One of my best, long standing commenters from the old blog recommended the Z-Man to me, so I started reading his blog and have now listened to about six months worth of his podcasts.
I hope I don’t piss off my commenter, but I have to give a hard pass to the Z-Man, who is an economic illiterate and almost certainly a welfare queen.
His latest two podcasts were just so triggering I have to say something. Despite his denials – he’s ten years too young to be officially a boomer – he’s a boomer. Despite his protests that he’s not Conservative Inc. nor a Libertarian goldbug – he’s no different than them.
Let’s just start with the facts: Z-Man says he’s a “small businessman” and the kind of guy you call up when you have a “million-dollar problem, not a hundred-dollar problem.” He lives in the Washington DC suburbs and constantly complains about the blacks while whining about the rich liberals in Bethesda, so that should tell you what class he’s in – not rich enough for the white areas of DC.
Consdering where he lives, the fact he’s a “small businessman” and has something to do with computers, I’m going to make a guess: he’s a contractor for either or both defense or a health agency/insurance company.
Meaning, 100% of his paychecks comes from the taxpayers. Defense and health are 100% socialized, and although Z-Man complains about “privatized profits, socialized costs” that is exactly what people like him do – they suck off of the taxpayers tit while maintaining the fig-leaf of being in the “private sector” because he’s not an official government employee.
So Z-Man complains that Greg Johnson said he was engaging in “economic dad-ism.” Z-Man then reassures us that Greg Johnson is “a nice guy” but “just doesn’t understand economics.”
Wrong on both counts. Greg Johnson is not a nice guy, he’s a narcissistic asshole who is nevertheless 100% correct that Z-Man is nothing but a old boomer faux-“free markets” guy lecturing the young whipper-snappers about “socialism” – all the while, sucking the tit of the fat government contractors that the Republican party has forced on the government for 30 years.
I know this because my old dad used to complain about it constantly. At the DoD, they were perfectly capable of doing the work themselves, but the Republicans wouldn’t let them. They HAD to farm out the contracts to “the private sector” because, according to Republicans, “the private sector is more efficient.”
The reality? It’s just graft. Northrop Grumman has only one customer – the Department of Defense. They do the same work as the government employees do – just without the quality control and oversight – and charge 10x the amount, then, give kickbacks to Republican Congressmen. It works exactly the same way with the Israel lobby. Rich Jews bribe Congressmen, then the Congressmen vote for massive subsidies to Israel, then the money gets laundered back to the Congressional campaign committees.
Z-Man claims he “understands economics” but he clearly does not. What he understands is accounting.
Saying that you understand economics because you understand accounting is like saying you understand warfare because you’re an expert at playing Fortnight.
Z-Man rants and rails against UBI because he thinks it will cause inflation. This is pure idiocy and despite thinking he understands economics and isn’t a libertarian goldbug, he still thinks there’s a gold standard or something.
His first mistake: he thinks giving everyone $1000 will cause inflation. Did Z-Man fail Econ 101? Does he not understand supply and demand? Since of course he uses black people as an example of why UBI is “muh socialism” and inflationary let’s use them as an example.
Tyrone buys his malt liquor at the corner shop for $5. But now Tyrone gets a UBI check, so he has more money to spend on malt liquor. So now Raj Patel realizes he can raise the price of Malt Liquor to $10 because now Tyrone has more money. Therefore, inflation!
Right? Well, no. We’re all race realists with an IQ fetish here, but let’s give Tyrone some credit. If Raj Patel starts charging $10 for malt liquor, Tyrone is just going to go to the liquor store next door, where Muhammad still sells the 40 oz for $5. What inflation? Econ 101, Z-Man, prices are set by supply and demand. As long as there is competition between Patel and Muhammad, we have a market, no matter how much money is in circulation.
Z-Man also claims that he “understands big numbers” thus he understands that we “just can’t pay back” the trillions of dollars of debt. OK, Z-Man, two simple questions:
- How many dollars are there?
- What is the maximum amount of dollars there can be at one time?
For some reason, Z-Man thinks we’re on some sort of gold standard, and that the supply of dollars is limited.
Z-Man does seem to understand that “the debt” can’t be repaid. But that is not really true and not really relevant anyway. There are two options to the pay/retire the debt:
- Print more money.
- Default.
If Z-Man really understood economics, and he really was against “socialism” he would want number 2: default. But he knows that will zero out his 401k. So, Z-Man wants to print more money, he just wants the money to go to more defense spending on his ‘small business’ as opposed to giving it to Tyrone – or Bill, for that matter.
It’s hilarious when Z-Man points out that everyone has 401ks and that it’s good to invest in the stock market because – hey – that’s a better return than a savings account.
Well, why is it a better return than a savings account? It’s because people like him voted for inflation as opposed to default.
Under the “free market” all of Wall Street is bankrupt. But the second one bank defaults, they all default. That’s what happened in 2008 when the Fed let Bear Stearns go under. That is what triggered the crash, because Wall Street was terrified that the Fed might not bailout everyone. So what did they do? They forced Congress to bail everyone out. The Republicans couldn’t say shit because the entire bubble was caused by George W. Bush and his war (via laundering money through Fannie/Freddy, etc.) then when it crashed every idiot boomer conservative blamed it on black people (even Steve Sailer, who I like, fell for this scam.)
You put some money in the bank. When you go to withdraw it, the Jew banker says, “oh sorry, your money is gone, a black guy stole it.” The boomer-cons actually believed this.
Z-Man does seem to understand that the financial system is what he euphemistically calls “over leveraged” but he thinks it’s just them that’s over-leveraged. But Z-Man himself and his socialist ‘small business’ is just as over-leveraged as the Jew bankers on Wall Street – in fact, he bought into their system.
Did he buy gold and bury it in his back yard? Did he save his money in an FDIC-insured passbook savings account for a low interest rate? No – he invested it in the stock market because he wanted the high rate of usury that could only be obtained by leverage (and outsourcing and offshoring jobs, and mass cheap-labor immigration.)
Now, the Jew bankers are getting the bailout – not him – and he is desperately screaming at the young white whipper-snappers like Nick Fuentes, “no I don’t hate Jews, but the blacks! Socialism bad! No UBI! Save my 401k! I’m a small businessman who is more efficient than government workers, look I wrote some software for the military!”
He actually has the nerve to complain that the youngsters just “don’t understand economics” while he is desperate to get his own 401k bailout while denying the UBI bailout to young white guys.
All the while his “small business” is sucking off of the government tit, almost certainly directly but if not at the least indirectly.
Yeah, the youngsters, who don’t have a 401k, they want UBI. They earned it just as much as the old boomer cons “earned” their stock-market usury in their 401ks.
The real “free market, not socialist” alternative would be default – MARK IT TO ZERO. But as Z-Man himself admits, he doesn’t want to live outside, so he demands a stock market bailout and only hints that maybe Wall Street was a “bit over-leveraged.”
See, I believe in a free market. MARK IT TO ZERO.
Z-Man’s 401k is worth $0.00. Repo his “20 year old truck” and house.
If these old boomers won’t give the young people their UBI, the young people should say “fuck you, boomer, and your 401k. Mark it to Zero.”
Z-Man understands accounting, he doesn’t understand economics at all. Has he actually produced a single gram of real, tangible wealth in his entire life? Or did he live a middle-class life as a loyal servant to the Empire but is mad he got stuck in a black neighborhood and couldn’t make it to Bethesda?
Conservatives are the enemy, no matter how hard they signal as “right-wing woke.” No matter if they don’t like blacks (who does? Not even black people like blacks.) And if they have to constantly tell you “I don’t hate Jews, you hate Jews” what that really means, of course, is that they are cowards afraid to speak truth to power.
I stand with Nick Fuentes against Z-Man, even though I’m far closer in age to Z-Man and I was forced to invest in a 401k too. If old boomer-cons like Z-Man are going to screw the young by whining about “muh socialism” and block UBI, we need to block all bailouts for their 401ks.
They didn’t EARN a dime in those 401ks – their ENTIRE returns are based off of the usury of Wall Street bailouts, imperialism, and mass immigration. THAT is how the stock market got so high. THAT is how Z-Man’s 401k returned more than an FDIC-passbook savings account – by off-shoring the jobs that Nick Feuntes’ generation would be doing.
Now these old boomer-cons are going to lecture people because they are afraid of everyone figuring out that their 401k are actually worthless? Don’t let Z-Man fool you – he wants a bailout while denying UBI to the young.
Let the cannibals eat him. His grandchildren can take care of him.
If he wants the young to save his old ass, he better show some proper respect to the young, healthy white guys. Otherwise, send him out to deal with the cannibals himself, or let him go hat-in-hand to the Jew bankers and see if they will prevent his investments from being marked to zero which is what they are actually worth.
These old boomer-cons are not “capitalist free marketers” in any way – they are liars. They are welfare queens and socialist leeches with merely an accounting fig-leaf.
EPIC RANT! Now, let’s educate these fat, old boomer-cons on real economics:
…
This can go on for a lot longer than people think. First off, while reserve currency is not really needed today (we have this thing called Internet now where relative values of currency pairs can be tracked in real time without the need for 3rd party intermediate such as USD), foreign people can’t let go of the concept, and they want USD. This will continue for some time, and as such, they will need USD regardless of US domestic policy. US is an Empire, and as such, the rest of the world economies will burn before US economy is really threatened. Like Beckow said, it may not be a physical need, but a psychological need nevertheless.
More fundamentally though, hyperinflation generally requires three things:
- External shock (Weimar – reparations to allies, Zimbabwe – IMF loan repayment, Venezuela – sanctions, post Soviet Russia – former Soviet republics dumping rubles and establishing their own currencies)
- Supply chain collapse (Weimar – loss of German Empire and industrial districts, Zimbabwe – replacement of competent white farmers with incompetent blacks, Venezuela – foolish factory nationalizations and failure to invest in oil company maintenance, Russia – new borders cutting off goods flow and government failure to support markets).
- Worker wages going up. If toilet paper costs a wheelbarrow of money, some consumer must have a wheelbarrow of money to set this price.
How does this play out in the US:
- This is what US military is for. Good luck demanding any real payment (gold, net exports, etc) from the US. Not happening, and if you keep insisting, you will get a good doze of democracy bombed into you.
- Barring Civil War, supply chain collapse is not realistic either. Ironically, US is a service economy, haircuts do not require complex supply chains, so even a Civil War will have minimal impact on haircut prices.
- US wages have gone nowhere in the past 20 years, and will continue to stagnate due to automation. When Hair Salon lady demands $1,000,000/hr in wages, she will be replaced with $20 buzz cut clippers working for 2 cents worth of electricity. Robots don’t care about money, and their cost is approaching near zero. Commodities are also dirt cheap. This is why hyperinflation is impossible in a modern economy. Technology is massively deflationary.
TLDR: despite USD being printed by the $trillions, hyperinflation is impossible in modern service economy due to robots not caring about currencies. Robots are free because you can simply borrow as much money as needed to buy them. Zero or negative rates take care of repayment. Absent external shocks (nuclear war blowing up automated factories), the future is deflation, and to achieve GDP growth, wage increases can not be counted on. Therefore, direct payments to consumers are required or Depression results.
— mal, Unz.com
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/dulce-et-decorum-est-pro-gdp-mori/#comment-3793919
Banned Hipster 
Also, what the hell is it with these Boomer-cons and their Sunday Schools lessons? Does Z-Man really think that he’s going to “school” everyone with his ridiculous fable about the European tourist with 500 euros, the hooker, and the hotel room?
Maybe he should take Econ 102 and learn about the velocity of money? If the European tourist’s 500 Euros was being traded back and forth by a Goldman Sachs algorithm multiple times per millisecond, how would that affect the credit economy?
Has he ever heard of continuous compounding? Again, if he’s such an economic expert, this is freshman year stuff.
Second, why does no one mention the Triffin Dilemma? The reason the USA has such a massive debt is because the USD is the world’s reserve currency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
Seriously, I hope the younger whites are not fooled by the idiotic Reagan Conserva-boomers. They are the reason we got into this mess. Reagan was the first one to give a massive bailout to Wall Street, in fact. Reagan destroyed the American job market and “financialized” the entire economy, giving everything to Wall Street. He also amnestied all the illegal cheap labor.
These fat old boomers worship that traitor Reagan, who let’s not forget, was basically a senile actor who just read jokes off of cue-cards.
Reagan was a 100% owned asset of Jewish organized crime figure Lew Wasserman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lew_Wasserman
Young white guys – never forget, these old boomers like Z-Man spent their entire life watching the Tee-Vee believing it was real.
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Since bank notes are used as ‘money’ and were directly deposited into my bone dry bank account, I think I’ll buy a small greenhouse, hopefully, I can get out of the lower of the lowest part of the middle-class. While I have a piss poor understanding of economics, I do know the FED was chartered by congress and is not indepdent of the US. It is an arm of the US. Sure, there are membership banks and directors that make a profit but congress can easily revoke the charter. That, of course, would cause a horrific economic collapse or the bankers would cause it themselves before such an measure could be made. What I’ve realized is that these FED NOTES can be replaced with US notes. Why don’t we just use US notes and open up public banks for very low interest credit where the profit they make goes back into the local economy.
Wall street needs to go, jsut a bunch of meme jobs for parasites.
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I have never met a single notable lolberg/cypto-lolberg who wasn’t one of the following:
A. A dude weed/coomer itdegenerate.
B. A Jew.
C. A faggot/tranny.
D. A ruined woman (pornstars namely).
E. An Uncle Tom.
F. A Mongrel Mystery Meat or some other non-Huwhite
G. A Nerd.
H. A Transhuman who fantasies about uploading his “mind” into an immortal woman’s body.
I. A Boomer.
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I must give this emphasis. My relative got into crypto-Jewing and bought two coins. Turned out the two he bought into were just drawn out scams and he lost 5,000 dollars. I’m sure the scammers made millions and are partying in Tel Aviv but I see no real use for Bitcoin other than for local economy on a decentralized level. My relative is a nerd.
A. A dude weed/coomer itdegenerate.
B. A Jew.
C. A faggot/tranny.
D. A ruined woman (pornstars namely). — Noticed that, lots of them on twitter marketing the best crypsies.
E. An Uncle Tom. — haha
F. A Mongrel Mystery Meat or some other non-Huwhite — Don’t see many blacks advocating crypto. There seem to be a lot of young, gay Trump supporters though.
G. A Nerd.
H. A Transhuman who fantasies about uploading his “mind” into an immortal woman’s body.
I. A Boomer. — Not many. If any, it is the upper middle-class.
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The real trap is that what wealth tempts us with, freedom from work, can never be broadly attained or society shuts down: see current crisis.
Thus no matter how wealthy we become as a system, it cannot be allowed to translate into meaningful change in the broad masses of lives.
Now, many call for robots as the solution, imagining a world of blissful landed leisure for all with only off-camera tech-savvy chumps doing real work to keep the whole thing going.
But what will really happen? As we saw with the failed alt right and now with this common cold panic, you can have as much freedom as you want, just dont dare try to use it.
Robots will be used by some faction as a means of power against the rest, and ultimately that faction will be swallowed up by the machines: the Abolition of Man.
Not that man has shown himself to be worthy of his status, it’s just that we still have irrational loyalties to ourselves.
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That may be true, but they are completely orthogonal issues.
Z-Man is a fucking clown.
Z-Man is just plain wrong and he obviously doesn’t understand economics. On top of that, he’s making explicit and implicit moral arguments that show him to be a complete hypocrite leech.
1. Z-Man claims that UBI will cause hyper-inflation. This is moronic and shows he doesn’t have a clue what he is talking about. We are in the middle of a massive DEFLATION and the Fed CAN’T PRINT MONEY FAST ENOUGH to stave off of the deflation.
The financial system hates to “print” cash, they want to launder the money through loans (“credit”) first. This is exactly what the WSJ editorial board said last week which I linked in an earlier post.
But the problem is the debt is unpayable because everyone – from the consumer to the largest hedge funds – are already leveraged to the max and there is no amount of economic growth that can prevent default by expanding credit.
Z-Man is utterly clueless about this, while is why he punted toward the end of his podcast and waved his hands about certain complex “Wall Street” financial shenanigans. He doesn’t understand that his 401k returns are the result of exactly the “Wall Street shenanigans” he punts on.
His 401k return is the inflation and now all that money printing that went into his 401k returns is collapsing, causing massive deflation.
2. Z-Man can’t even read the dictionary. UBI is not “socialism.” UBI does not put “the means of production in the hands of the state.” If Z-Man wasn’t a clueless boomer-con, he would know that the entire Wall Street/Fed apparatus is itself the “centralization of credit” that the Communist manifesto calls for. This is the one things the libertarians actually get correct.
3. Z-Man is making a bullshit moral argument about “hard work” and social parasitism – but it is he, Z-Man, the Reaganite boomer-con, that has been living high-on-the-hog off of socialism. But since he has his 401k and “small business” accounting fig-leaf, he pretends he’s the “hard worker” and all these youngster just don’t understand the value of “hard work” etc.
The guy is scared that his fake profits in his 401k – the result of a socialist financial system, imperialism, and money-printing inflation, is going to be marked to zero – which it should be under the free market principles he lies about following.
He’s a fucking clown. He’s clueless about economics. He has zero idea what the hell he is talking about, and he can’t even get basic Econ 101 definitions correct.
That this fat old man has the gall to lecture to the younger generation is EXACTLY WHY people make jokes about “the Boomer Remover.” Z-MAN *IS* the problem.
He’s a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. He’s too stupid to realize how much he doesn’t know.
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The fact that you don’t agree that printing money is the literal cause of inflation disqualifies you from any intelligent discussion on economics. Read a book.
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The fact that you don’t agree that destroying money is the literal cause of deflation disqualifies you from any intelligent discussion on economics. Read a book.
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ZMan is one of those bloggers who’s had their worst qualities brought out by the plague; typically, they mock OTHERS as being “hysterical.” Not only is he a master of economics, he also knows more about probability than Nassim Taleb. So when he disagrees with a peer-reviewed article by this NYU professor, his response is “Taleb advises us to lift our skirts over our heads and shriek like a little girl.” In fact,that seems to be his new, go-to response to any disagreement: “Girly man!” Apparently the two beer kegs he has swinging between his legs (h/t Tom Wolfe) more than make up for the lack of any academic training and experience (which btw he calls “not real work,” unlike his own manly parasitism).
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Are you talking about this guy?
https://thezman.com/wordpress/
I am so glad you did not quit blogging. I did really like the old AS blog, still have saved articles I read there.
Also, could you recommend some author, manual, book or series of books on economics?
Over the years I have digested a lot of political history, both of my country (Spain) and international, but I have the feeling of not really grasping how money works, central banks, the stock exchange, etc. which I think is necessary to get the full picture.
Thanks in advance.
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Hi Oscar, glad you found the new blog.
I don’t really have any specific recommendations. A freshman year Macro-Econ textbook is really all you need. Nothing I am saying is at all controversial or out of the mainstream.
It’s interesting to read the former chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, on deflation. That’s why he was appointed, after all, the stave off the deflation that everyone knew was coming; it happened in 2008, just two years after he took office.
Even two years before the crash, Bernake was known for his work on the Great Depression and how the Fed caused it by cutting the money supply during a massive deflation; Bernake’s entire thesis was that the Fed caused the Depression and the way to shorten it was to supply “liquidity.”
It worked, but of course just pushed the inevitable further down the road.
The problem with the conservatards like Z-Man is they think when the stock market is up that’s “good” – even though that is precisely the inflation they are always warning about. Then, when deflation hits – when there is no inflation in sight – that is when they worry about inflation.
There is no GDP growth that can pay off the debt. The public debt doesn’t matter – you can print it away and the inflation is exported due to the reserve currency status. See the Triffin Dilemma.
Nothing lasts forever but the USD could remain the world reserve currency for another 100-200 years perhaps.
But there’s no way to de-lever the consumer – and the financial system, the banks, are in far, far worse condition. There’s only two options – default/deflation, or printing money.
There’s no inflation in sight, which is why a UBI will keep people alive while the crash happens.
Idiots like Z-Man and his nutjob followers are keeping us from the fixing the problem due to their insane ideological fanaticism.
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The death-knell for national sovereignty was sounded in 1913. Many at the time feared dire future consequences. How dire I doubt they could ever have fathomed at the time.
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I landed on ZMan via Vox Day a few years back. He had a few zingers in his commentary but something seemed off about him. As an aside, I’d pay money to have your summation on Vox Day…
Funnily enough, ZMan struck me as an IT professional, clearly from a blue collar background, maybe did some programming or networking diploma somewhere and, whaddya know, his career grew in the early 2000s. A couple certifications latter, maybe picked up a few in-demand programming languages that were hitting their peak, hell maybe a project management designation, and the next thing you know ol’ Jed’s a millionaire… well, OK, clearly with that chip on his shoulder, he’s not flush… but sounds like he was making/billing good bucks and a million ain’t what it used to be.
Yours was a good rant, Hipster. And side two of the post rings true. Great zingers AND great content. If you ever come out with a book, or have one under another name, I’d devour it.
And I agreed, even if Z is an GenX (…doubtful), he sure acts like an American boomer. He read the Closing of the American Mind and a bit of Aristotle, and voila, he’s a reluctant albeit preachy intellectual Everyman. What a world.
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Zman is a fucking cunt.
If you contradict the little bastard he removes your comments.
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No idea if anyone is going to see this but I’ll throw my two cents in …. can’t add anything relative to economics but will say –
TheZMan is a horse’s ass. He is a vain little dictator who oversees his blog-kingdom with an iron fist and operates on banning contributors and deleting comments. He’s a modern Archie Bunker who functions on insults and simplistic thinking who can sometimes see the dots but rarely connect them. TheZMan’s greatest insult, which he spews frequently, is that anyone he doesn’t agree with is a “conspiracy theorist”. Now that’s some original thinking. The most whopping bullshit he spews is that he is a leader of “dissidents” when in reality the folks that follow him, and tolerate him, are about as dissident as a group of twelve-year-old girls. TheZMan is a relatively good example of what’s wrong with the right: navel-gazing, narrow thinking, no room for dissenting opinions or dialog.
.
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