Podcast: Play in new window
- How to move a world to compliance (& make them think it’s their idea)
- Making an agenda everyone’s moral duty
- Read the 45-page report to NATO: “Cognitive Warfare”
The McAlvany Weekly Commentary
with David McAlvany and Kevin Orrick
Hacking Your Mind: Are You A Victim Of Cognitive Warfare?
October 20, 2021
“Inflation and financial repression—these are hobby horses here on the Commentary, but governments have now been given carte blanche to solve our global problems. And we’re already seeing the inflation numbers. Last week—CPI, PPI, we’ve got new inflation numbers from China—it’s sending a strong message that the solution suites chosen come with a variety of costs. Question is, are we collectively willing to pay these costs?” — David McAlvany
Kevin: Welcome to, “The McAlvany Weekly Commentary.” I’m Kevin Orrick, along with David McAlvany.
David, it’s funny, it depends on what time of the week you look at something to see whether you should be alarmed, or whether you should go back and take a nap. Last week, volatility was spiking, China looked like it was melting down, but strangely enough, they were able to twist the knobs and silence things—whoever the proverbial “they” is, turned the volatility down to almost nothing.
David: Yeah. From one side of the valley to the other, we came off the valley floor pretty quickly. You had the volatility midweek, which was absolutely unreal. And if you looked from, again, say Friday to Friday, you hardly would know anything happened. The VIX went on a crazy roller coaster ride. Credit default swaps went through the roof and then came back to earth again. And these are sovereign CDS, bank CDS, a whole host of Asian, and European, and even US CDS. It was reminiscent to me— you’ve probably watched the Robin Hood cartoon?
Kevin: Of course.
David: I could imagine Sir Hiss speaking into Prince John’s ear, and whispering some new reality, like, “All is well, invest with confidence. You saw nothing.” And then that system download is complete. There’s actually another clip I’d love to play that I think is apropos for our discussion today from that Robin Hood cartoon.
Prince John: Taxes. Taxes. Beautiful, lovely taxes.
Sir Hiss: Sire, you have an absolute skill for encouraging contributions for the poor.
Prince John: To coin a phrase, my dear counselor, Rob the poor to feed the rich. Am I right?
Kevin: Dave listening to that, it brings back the thought of propaganda, which goes back as far as time goes. And I was looking at Joseph Goebbels and he was considered the master of propaganda during Hitler’s time. And there were five concepts that they just continued to repeat, and that is: avoid abstract ideas—appeal to the emotions; constantly repeat just a few ideas, use stereotyped phrases; give only one side of the argument; continuously criticize your opponents; and pick out one special “enemy” for special vilification. Those were the five points that Goebbels continue to repeat over and over and over. It seems that we see that in sort of the social engineering that’s going on right now. Don’t you feel?
David: Well, hackers know who Harl is, H-A-R-L, going all the way back to 1996, ’97, when the internet was not ubiquitous. Hackers would focus on exploiting the vulnerability of people in order to access a network. So really nothing has changed. That is still the primary target of hackers. So social engineering is what they called it then. And it’s how it’s still referenced today. Creating these access points into the network via people. Social engineering is defined by Harl as the art and science of getting people to comply with your wishes. And that’s fascinating to consider in the context of Covid and the 2020, ’21 policy moves. It’s also fascinating to see how much of our fiscal future will be determined by the leveraging of things like climate change, again, to get people to comply with your wishes.
Kevin: Well, and I think the other word for propaganda should be comply because really what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to get a large number of people to comply with what you want to have done. That’s propaganda.
David: That’s right. So to move a targeted audience towards compliance required creative social pressures which allow the target to feel their decision exists in a believable situation, even though it’s contrived. And again, this is orchestrated by the social engineer. A short list of methods would include the direct request of an individual to complete a task. Just very simply. I need you to do this. Would you do this?
This happened this last week. Someone called our local bank and said, “I need access to David McAlvany’s bank account.” I’m not kidding. Just this last week. I was called by the fraud department. And I thought, how fascinating. Somebody just called and asked, right? And there was no compliance, obviously, but that’s a method, a direct request.
But then there’s also the creation of contrived situations, contrived situations, in which case, the individual is invited to play a part. So this is sort of contextualized compliance and you’re kind of doing somebody a solid by doing this and getting on board, and maybe even it opens up future opportunity for you. And these methods have elements of moral duty, of appeals to future benefits and advancement. And again, this is all laid out. If you want to read Harl’s ideas on this, it’s fascinating, but again, moral duty appeals to future benefits and advancement and the sense that they are one of many playing their part, not solely responsible for their actions. So what’s described as diffused responsibility.
Kevin: Yeah, it seems you have to get compliant people. I look at the last two points of Goebbels, continuously criticize your opponents and pick out one for special vilification. And so what you’re trying to do is get compliant people to help solve a problem that is actually a danger to people’s safety.
David: Yeah. Since systems are easiest to access through people, you’re looking for the easiest person to convince to comply. So, and that will be unknowingly in whatever scheme is being laid out. Right? So manipulation, the presentation of complex arguments structured into the groundwork that’s laid by the social engineer. It ultimately relies on people that lack the depth of involvement in an organization or in a system to appreciate what’s being compromised by their actions. So again, coming back to hacking literature, it points to less competent people being the best targets. And the opposite of that is trying to manipulate, let’s say, the system’s administrator who would really know the complexity and would appreciate what’s being asked of them and have some concerns and probably not comply. Unless, of course, the person who is hacking is more competent than the system’s administrator and is able to pull the wool over their eyes.
Kevin: So if you’re either trying to hack a system or you’re trying to use propaganda, which in a way is the same thing, you want to avoid the person who understands possibly what you’re doing.
David: Yeah. People who obstruct social engineering in the system hacking context are thought of as non-compliant and Harl characterizes them as bright, highly original, able to cope with stress, and self-confident, and to the hacker, these are largely a waste of time.
Kevin: Like many things education would probably be one of the greatest deterrents to being hacked or being propagandized without your knowing.
David: Yeah, because education is just a form of raising awareness. So, training staff to ask questions, to remain situationally aware, and understand their role as an active and vital link in the chain of security, it makes hacking a system far harder by essentially hardening each link in the chain.
Kevin: So when we go to central planning, okay, if your job was to try to control a nation, or even control, in some cases, world events or world reaction, you would probably use similar principles, wouldn’t you?
David: Yeah. Hacking and the discussion of social engineering are not far removed from the central planner’s concept of how do we move people in a certain direction, the desire to move the massive human actors in a particular direction at particular times, while keeping those subjects believing that they’re making healthy and autonomous choices.
So The End of Theory was all about this. Bookstaber’s new economics was about the hijacking of free will, essentially hijacking of free will using big data and AI to shape future economic and financial market outcomes. And, and that’s the end of economic theory. Again, the end of theory is really the end of economic theory, which is necessary to explain human action. And he wants to redefine the parameters of volatility using today’s access points to the human mind.
Kevin: Now magicians sometimes— or a hypnotist will do something in front of an audience to show that his subject thinks that they’re actually making a choice. That’s already been predetermined. I was reading something on hypnotism last night. It’s just interesting because the person who has been hypnotized, and this was tested through the CIA and other intelligent sources, the person who has been hypnotized actually thinks they’re making a decision on their own, but it in many cases is pre-programmed.
David: Last year, NATO—this is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—NATO’s innovation hub engaged with the topic of cognitive warfare. And the conversation in cognitive warfare stretches the five conflict domains. You’ve got air, land, sea, space, and then cyber into a sixth area, and that is the human domain. And it looks at how social sciences can be harnessed to actively engage and undermine a target audience’s trust. This is a—this particular paper I read—45-page paper on the topic. It says that, “In many ways,” and I quote, “cognitive warfare can be compared to propaganda, which can be defined as ‘a set of methods employed by an organised group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organisation.’” That’s actually a reference from Jacques Ellul’s famous book Propaganda.
Kevin: It was. And see, I was just thinking that I could have also come right out of George Orwell.
David: Yeah. Well, I mean the innovation hub is working in cooperation with Johns Hopkins and the Clark’s Scholars group. And the tools they’re developing are to track and respond to instances of cognitive warfare. This is the sixth domain and it’s an interesting one, given the direct accessibility to the masses that they have today, specifically through the internet. So media was the organ of propaganda in the 20th century. And today it’s just playing a supporting role to social media and our curated digital world, which we’ve had a pretty extensive conversation on the past.
Kevin: There’s an addiction to the Like button and things like the Like button. I remember reading something by the inventor of the Like button, and she stepped away and said, “I had no idea the damage that I have done.”
David: All right. So now we have AI, we have big data, and we have our current digital addiction, which has opened the horizons even further for social engineering. What I want to do is connect the hacking of a system—again, these are Harl’s ideas—with cognitive warfare, and assume that governments see an opportunity globally to advance their agendas. And that’s why NATO’s talking about it in terms of a conflict zone, the equivalent of air and sea and land, et cetera. But we also have domestic audiences as well. So you’ve got domestically an advancement by governments to define the narratives, which make sense of their actions, which justify their actions, and justify what people within their society be compelled to do.
Kevin: So this digital addiction that you’re talking about could almost be a form of hypnotism where people feel like they’re free agents, but they’re not.
David: We appear free agents. Yeah. Again, unless our brains to some degree have been hacked, as Harl described. And again, as the NATO project suggests, is the new frontier of warfare. So consider the complex set of data points in the narratives that are handed down with an authoritative voice with people that are—and again, these are generalizations about culture today—but people who are generally compliant, not particularly bright, unoriginal, unsure, and easily susceptible to stress. This is the opposite of Harl’s list.
And actually at the end of his presentation back in 1996, he says, basically, that you can and should train people to be more stress resilient. So that when they’re put under stress and they feel pressured, rather than capitulate, they become again, a stronger link in the chain. So again, what I’m describing really is the opposite, the opposite of Harl’s list. Yeah, the anti-target.
So if you’re talking about compliance and you’re talking about not particularly bright, and unoriginal, and unsure, and easily susceptible to stress, these are your prime targets for mass social engineering, which frankly sounds like 95% of the US population, maybe 95% of the global population. I mean, I can only speak to the training and indoctrination we impart through our public schools, 5%, very bright. 95%? Frankly, perfect cogs on the wheel, designed to fit in and exist in a friction-free utopia.
Kevin: You look at what’s going on right now in society. And whether a person agrees or disagrees, you have to admit, people are wanting to be part of something. There’s this push to have a label and to make sure that you are compliant, the woke generation. Okay. Let’s say the question is, are you woke or are you not woke? So, in a way, that can be used as propaganda as well.
David: Yeah. One more word on propaganda. It’s not necessarily false when categorized as propaganda, it’s just intentionally curated to drive belief in action. And in that respect, it’s not much different than the social engineer hacking the system, practicing the art in science of getting people to comply to your wishes.
You know, Kevin, last week we had former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who had this sort of scathing comment on central bankers and their role in this woke world. He said, “We have a generation of central bankers who are defining themselves by their wokeness. They’re defining themselves by how socially concerned they are. They’re defining themselves by how concerned they are about the environment. They’re defining themselves by how concerned they are about financial excess and business ethics. And they’ve grown up and had their whole experience shaped by a period when inflation was below target. And so it’s very hard to lose old habits. We’re in more danger than we’ve been during my career of losing control of inflation in the US. We’ve gone even further towards losing it in Britain. And I think we’re at the same risk in Europe.” That was just October 13th from Larry Summers.
Kevin: Yeah. And it’s a lot easier to pay for things that you probably normally couldn’t afford when you’re in a period of time where you can print money. I mean, look at energy. We’ve looked forward. I mean, who doesn’t want to have a world where there’s no emissions? I mean, I would love that world. I would love that world to be able to get up and be able to breathe without worrying about air pollution, but there is a cost, there is a cost. And since we do need energy, isn’t it amazing that we’re starting to pay the price for energy right now, for ideas that we put forward, you know, just a couple of years ago.
David: Well this is one specific economic issue. And again, it’s a little bit like embracing a porcupine. How do you embrace the good while looking at some of the things which frankly are propaganda related. So energy prices have vaulted higher. We see in this some of the unintended consequences of groupthink that has in recent years, you know, again, prioritized net zero carbon goals. And that yet there’s practical issues that demand and supply, which in the process have been neglected. So now prices biting us in the backside. And this is a point we’ve raised previously, but the energy crisis, like the supply chain crisis, is largely policy induced. See, you know, be careful what you wish for echoes into the present from, I think it was Aesop’s morality tales at 2,500 years ago.
Kevin: Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could actually put a price on this net zero goal, to be able to get up and say, all right, we’re no longer producing carbon emissions into the air. How do you put a price on that?
David: Big project by Bank of America to do just that, to say, what does it mean to get to our goal of net zero? What are the actual cost costs? And what does that imply in terms of the inflationary impact? So Bank of America projects that getting to net zero by 2050 is doable at a price. So the funding of that transition will be on their numbers between one and five trillion dollars a year. And the likely mechanism for funding is government sponsored debt programs in the form of green bonds. Corporations making the transition will find better terms on their debt. Municipalities, and frankly any other entity that has green associated with a positive contribution to getting to net zero targets, they’re going to be rewarded.
And of course, this is in line with the ESG games that we’ve seen being played. It just takes them to another level: reputation, standing, access to capital. I mean, we already have BlackRock and Vanguard sort of setting the stage for a multi decade push into corporate sponsored environmental activism, again, sort of net zero sponsorship by these big groups.
So yes, you can think of the urgent ecological needs, and we should, but you should not forget that the transition comes at a cost. And Bank of America was saying, yeah, one to five trillion in new money each year, that is an annual cost to get us there. So this is one to five trillion dollars in new money and credit flowing. And we should bear in mind that those at the socioeconomic apex—back to BlackRock managing more than the Federal Reserve does, 9.5 trillion versus 8.5 trillion on the balance sheet of the Fed. Groups like Vanguard also fit this sort of activist bill. They stand to benefit handsomely.
This transition is a lot of money. It includes a lot of money, but when we think of the military industrial complex, we’ve redefined the objects of war. The machinery is different. The complex is just as dangerous. And those who are running the complex, frankly, just as hungry and just as opportunistic. Fear, frankly, is still the tool used to justify the existence of the complex. I think you’ve got slightly different winners, but the losers, the losers are the same. Going back to Sir John and Hiss, where we started today.
Kevin: Yeah. And going back to Goebbels last point, which is pick out one special enemy for special vilification, whoever the enemy is, you need to make sure that the people who are going to pay for the solution are scared of it.
David: Well, the rest again, stuff for the cost, the transition again. When I think of the rest, this is the hoi polloi. This is the everyman. This is the submergent, submergent middle class.
Kevin: Yeah. But you can do anything with money. If you can continue to print money and it not fail in value, you can pay for anything.
David: You got munies, you got corporations, you got banks—you name it. Again, entities— Money will be on offer if you’re doing your part in the cleaning and greening of the planet.
Kevin: Okay. But talking about cleaning and greening, we talked about trees last week, and you called MMT the Mo Money Tree. Now, if we can just use our environmentalism to keep the mo money tree alive, we can keep all the rest of the trees alive as well.
David: It serves as a visceral threat and a justification for why we must stay engaged. And again, we’re talking about the associated costs of transition to a net zero world, those costs being socialized or added to an extended list of “losers” via new tariffs and tax levies.
So if you’re asking, where does the money come from? Again, one to five trillion a year, a part of it is new taxes. And a part of it is from the central bank, of course. It’s a different form of QE. It’s not printed for mortgage backed securities or Treasurys, right? We’re still doing that 120 billion dollars a month. And, and yes, we’re going to cut that back between now and supposedly next June if they get started on the “taper” between November and December. So they’ll cut it back. And we’ll only have, what is that? Maybe 430, 440 billion left to add to before that game is over. So again, this is a different form of QE. We’re not printing for MBSs or Treasurys, but printing for a better world. That’s tough to argue against.
Kevin: You know, I sang last week. I won’t sing this week, just to save everybody.
David: Thank you.
Kevin: We Are the World, the song We Are the World, we are the world. We are the children. We are the one who make the better place. So let’s start printing, I think is how they have to put that. I guess we’d better start printing right away if we’re going to have 435% inflation. That’s the sad thing, Dave, the sad thing is, we are being tongue in cheek here. You cannot print money without ultimately devaluing that money.
David: Yeah. So this is what’s interesting is the setup is as follows. Agreement has already been reached that we must do something or face planetary extinction, right? There’s, I mean, I understand that there’s an argument to be made against that, but the vast majority of the planet says that is settled. That is a settled discussion, right?
Kevin: Remember only give one side of the argument. Only give one side of the argument, over and over.
David: And the added piece of this is that cost for future generations in terms of debt can be ignored. We’re back to the MMT. A new economics has been hatched to assuage, whether it’s concern or guilt for the cumulative $150 trillion in increased global debt burden. So that’s what it adds up to. If you’re adding one to five trillion a year, you end up with 150 trillion in increased global debt burdens. And we’re also told that inflation is manageable. Again, that is what we’re told.
Kevin: But you want to definitely be close to all that money that’s flowing. So either something that’s solving the green problem, okay?, or the greening up of the world, or you want to make sure that you’re one of the financiers of it, or you want to make sure that you’re a politician at least pretending to be concerned.
David: Yeah. Here at the onset of the 21st century, it’s not innovation that makes you wealthy. It’s getting as close to the money flows as possible. And in this case, you’re talking about motivated money flows. So for the next three decades, fortunes will be made by proximity to the trillions that flow from global governments for saving the world. You can do your part. So we, again, we go back to the setup, if you will, Harl’s setup. We have a believable situation in which each one of us can do our duty. Systems permissions have been granted. Now it’s just a question of how on a daily basis we absorb the downloads.
Kevin: The question is, how much does it cost? And you said Bank of America is already giving us numbers.
David: Yeah. I mean, to put that in terms of the implication for our daily lives, you’re talking about global inflation which is expected to rise through that period. Again, 2021 out to 2050, above what would have been otherwise. And inflation rate, this will add one to three percent per year. So if we assume that this is the only source of inflation—again, zero inflation except for what it’s going to cost us to move to a net zero situation—your best case scenario is 35% inflation cumulative between here and 2050. Your worst case scenario is a 143% inflation, which is to say that it would take $2 and 43 cents to buy what $1 buys present day. Again, that’s assuming no other sources of inflation. To be fair, if we just assume the Fed’s 2% target— and I think that is fair. By the way, the Fed staffers are right now very confident that we are going to be below 2% inflation by the end of next year.
Kevin: Oh, tell that to my wife. Tell that to my wife who goes grocery shopping.
David: I’m, I— Hiss is saying something in my ear: Everything is going to be fine. Hit the reset.
So best case is 143% inflation. If we’re talking about incorporating in the Fed target. The worst case is 432% inflation accumulating between here and 2050. That is that if you go out to 2050, which is not that many years away, we have children and grandchildren that will be in their prime in this period of time. $4.32 needed by 2050 in order to buy $1 worth of valued goods today.
Kevin: So the question that I would have, Dave, is, you know, us growing up, we have heard about the military industrial complex, you know. Eisenhower talked about that. And that was an excuse. I mean, you picked one special enemy for special vilification, like Goebbels said, and you pay for it with inflation in this particular case. So instead of the military industrial complex, do we have now the environmental industrial complex? Is that just a new way of replacing just another cold war?
David: Well, you’ve got a couple of options. I mean, depending on the news cycle and attention spans, you can dip into the War on Terror when and as needed because the cold war is behind us, but we can fix that up and gin it up anytime we want. You’ve got the war on Covid, which is also a very convenient thing that, you know, obviously we can justify, spend trillions to resolve. And yes, you’ve got the war on environmental degradation and decay. And it’s something that if we’re not fully committed to, we are talking about an apocalyptic end.
So the unique aspect of inflationism under the guise of saving the planet is that we’ve already granted permission because we’d be doomed otherwise. So take your lumps with rising costs for decades to come or take your lumps with rising temperatures and water levels. Everyone gets philosophically flaccid with the inflation issue when death is presented as the alternative. So who cares about a paper cut and its slow bleed from that versus the environmental version of the Texas chainsaw massacre when that’s the alternative that’s presented?
Kevin: Well, then, why not raise the debt ceiling? Why do we make such a big deal of this? I mean the debt ceiling is just a, it’s a waste of time because inflation, you can eat any amount of debt away over time with inflation.
David: Yeah. And I mean, it almost doesn’t need to be said, but on the other hand, this is the value of inflation to a central planner. It cuts the burden of debt down to size. If we are talking about over 400% cumulative inflation numbers between now and 2050 to pay for, this is not a green new deal. This is a radical revolution for the way we operate in, in sort of a post carbon world. 400% cumulative inflation numbers. That is the equivalent—again, this is sort of back-of-the-napkin math—to a 75% reduction in debt burden over 30 years. And it’s being paid off with cheaper dollars. So you’ve got the negative compounding effect on unsustainable debt, and that is a policy perk. So in inflationism is policy and yes, it’s sold under many guises.
Kevin: I would imagine that the very, very rich, the upper 1% of 1%, probably have money that they could put toward this, like China is sort of needling their rich to do. But that money’s actually going to have to come from the middle class. We know the money can’t come from the poor, and the ultra rich are probably not interested in giving up a lot of their assets to green up the world. So what happens to the middle class as we have this “acceptable” 400-and-some-odd percent inflation?
David: Well, isn’t it ironic that the ultra rich are ultra involved in the green agenda? Meanwhile, they won’t stop flying their private jets. And so if you look at their personal carbon footprints, they are impressive in scale. So Kevin, there is a social restructuring implicit to squeezing the last of the middle class into poverty. And I think this is not lost on social engineers. Social engineers know this, and they know that inflation is too obscure an idea for people to concern themselves with, particularly when juxtaposed with planetary hot oven extinction—or, I don’t know, maybe it’s the alternative this week, ice box freezing. Whatever conveniently fits the climate change narrative.
You have to have a reduction in social and political frictions, and whether it’s eliminating insurrections or, again, just gaining the confidence, larger objectives need to be in play in order for us to be unified and for us to ignore the pain that we’re experiencing. And I think one of these unifying things is, again, whether it’s Covid, which is frankly not particularly unifying, not anymore, or certainly climate change, which there’s much more general agreement in terms of it being an issue. We’ve got to do something. So again, social engineers benefit, and it does represent something of a social restructuring.
Kevin: You know, there’s a nice runway in Davos, Switzerland, where they do a lot of this engineering and talk about the environment. I wonder if maybe we got rid of the runway where all those private jets land for the elite, who are so concerned about the environment, and maybe replace it with bike racks. I wonder if they would bike into Davos to discuss the same problems that they fly in on their jets?
David: I don’t know very many fit billionaires, frankly.
But I think one thing— I don’t want to this to be misconstrued, what I’m saying. Climate change is as real is Covid, but crisis—this is really what I’m getting at—crisis is too valuable. A commodity to not be traded on by our ruling class. So save the world, solve our debt problems, silence dissent, and make trillions in the process. It’s a win-win for everybody. Now, if we put that win-win in print, one of those is probably in bold, in a larger font size than the other. A second smaller win might be, you get to survive. You get to live, you get to eat another day, with permission granted, of course.
Kevin: So all men are created equal just like animals. Only some are more equal than others. So Orwell again, right?
David: He wrote this script 72 years ago. We see the challenges of redistribution. We see the challenges of social engineering on display. The Chinese are faced with this, putting the success genie back in the bottle, right? Wealthy individuals who’ve made money taking risk and participating in a market dynamic now need to learn to share, and need to learn to be content with less.
Kevin: I keep going back to the fear motive, though. Again, continuously criticize your opponents and pick out one special enemy for special vilification. Fear is the tool that would actually create a sense of gratitude for this kind of inflation. If you can get people scared enough about the earth, again, like you said, there are environmental reasons to change some things.
David: Right.
Kevin: But can we afford it?
David: Yeah. I mean it seems to me the only way to keep the Haves happy with becoming the Have Nots is to sufficiently scare them into gratitude, grateful to be alive. I mean, look, you should be grateful you are even alive. So throw in some war, throw in some pestilence, throw in some apocalyptic visions of the future, and it’s any catastrophe which reshapes the experience of being leveled, and frankly distracts the mind from the means of leveling. Again, that may be taxes. That may be a variety of means leading to gradual impoverishment, gradual enslavement, but distractions are helpful. Helpful when the leveling is policy-induced—in that sense, unnatural.
Kevin: You wonder if Covid isn’t like the grand test for everything else that’s to come.
David: Well. And again, I think we’re talking about policy responses. Clearly the policy responses have laid out a framework for how people do what they’re told to, and when they don’t, what leverage points you can bring against them. So climate change, like Covid, gets woven masterfully into the brave new world of limitless government expenditure. And this again comes back to fiscal spending and ultimately inflation and what the implications are, why this is not a transitory issue, and why we have significant changes in asset allocation going forward.
We have a brave new world of limitless government expenditure. We have ever increasing forms and quantities of taxation. For the last decade we’ve pounded this. Inflation and financial repression. These are hobbyhorses here on the commentary. But governments have now been given carte blanche to solve our global problems. And we’re already seeing the inflation numbers. Last week, CPI, PPI, we’ve got new inflation numbers from China. It’s sending a strong message that the solution suites chosen come with a variety of costs. Question is, are we collectively willing to pay these costs? We are past the discussion point on either Covid or climate change. That piece of social engineering is complete. Collectively we’ve given access. I wonder if we’ve fully considered the sixth domain and the fact that propaganda and narratives are intentionally weaponized. Power is projected internationally and certainly even closer to home. What we have is the art and science of getting people to comply with your wishes. It’s not just the domain of computer hackers.
Kevin: So really what you’re saying, Dave, is what we heard in the Robin Hood clip. And that is, you tax the poor to feed the rich.
David: Aha! Aha!
You’ve been listening to the McAlvany Weekly Commentary. I’m Kevin Orrick, along with David McAlvany. You can find us at mcalvany.com. M-C-A-L-V-A-N-Y.com. And you can call us at (800) 525-9556.
This has been the McAlvany weekly commentary. The views express should not be considered to be a solicitation or a recommendation for your investment portfolio. You should consult professional financial advisor to assess your suitability for risk and investment. Join us again next week for a new edition of the McAlvany Weekly Commentary.
