Objectivism Among the Alarmist Cults

The world is filled with alarmists because alarmism sells. Y2K, communist menace, health threats, Mayan prophesies--all of these fears from the plausible to the outrageous strike some cord in us, gives us some weird frisson, like the vampire movie or the roller coaster. And they all sell: Books, TV shows, grants, political following. So global warming, pro or con, progresses from a consideration and discussion to a franchise. This is no better seen than in FOX News where a passionate subset of the political community has set up shop, isolated, self-contained, fanning its own flames, and invisible to their opposition at MSNBC as MSNBC is to them.

No popular anxiety is more persistent across economies than the fear of economic collapse and, its obverse, the love of gold as a hedge against economic disorder. Many of gold's proponents become messianic and marginalized, some become hardened so that even when correct seem randomly so. Some are inflation theorists who believe in any commodity, some are mining experts who see gold as a resource of declining availability, some are doomsday seers preparing for an age of scorched earth and bartering. Usually these gold enthusiast are somewhere on the curve from worrier to cult. But sometime the wolf-crier is right. So one might worry about this quote musing on "how credit is funded and dispersed – our global monetary system," when his conclusion is "What that will look like is conjectural, but it is likely to be more hard money as opposed to fiat-based"--if the writer were a reasonable guy. The writer is Bill Gross, the head of the thoughtful, conservative PIMCO Fund family.

Now that is a story.