To rig an economy, you have to grow the government. There has to be many regulations and a high level of central spending by the government. Government debt is preferable to have, because it is largely owned by the rich.
But Ludwig von Mises warned that there are three geese which lay golden eggs, and if you harm them, stagnation follows. Here is a graphic display of these 3 pillars that hold up an economy:
Savers
Starting at the bottom left, you harm savers by printing money and devaluing their savings. You can also harm savers by holding their incomes down and keeping them in debt. The rate that banks offer for a 6-month Certificate of Deposit (CD) should be close to the rate they charge to their best customers (prime rate).
When the rate charged is much higher than the rate paid out, savers suffer. It costs them much more to borrow than it pays to save. In 1964, banks paid out 4% and charged 4.5%:
But by 2013, banks were charging 12 times more on loans than they paid out to savings:
A society which does not save for the future ends up in ruins. Back when the US economy was more free, annual savings were more than 10% of GDP:
But recently savings have gone to zero, even dipping below zero. Expected productivity gains can bid up interest rates while also putting cash into people’s pockets, incentivizing savers to save.
The real interest rate gets bid up when investors have confidence in investment prospects — as they always do when operating inside of a free economy. But when an economy is unfree, no good investment prospects exist, so interest rates fall, instead.
Back in 1989, so many good investment prospects existed that the real interest rate was 5%, due to investors bidding up the rates with high loan demand:
But look at what happens when the economy becomes unfree, such as after 2010. Saving isn’t fruitful if government intervention and “public-private partnerships” have destroyed all prospects for growth.
Scientists
In order for scientists to thrive, they have to be free to publish their findings without any kind of censorship, whatsoever. A free flow of information is how a society advances. But with COVID there has been a huge push to silence or otherwise thwart scientific advancements made by independent scientists.
Only scientists funded by the rig-the-game cronies are completely free to publish without worry of censorship.
Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making a vital breakthrough that leads to huge profits. The rigid regimentation of business practices during COVID made it so that innovators who think out-of-the-box would be stifled before they began.
As witness to this trend against entrepreneurs, labor productivity growth has been on the decline:
While 4% labor productivity growth used to be a common finding prior to big government, after 2010, it was lucky if we saw even 1% growth in labor productivity. Labor productivity is what grows wages, productivity “pays for” wage increases.
But the lull in productivity growth didn’t stop the top 0.1% from growing their nominal wealth (red line below), due to a government-rigged system which funnels the proceeds of economic activity toward them and away from other economic actors:
The blue line is the annual change in labor productivity, and it goes negative in 2022, though the top 0.1% still saw a small nominal growth in wealth that year. In 2021, they grew wealth by 27% — over 10 times the growth that could theoretically be “paid for” by labor productivity gains that year.
Like bankers charging much more than they pay out, the top 0.1% has been growing wealth at rates unlinked from labor productivity growth.
It’s a bonanza for bankers and billionaires, while the rest of us are losing the ability to afford the same living standard as before. This growing inequality is exactly what the Great Reset is attempting to perpetuate.