Mish starting to see the Ministry of Propaganda at work

Mike Shedlock is required reading for anyone who wants to know the real state of the economy.  He has, since I began reading him in 2006, be the most accurate caller of all things economic out there.  Others have gotten other some aspects right in a big way but then missed the boat with "immediate hyperinflation" calls.  Knowing that this will result in a tangent to even mention, Peter Schiff jumps to mind.  While he has been wrong in his hyperinflation calls so far, I will never forget this YouTube video of him telling a bunch of mortgage bankers and investors that the housing bubble was a bubble and that it would pop.  Many of his predictions were spot on and the rest of them will probably occur over time. 

Please watch the whole thing even if you already saw it in the past.  You will learn something for sure.  Perhaps the most instructive part of the video (and most relevant to points I will make below) is the reaction of the audience and the response from the talking head economist (all near the end of the video).  They are priceless in terms of making the individual journey out of the herd and into a more enlightened state.  The main point here is that people could not listen to logic and math.  Their heads were up their asses and they could not see the light of day.  This is and will continue to be an important lesson to keep in mind as the global debt Ponzi unfolds in the coming years.

In any case, Mish is a data driven person.  So what you get from him is a good real time read of the state of things.  What you don't get from him is a lot of top level picture insight early on.  Why?  Because early on you never have any hard data about the big picture.  Big picture data comes in like puzzle pieces.  Mish waits until a big part of the pieces are in hand before he will see and report on the big picture.  It means when he makes a call that it's probably correct but he will wait to make the call longer than I would like to see.  In particular, he is very slow to call bullshit on government lies.  It's probably not because he can't see it in advance.  It's probably more related to running a popular blog and wanting to keep readership of people who are quick to laugh at "conspiracy theorists" no matter how well informed they might be.

Recently I am seeing Mish begin to call bull$hit on the government employment numbers.  While it was obvious to me that Obama did whatever he could to make things look artificially rosy during the election year in order to get re-elected, Mish has defended the likely honesty of the employment numbers all this time.  But lately he is showing signs of awakening is in this short post of his.  His bottom line is "Digging under the surface, much of the drop in the unemployment rate over the past two years is nothing but a statistical mirage. Things are much worse than the reported numbers indicate." That's starting to sound a bit like a conspiracy theory, Mish.

The point of my blog post isn't really about the unemployment rate or the fact that the government is engaged in feel-good propaganda (AKA manipulative lies) across the board, including .  It's about the fact that enough pieces of the lies are now visible and are known that conservative thinkers like Mish are starting to call a spade a spade.  In other words, it's yet another in a long list of signs that people's confidence in our lying, corrupt government is waning.  The confidence game is moving toward collapse.

Once that confidence is gone, and it certainly will go away in the coming years, it is nearly impossible to get back.  Once the con game collapses and the patsies get wise, it's really hard to fool them again.  Even the sheeple who cannot bring themselves to believe that our government was clearly aware of in advance/in collaboration with/directly involved with the 3 steel frame buildings that collapsed on 911 will suddenly wake up to the logic and facts of the matter. 

It is an ugly thing to see the herd wake up and realize how badly it has been fooled and how gullible it allowed itself to be.  Because of the Kubler-Ross grief cycle, the confidence pendulum swings the other way and over corrects.  People become completely cynical (despite any positive facts that might surface in the future) as they enter the teeth of the anger stage.  This is the stuff that civil unrest and even war is made of.

One day, people are going to finally question the real need behind things like government tracking of the unemployment numbers.  Think about it, why do they do this?  It costs money and takes time.  People involved with creating the data and with following the data once its created are wasting huge amounts of time that could be spent bettering our world, producing something of value.  One day, people will realize that this is nothing more than a parasitic feedback mechanism done by government and for government.  Government tracks these things so that it can know how much economic value to extract from the herd without killing it. 

It's no different from ranchers measuring the weight of their animals, feed consumption, amount of wool or milk they produce, etc.  People don't need government tracking any of this.  Governments do it because they consider people as livestock.  Government lives off the labor of people the same way as ranchers live off the lives of chickens and cows and sheep.  Government is parasitic.  In the same way that free horses (AKA"wild horses" by ranchers who think anything they don't own is bad) do not need ranchers, free men do not need government.  People who do need government are, by definition, not free.

Now stop rolling your eyes and actually think about the logic of what you just read.  If you don't already see it, you will someday.  God willing, and the river don't rise.