Unit 9 Lecture Notes

The impact of the misery industry has been to constantly pillage the people of the world's poor countries to the benefit of their governments, and to the benefit of the US government that issues the reserve currency they use. By ensuring the whole world stays on the US dollar as a standard, the IMF guarantees the US can continue to operate its inflationary monetary policy and export its inflation to the whole world. It is only once one understands this grand larceny at the heart of the global monetary system that one can understand the plight of developing countries. And it is also because of this that the thousands of actors playing economists in the IFI's cannot ever be taken seriously or conversed with as adults. Having had the misfortune to have studied with hundreds of these people, I have yet to meet one of them who is cognitively capable of even understanding the horrific redistributive implications of the US exporting its inflation to the world, or the fact that their own jobs merely exist to keep this system alive.

It is hard to convince a man of something when his paycheck and third world Raj status is dependent on not understanding it.

Domestically, the impact of the misery industry has been mainly to allow governments to take on larger quantities of debt, and a disruption to the flow of financial and human capital. Instead of allowing entrepreneurs and individuals to reap the rewards of their productive work and naturally reinvest back into the economy (thus shaping the decisions of other producers to meet their demands), the average third world government confiscates the wealth of the productive and puts capital in the hands of clueless unaccountable misery industry central planners and their subordinates in local governments.

In the absence of a free market (thanks to the misery industry's central planning), the misery industry itself ends up being the most lucrative employer in developing countries. Instead of the brightest talents of developing countries seeking to work in a productive capacity and serve their fellow citizens, they are attracted to worthless jobs as assistants to the misery industry foreigners, and end up shuffling papers, writing reports, and conducting the studies nobody reads but that are necessary to keep the funding flowing. One of the most depressing facts about poor countries is that the few educated young people whom would hope could change things seem to be primarily interested in careers in the misery industry.

On top of destroying the market economies of poor countries and turning them into centrally-planned failures, the large amounts of debt enable them to persist longer in failed policies, which conveniently gives the donor governments a great excuse to politically control these governments. The net result is that the third world is not just centrally-planned, but also accountable to foreigners instead of locals. Without the misery industry to bail out every kleptocrat in the third world, the alternative would not be constant inflation and recession. On the contrary, it would only take one of these crises to completely destroy the government that engaged in it, and allow the country a new start. Had kleptocrats not constantly had recourse to the IFI's endless credit line, they'd quickly bankrupt themselves until they are replaced by governments that behave responsibly, and only spend less than they earn. While hyperinflation is never fun, having it destroy a government and replace it with a better one with a hard money is a far better outcome than the eternal purgatory of constantly high inflation, fiscal crises, capital controls, and protectionism that the IMF promotes.

If you live in a poor country, you are witnessing the value of your money collapse through your government's own inflation and the US Dollar inflation. You are suffering from monetary central planning on a local and global level, you are witnessing the complete distortion of your local markets through the intervention of foreign central planners, and the brightest minds in your country will be tempted to enter into parasitic careers in the misery industry rather than produce something of value. It is obviously not the argument of this paper that the misery industry is responsible for making poor countries poor. Rather, in light of all the ways presented in which the misery industry disrupts and destroys the economic and political institutions in a poor country, it is very hard to argue that the misery industry has not hampered developing countries from developing, growing, and eliminating poverty.