Spiritual truths from market discipline and inflation

[ClaytonB]

In the market, if you try to sell a product for which there is no demand, you will find yourself unable to make any profit. Soon enough, you will no longer be able to pay the light bill, rent, payroll, and you will be forced to shutter your business. A sad story for your dream boutique but this is actually a happy story for the rest of us. It's good news even for people like environmentalists... the more wasteful businesses in existence, the more literal junk is being produced and the more the earth is being polluted. Economists term this market discipline. No one has to punish bad business ideas for being bad. No law has to be passed or enforced. Spontaneous, distributed action brings about this discipline without any single individual intending it. Inflation is the great enemy of market discipline because it relieves the commercial interests who are cuddled up to the central bank or its cronies in the commercial banks of the harsh reality of market discipline. Unlike legal discipline, market discipline is absolutely dispassionate, absolutely impartial and absolutely merciless.

Another analogy of market discipline can be seen in Nature. The various species of life are not regulated by some wise, all-knowing, all-powerful central planner. Rather, they are in equilibrium by virtue of the forces of scarcity in Nature. When food supplies drop, populations dwindle. The landscape of life is altered and it either replenishes when resources become available again or the axe of the evolutionary executioner swings down upon the neck of a species and it goes extinct, freeing up the resources that were once controlled by its genes to be controlled by other, different genes. Unlike domesticated life, wildlife is subject to natural laws that are absolutely dispassionate, absolutely impartial and absolutely merciless.

Yet another analogy of market discipline (and Nature) can be found in the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 11 contains an almost completely self-contained and thorough description of the covenant that God made with the Israelites: obey me and remain faithful to me, not worshiping other gods, and I will bless you... disobey me and turn away to worship other gods and you will be punished, invaded and scattered to the four winds. Very black and white. While this covenant was ultimately administered by the all-seeing, all-knowing Creator, it was in effect administered through the vagaries of history -- plagues, famines, invasions by foreign powers, and so on. "Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" is the closest thing in human relations to "nature red in tooth and claw." Insomuch as God is held to be just and perfect, his administration of the Old Covenant must be seen to be absolutely dispassionate, absolutely impartial and, since salvation was not possible through animal sacrifice, absolutely merciless.

Modern Western culture is a creature of thousands of years of insulation from the long-run effects of unsustainable behaviors. After the Agricultural Revolution, humans expanded out of the Ancient Near East into Asia, Europe and, eventually, over to North America. Each expansion into new territory yielded a wealth of virgin natural resources. This cosmically improbable chain of fortuitous historical accidents relieved humanity, especially in the Westward expansion, from the accumulated consequences of mad social and political structures. At every turn, humanity has been able to escape the hard discipline of resource-constraints that other animals must live under. The closest we have been to equilibrium under constrained resources was during tribal life in the African savanna, before the Agricultural Revolution. Since then, human history has been an almost uninterrupted orgy of plundering virgin resources and moving on to the next frontier.

It is not difficult to see that human life on this planet is in the most precarious imaginable position. Nature has at least a million ways to wipe us out without experiencing so much as a hiccup in the inexorable evolution of her dispassionate, impartial and merciless laws. The inevitability of the end of the human orgy of resource exploitation is the most undeniable of all facts. We are like the speed addict who is selling off the very last of his valuable items to buy more dope. What looms in the dark clouds of the near future is the hangover. We're not talking about the pop-an-ibuprofen and pull through it kind of hangover... no, we're talking about the unendurable agony, nausea for miles, vertigo, itching inside the marrow of your bones kind of hangover.

Jesus said you are better off cutting out your eye in order to make it into the kingdom of heaven. The inevitability of the hangover is why he said this. There is a spiritual wickedness in the world that thinks it knows better. This spiritual wickedness is what has driven the evil of inflation for centuries. It's too clever by half, and twice as arrogant. Regret is not merely a question of suffering, it is also a question of surprise... regret is the result of what you never saw coming. No one can plan for what they will regret. It is the unknown of all unknowns, the dispassionate, impartial and merciless repayment for every wrong without exception. It is the law of Moses.

This is what the Sovereign Lord says:
Disaster! Unheard-of disaster!
See, it comes!
The end has come!
The end has come!
It has roused itself against you.
See, it comes!
Doom has come upon you,
Upon you who dwell in the land.
The time has come! The day is near!
There is panic, not joy, on the mountains.
I am about to pour out my wrath on you
And spend my anger against you.
I will judge you according to your conduct
And repay you for all your detestable practices.
I will not look on you with pity;
I will not spare you.
I will repay you for your conduct
And for the detestable practices among you.
Then you will know that it is I the Lord who strikes you.
(Ezekiel 7:5ff)