Smug liberal lockdown supporters should be happy with their skyrocketing grocery bills
Why the professional middle class who cheered for lockdowns, masks, and money printing may be about to learn a harsh lesson in reality
As grocery prices continue to skyrocket, I hope everyone who cheered for lockdowns and mass money printing, citing that “human life is more important than the economy”, is now very happy, and enthusiastically embracing our New Normal. With even mainstream news anchors now casually reporting that we can expect a further 170% increase in grocery costs over the next 12 months, I hope also that all middle- and low-income earners are due for at least a 10% pay rise this financial year. If not, I suggest starting that conversation with your boss now.
These are the results of rampant hysteria and unilateral government action. This is what happens when we outsource our personal agency to unaccountable bureaucracies and corporate bobble-heads; when we adopt meaningless slogans like “stay safe” and “we’re all in this together” in place of open, uncensored dialog; when we trade freedom for security.
Throughout the sham of the past two years, it has consistently been the well-off, corporate/bureaucrat class who’ve clapped the loudest for the hardline authoritarian regimes who’ve brought us to this point, while simultaneously praising the censorious actions of the media and Big Tech whose gross propaganda efforts enabled the dissolution of whatever remained of our democracies. These folk have also completely ignored the massive, unprecedented transfer of wealth from the working and middle classes to the very richest of the rich.
So perhaps all the lockdown enthusiasts are indeed still happy despite the falling standard of living, and congratulating themselves on a job well-done; for rolling up their sleeves and taking one for the team; for doing the right thing in order to defeat the deadly virus with the 99% survival rate. Because after all, people’s lives are more important than the economy.
But I wonder at what point these folk will start to feel the pinch in their grocery budget? 50%? 100%? 200%? Maybe some of them already are – my grocery bill has increased by at least 30% so far and I’m certainly not happy about it. But I am not particularly bemoaning my own situation here, I’m still okay for now. However, I hate to imagine trying to live on, say, half my income with the current inflationary pressures. And 170% more to come? I hope this figure is mere media hysteria, as so much of what they say is. But this story, for once, is actually supported by observable everyday facts. The media may have earned my complete distrust, but my grocery bill never lies, and on this occasion, it would seem that the two of them are in agreement.
At what point do even the glib news presenters with their $2000 suits and dazzling dental veneers begin to look doubtful as they read their scripts? Is there an upper limit, beyond which, no amount of inflation can put a dent in one’s lifestyle? Indeed there is. I don’t know the figure, but it’s not a question of salary, rather net worth. For when the bulk of one’s wealth is in stocks and other commodities that appreciate with the currency, then one has little to worry about.
So where does that leave us? Once again, and as always (is anyone surprised at this point?): It is the poor and middle classes who get shafted. This has been going on for at least my entire lifetime. It took me a long time to see it because the propaganda was so complete. But it is clear to me now, and many tens of millions of others around the world, that this entire circus is one giant Ponzi scheme. One only need look at real wage growth alongside the cost of living since the 70s, the affordability of housing, and the average household debt. And all this only scratches the surface.
We are being harvested. Or more accurately, our wealth is. The productive classes are like a giant piggy bank for the useless elites at the top who only know how to extract value. It’s funny, I used to consider myself a conservative and a capitalist. Yet in recent years I’ve been told I’m beginning to sound like Marx. From what I know of Marx, I despise the man – he was a bludger and a grifter, a fat and fetid narcissist by many accounts, who may well have spawned more human misery than any other political thinker in history.
Yet I agree with Marx on the fundamentals of what is wrong with our system. I have read the Communist Manifesto and find much therein that accurately describes the problem we face. What I have always disagreed with is Marx’s proposed solution to the problem. For it should be clear to anyone capable of logical thought, without having even examined the history of the 20th Century, that the revolution of the proletariat he advocates for in the Manifesto would only lead to mass murder and suffering and the perpetuation of the exact same problem, just with a different ruling class.
I still consider myself a capitalist – in the true sense of the word. I’m for a largely unregulated market where people are free to trade their labour. We do not live in such a system. Yet it is still referred to as “capitalist” and as such, the central planners and Marxists of the world, including many of our current ruling elite, still decry capitalism as the great evil which has brought us to this point.
We’ve been brought here not by capitalism but by cronyism. A small group of very rich people with no national or ethnic allegiance, acting in their own interests to manipulate the global markets and money system – a system that is now so bloated with debt taken on by their puppet governments to pay for the disgraceful socio-political experiment of the last two years, that there is no longer enough productive capacity on the planet to pay it off.
Our system is insolvent. It is debt piled upon debt, used to pay off the debt that was leveraged to finance the previous debt. On and on it goes, and the only way to keep the lights on now is to keep printing money. And this is why we’re facing inflation we’ve not seen since the 1970s. If things continue in this direction, it will soon be inflation we’ve not seen since the 1930s – The Great Depression.
Marx’s solution to the problems of capitalism was essentially to confiscate the property of the middle classes and give it to the poor. We saw how well that worked when the Soviets tried to enact this wonderful idea. Wouldn’t you know it? Human nature kicked in and, once the vanguard of the revolution had done all their confiscation, they decided it would be much more fun to keep it all for themselves.
I do not find it coincidental at all that the central planners of our new global order are acting out the very same tragic pantomime: Extracting the wealth of the productive classes and concentrating it all in their own hands. The tools used to execute this larceny have changed, but the premise remains the same.
Listen to the way they speak. Listen to Klaus Schwab and his pals at the World Economic Forum talking about “resetting global capitalism” and creating a fairer and more inclusive world, then watch these same globalist interests cripple our economies with lockdowns and disastrous public spending, simultaneously shifting trillions of dollars of wealth from the working and middle classes to their own pockets. You don’t even have to read Marx or know much 20th Century history at all to draw the obvious parallel.
It is possible to agree with someone on the root of a problem but diverge drastically on the proposed solution. As such, I agree with Marx that we have a problem, but the answer is not authoritarianism. We have seen, and continue to see, where that gets us. The answer is freedom. True capitalism is about freedom. The world we currently inhabit is a weird new amalgamation of hyper corporatism, fascism, and Marxist dialectic, with a whole lot of other stuff thrown in for extra flavour. I don’t even know what to call it.
One thing remains constant though – we have more in common with each other than we do with our so-called leaders. We – the working people of the world. Call yourself what you will, be it working class, or middle class, or even delude yourself that you’re somehow part of the elite like I used to because I had a good salary and a Platinum Card. Whichever way, it is not about left or right, it is about the powerful minority and the great mass of humanity beneath – as it has always been.
Whatever label you slap on yourself, the sooner we stop fighting amongst ourselves about fake left-right issues and realise it is us (the workers) against the machine (the central banks, billionaires and elites at the WEF), the sooner we can set about undoing this colossal cluster fuck they have conjured, and begin moving back toward a purer form of capitalism – a free market where our labour is not constantly undermined by inflationary monetary policy and market manipulation.
Because there may come a point when those who cheered on the lockdowns and the money printing, believing they were part of the club, and immune from the fallout, will look at their grocery bills and begin to feel afraid, and perhaps start to wonder what exactly it was they were cheering for, as Covid recedes further from the popular memory and the inconvenient facts are quietly swept under the rug – how the lockdowns did nothing to stop the spread; how cases and deaths were drastically inflated by dodgy reporting parameters; and how we hobbled an entire generation of children with insane, inhuman, and entirely unnecessary measures.
There may come a time when these people realise they were never part of the club and merely part of the plan, and perhaps then they will realise that it is not a case of the economy being more important than people’s lives, but rather, that the economy is people’s lives.