Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

America Collects Tribute (Taxation) Via the Dollar
https://t.co/m7Y8BbRE0a
From the world’s greatest professor: @whatifalthist

Rudyard uses the term ‘Tribute’ for reasons I’ll let him explain, but I presume (perhaps foolishly) that he is either trying to make a point, or ignoring the unassailable ambitions and results of the American Postwar Order, as a continuation of the British Prewar Order.

The American postwar order sought to eliminate empires, and the imperial incentive to world war, by using its economic, military, and strategic advantage to ‘bribe’ the world out of empires and into nation-states and federations of nations states, using the Smithian insight that the sovereignty of PEOPLE in their territory, (not governments), their natural desire for natural (human) rights, and their resulting economic interdependence, would create a lasting peace – unless someone tried to restore the parasitism of empires (Russia, Iran, and China).

This has been the most effective means of creating world prosperity since the high point of the roman empire. But superior knowledge, understanding, and technology can be imitated, and all human organizations of all scales expand to the point of their incompetence. So the seeds of calcification and collapse are always embedded in our successes.

The dollar is the most ‘fair’ tax ever invented by man for the collection of resources necessary to produce, administer, and defend the American Rules-Based Order (Rule of Law by the Natural Law of Sovereignty in demonstrated interests and Reciprocity in word and deed.)

But like all taxes, the developed world seeks to avoid those taxes while still maintaining the value of the international order – for free. Meanwhile, the undeveloped world eschews the responsibility that the rules-based order demands of them – still hanging onto the false religion (hope) of socialism and communism. And worse, the remaining Imperial world jealously guards its rent-seeking and corruption and seeks to expand it’s rent-seeking and corruption over other smaller nations.

This American strategy did slowly harm the American worker and middle class, primarily because our incentive to industrialize the world to raise them into economic cooperation and interdependence in exchange for cheaper consumer goods for all, allowed the export of strategic industry, resulting in a hollowing out of laboring, working, and lower-middle-class jobs and income. And causing unhealthy migration to cities that crush rates of reproduction. Which in turn led to tolerating immigration. When combined with leftist march through the institutions of cultural production, this resulted in our current division, crisis, and brewing civil war.

This postwar effort worked until the fall of the soviet union, when the West in general, all of it, presumed that they had ‘won’, and that nature would take its course, and the rule of law, natural rights, and economic prosperity would benefit everyone, producing another long peace.

Unfortunately, (a) Russia, Iran, and China (and possibly Turkey) are less developed, have elites that parasitically captured the government at the expense of the people, and have reverted to their imperial ambitions in order to preserve their parasitism upon the people. And (b) some regions have experimented with socialism, failed, and missed the window of opportunity for global economic status. And (c) the poisoning of the American and Western liberal project by leftist immoral hedonism and the destruction of institutions and in particular, the family is antithetical to the oldest and least advanced civilizations of Islam and Africa. So we have lost the ‘virtuous’ and moral high ground leaving only the economic high ground – and that’s just insufficient for people who are more dependent on family, clan, and religion than the developed world is dependent upon formal institutions.

So, we must study history because living memory, especially among the young, is insufficient to protect us from repeating mistakes we may presume are new and novel circumstances but are anything but. Man is constant over time. All that changes is information distribution and the degree to which we migrate ever closer to natural and physical laws of nature, despite the increase in responsibility it requires of us.

And all but a few of us resist.

Forward progress is not guaranteed. Dark ages are not rare. Some of us must always and everywhere stand guard against human hubris, ignorance, bias, wishful thinking, deception, denial, and corruption.

Cheers
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
The Science of Cooperation