Stagflation And Happiness

For the first time in more than twenty years I heard the word - stagflation - mentioned on various financial channels. Stagflation means a stagnant economy coupled with inflation. A two-headed monster for sure. If this is true, how did we get into this situation again? Shouldn’t we learn from our mistakes? We should, but we never do, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Let me clue you in on something I deem important. I’ve been thinking about this concept for quite some time. It’s my humble opinion that the concept of gain doesn’t exist because for every supposed gain there is always an offsetting loss. The medical profession is learning this the hard way. The pills that are supposed to cure a patient of an ailment end up causing the patient to fall victim to another malady, often far worse than the original ailment. And so it goes, as Vonnegut used to say.
As for our economy, it is, in reality, zero based. By that I mean the entire system is merely an exchange. Nothing else. The tree we cut down today is the tree we won’t have tomorrow. The mountaintop we blow up today is the one we will want tomorrow.
To give you an example of what I‘m talking about, I’ll use something that is dear to my heart. Gardening. I have been gardening for forty years. Over that span my garden has taught me many things. While performing the physical part of gardening, such as weeding and watering, I’ve had plenty of time to dwell on what is taking place before my eyes. For one thing, my garden doesn’t produce crops unless I place a seed in the ground and care for it until harvest. That fact is: I can only take out what I’m willing to put in. Makes sense, doesn’t it. A dynamic balance is the key to my gardening efforts and it is the key to contentment. But it seems the big honchos on Wall Street don’t believe this. They want to get something for nothing. Without sowing seeds, those clowns expect to harvest a bounty. That isn’t the way it works, folks. And believe me, those people are smart enough to know better. But they are so used to taking shortcuts and thinking they have something to gain by cheating that they miss the obvious, that there is no gain without an offsetting loss. First it was the savings and loan fiasco and the Keating Five. Then Michael Millken made junk bonds appear to seep gold. Another fairy tale appeared when an obscure energy company called Enron, made other corporations drool with envy at how much money they were raking in. Of course Lay, Skilling, Fastow, and the other crooks eventually had to admit their scam. Notice a pattern here? Every time the stock market has risen in the last twenty years a scam of epic proportions has been behind the escalation. What we’ve been calling an increase of wealth is an allusion. All we’ve done is squander the last of our country’s resources. American seem to be enraptured with a culture that esteems graft and corruption, whose heroes are less than noble. Is it because of our nation’s violent history? And if you doubt we have a violent filled past you need to read a few more recent history books. The People’s History of America by Howard Zinn is a good place to start your enlightenment.
America is far down the list when it comes to happiness. We have been programmed to always calculate our happiness based on money. The more money we have, the more happiness. But I keep reading magazine article after magazine article that begs the question, “Why are Americans so angry? Why aren’t we happy?” Maybe it’s because we’ve based our thinking on the wrong paradigm. Money doesn’t equal happiness.
What country is the happiest? It’s Denmark, followed by Malta, Switzerland, Iceland, and Ireland. What makes the citizens of those countries happy? Their citizens neither have extreme wealth nor extreme poverty. Ahh…A Dynamic Balance! Get it? That’s how to by happy. Create a dynamic balance in your life and let fools strive to be materially wealthy. If you are fortunate to enjoy the love that comes from being part of a family, you have all the wealth you will ever need. Trust me on that.