Everyone will have to ratchet down their standard of living by over 75%

A recent piece in BBC’s “Future World” series on its surface celebrates someone who choose to live an “ultra low carbon lifestyle”. They made a conscious and individual decision to bring their own personal carbon footprint down below 2 metric tonnes per year.

Throughout the developed world, per capita carbon output ranges from 4.46 (France) to Canada being the highest at 15.43.

The article talks about the personal challenges around living an ultra-low carbon lifestyle. According to the piece, 2 tonnes/year is also about half the output of a single gas powered car in the US, so the first step for any Americans (or Canadians) wanting to do this, they would have to start by ditching their cars.

Other behaviours which move the needle would be: eating a plant based diet, buying green energy and forgoing one transatlantic round-trip per year.

In terms of what level of personal CO2 emissions gets the job done “for the climate”, estimates vary. While the 2 tonne number was somewhat arbitrary, there are other climate focused think tanks that feel the number has to be 1.4 tonnes of C02 per person by 2040 and 0.7 by 2050.

The Fallacy of per-capita output

Going back to Canada’s “excessive” carbon footprint – if we look at a metric that really means anything – total CO2 output – Canada is basically a rounding error to the world’s largest emitter, China.

At an average annual temperature at -4 to -5 celsius, Canada is also the coldest G7 nation. So perhaps we can forgive the Canucks for not wanting to freeze to death – even if it means emitting Co2 for heat. Also worth noting that far more humans are killed each year from being cold (17.7 million per year, on average) than from being too warm (2.2 million per year), roughly 8X.

Here’s the thing: everybody has to comply

While the overall timbre of the piece lauds the story’s protagonist (a communications officer at a climate non-profit) over her decision to make this lifestyle choice, sprinkled throughout are casual, back-handed references at where all this is going:

The ultra-low carbon lifestyle isn’t just for the eco-minded, it has to be for everybody. Or it isn’t going to work (“work” being defined as controlling the planet’s climate decades out).

“what do truly low-carbon lifestyles look like – and can they really be achieved by personal choice alone?“ the article laments.

Well if the answer is “no” then that means the ultra-low CO2 lifestyle has to be  for everybody. How we do that is a matter of “both individual and systems change”. By systems change is meant that

“with the right policies, infrastructure and technology in place to enable changes to our lifestyles and behaviour, we can reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions substantially by 2050…

 

In richer countries, this means moving towards a far lower carbon lifestyle for most people. But the changes to get there aren’t necessarily painful or even negative. For example, research has shown that good public services enable higher wellbeing at lower energy use.”

If you read between the lines we see the implications of this. It basically means that an ultra-low carbon lifestyle has to be brought about through systemic change, government policy and massively expanded public services – or said differently, increasing dependence on The State.

Private infrastructure – like cars – will have to become a thing of the past:

One major change would be to change how we move around. Akenji envisions a combination of public transport alongside micro-mobility systems (such as electric scooters and drones) which make it efficient and effective for people to reach it. Private cars, with their huge emissions and often empty seats, would largely be a thing of the past, he says, and car parks converted to green public spaces where people go to play, relax or do exercise.

The Climate Cult-ist ‘s Dilemma

We live in a world where many people believe many different things, but nowhere else do we find the kind of mandatory buy-in required as with the so-called climate crisis. Fortunately we’re hearing from an increasing number of scientists that there is no crisis, and whose voices are getting louder even in the face of corporate media “fact checking” and other headwinds of narrative control.

Climate crisis or not, I personally think decarbonization will happen anyway if for no other reason than that fossil fuel supplies are finite. With rational energy policies, including nuclear, natural gas and hybrid EVs (as opposed to full EV), we could significantly ratchet down CO2 emissions while still providing increased energy inputs to a world hungry for higher living standards.

Doomberg frequently quips that one’s standard of living can be measured by how much energy one can afford to waste. Somewhat glib perhaps, but he uses it to hammer home the point that energy is life (also his phrase, see this Tweet thread that goes deeper on why).

1/ Since disorder is spontaneous, the human endeavor is a constant, unrelenting struggle against the forces of entropy. We are a highly ordered species – a true miracle of the universe. Beating back entropy requires energy. Ergo, energy is life.

— Doomberg (@DoombergT) June 18, 2022

The reality is there is no viable path forward that makes reduced energy usage  and standard of living reductions a requirement, let alone mandatory. 

Doing so means telling the middle class to own nothing and eat bugs, while the elites parade through the city in lengthy motorcades on their way to the airport to wing it to Davos in their private jets. It means telling third-world nations to remain mired in poverty. And it means forcing the Chinese to stop building all those coal-fired plants and to keep the 600 million subjects there who are still living in extreme poverty, poor.

Good luck with that.

The simple reality is that any desired policy or collective goal that requires 100% compliance from a population (let alone the entire world) will simply not occur. Even if 100% of the world’s population believed in anthropogenic global warming, you still wouldn’t achieve consensus on the forecasts, the models or how to implement a response.

For people who believe the climate emergency narrative (and make no mistake, it is a belief, like any other), the reality of this induces a type of eco-anxiety. Climate researchers and activists are sensitive to this dilemma and have created a word for it, “solastalgia”,

“the condition of feeling lonely, insecure and powerless because of the intense changes in one’s immediate environment, which can be caused by the acute impacts (e.g., floods and wildfires) of climate change, the chronic degradation of places caused by climate change (e.g., sea level rise) (Galway, Beery, Jones-Casey, & Tasala, 2019) or by human activity (e.g. mining, deforestation) (Albrecht et al., 2007, Galway et al., 2019). Solastalgia is not nostalgia, because it is not a longing for a place from which one has moved, rather it is suffering from change and lack of control over it (Albrecht et al., 2007).”

If that weren’t bad enough, they also face cognitive dissonance over their own carbon footprints – not all, in fact not even very many of those involved in the fight for climate change, are actually living ultra-low carbon lifestyles themselves, and that causes them eco-guilt. In this widely cited paper on the topic, 17 respondents were interviewed about their coping mechanisms around ‘the emerging “psychoterratic” syndromes such as eco-anxiety, eco-guilt, and eco-grief”, the respondents were:

They reported feelings of helplessness, meaninglessness, that we’re all going to die, guilt over travel, guilt over their own carbon footprints, conflict with family over eco-awareness, the list goes on, but widely summed up as

At their core, the anxieties faced by these people are indicative of the human condition itself: we all have unique insights into the world – and if we’re introspective and genuinely curious – we become attuned to system problems that we feel need addressing. All Bitcoiners understand the “Fix the Money / Fix the World” maxim. But the approach to orange-pilling people is markedly different from eco-sermonizing.

But beneath even that, we all face impermanence, uncertainty and even mortality. Part of our psychological process of individuation is to find meaning and purpose within it all. It’s called life. Only for most of us, while seeing that our emotional support structures incorporate  community, family and purpose, we realize that at our core we are, in our earthly incarnations – here alone, as individual souls. We must face the world as it is, and we each have a personal responsibility to grow into it under our own devices.

It is  mainly the eco-anxious, the collectivists and Marxists who believe it critical, even necessary that the entire world must conform to the same worldview “in order to save humanity”. It’s textbook messiah complex and narcissism (see Deconstructing Wokethink)

Weaponizing “eco-guilt” (a.k.a “Rigging the game”)

This eco-anxiety is so acute that many think it noble and just that the structure of society itself must be altered to fit the worldview. There are academic papers on using eco-guilt to motivate eco-friendly behaviours  (“eco-shaming”). In The Bitcoin Capitalist we’ve covered the UK’s “Nudge Units” which use social media influence operations to condition behaviors.

There is even one from Ross Mittiga, a professor of Political Theory at the Catholic University of Chile, and a democratic socialist (of course) who argues for the political legitimacy of authoritarianism to the point where political candidates must “pass a climate litmus test” before being permitted to run for office, and even overturning previous democratically driven policies if they are deemed harmful to the climate:

“Governments might also justifiably limit certain democratic institutions and processes to the extent these bear on the promulgation or implementation of environmental policy. This could involve imposing a climate litmus-test on those who seek public office, disqualifying anyone who has significant (relational or financial) ties to climate-harming industries or a history of climate denialism. More strongly, governments may establish institutions capable of overturning previous democratic decisions (expressed, for example, in popu- lar referenda or plebiscites) against the implementation of carbon taxes or other necessary climate policies.”

In the future it’ll be a lot more expensive to be free

This drumbeat for climate collectivism is going to get worse before it gets better. While it’s encouraging to see more reality being injected into the conversation – and eco-messiahs increasingly discrediting themselves through their lifestyles of conspicuous consumption – large swaths of the population are buying this story hook-line-and-sinker, and as Late Stage Globalism enters into its endgame, we expect policy makers to become more desperate and draconian.

CBDC’s will probably come out of the gate as personal carbon quota systems and mass adoption will be driven through UBI delivered on the rails of social credit systems and digital ID.

COVID was supposed to be a godsend for those seeking to create precedent for unlimited stimulus, quasi-UBI and prototypical social credit mechanisms through vaccine passports et al. Fortunately it was all too much, too soon and it appears as though the opposite may be happening.

Where another twenty years of operant conditioning and creeping totalitarianism may have provided the perfect setup for an enduring, technocratic authoritarianism, the widespread policy failures created a larger swath of population who is now wary and suspicious of the next “existential crisis”.

The 37 Trillion in new M2 money blowing out the currency system, the central banks forcing themselves into a corner on interest rates vs inflation, the new pandemic of “sudden and unexpected” excess mortality, and now various  Covid tyrants trying to distance themselves from their role in it all, it certainly looks as though the globalist elite of hyper-Liberalism have overplayed their hand.

That won’t preclude them from trying, however, and there are still many who think #CovidsNotOver, want to #BringBackMasks who will be all too eager to have their lives mediated and gamified via their smartphones and dramatically ratchet down their lifestyles in order to “save the climate”.

Let them.

You don’t have to go along with it, but it will become more expensive to be free. Wealth taxes, windfall taxes, heavily regulated chokepoints between the rapidly deteriorating “fiat world” and the coming “anti-fiat” economy will require being a net producer, owning hard assets across multiple jurisdictions and networks, and garnering multiple income streams. The middle class is being demolished, and with calls to reduce living standards by over 75% (cutting personal emissions from an average if 8 tonnes per capita to 1.5 and then 0.7), it looks intentional.

“In the future, there will be only one occupation: managing one’s wealth. And most people are going to be unemployed”.

As I wrote in a recent issue of the premium letter:

The CBDCs will roll out, and intended or not, become full-fledged China-style social credit systems, from which “the smart money” flees into Bitcoin and other hard assets to preserve its wealth.

 

This leads to “The Great Bifurcation” scenario I’ve written about at length.

 

It’s where Neo-serfs who rely on The State for their economic survival live lives of quiet desperation and servitude, their carbon footprints metered, their behaviours monitored, nudged and shaped; their destinies largely out of their own hands. Life is something that just happens to them, punctuated by episodes of “gaming the algo” to score additional privileges or avoid punishment.

 

Marbled throughout this world would be enclaves, and networks of sovereign individuals and micro-states for whom life is a futuristic extrapolation of hyper-capitalism and mobility. This is the Sovereign Individual thesis meeting The Network State, writ large.

Become a sovereign individual in whatever manner suits you: own gold, stack sats, have a Plan B, work for yourself, not somebody else and for God’s sake, turn off the TV and stop subjecting yourself to the corporate media. Connect with like minded individuals and form both virtual and real communities and networks.

The defining tension of Late Stage Globalism will not be between “left” and “right” but between sovereign individuals and collectivists, decentralization vs centralization. Join the Bombthrower mailing list and get a free copy of our investment thesis, or try The Bitcoin Capitalist: The monthly journal for today’s Sovereign Individual. Follow me on Nostr or Twitter.

I’ve been hearing the phrase “Everything Bubble” come up more often lately. This isn’t a new phrase, Graham Summers was among the first to coin it in his 2017 book “The Everything Bubble: The Endgame for Central Bank Policy”:

“The Everything Bubble chronicles the creation and evolution of the US financial system, starting with the founding of the US Federal Reserve in 1913 and leading up to the present era of serial bubbles: the Tech Bubble of the ‘90s, the Housing Bubble of the early ‘00s and the current bubble in US sovereign bonds, which are also called Treasuries.

Because these bonds serve as the foundation of our current financial system, when they are in a bubble, it means that all risk assets (truly EVERYTHING), are in a bubble, hence our title, The Everything Bubble. In this sense, the Everything Bubble represents the proverbial end game for central bank policy: the final speculative frenzy induced by Federal Reserve overreach.”

Most recently the idea of the Everything Bubble came up on Coindesk’s Breakdown with NLW edition about NFT’s and the record setting sale of Beeple’s The First Five Thousand Days for $69 million USD. I say this as a guy who has been into crypto since 2013 and is getting even more involved today: I don’t get NFTs. Or rather, it only makes sense why they’re selling for such excessive valuations when you consider it to be a phenomenon occurring within the dynamics of an Everything Bubble.

Endgame is another theme asserting itself, that’s what Grant Williams and Bill Fleckenstein call their podcast (it recently went premium, but the first bunch of episodes are widely available across all major platforms). In Grant Williams’ February newsletter (“Let Them Eat Risk”), he afforded a lot of coverage to Bitcoin, including a piece by Ray Dalio and Rana Faroohar’s “Bitcoin’s Rise Reflects America’s Decline” (originally an op ed for the Financial Times).

What struck me about her piece, and to a similar extent, Dalio’s, was this recognition that even if they hadn’t themselves embraced the idea of crypto, it would be a mistake to dismiss crypto-currencies as merely a speculative bubble. Said differently, even Bitcoin skeptics are beginning to understand that Bitcoin’s rise means something. It portends a shift. A big one:

“A little over 100 years ago, there was a bubble asset that rose and fell wildly over the course of a decade. People who held it would have lost 100 per cent of their money five different times. They would have, at various points, made huge fortunes, or seen the value of their asset destroyed by hyperinflation.

The asset I’m referring to is gold priced in Weimar marks. If this reminds you of bitcoin, you are not alone. In his newsletter Tree Rings, analyst Luke Gromen looked at the startling similarities in the volatility of gold in Weimar Germany and bitcoin today. His conclusion? Bitcoin isn’t so much a bubble as “the last functioning fire alarm” warning us of some very big geopolitical changes ahead.” (emphasis added)

The entire piece is quite good and I recommend reading it, she concludes:

“None of this makes me want to buy bitcoin. But I also don’t see it as a normal bubble. It was unclear at the beginning of the 20th century which of the hundreds of automakers would win the race to replace the horse and buggy. Now, who knows whether bitcoin, ethereum, or diem, or some yet-to-be-invented digital currency will win out long term. For now, the bitcoin boom may best be viewed as a canary in the coal mine…”

This resonated with me and reminded me of a comment left on my “This Time is Different: What Bitcoin Isn’t“ piece when it ran on Zerohedge back in 2017 (the ZH copy is behind their premium archive now).

“Bitcoin is a hole …in a burning building

I had the thought that Bitcoin is like a hole in the wall of a burning building. The burning building is the petrodollar. The Bitcoin hole in the wall doesn’t meet any standard definition of a door. It wouldn’t pass a building inspection and it may not last long. It will most certainly be replaced by something else in the long run. But in the short term, no one inside that burning building really cares about any of that and the ones that first smelled smoke are already pouring through it. Many more will follow and some, sadly, will die in the fire. There are other exits from the building too, some may be safer than others, but the most important thing is getting out of the burning building as quickly as possible.”

I’ve been pulling together numerous threads so far from disparate sources, many of whom are Bitcoin and crypto-currency skeptics, all of whom are people I think are worth following anyway because they’re super smart and put out extremely high signal content.

The last one I’ll pull in is where the title for today’s post came from. I heard Diego Parrilla say this phrase on the Macro Voices podcast, in an almost off-the-cuff manner. My brain did a sort of physical convulsion that is hard to describe but has only happened maybe a half-dozen times in my life. Maybe that’s where the expression “mind blown” originates.

He said “we’re in an everything bubble that’s too big to fail”.

It’s not an institution, it’s not an asset class, it’s not a political ideology, a social media platform or a monetary regime. It is everything. 

When you consider that, it explains why policy makers are behaving in the way they are. We’ve painted ourselves not into a corner, but into a bubble. There are no soft-landing scenarios out of which we can extricate ourselves from this bubble, and under no circumstances can this bubble be allowed to deflate, let alone pop.

I’ve been treating the rise of Bitcoin and gold as a flight out of fiat for some time. I’ve known that policy makers were motivated to keep the system on the rails for as long as humanly possible. None of this is new to me. But what really got me was that particular phrasing all of us being in a bubble that’s too big to fail.

It means in all of the language and trial balloons around The New Normal, the Great Reset, Build Back Better, the backdrop of desperation that seems to permeate it came into clearer focus for me.

Some kind of Great Reset is, in policy makers’ minds, the only way forward to get out of The Bubble. I looks like they want to do it in a way in which they get to  keep living like they’re inside The Bubble and still run the show, while everybody else has to get used to living life under a drastically reduced standard of living and submit to rapidly emerging social credit systems.

In other words, it almost looks like the plan to softly deflate The Bubble is to kick everybody who isn’t part of the establishment elite and its support systems, out of it.

It’s The Great Bifurcation, pulled forward about 20 or 50 years by a virus that would have otherwise been somewhere between a nothingburger and SARS…

“Even in the worst-case horrendous scenario, COVID-19 will kill far fewer people than the Great Plagues, including the Black Deaths, or World War II did… [but] changes that would have seemed inconceivable before the pandemic struck, such as new forms of monetary policy like helicopter money (already a given), the reconsideration/recalibration of some of our social priorities and augmented search for the common good as a policy objective, the notion of fairness acquiring political potency, radical welfare and taxation measures, and drastic geopolitical realignments.

The broader point is this: the possibilities for change and the resulting new order are now unlimited and only bound by our imagination, for better or for worse. “

— Klaus Schwab, experiencing near-fatal orgasm whilst pontificating in his COVID-19: The Great Reset

The escape valves from The Everything Bubble

But there are escape valves from The Everything Bubble, ones that can be used by normal everyday people who aren’t elites, who don’t get invited to Davos every year to “reimagine” everybody else’s lives, who don’t take private jets to work, who just want to be able to mind their own business, live their own lives and preserve the wealth they’ve worked hard and fairly to build up over their lives.

Those valves are to move out of the fiat money system and into “stuff” like commodities, real estate, agriculture, like gold and precious metals. And crypto. This is why all of these things are blasting off (Gold is less than 20% off of its all time highs. Crypto can dump more than that overnight. These two asset classes are not mutually exclusive, they are just on different wavelengths).

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Announcement: On March 17th the Crypto Capitalist Letter will launch. The focus is on navigating the New Normal with a focus on actionable items lincluding investing in crypto stocks.

This is part 4 of the Jackpot Chronicles: Four Post-Coronavirus Scenarios. Read the series here, or sign up for Out Of The Cave here.

“In the future there will only be one occupation: managing one’s wealth. And the majority of the population will be unemployed.”

– Me.

The original working title for this installment of The Jackpot Chronicles was “Mandatory Pollyanna”. That’s the one where central planners and bureaucrats manage to “save” the global financial system yet again, but at a cost of undertaking an LBO of the entire economy and running it as a centrally planned utility.

I’ve decided to rename this scenario “The Great Bifurcation”, because should it come to pass,  I think the the inevitable result  would be the emergence of an even more pronounced and starkly divided Two Tier Society.

It is arguable that the groundwork for TGB was laid as far back as the adoption of central banking and fiat currency, which gave asymmetric advantages to the class of elites closest to the monetary spigots: This was known as far back as the late 1700’s when Richard Cantillon wrote his treatise on Economic Theory…

“An 18th century French banker and philosopher named Richard Cantillon noticed an early version of this phenomenon in a book he wrote called ‘An Essay on Economic Theory.’ His basic theory was that who benefits when the state prints a bunch of money is based on the institutional setup of that state. In the 18th century, this meant that the closer you were to the king and the wealthy, the more you benefitted, and the further away you were, the more you were harmed. Money, in other words, is not neutral. This general observation, that money printing has distributional consequences that operate through the price system, is known as the “Cantillon Effect.”

Why Wall St. Gets a Bailout and You Don’t, by Matt Stoller

Today it’s not the King’s courtiers who benefit, it’s who is in closest proximity to The Fed: primary dealers, investment banks, hedge funds, private equity, venture capitalists and corporate monopolists. Even in Cantillon’s day, when he enumerated the various ways new money could come into the kingdom, it was all the result of actual money entering via conquest, trade, mercantilism, or taxation. The choke point then under any scenario was the sovereign, and those in court tended to do well whenever the money supply increased.

Now, imagine having the ability to print “value” out of thin air, and then exchange it for equity stakes in the means of production, the way central banks can today. Imagine being able to do that for the world’s reserve currency. Then try to imagine that power and wealth diffusing through society equally and proportionately. You can’t, because it doesn’t. It won’t. It never has.

So today we’re hit with this pandemic, which I’ve said before isn’t the cause of the economic dark age we’re now entering but a catalyst of it. This unidirectional wealth transfer has to be spun in a way that the marks (the subjects) don’t understand they are being robbed blind. They have to want to be leached into poverty. They have to demand it.

This is the underlying logic of ideas like Universal Basic Income, and descriptive rationalizations like Modern Monetary Theory. To the rabble, it looks like the government finally set aside any silly notions of fiscal prudence in order to further build out the welfare state for the good of society. There is an entire segment of the population who is now taking home more money from government stimulus and bailouts than they were when they were “working” for a living.

What is really happening however, is that the fiat currencies which are being printed into existence and distributed to the underclass in the form of various stimulus and aid packages are essentially being transformed into a kind of “company scrip”.

Company script of yore was only redeemable for living essentials at the Company Store. In our era, it’s more of a company platform: a fast emerging, digital, ubiquitous, cashless banking system, where all purchases and transfers are tracked and logged. With the digitization of  this next generation company scrip, (“smart scrip”?) which has the veneer of a currency, policy makers will have much needed ability to fine tune economic activity under extenuating circumstances. Consumer behaviour can be tightly monitored, modified, coupled with “immunity passports”and other parameters deemed necessary, including having purchases curated or rationed.

All the while the elites, the financiers, the political class and the kleptocrats continue to inexorably accumulate the lion’s share of the equity and productive assets of the global economy.

On the other end of the scale are the corporate behemoths, who have shifted their business models from normal course operations to financialization:

Companies today are borrowing money at artificially low rates to buy back their own shares, which are trading at or near all-time highs. The value investor in me finds that kind of stupid.

When I wrote this, the major indices were putting up a string of all-time-highs (but the underlying technicals like the advance/decline and insider selling look awful). But what a lot of people don’t realize, because the media doesn’t give it very much coverage, is that most of the earnings gains in the S&P (said earnings gains supposedly driving the p/e multiple expansion which is propelling it to new highs) are coming from stock buybacks.

In Q2 2016, share buybacks accounted for 72.9% (!!!!!) of the trailing 12 months net income of the S&P.  Read that again. That’s not 72.9% of the earnings gains; it was 72.9% of the earnings. 72.9%! That means nearly ¾ of the earnings are all financially engineered, and most of the funds used to buy back all those shares are borrowed because of these ultra-low, artificially suppressed interest rates and credit expansion.

Out of the 500 companies in the S&P500 in 2016, 146 of them spent more on buybacks than they actually made in “earnings”.

That’s financial engineering. It cannot go on forever, but it will “work just fine” until eventually, it doesn’t. When that moment comes, it will be disorderly and there will not be enough chairs to go around when the music ends.

I wrote that back in 2016, in the inaugural post for Out Of The Cave. Now that eventually has finally arrived, we’ll see how corporate welfare plays out in the Jackpot. For those companies that blew their wads on buybacks over the last decade, the Great Bifurcation scenario would see their bail-outs come with conditions that they restructure their operations in alignment with the imperatives of The New Normal: such as enhanced pre-flight screening for the airlines, and sundry social justice initiatives that bring  a centrally planned economy, controlled by the State closer to reality.

What will the Great Bifurcation look like?

Aside from permabulls pining for a V-shaped recovery in stonks, the subtle drumbeat being relentlessly pounded by policymakers and corporate media is that things have changed forever and there will be no return to normalcy as we would have understood it just a few short months ago. Nor should there be, if you take the advice of super rich celebrities softly singing “Non á un Retour á la Normale”

Under this scenario’s new rules, which will include enhanced tracking and surveillance, monitoring, government interference into every aspect of our lives and necessary restrictions on free speech to curb “misinformation”, we will notice one thing over and over again:

The New Rules for The New Normal will only apply to the rule followers, not the rule makers or the rule tellers.

Spot the difference:

• When Shelly Luther, a Texas salon owner defied a court order to close down her hair salon, citing that she had to keep working in order to feed her family, she was sentenced to 7 days in jail.
• When Almeda County, CA issued workplace shutdown orders, Elon Musk simply ignored it and the county “entered into negotiations”. with Musk in order to garner compliance.

The difference here, other than one is one is a self-employed solopreneur trying to keep her head above water and the other is a self-absorbed solipsist douchebag with a private jet, is that the former gets paid in company scrip (fiat coupons called “dollars”) while the latter is a lynchpin in the financialization juggernaut that makes its return on funding rounds, IPOs, secondary offerings and any other transaction that generates fees for underwriters.

For everybody else, how many of us will be able to simply refuse to comply with government ordinances when they are decreed from on high? Whether it comes to receiving mandatory vaccines, rolling travel bans, permanent restrictions on social distancing and assembly, or to close down our businesses again, will we then be able to enter into “negotiations” with our respective authorities regarding the finer points of whether we actually have to comply? Somehow I doubt it.

Spot the difference:

• Various jurisdictions around the world are imposing jail terms and fines for violating lockdowns, including numerous US states , Canada, India, Saudi Arabia (mildly surprised they’re not beheading them) and others too numerous to mention,

vs

• Canada’s Prime Minister traveled to his vacation home for Easter after lecturing Canadians to stay home over Easter
• Ontario Premier Doug Ford traveled to his cottage while advising everybody else not to
• NYC Mayor Bill Di Blasio, who set up a snitch line encouraging citizens to report each other for not social distancing, had no compunction about hitting the gym in Brooklyn
• Neil Ferguson, the man behind the botched computer model that factored into the global lockdown, breaks quarantine for a dalliance with a married climate activist, gets off with an “awww shucks” and a  slap on the wrist.

https://twitter.com/DowdEdward/status/1257545327080427520

The difference here is between mere rule followers and the rule makers. Imagine these same disconnects across every aspect, every social strata, every economic sphere of society.

The Great Bifurcation will be baked in so that:

The underclass will be under the never-ending spectre of lockdown and quarantine, social distancing rules, restrictions on travel, events and diet, while the elites jaunt about in private jets, holding emergency sessions aboard super yachts and convening at Davos to reimagine the (your) future.

Wealth inequality will be even more starkly exacerbated as global currencies wither into money-like coupons and food stamps, redeemable within approved digital ecosystems on curated transactions.

Contact tracing, immunity passports and other “health initiatives” will morph into social credit frameworks worthy of China, from which the political class will almost certainly be exempt.

The people who decree and implement these measures will enjoy a life of comparative plenty and freedom.

And yet, it all has a certain logic to it…

Why should you have any liberties left?

If the Savior State is going to incentivize you to not work and eventually ends up paying you a basic income every month for staying home, then the logic does follow that they should be able to protect their property investment by setting the allowable parameters within which you should be permitted to operate. After all, you’re living your life on their dime scrip.

Under The Great Bifurcation scenario, humanity drifts apart, H.G Wells style, into two separate races. The capstone class will be our patrician overseers who have The Science, the models and the economic toolkit to deftly guide society through The Jackpot. The other will be a much larger underclass of comparatively childlike simpletons who believe #fakenews, have negative equity and no assets, and generally can’t be trusted to be left in a room alone with sharp objects. They’ll need shepherding, and the newly ascendent  social credit system will give them the right dopamine hits at the right time to do it.

Between these two races will exist an impenetrable membrane of norms, culture, narrative and even law that enforce a social divide reminiscent of a Dickensonian steampunk tale. Normally I would posit that were this scenario to prevail, it would take generations to dumb down the populace to the point required to pull it off. However given the exigencies of The Jackpot, and what I expect to be a never-ending state of compounding emergencies, the timeframe may be greatly accelerated.

Remember the recurring theme of The Jackpot: The next 20 years will not be a linear extrapolation of the previous 20.

In the next edition of The Jackpot Chronicles, our final post-crisis scenario looks at The Deglobalization Scenario. That’s the one where reality sets in and is not only acknowledged but embraced. Businesses and policy makers get religion and realize that financialization and globalization have ultimately failed and in order to achieve long term viability, the entire paradigm has to be “reimagined”. I also discussed this recently in the AxisOfEasy podcast with Charles Hugh Smith and Jesse Hirsh.

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