Paradocracy

The general market is largely susceptible to shifts in demand and proclivities, and advances in production and technology can often render obsolete many of the market's prior mainstays. For this very reason, specific sectors, industries, goods, and services have been forced to improve, adapt, or assimilate, or to instead vacate the market altogether. Let us venture into an imaginary setting with a human population of 2,437. One given weekend, this town unsuspectingly receives an influx of more than 900 people. The local diners, motels, grocers, and ice cream parlors are suddenly eviscerated of stock while their respective capacities are tested by the sudden appreciation in demand. In response to the immediate explosion in demand, the businesses expand their scales of production, their staff, and the capacity of their infrastructure. One week later, that population of greater than 900 leaves the area, and the businesses are left with excess supply and staff,  oversized  i...

For centuries, gold has remained a store of value as fiat currencies have and, if history and modern trends are any revelation, always will fall to  asymptotal  zero at the hands of the monetary manipulators. The global marketplace is today at the mercy of a currency war which risks savings and the middle class to encourage hasty consumption, speculation, and  malinvestment  to prop up asset classes and generate the wealth effect in an environment saturated with exorbitant paper gains cloaking real and eventual losses, not to mention the unseen and myriad gross externalities veiled by unsubstantiated optimism.  As the Federal Reserve has continued to expand its balance sheet, one can observe a strong positive correlation between the dollar price of gold and the extent of the Fed's dollar assets. Of course, the dollar price of gold, in keeping with any other asset, is susceptible to market corrections and speculative buying and selling, as well as ...

According to the subjective theory of value, all measures of wealth or utility spawn from the extent of the assessor's or competing assessors' personal valuations corroborated by their respective capacities to match their resources with their expected returns across their anticipated time horizons.  For me, wealth takes many forms: spiritual, existential, personal, interpersonal, tangible, and aesthetic. I generate my wealth by cultivating purchasing power to enable a standard of living which momentarily maximizes the product of my time by granting me the power to consume the foods which I enjoy and which sustain my life but also allow me to pursue my hobbies. My current balance sheets are a modest quantifiable presentation of wealth, but the expenses are channeled to a further time horizon wherein resides an expectation of greater return and therefore an anticipatory sense of wealth.  Wealth in modern society is a paradigm into which I can only aspire to endeavo...