Plato famously observed that words reference concepts, but don’t constitute concepts in themselves. Take a classic example: what is a chair? Someone might explain a chair is “something with four legs that you can sit on,” but then you could point to a couch and say, “so is that a chair?” They might then distinguish the couch from the chair, explaining that a chair is similar to a couch but smaller. But then you can sit on a small table and say, “ok so is this a chair?” The point of all the ball busting is to illustrate that words are referential. There’s no official definition of chair. All words are non-exhaustible descriptive categories. Yet you know what a chair is based on how people generally use chairs, and we use words to communicate about chairs and everything else by imbuing various symbolic expressions (i.e., face noises and inky squiggles) with ideas. Ideas pass through the frame of one mind riding inside an expression to be parsed through the frame of another. Meaning is not contained inside of infinitely deconstructible and inadequate words, it is contained within ideas.
People deconstruct words through technicalities because technicalities are found at the margins of descriptive categories—they make all the difference in meaning, especially within a subject matter for which the pool of vocabulary is granular and/or filled with overlapping concepts that nonetheless differ on crucial points. Pointing out a technicality can save the day. Appealing to irrelevant technicalities, however, is an exercise in pedantry. Appealing to the idea that irrelevant technicalities warrant the suspension of judgment is an exercise in foolishness. Appealing to irrelevant technicalities in order to save one’s ass at the expense of other asses is an exercise in selfishness. We need not have access to the Platonic Recession to recognize the arrival of one of its iterations.
Recessions have been recognized traditionally when GDP is negative two quarters in a row, suggesting the measured contraction is not the consequence of a mere passing externality. Our leaders have since raised technicalities, and the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed that two negative quarters merely signal a recession, and that a recession is better defined as a “significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months.”
We have had significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months. What is the point therefore of raising technicalities about the word recession? Is there a sincere reason to believe our economy will stop shrinking before we are able to create and/or re-shore our own infrastructure? That’s a costly enterprise. Where will the money come from? Are we pretending a vote to raise taxes is going to succeed ever, much less over the next quarter? Are we printing more? Fine by the rich. It’s nice to have inflatable property in a credit system because increased equity translates to greater purchasing power. Plus, newly disenfranchised renters will provide cash flow.
But as we have recently learned, QE and negative real rates don’t translate into productivity if there is no infrastructure to leverage. Our economy has so much empty bloat that business didn’t produce shit even after they got free money, ultra-cheap borrowing costs, and inflated assets to borrow against. So how can anyone sincerely argue that we are not in a recession right now? What is the technical objection that demonstrates that businesses will now be productive moving forward?
Zombie corporations, executive compensation structures, carried interest, insider trading, algorithm-driven micro trading, and other capital sponges soaked up the fed’s liquidity. QE and the resulting inflation enriched property owners and economy hackers, and the poor were burned like chaff.
Businesses are facing rising costs, which will further reduce wages and increase unemployment, which will make this recession stagflationary. The politically powerful continue to believe the US will prop up the house of cards long enough for future productivity to mitigate against the manageable pain of controlled deleveraging. They might be right, because sacrificing the disenfranchised has proven to be an acceptable carry cost for politicians, and one might argue that a carry cost is necessary to preserve what infrastructure we do have.
But then, if the wealthy have just proven that their property creates nothing, but serves only as royal identification conferring entitlement to credit and subsidies, what exactly is being propped up? Broken businesses, or castles? This recession will be overcome only when the US can carry its own newfound crushing weight. Why not deflate, raise rates dramatically, allow useless businesses to fail, and bail out individual people? Too many 401(k)s filled with air? Privatized gains and socialized losses make losses intolerable, but the check has arrived and someone’s gotta pay.