, instead of being paid handsomely to act as resource managers, they are simply parasites. And the meat eaters will keep killing the members of the herd, because they still have to eat. Until both the predators and the prey are all dead. This is simply the nature of the beast, and a million well intentioned eco-books imploring the leopard to turn vegetarian won’t change a damn thing. The bankers must die of starvation before they go away and a new food chain is established. If you are reliant on the bankers to keep your numbers down, to keep the grass supply from being overgrazed, please beware that one day YOU will become dinner.

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