Dear Friends,
It seems to me, what if the economy is in recession and the elite claim it’s not? The media will report all is well and the politicians will feel comfortable in their ivory tower, but the people will feel the recession. We need not be told we are suffering, we feel it firsthand, while the elite don’t feel our suffering at all. That’s why they are so willing to mete it out. Moreover, what if we have been in recession since 2022 and the administrative state has lied about it? The history of bureaucrats lying has a long and honored tradition. In fact, they lie when the truth would serve them better… so the possibility they lied is on the table. The fact the BLS just revised away all the jobs that were created under the Biden administration is another strong clue. Then there’s personal experience.
When you live in a cubicle insulated from the real world and the consequences of your actions… absurdity becomes normalized. People living in such an environment will often do things like circulate emails how to undermine the administration, act in ways contrary to the stated goals and means of the President, and invent reasons to go after those they dislike, criminally. If a bureaucracy were shown to be so utterly bereft of ethics, scruples, and filled with that much arrogance… it must be eliminated for the sake of the people and republic. Nevertheless, such a bureaucracy would stop at nothing to advance its egoistic agenda. So, covering up its economic failures with a few hundred lies, compounded over years, doesn’t seem like a wide river to cross. It’s certainly not as wide as the Rubicon.
It appears that nearly a million jobs turn out to be phantoms, non-corporeal careers, that vanished the moment they were observed. This gives us right to be alarmed. If effectively zero jobs were created during the entirety of the Biden administration, despite the tens of thousands of government jobs they opened up, that suggests more jobs in the private sector were lost. That’s generally seen as a sign of recession at least in the cyclical economy. Moreover, what else are they lying about? If they lied about the number of jobs created then maybe they lied about economic growth? At this point our bureaucrats are as trustworthy as a used car salesman with an odometer tool in his hand. So maybe we have been in a recession for years and the elite have tried to keep us in the dark.
Why would the administrative state, the bureaucracy, risk its reputation to hide a recession? Who knows the mind of another, but we can always ask, qui bono, who benefits? The obvious answer is central planners whose policies led us into recession. Clearly, they are the primary recipients of the benefits of hiding a recession from us. Then there are the bankers and Wall street that can arbitrage a recessionary economy into profits, as long as we’re kept in the dark. The bureaucracy itself benefits in that the damage their tsunami of regulatory friction does to economic activity is hidden as well. They all can claim, look at the economic numbers, the consensus is that we are in economic growth. We however have had the unsettling feeling in our gut that the numbers were wrong.
Job hunters and business owners alike fear the economy. Demand is collapsing, but mass layoffs have been staved off by mass deportations. Which drive up a firms’ cost of doing business, since an illegal alien costs a third what a legal American does. With no social security, workers comp, or taxes, hiring an American doesn’t make economic sense. So with illegals being deported, mass layoffs are off the table, for now. Demand is down and inflation has yet to eat its way through the economy. Continuing inflation reveals the brilliance of flooding the economy with money even as they shut it down. You have to admit, it is possible we have been in recession for 3-4 years now and the leading edge of the economy has bottomed out with the rest of the roller coaster following. If you agree… act accordingly.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
