A Crisis Carol
At the close of World War I, the victorious celebrated their win by crippling the losers. It was a stupid age. Rabid Nationalism, teetering Empires, and the wailing of a new born industrial Goliath in the New World all combined to overpower a creaking and defunct world economic system that had long outlived its time.
It was catastrophic international economic collapse that led directly to the evils of the two decades that followed: The “Roaring” twenties of unsustainable growth, and the inevitability of the hangover that was the Great Depression. Looking back, it is a wonder nobody could see it coming, but the second great World War - truly global for the first time - was nothing more than the reprise of a spectacle with a truly crappy intermission.
The dust hadn’t settled when the sons of World War I - the fathers of the Baby Boom - met again to plan the sequel, determined this time to have an endless run and a cast of thousands. The International Economic Infrastructure forged at Bretton Woods in 1944 remains beneath the surface of everything we do on planet earth to this day. And, like the one that led to the first Great War, is now woefully - and dangerously - inadequate for the age in which we live.
However, as obvious as that fact now is, like the mid war brain trust that flushed everybody into the toilet in 1939, the current thinkers of our age seem hell bent on repeating history, racing to pull the plunger as the murky waters spin below. They can do no other. A single generation - the great cohort called the Baby Boom, the bulge in the snake, the privileged ones - is grasping and clawing to maintain a world order that has made them rich, fat, and stupid. Their attempt to prop up a world built only for them, at the expense of all of us left behind, is criminal.
We, those who follow in their wake and must clean up their mess, should not sit idle while our planet is mortgaged for their comfy and secure retirement. In the early days of 2009, it seems that all is coming apart. It seems that way because it is. Eventually there will come a point where all the lines intersect, all the forces of nature meet, and this crisis will force change of the most fundamental kind. We, then, have a choice to make. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride, or get off the damn roller coaster and do something about it.
Charles Dickens said in his own time, in the person of that eras evil money lender Ebenezer Scrooge; “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?…. Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead…But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change”. He was fighting the industrial revolution and the ills of mercantilism, but Dickens plea remains as fresh today as it was then - change isn’t just possible, it’s necessary. Our courses have foreshadowed certain end, which, if preserved, they must lead. But if we can depart those courses, the end will surely change.
Good enough for me. I’m in.
Aetius Romulous
Historian, Economist, Accountant, Writer, and blood sucking CEO.
Born at the wrong end of the Baby Boom Generation - too late to enjoy the ride, too early to have missed it, and stuck in the middle with the mess.
Aetius writes and blogs from his frozen perch atop the earth in Canada, spending the useful capital of a life not finished making sandwiches and fomenting revolution.
It's a living.
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Is This What We Want? - Essays on the question of our world
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There Is No Recession in Heaven
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