The MOPE Dictionary

Welcome to the MOPE Dictionary! (see link on right margin)  What is MOPE?  Management Of Perceptions Economics.  Governments use MOPE.  Central banks use MOPE.  The banksters use MOPE.  Unions use MOPE.  Everyone wanting an unfair piece of the economic pie uses MOPE.  MOPE is lies, MOPE is bending definitions, MOPE is sanitising the truth, MOPE is euphemisms, MOPE is economic fallacy dressed up in fancy clothes.

MOPE is misleading and it is dangerous to the uninitiated, which is why we have decided to demystify all the garbage out there by producing The MOPE Dictionary.  This will help you sift through the trash next time you listen to that speech by a politician or a central banker, or the next time you read The Economist or a Goldman Sachs research report.

This is a work in progress.  Submissions welcome in the comments section! Enjoy

Accommodative Monetary Policy – See Monetary Stimulus

Affirmative Action – Institutionalised racism

Aggregate Demand – Borrowed and Printed short term spending injections that leave everyone worse off eventually

Animal Spirits – Rational human behaviour in response to false monetary signals driven by excess liquidity created fraudulently by the central bank

Austerity (Government) – See Fiscal Austerity

Bailout – (1)Protecting the jobs of unionised employees. (2)A golden handshake for failure. (3)Daylight robbery

Black Market – Thriving free market of willing buyers and sellers operating despite the state’s best efforts to shut it down.

‘Buy Local’ Incentives – Mercantilist trade protectionism; protecting local business at the expense of local consumers

Cartel – (1)A virtue in banking and governmental power. (2)A vice for everyone else.

Central Bank – A legally protected monopoly in money printing and designated protector of the commercial banking cartel

Competition Commission – State Agency for Alternative Methods of Revenue Collection

Consumer Price Inflation – A rate of general price increase far below the actual rise in the cost of living and periodically adjusted by governments to show lower inflation than actually being experienced

Consumer Protection – Price hikes and limiting product choice

Countercyclical Fiscal Policy – Pretend everything’s OK by borrowing from future GDP to plug holes in present GDP

Credit Rating – Meaningless credit scores given to effectively bankrupt countries to dupe gullible investors into lending more money to them

Debt Ceiling – Number that makes dumb American’s think their government intends to stop spending their future away

Deepen Financial Market Liquidity – See Monetary Stimulus

Depression – An intense version of a recession.  See Recession

Econometrics – (1)Using erroneous mathematical relationships to infer economic truth. (2)Permenantly incorrect forecasting.

Economic Sanctions – A way of using heady foreign policy pretexts as a means for increasing government control over the economy

Economies of Scale – (1)An argument used by the state to legislate forced monopolies. (2)An argument used by the state to force large successful firms to pay windfall taxes, levies, and to justify subsidising smaller unsucessful firms.

Election – A shuffle of political positions between political elites

Entrepreneur – The primary funder of government.

Environmental Economics – A term used for the art of inventing ecological problems and then persuading government to pay you money to solve them.

Exchange Controls – (1)Another way for the state to tax and control the movement of money. (2)A means of artificially protecting one’s currency from free competition.

Externality – (1)Failure to apportion property rights correctly. (2)An environmental economist’s favourite term.

Fair Trade – (1)Forcing poor Ethiopian coffee makers to sell their product at prices above the market clearing price, generating over-investment in supply relative to demand, and leading to gluts, unsold stock, waste and ultimately renewed joblessness among farmers. (2) Form of trade that appeases the consciences of wealthy Western liberals.

Federal Open Market Committee – Selected puppets of the world’s big bankers

Financial Regulation - Getting money as efficiently as possible from Wall St to Washington

Fiscal Austerity – When the state ruins the country at a slower rate

Fiscal Stimulus – Get into more debt to fix the debt problem

Food shortage – Far too much printed money chasing after more than enough food, making it unaffordable for the poorest

Fractional Reserve Banking – Custodial fraud and embezzlement

Free Trade – Free trade for goods and services where WE have a competitive advantage

Global Warming – Temperatures getting really really hot…and really really cold

Global Warming Movement – Generally confused fraternity who cannot predict climate

Government – Entity that appropriates the monopoly of coercive force to achieve desired ends of resource allocation and control

Government Debt – A few people borrowing from a lot of people, promising to pay them back by: (1) taxing them more, (2) printing money and debasing its value, and (3) going into more debt (see Rolling Debt Over)

Homo Economicus – Completely erroneous and false construct of ‘rational’ behaviour conjured up by stoned ivory tower professors

Imperfect Competition - Real life

Indifference Curve – A theoretical nullity about subjective consumer preferences

Indirect Taxation – A way of taxation the state imposes to try dupe people into thinking they’re not being taxed

Inflation Targeting – Targeting a rate of wealth destruction through money and credit creation

Insider Trading – A perfectly legitimate and efficient transaction between a willing buyer and willing seller called illegal by the state when done in the private sector, but mostly ignored when done by state officials for state contracts with taxpayer funds.

Intellectual Monopoly – See Intellectual Property

Intellectual Property – a.k.a Intellectual Monopoly: An arbitrary state-granted and protected monopoly on ideas and inventions excluding free market competition, raising product prices and retarding technological progress.

J-Curve – Erroneous short term explanation used to ‘prove’ that a weaker currency creates trade surpluses.

Keynesianism – Convoluted restatement of old get-rich-quick fallacies

Kleptocracy – A key pillar of government

Laffer Curve – Graphical justification for minor tyranny as opposed to major tyranny

Lender of Last Resort – See Monetary Stimulus

Leverage – Debt

Liquidity Trap – A broken banking system

Monetary Policy Committee – See Federal Open Market Committee

Monetary Stimulus – Print money because there are no other options other than economic depression and banking system failure

Oil shortage – See Food Shortage

Open Market Operations – Centralised manipulation of asset prices and money markets

Output Gap – The difference between what governments wish they could tax from the productive sector and what they can actually tax

Overheating Economy – An economy experiencing rapid and completely unsustainable growth due to excessive money and credit creation driven by the central bank.

Phillips Curve - False proof: that higher inflation creates jobs. Actual proof: that boom-bust cycles lead to false job creation and then inevitable unemployment

Politics – The coercive allocation of resources for biased ends

Pre-emptive war – pick a fight

Progressive Tax – Tax the rich proportionately more than the poor because there’s less of them so they can’t vote you out

Public Works Projects – Huge government spending waste-a-thons providing temporary work to build something the country doesn’t need for double what it should cost

Quantitative Easing – See Monetary Stimulus

(The) Quantity Theory of Money – Irving Fisher’s erroneous theory of money and inflation based on a mathematical identity MV=PT, offering a great example of the errors created by the mathematical method in economics. Read more

Recession – Political opportunity to grow the size of government

Reflation – See Monetary Stimulus

Regressive Tax – Democratic suicide

Regulatory Arbitrage – When investors take their money out of tyrannical and coercive jurisdictions and into less tyrannical and coercive jurisdictions

Regulatory Failure – The modus operandi of the state

Reserve Currency – Fraudulent paper backed by fraudulent debt paper backed by broke people

Risk-Free Rate – the rate of return on a AAA-rated government bond, i.e. a high-risk rate

Rolling debt over – A Ponzi Scheme

Separation of Powers – (1)Mutual respect among the various organs of state of each of their jurisdictions of tyranny and graft; (2) Oligopolistic political power

Speculative Activity – See Animal Spirits

State of the Nation Speech – See State of the Union Speech

State of the Union Speech – An annual speech given by a president with the express purpose of saying as little of substance as possible in 1 hour.

Systemic Risk – Chief scapegoat for more monetary and fiscal stimulus and taxpayer funded bailouts

Trademark – The use of large balance sheets by large companies to spend large sums of money on expensive lawyers to persuade judges to grant unfair monopoly priviledge on non-scarce, unoriginal ideas backed up by state cronyist laws.

Tragedy of the Commons – The denial of private property rights to free people used by the state to justify taking over more resources from the private sector.

Treasury Bonds – Pieces of paper legally consigning your children to slavery

Underground Economy – See Black Market

Unemployment – (1) For the incumbant party: People out of work who we feel like counting; (2) For opposition parties: People out of work who’ll vote for you if you promise them jobs

Unfunded Liabilities – Massive debt hole that will never be filled

University - (1)Place of indoctrination and destruction of common sense. (2)Black hole for rich people’s money. (3) An overpriced party.

Velocity of Circulation – See The Quantity Theory of Money

Windfall Tax – State jealousy of the private sector