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Where Quantitative Easing Meets Sustainability (or Bennie and Clyde)
November 18, 2010 Uncategorized

In the you can’t make this stuff up category, the Antiplanner shares a news story:

Portland, Oregon is full of sustainability advocates who look forward to petrocollapse and “experiment” with such things as country living and learning to live as voluntary peasants. Two such sustainability advocates are trained engineers and have a blog promoting urban gardening and raising chickens as if these were somehow new ideas.

Apparently, these engineers have discovered a new means to sustainability: robbing banks. Police allege they had already robbed two banks and had plans to rob a third when they put up their latest post about pickling beats “found” (quotation marks theirs) in a farmer’s field.

Banks are, after, merely a front for America’s petro-dependent lifestyles, so bringing down the banks will hasten petrocollapse and allow us all to more quickly reach nirvana as involuntary peasants. Or anyway I imagine they justified it in their minds using some similar logic.

So, for a quick review. The federal government can perpetually spend more than it takes in from tax and other “revenues.” It can perpetually issue bonds to cover the difference (and of course, never actually having to pay them off, we just keep rollin-em over) and in case you are worried that no one in their right mind would ever buy them after a long period of this, the Fed can simply buy them up. Of course, it is not really permitted to buy them straight from Uncle Sam (you know, because only Zimbabwe can do that), so it goes into the “secondary” market to do this. Of course, that secondary market may only exist at some point because Uncle Fed is there to pick up the slack. And as for where the Fed gets the resources to do this? Ahh, this is where the sustainability part comes in. It doesn’t even have to print dollar bills anymore – so no more trees destroyed and paper used to make the money (of course, little do they realize that this likely results in fewer trees existing), because with modern technology, all it has to do is send electronic zeros and ones through the thin air and … waaalaaa … deposits end up on the balance sheet of the treasury bond holds where the treasury bonds once were. That’s 100% perfectly sustainable. Yep.

Actually, the bank robbers still need to drive petrol-powered cars to make this all happen … so they’ll have to become trained computer hackers to make sure that this activity is truly sustainable.

"2" Comments
  1. Two comments.

    First, Wintercow’s discussion about how one does not have the mint to turn our currency into Weimar marks was well-put, and with editing can be part of a chapter in one or more of Wintercow’s forthcoming best-sellers.

    Regarding the strange folks in Oregon who wish us all to live like middle-ages serfs, or like the noble Sioux in teepees, or the Mongolian rider heroes who live in yurts, which resemble hospitality tents at golf events….

    This afternoon I got a call from a friend who is the main deer hunter on our farm.

    He told me that he and his hunting buddy (who happens to be a butcher) were scouting deer trails on my neighbor’s property, in the woods that abuts our pasture.

    Mike, the butcher, found a clearing where a teepee, not a tent, was erected, and there were also pots and pans and other signs that someone is living there.

    This is about a four-iron from my brother’s back yard, and maybe a good drive from my side yard and a well-struck three wood, assuming the trees and other vegetation did not get in the way.

    I went over to talk to the neighbor who owns that piece of property, and he had no idea who might be squatting. He is going tomorrow to look. Since small game season is in effect, I assume he will carry a shotgun.

    I have locked all the cars, and locked the house. I cannot lock the pickup shed, where I store among other stuff shovels, but then I have never been afraid of a bad guy stealing a shovel.

    I am not sure I ever told Wintercow that Jihad Jane lived in our town, about two miles as the crow flies from where I sit.

    When I was visiting with my neighbor, I mentioned Ted Kazynsky, the Unabomber who shares Al Gore’s economic and scientific views, and my neighbor agreed it would be a good idea to take a walk in the woods.

    I will keep Wintercow posted, either here or via email. Through negligence I have lost all of Wintercow’s phone numbers, except for the one at the U of R office.

    Teepees pitched on somebody else’s property give me the Willies, and I am not talking about Clinton.

  2. I had to get in Mike the Butcher. His name is really Mike, and his day job is being a butcher. This contrasts with Mike the Butcher of Golf Course Fairways, or Mike the Butcher of Keynseans.

    Mike the Butcher makes the very best deer/beef/pork kielbasi, smoked to perfection. Mike Bloomberg wishes secretly to have a few bites out of sight of the health police.

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