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Against The “Impossible” | ZeroHedge

Authored by Josiah Lippincott via American Greatness,

Earlier this year, I was talking with a prominent libertarian economist on matters of fiscal and monetary policy. I noted that, in my view, the core problem in this unholy nexus was the Federal Reserve’s ongoing dominance over the nation’s money supply and financial industry.

It was critical, I said, that we dissolve the central bank. The inevitable consequence of credit expansion (money printing) is inflation and malinvestment. The very existence of the Federal Reserve robs savers of their purchasing power and occludes true market data, leading to investors pouring their limited resources into schemes that should not exist in a free market. In doing so, these investors did not place their funds into products that buyers actually want.

This inevitably leads to cycles of boom and bust that are ruinous for the common good.

I expected him to agree. After all, this was a libertarian economist; I assumed that ranting against the Fed, fiat money, and government interference would be his thing.

Instead, he simply shrugged. Getting rid of the Fed is impossible, he told me. We therefore had no choice but to make our peace with this system and try to make it work as well as we could.

“Impossible.” That word stood out to me.

Precision in language matters. When we use a word, we should know what it means. We should not say things cavalierly. Without clear language, there can be no clear thought.

If something is in fact impossible, then, of course, we should not spend time debating about it. It is impossible, for instance, to have the sum of the three angles of a triangle add up to any number other than 180 degrees. It is likewise impossible to drop a heavy weight from a height and expect it to float or for a human being to give birth to an oak tree.

These things are truly impossible. By the rules of logic in the world we inhabit, certain things cannot be otherwise. They simply are. These brute facts are not a subject of deliberation. Nothing is to be done about them.

We should be deeply wary, however, in assigning this status of immovable fact to things that, as it turns out, can be other than what they are.

Just because a thing is difficult to accomplish or unlikely does not make it impossible.

Political regimes can change. There are, for instance, many different kinds of governments on the earth, and they differ in crucial ways. Laws are made and unmade. People move. Governments come into being and are overthrown.

There was, for instance, a time in this nation’s history when the Federal Reserve did not exist. There may come a time when it will once again cease to be.

Congress brought the Federal Reserve into being by law. It could be undone by the same process. Human institutions do not possess the certitude and unchanging quality of the basic axioms at the heart of logical thinking. 2 + 2 has always and everywhere equaled 4, but the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991. That government has not always existed everywhere and always.

Man has a nature. He always and everywhere has the same features. All men seek good things and avoid bad things. Men may disagree wildly about what those things are, but all of us are engaged in this fundamental pursuit. If a suicidal man thought he would be better off alive than dead, he would not kill himself.

Moreover, we see that human beings always give birth to human beings. We all need to sleep, eat, and defecate. Man is always and everywhere a being unto death. These are unchanging realities for us.

It is incorrect, however, to attribute an unchanging nature to things that are in fact changeable. I notice that on the American right, there is often a profound sense of pessimism and melancholy that stems from this error.

Many an influencer, activist, or commentator I have known will proclaim a given policy or campaign to be “impossible.” They will write it off as unfeasible with a wave of the hand. It cannot be done. Why even try?

This despairing view of reality has poisoned many great projects and prevented countless others from even getting off the ground. There are indeed many policy changes that are not wise to pursue or that require resources that would be better spent elsewhere.

Trade-offs and opportunity costs are simply part of life. They are unchanging features of human action. But to say that a thing comes at a price or is difficult is not the same as saying it is impossible.

Nor are crude references to statistics a substitute for thought. The odds of any given American becoming a billionaire are only 1 in 380,000, but those odds are not definitive statements about an individual’s ability to create a groundbreaking innovation (or utilize government regulations to monopolize a lucrative market).

At the end of the day, pointing to aggregates is not enough to understand the individuals that are part of the whole. Averages can be useful politically and can even help guide personal decisions. But an average isn’t everything. It isn’t the last word.

Precision in thought—knowledge of what we know and acknowledgment of what we don’t—is crucial for political life. Despair is a sin, and pessimism is not necessarily wisdom. You often can, it turns out, just do things. And you should!

As the American right moves forward in the coming years, we need to remind ourselves of this core truth. Real change, both for good and ill, is always possible. It is an error to presume to have knowledge that we really don’t have.

Both mindless optimism and free-falling pessimism are wrong. The latter is, among conservatives, more common than the former. It poses a greater spiritual danger. The temptation to sit on one’s hands, wishing and whining but never doing anything useful, is very powerful on the right. A whole legion of anklebiters, cranks, and dour-faced losers surrounds us.

These people are a spiritual dead end. There is nothing to be gained, in the end, from complaining or fantasizing about an apocalypse in which action will then and only then become possible. We live in this world, right here, right now. We should focus on that!

I don’t know, for instance, if we will succeed in my lifetime in eliminating the Federal Reserve. I am not certain that it should be the highest priority for conservatives in this moment. But I am certain that we cannot live in peace and freedom while the central bank burrows its way into every aspect of the American economy.

The right thing to do is to oppose tyranny wherever it is found. We should be honest, if only to ourselves, about what needs to be done. We should never pretend that slavery is preferable to liberty or defeat to victory.

We should fight. We should make a day of it. We should follow the words of Virgil’s Aeneid:

Do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it!

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