Crashing Confidence: The Dallas Fed Reveals All – The Epoch Times

News analysis

July Fourth is always a bittersweet holiday, a time to reflect on the grand ideals of the founding of American independence. But this year it will once again be impossible to believe that those ideals are still with us as a governing principle, at least not consistently, not even predominantly, certainly not right now.

To summarize the current problem, the nation decided to turn against those ideas of freedom and rights in the name of virus control (a model mysteriously copied from the praxis of the Chinese Communist Party) and thereby unleashed at home the very tyrannies that our ancestors fought so hard to establish as a permanent feature of American life.

And we are paying the price in the worst way now. They shut down nearly the whole of the American economyas if that would be possible without causing egregious damageand closed churches and schools. They tried to make up the difference by spending and then printing trillions of dollars, believing somehow that this would not create an eventual calamity.

That calamity is here now, and it is showing up not only in raging inflation but also worker demoralization, cultural nihilism, radical political discontent, and economic dislocation. The most pressing problem right now is satisfying American energy needs but the Biden administration offers no more than wind and airliterally recommending those two means of powering our lives rather than tapping abundant fossil fuel resources.

The incompetence on display daily is truly mind-boggling. As a result, not even our usual July Fourth celebrations can be observed without pressing reminders of how prosperity is being drained away. The typical celebratory parties this year, according to Wells Fargo, are up fully 11 percent over last year. Thats also the real-time rate at which food and beverages are going up in price.

Farm Bureau, according to The Epoch Times, fully expects a 17 percent increase:

The authors of the study assessed many of Americans favorite cookout foods. They found that the price for two pounds of ground beef surged 36 percent to $11.12, two pounds of boneless and skinless chicken breasts jumped 33 percent to $8.99, three pounds of center cut pork chops climbed 31 percent to $15.26, and 32 ounces of pork and beans rose 33 percent to $2.53.

Such a level of inflation has been unknown in the United States for forty years, and it is worse this time because of its longevity. There is no one at the Fed right now with the courage to do what needs to be done, and no one in any policy position within the reigning party will push economic growth over control, enterprise over diktat, or freedom over compliance. For these people in office, command and control is all they know.

We will soon be watching those firecrackers in the sky to celebrate freedom as a principle but it was little over a year ago when many ruling-class voices were dismissing the whole idea and even calling it freedumb. That was surely a turning point in American cultural life, when the people who imagined living out this countrys main ideals were put down as enemies and suspected as possible insurrectionists.

Regardless, the resistance to this unrelenting attack on American ideals is growing and appearing in highly unusual places. One that struck me most recently was the printing of actual truth on the pages of a site run by the Federal Reserve itself.

Some background.

The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 with branch banks around the country to give it the appearance of decentralization even though its not true. Those branches survived to this day. Each specializes in a few tasks to give them some reason for existence. Each one has a different character. The Dallas Fed has always had a more conservative bent, leaning more toward tighter money and freer markets.

The Dallas Feds latest survey of manufacturing output sentiment has done the world a service by actually printing comments from businesspeople who answered the survey. Here are some of the choice answers. Its remarkable to me that such sentiments have been printed in this venue.

These comments are not only obviously true. That they appear on a Fed site is stunning and indicative of real revolt happening at all levels of society.

Lets return briefly to the problem listed above, namely that none of this can be fixed anytime soon. We are in for two-and-a-half years of continuing hell. It seems incredible to contemplate. And remember we are talking about responses from Texas, a state that opened earlier than others and has a lower tax burden than most states. Its a state to which people have moved in order to escape the despotism. And yet even here, there is no escape.

After years of this, what will be left of American industry, culture, the labor pool, and optimism generally is hard to know. The tragedy of it all is that the Biden administration really did have a chance to do some good, to bring calm and normalcy to American life. They instead chose some kind of mythical revolutionary path inspired by untested woke ideology hatched in university settings that has nothing to do with real-world longings for liberty and a happy life.

Its best not to let this July Fourth pass without deep reflection on the meaning of the holiday. The ideals of this holiday are not just for the 18th century. They are for the 21st century too. The sooner we see this and act on it, the sooner America can get back to being a light unto the world.