The Federal Reserve And Central Banking As r-stimuli

A reader writes,

I just finished a fantastic book on the Federal Reserve and central banking called The Creature From Jekyll Island, by G. Edward Griffin. I could not recommend it more highly; I think you would love it.

The author provides a history of central banking catastrophes, from ancient times through the present, and while he discusses these collapses in terms of monetary policy, the effects of flooding the market with free money are exactly what one might expect given a knowledge of r/K.

Maybe it’s because I just finished the book and all this knowledge is fresh in my brain, but it seems to me that the Fed, which simply creates money from nothing, could be the single biggest driver of r-selection in the world right now. It literally creates free resources out of thin air, and prevents economic natural selection (by continually bailing out the TBTF banks, for example) that would shift the world back toward K. As soon as the economy starts to falter, the Fed prevents the pendulum from swinging back by flooding the world with more free resources.

Looking back at the 20th century, the times of greatest r-selection seem to occur right after the Fed takes action: the Roaring 20s occurred shortly after the Fed itself was established, the free love movement and modern feminism got a kick-start once Nixon took us off the gold standard and accelerated fractional-reserve banking, and of course the almost unbelievable caricatures we see on the left today only exist because Obama continues to push our deficit to new heights while giving welfare and cheap loans to any body with a pulse.

At this point, if someone were to ask me what one thing would make the most difference in pushing our country back towards K (aside from a Trump victory, of course), it would be to eliminate the Federal Reserve. Stop the free money, end the free resources.

This is it.

r and K are feed forward mechanisms. You begin to shift things r, and the r around you – the free sex, conspicuous consumption, forced trigger-free zones, culture of hedonism, it all feeds the r-natures of men, until so many have gone so r that the resource availability can no longer support it, even with all the sex, hedonism, and forced amygdala trigger-free zones, laden with dopamine and devoid of even the slightest angst straining to drive you more r.

Then it begins to go K. That little bit of K – the threat, the aggression, the perception of shortage – it feeds itself. Violence proliferates as each person grows more K and more willing to engage in it. People hoard resources, reducing resource availability. Fathers get violent with men who approach their daughters and wives. Women fail to snag a provider if they seem round-heeled, so they begin to signal chasteness through demeanor, clothes, and behavior. Irritated K’s enforce morality and family values. A sexualized culture turns chaste. A safe environment becomes ever more violent and dangerous. A culture of consumption becomes a culture of shortage. And all of that feeds the K and the Darwinian selection until the success emerges, the resources grow glutted enough to overcome the environment, and that begins the ever accelerating, self-fueling slide toward r.

That is the cycle. But what would happen to the physical mechanism – the epigenetics, the brain structures, the psychologies, if instead of completing a full cycle, there was an intervention? When the resources first cut short, that intervention re-imposed r at the very beginning of the K-shift. You end up with a human machine with a biology is designed for the cycle, but that never quite re-K-ifys itself, before taking another pass through the r-ifying side of the cycle.

That is what Central Banking is. Rabbits don’t know this mechanism. They just know they like to look around themselves and see the signs of r. They feel like shortages are painful, so we shouldn’t have them. Controlling the currency is a good way to do that. Just looking at the economics, apart from the biology, it sounds great – a machine that can eliminate the bad periods of economic downturns, and we will all always be happy. But recognize the biology – that the human machine is malleable, and the responsible, ordered form arises from hardship, while the disordered mouth-breather who can’t keep a civilization functional comes from glut, and the whole equation changes. What is best, if that is the case?

Now imagine that such an intervention reached its limits, and the human machines had so deteriorated with r that even with interventionist support the collapse was unavoidable – a slide into real, brutal K, composed of all the decades of K avoided thus far, put together at once, and concentrated into as short a period as possible. You need another stab at intervention, so you begin “borrowing.” Intervention II worked, and now you’ve held off K again – but at what cost?

Humans aren’t designed to experience good all the time. Humans are designed to be tempered by hardship. Remove the hardship, and their form dissolves, their greatness evaporates, and most importantly, they become so malformed that when the bad returns, it will add together all the bad you’ve avoided, square it, and savage everyone to a degree nobody would ever imagine.

You can’t unbalance the cycle in the long run. What unnerves me is, given all that, when the collapse comes, this K will be unbelievable. WWII could be a piker by comparison.