The collapse of Capitalism?

You gotta admire Marc Faber: He's the Roland Emmerich of economists. He lusts for the Apocalypse. If Armegeddon were a woman, he'd kiss it. With tongues. Hell, he'd do unmentionable things to her while pulling her hair and making her call him Daddy.

Right now, he's proclaiming to the world that the U.S. economy -- and capitalism generally -- is doomed. The following comes from his euphoniously-titled Gloom, Boom & Doom report:

The future will be a total disaster, with a collapse of our capitalistic system as we know it today, wars, massive government debt defaults and the impoverishment of large segments of Western society.

If Philip Glass were to set those words to music, we'd have the ultimate in Debauched Art.

My (layman's) problem with Faberism comes to this: He thinks that the America-killer will be hyper-inflation. Do you see any hyper-inflation around here? A lot of people are saying that the real problem right now is worldwide deflation.

Actually, I've thought for a while that a controlled degree of inflation would be a good thing. Emphasis on controlled. If prices and wages rose generally, your staggering house note would suddenly look a lot more payable, and the burden of debt owed to foreigners becomes far less burdensome. Inflation is a destroyer, especially of savings, but it does make old debts smaller.

Inflation need not segue into Weimar-esque hyper-inflation. Nations have been able to turn off the spigot at just the right moment. As I once noted in an earlier post:

A system of wage/price controls can apply the brakes. This has been done successfully in the past -- the Wassenaar Agreement in the Netherlands in 1982 provides one example.

If the Netherlands could do it, why can't we?

Printing money has, in fact, been going on for about a year. Okay, they're not literally printing it, but it is still being conjured out of nothing. They call it quantitative easing. That's how Japan made some headway against its ten-year slump.

Still, the path is dangerous. Hyper-inflation seems like a far-off possibility right now, but it could happen -- and today's ideological constraints may make wage and price controls impermissible, even in the most dire of emergencies.

So. If Faber is right and capitalism is doomed, what comes next?

The few remaining Come-comrades-come-rally types may be thinking: "Aha! Now is our chance! We must seize the historical moment!" Oh, grow up. No media or intellectual infrastructure serves the left-of-center alternatives. Fred the Red don't know when he's dead.

But there is a massive underground infrastructure serving the fringe right. I'm talking about what we might call the "Alex Jones" right -- the guys who see conspiracies everywhere, the reactionaries who see the GOP as a bunch of pinkos, the Illuminati-spotters, the wackos.

That's why I've always considered the so-called "fringe" to be worthy of close study. When everything turns to shit, they'll be the only ones with their shit together.

Can they solve our economic woes? Of course not. Many of these guys are libertarians at heart, which means that they'll try to put out our financial fires by pouring on the gas. That trick won't work.

But they can end democracy, if they have a Pinochet lurking amongst their numbers. I think they do.