12th Floor Prophet

On the way back from Margret's distress call I decided that I'd drop by Shlomo's cube. He's a mathematician posing as an accountant in the payroll department. He is absolutely mad. I mean insane; like, clinically insane, but somehow he is strangely prophetic and I enjoy his rants. I think that he enjoys having people listen to his rants too, but I'm afraid that he doesn't get too many visitors for that purpose.

"Hey Shlomo" I said.
"Smedley, long time no see"
"Are you kidding? I saw you two days ago."
"Yeah, I guess you're right. You are one of my only personal visitors."
"Have you heard about the companies problems?"
" Ah, don't get me started. They are doomed. Things are going to change around here."
"You don't say?"
"You understand, The whole world is experiencing something of an unrecognized realization of long held economic beliefs. Do you recall Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels? The fathers of communism, right? Well if you've ever read anything about communism then you know that they believed that after their dictatorship, they would gradually move into a socialist utopia and there would be no use for a dictator. Well, there is a capitalist version of that same belief. The thing is that capitalists haven't thought this whole thing through.

What happens when the capitalist system is so dominant that it no longer challenges itself? (pause) What happens when the people borrow more money than exists in all of the world? What happens when the banks foreclose on all of the worlds accumulated debt? (pause) I'll tell you what happens. (pause) Banks don't know what to do so they freeze. The world has a finite amount of commerce and money. When the worlds Money value exceeds the value of goods that exist, then there is a giant crash or a deflation of the entire system. This has happened in the past but this one is special. This time there is no relief. This time the banks will be left holding all of the money and all of the debt. at the same time. What that means is that the worlds economy transforms into a capitalist paradise. I know what you're thinking. Your thinking, this guy's crazy, but a capitalist paradise is something different than a socialist paradise and that may not mean paradise for us. It may mean trouble.

You see the principals of capitalism have already been compromised and that was the plan all along. Private citizens don't really own anything do they? Almost everyone who owns anything owes money to a bank. What that means, is that the government props up the frozen banks and is then reliant on them to finance everything. Capitalism then changes into a pure quangocracy or a government controlled by an unelected coalition of organizations. In this case it would be the banking system. It will be entirely up to the banks to determine how wealth is distributed. It's a scary scenario."

He went on to show me some mathematical algorithms that helped illustrate his crazy talk. It was interesting and a tiny bit scary but I doubt that anything like that is actually possible. Not here. Nothing bad could ever happen here, right?