Of Andrea Cavalleri
I mentioned it in my essay on libertarian-communism and I owe this explanation to the readers.
The London School of Economics has produced a sort of rudimentary theory that would place the blame for the financial crisis of the last decade on the decline in the birth rate.
The reasoning, very simple, it sounds like this: fewer births means that there are fewer young people paying contributions, while the number of pensioners does not decrease. Therefore the State has to go broke to pay pensions and this fact dramatically increases the public debt and induces the crisis.
This explanation, suggestive and on a superficial level quite attractive, it is absolutely wrong.
To understand this, it is enough to analyze the proposed mechanism in its entirety: if young people are too few to pay pensions to the elderly, it means that they, despite working like crazy, they are unable to bear the burden of maintaining the commitments already made.
Therefore the system would need to make the most of the work of young people in an attempt to cover pension expenditure.
On the contrary we observe a system that, in the official data largely toned down, produces over 30% of youth unemployment and that, actually, produces a percentage close to 50%.
So if the economic mechanism in place produces high youth unemployment it cannot be, and it isn't, the lack of young people led to the crisis, otherwise all existing young people would be employed. Conversely, the overabundance of young people compared to available jobs indicates that, according to our economic-financial system, young people are about double what they should be.
I immediately prevent the raising of ideological shields, declaring that I consider the demographic crisis to be a serious problem that must be remedied.
I simply say that it is a foolish hypothesis to point to it as the cause of the crisis, when the opposite effect is much more evident, that is, youth unemployment, with the economic constraints and uncertainties about the future that it brings with it, it prevents many young people from starting a family and procreating.
It is interesting to note that this theory has had no resonance except in certain Catholic circles, in my opinion, for very specific reasons and purposes.
In fact, it seems to me to be an attempt to separate the liberal theory from the Malthusian one, to try to justify it in the eyes of pro-life circles.
But not only were Malthus and Ricardo friends, so that the two theories were born twinned, but always and throughout the world the driving forces of liberalism are and have been Malthusian, to the point that the two things almost coincide.
To cite today's most macroscopic example, just think about Planned Parenthood, which isn't just Planned Parenthood, but it's Rockefeller's Planned Parenthood.
So it can be stated with an analogy that if the Catholic Communists were Lenin's useful idiots, the catholic liberals are the useful idiots of the Rockefellers.
However, there is a second purpose in trying to mask the real reasons for the crisis with the demographic argument and it consists in diverting attention from the debt Ponzi scheme.
A Ponzi scheme is that mechanism whereby a financial manager pays investors' returns with the shares of new investors.
Clearly it cannot work unless the number of investors grows infinitely, so it just doesn't work; it's an experience that someone had while entangled in the chains of Saint Anthony, which I am, to be precise, one scheme Ponzi.
The issuing of money solely in debt form, it has produced a monetary system that repays debts only with more debts (plus interest) and therefore it is a Ponzi scheme, which can only sustain itself through infinite growth.
But, about the monetary system, now global with the exception of a few states, a strange thing happened.
If small or medium-sized crooks who practice a Ponzi scheme go to prison, the large monetary institutions, who practice the same pattern with debt, they expect the real economy to adapt to their scheme through infinite growth.
When Madoff was indicted for a fifty billion dollar scam he said: “You accuse me of having created a Ponzi scheme… but the FED does it too” he expressed this same concept that I have just explained.
But how can economic growth be infinite?
In fact it cannot and this is why crises occur periodically, bankruptcies and debt restructuring, which create the illusion of its sustainability for a while longer.
But the simplest and most concrete way to fuel continuous economic growth is that of continuous population growth.
And here the dashes join and the functionality of the theory of the London school of economics is understood: it serves to avoid questioning our crazy and unsustainable financial system, in addition to clearing the liberalism that, at the level of economic thought, he is the most trusted ally of this system.
Two more short notes.
The first is that our monetary system is Hegelian, in the sense that it demands that reality adapts to theory and not vice versa.
In fact, the entire financial system is based exclusively on conventions and the impossible is expected from the real economy (that is, from people's real lives ) in order to safeguard these conventions.
This affection for mere conventions is strange, perhaps to understand it you should ask him for explanations 0,7% richest on the planet, owner of half the world's wealth: who knows if in the presence of different conventions it would be equally rich!
The second note is aimed at Catholics.
Liberalism and Catholicism are mutually exclusive.
The market god, which is the one that would like to halve births because it only has jobs for half of the young people, he is not the Christian God.
Perhaps the Church has not pronounced a formal and explicit condemnation of liberalism, however, the concepts expressed in the “Quadragesimo anno” clearly go in that direction.
If anyone had doubts and did not master the topic, just keep three qualities in mind: be Catholic, be intelligent, be liberal; and remember that you can only have two.