csen:
There’s a lot of debate right now about whether this is a 1995-like relentless bull market, a 1999 or 2007-type rally before the crash, or even an early 1980’s-type early stage bull market. It’s none of those.
If there’s one chart that sums up the post-2008 world, which could last another 20…
Good analysis, although I’m not so sure about his conclusion.
Thus the plutocracy, in a democratic state, tends inevitably, despite its theoretical infamy, to take the place of the missing aristocracy, and even to be mistaken for it. It is, of course, something quite different. It lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honor, courage — above all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state; it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal. Its most puissant dignitaries of today came out of the mob only yesterday — and from the mob they bring all its peculiar ignobilities … The plutocracy is comprehensible to the mob because its aspirations are essentially those of inferior men: it is not by accident that Christianity, a mob religion, paves heaven with gold and precious stones, i.e., with money. There are, of course, reactions against this ignoble ideal among men of more civilized tastes, even in democratic states, and sometimes they arouse the mob to a transient distrust of certain of the plutocratic pretensions. But that distrust seldom arises above mere envy, and the polemic which engenders it is seldom sound in logic or impeccable in motive.
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H.L. Mencken, “A Glance Ahead,” 1926
In which Mencken considers that democracy might be a “self-limiting disease, as civilization itself seems to be.” (via willystaley)
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