“The Garden Metaphor” of worldwide finance
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The Garden Metaphor is a parable to modern worldwide finance.
The author of the metaphor, beautifully establishes the conclusion of how industries and people in our world are manipulated in a similar fashion to how a gardener arranges the growth of plants.
People who are authorized to print money without backing it by precious metals, commodities, or other substantial resources, do not have to send armed forces or violently suppress dissent, in otder to enforce their will on others, but rather to "inject", so to speak, money into areas which they are interested to influence their will upon.
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In my garden, thanks to my hose and an awning which prevents outside rain coming in, I hold an effective monopoly on the distribution of water.
With my finger on the trigger, I can decide which plants get water and which don't. I can choose which areas of the garden thrive, and which die a slow death.
In general, the plants which I do aim my hose at will flourish, along with any vegetation underneath or nearby which will inevitably benefit from incidental runoff.
By dividing the garden into separate pots and beds, I can even restrict the extent to which plants can use their underground root networks to share water among themselves.
It should go without saying, that my goal in watering these plants is not to somehow gain or accumulate more water from this process; any more than a farmer's goal is to gain more animal feed by pouring it into a horse-pen, or a parent's goal is to gain more candy by handing it to a child.
The water, from my point of view, is a means to an end. It's a tool of control, and not something I'm seeking to accumulate more of, for some arbitrary reason.
In fact, the cost of the water is inconsequential to me, and my access to it near instant and effectively unlimited; as we all know, it is through the strategic distribution of that water, from a higher position than the plants, that I achieved my real goal, which is to influence the growth of those plants, and to shape the overall makeup of the garden.
With the power to create funds from nothing, economies all over the world can be manipulated in a similar fashion.
When funds are issued into the system, money flows; and as it moves, more people have money to spend, more transactions occur, and more people are inspired to start certain kinds of businesses, or proactively find ways to get some of that money for themselves.
The economy is doing well, people would say; the industries or particular organizations where those funds are injected, whether it be by loans, or government grants, private investment, or whatever, will flourish; as the recipients of those funds use their newfound bank deposits to rent office space, or hire employees, or pay vendors, or buy coffees from the cafe downstairs, these funds radiate outwards, and anyone around them or their industry gains a flow on benefit from that initial fund injection.
It's no surprise that those who work in high level banking, tend to be wealthy. They are closer to the injection site, and upstream of most trickled down recipients of these funds.
Of course, people then, naturally, observe which businesses and industries seem to have money, and become quickly inspired to cater to those businesses.
This is akin to the gold rush effect, and as such, booming industries grow around them.
As you can imagine, it doesn't particularly matter whether or not the initial recipients of these funds are actually viable businesses, in the traditional sense.
You will notice that many of the most successful tech businesses are expected to and do lose money for many years, gunning for the seemingly outside chance of achieving a defensible monopoly through a winner-takes-all business model.
This all seems to make some sense in retrospect, but how many people do you know that would be interested in investing millions of dollars in a business model that consistently lost hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes over a billion, every year for nearly a decade?
Just as in the garden metaphor, with unlimited money in the money hose, the eventual success of chosen companies, along with anyone connected to them, is almost a foregone conclusion, because the holder of the money hose has deemed it so.
Even a distinct lack of public interest in the goods and services being offered can be overcome with years and years of relentless funding.
Just as unproductive or uncompetitive industries can be maintained and even expanded with never-ending grants and subsidies.
Just as cities can be built in the desert, industries can be created and promoted with ongoing strategic injections of funds, or they can be left to die through the subsequent withdrawal of those funds.
Also, by financial institutions attaching requirements and strings to the issuance of that money, however implausible the reasons provided, mass behaviour can effectively be dictated in a flow-on manner throughout the entire corporate system, and beyond.
With all of this in mind, one can imagine how it may be possible, despite us being in a supposedly chaotic, volatile, unpredictable world, for certain trends to march on unimpeded, progressing in an orderly fashion, year after year, until they eventually take on the appearance of being inescapable, unarguable, and perhaps even inevitable.
These gradual shifts, with enough strategic injections and system-wide incentives in place, finally manage to catch-on, despite their initial economic non-viability, and without any groundswell of people demanding, or even being particularly interested in them, in the first place.
So, just as I can force non-natvie plants, in my garden, to grow despite them having no business surviving in my geographic location climate; so, too, can the issuance of funds shape world economies, for the most part, however they see fit.
Source
“The Garden Metaphor” was taken from the documentary series of BabylonObserver.com
Mystery Paper Documentary Series
Episode 4 – The Decolonisation Show
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Post script
For other episodes in the Mystery Paper series, as well as other articles and material, visit BabylonObserver.com
For entertainment purposes only.
—The Babylon Observer