According to the Financial Times (all the news that’s fit to print), in the last week, the world’s economies lost 80,000 jobs. I have one question: How?

Seriously, how in the hell does something like this happen? The world did not stop turning.

These 80,000 people don’t want to be poor. They don’t want to be unemployed and unproductive. They didn’t choose to reduce their standards of living. They didn’t just decide that all of their needs, now and forever, have been met. No, all of these people still need food, shelter, warmth, leisure, whatever. Everyone still wants goods and services; everyone still wants stuff, and those needs can only be satisfied by production, which requires people.

As long as needs and wants remain unsatisfied, it doesn’t make sense that people are losing jobs left and right.

The idea that resources have been allocated towards the production of goods and services that aren’t really wanted, is the very essence of the Austrian take on business cycles. This is the crippling malinvestment that squanders capital, destroys wealth, and leaves people jobless. The joblessness is the very real personal side of malinvestment.

Not unless we assume that most of these people were simply not producing anything that anybody really wanted or needed, does it make sense. But it’s not their fault that they engaged in such unproductive activities, as individuals they were simply responding to incentives in the form of wages.

Following the paper trail, as it were, something had to make these wages possible, something had to tolerate or even encourage the misallocation of so many scarce resources, towards the production of things for which there was never any real demand. Something exogenous had to destroy all of our productivity.

We didn’t do it on our own.

That something is price inflation. And inflation is always caused by manipulation of the money supply by a central bank. Far from “stabilizing” the economy, or the money supply, by creating money from nothing they are capable of indebting everyone, controlling everyone.

Jobs, wealth, productivity, capital: all squandered, destroyed. And now they say, “The free market has failed you!” Now, they say, “You need Government more than ever before!”

The very people who claimed stewardship for your safety, your well-being, your economic prosperity are the ones responsible for so thoroughly eviscerating all those things. Those who created so much on paper, to expropriate the real, do you reward their deception? Do you reward their abysmal failures with more of your blood, sweat, tears?

Do you believe them when they say, “You need us, now more than ever”?