Mr. Kimball, your style and content are chronically wise & delightful, despite the bow tie.

Re the markets, some are seeing everywhere a lack of comprehension as to the nature of capital and the future. “Hope & Change” seems to’ve come to signify “money” as a sort of harvest, which the village should divide equally.

Fine, that’s the political issue –but “money” is never the harvest. The harvest is “a living”. Money is a condition of the harvest’s creation –a valuable tool of a preparation which includes first the saving of the seed (not to have eaten it during the winter), then the work of plowing and planting, and the power to protect the results from all the forces of destruction.

So, sure, we should continue as before, systematically debating annually how to divide & share the harvest –but IF the goal is survival of the tribe, then the first principle has to be protection of the seed. Wastage, rot, fire, flood, theft, greed, hunger, many forces want to consume the future, they exist on a continuum with man at one end and weather on the other.

This isn’t politics, this is nature. The markets are part of nature, indelible parts in our nature, human nature.

What is upsetting folks who savvy all this (no matter in what terms; it’s ancient and gut –some will get it, others won’t, as always back thru time) is that the (not to have eaten it during the winter) applies to each & every year, since that no matter how many cycles the taboo is successfully observed, the belly-imperative is that it takes but the one breach to destroy the tribe –usually in the worst way.

The ruins of old civilizations are emblems in the stone of successes which failed to preserve themselves.

Not fantasy, but history –the real deal, just as real as today, in a different and utterly indifferent time.