Humble pie

So. Been a stretch eh? Yeh, the main road got blown in real good and the phone line went down somewhere on it's 2814 poles and the powers been a flickering at times, but we're all surviving up here, I mean that's what fire wood is for. Bob and his brother Bob and his other brother Bob cleared our twenty three miles of road even though the path meanders a little out over the ditches at times, come spring thaw we'll all have to be a mite careful about following their rectilinear rectitude. Yes it was quite a storm, the wind howling for three days straight from all four directions and in between. Six inches of snow all piled up against anything that it could get a grip on. Our D7 was in it's glory as we built a ski hill beside the barn to keep the cattle from succumbing to barn fever, it being a wee bit cramped in there for the whole bunch, with all the cleaning we'd have to do up after them. They've taken to camping out on top and even requisitioned straw and hay to be brought up to them, but we put a stop on that because legally they're on the wrong side of the fence and they darn well know it.

Austerity. That's what cultivated Herb calls it. The rectitude behind our 70 miles of remaining blown in for weeks on end. Although the sign which says “Rough road ahead” may be buried and no one realizes that life exists beyond the contours of our nearest outpost, but that's a crock, they know we're here with all the joking we overhear about us squatters. Cultivated Herb was telling us of the Basel Committee which in 1974 due to stagflation convened itself out of the central-bank Governors of the Group of Ten countries of the member central banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which included Canada. A key objective of the Committee was and is to maintain “monetary and financial stability.” To achieve that goal, the Committee discouraged borrowing from a nation’s own central bank interest-free and encouraged borrowing from private creditors, all in maintaining the stability of the currency.

The presumption was that borrowing from a central bank with the power to create money on its books would inflate the money supply and prices. Borrowing from private creditors, on the other hand, was considered not to be inflationary, since it involved the recycling of pre-existing money. What the bankers did not reveal, although they dang well knew it themselves, was that private banks create the money they lend just as public banks do. The difference is simply that a publicly-owned bank returns the interest to the government and the community, while a privately-owned bank siphons the interest into its capital account, to be re-invested at further interest, progressively drawing money out of the productive economy.

Thus our far sighted and truly caring governments had to impose austerity upon us all, so that we could support our impoverished bankers without financing too large a deficit. It makes for an honest humility to be able to wake in the morning and realize we are doing our small part up here, to live isolated from the mainstream of humanity for weeks on end to give that much needed stability to our currency. But lord, it's hard to be humble. Seventy miles of ten foot drifts to the nearest six pack. Look out widow Rachael, you got some tax free hooch?

You keep that pot covered, eh.