Herri met de Bles
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
(ca. 1550–60)

"The outcome seems certain from the outset."

Prosperity tends to keep speculation in check. The need for assuming great risk, hoping for even greater reward, might be capable of working as a precursor to periods of Prosperity, but it serves as no sure or certain cure for any ill, and should therefore be preserved for rare times of great peril or even greater possibility. When a society comes to perceive its future as necessarily speculative, it might be PreProsperous or merely lost. Only an eight-year-old would plan to succeed by continually upsetting otherwise reasonably stable apple carts. Invoked much more than once in a generation, speculation teeters on the indistinct edge of excessive, for betting the farm on anything too easily puts Prosperity off its feed. It seeks stability, and as such might be the most reliable indicator that the leader isn’t a wild-eyes speculator.

Our present leader turns out to be a wild-eyed speculator. He seems to firmly believe he’s wealthy, but it requires little scrutiny to see that he behaves as if he’s broke and frantic. Given his continuing insistence against sharing his financial records—of which, if he were truly wealthy, he should be proud to share, even boastful—it’s likely that internally, he feels as though he’s forever teetering on that indistinct edge where Prosperity never finds root. This state might explain why he governs as if facing some huge crisis almost exclusively of his own making. He declares national emergencies about as regularly as most people take bathroom breaks, but not usually as effectively. He shits his pants, beneath which he reportedly wears adult diapers because his behavior always teeters along that indistinct edge of excessive. He inherited a deepening Prosperity from his predecessor. He immediately began behaving like a speculator, as if that behavior would necessarily render him the savior of a society instead of its underminer-in-chief.

The markets operate now on the edge of terror. So do the people, though many people have been spooked into becoming speculators, too: Spookulators. Their leader (I refuse to claim him as mine) cheers them on, leading by demonstration in ways he very likely can’t quite recognize as hurtful, for chronic speculation is a form of addiction, and Spookulation, self-destructive emulation. Spookulation is how mobs rule. It is a dread enemy of any and every Prosperity, for it can only get no satisfaction, regardless of the success or failure of any individual trade. Each becomes self-reinforcing. It no longer really matters who wins or who loses, but that they remain playing. In the eyes of the speculative leader, We, The People extends no further than those he sees still sitting around the table, willingly betting their future on his unlikely omniscience. He only wins when they lose, and then, only if they insist upon continuing to play. It’s as if he’s earning some commission from each player’s engagement, and perhaps he is.

Played with public funds, this sort of “investment in the future” can stretch far beyond any foreseeable future. The outcome seems certain from the outset. We each learned the rules of speculation long before we learned to distinguish it from investment. Before making this distinction, each and every so-called investment opportunity seems indistinguishable from speculation. This notion stems from a lack of understanding more than from clever perception. The differences never appear obvious to naive or innocent eyes. They require knowledge and a stable trading platform. From these, Prosperity can often be born. Speculation might well have its place, as might luck, but skill at this trade seems irreplaceable by mere good fortune. Speculation seeks Prosperity by accidental means. It can happen, though it’s by definition never certain.

You might respond that the possibility of Prosperity is never quite a certainty, and I can’t successfully counter that perspective. But there are uncertainties, and then there are uncertainties, like the different kinds of infinities Physicists get their undies into bundles about. These two classes are in no way equivalent, other than that they share the same name. Spookulation seems the rough equivalent of spooking a horse to direct its path. It works, after a fashion, though the rider more often has to choose the path the horse chose under duress than their own preferred preference. A skillful rider can often quickly correct an incorrect trajectory, anyway. Prosperity seems more reasoned. It leverages stability rather than upset. It knows its horse and suggests a course. The horse, understood and ably led, usually responds as expected. Some cannot imagine riding anything but a bucking bronco, even though they most often get bucked off.

What our Spookulator-in-chief created once inaugurated was an economy focused on Spookulation. The smartest money left the playing field as soon as it recognized that the necessary stability of the trading platform would be the first deliberate casualty of attempting to Make America Great Again. It would need to be made great again because he would first undermine what had made it great before. He subtly promised to make Prosperity worse so that he could claim credit for delivering the replacement. No replacement Prosperity will be coming, not in this incumbent’s term. Nor will it likely return quickly after he’s replaced because Spookulation undermined the stability of the economy Prosperity always depended on. Where has Prosperity gone? It’s gone into hiding after having transformed its holdings in the future into cash, which presently lines its mattress. Or, it blew its load speculating in oily futures. When some future savior, as yet unidentified, chases the Spookulators out of the people’s temples, Prosperity’s secreted cash might serve as the foundation for the next Prosperities in line.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz