Curt Doolittle

Theme: Crisis

  • It’s Not Colonization, It’s Containment

    Obama was warned by Bush, along with the other democratic candidates, that once he gained office he would not be able to exit either country. The one who paid attention to that warning was Clinton. Obama softened slightly but was more reliant on the radical left. So he wasn’t as careful. Now that he’s in office he can’t fulfill his promises to his radical left supporters. Contrary to some of the nonsense I’ve been reading from the left lately, we aren’t colonizing the muslim world. We wouldn’t want to. It’s thankless work. It’s expensive. And they’re too primitive to be of value to us as colonies. The labor is too ignorant and uneducated to function as laborers. The people are too poor to function as consumers for advanced goods. The institutions and infrastructure are too corrupt and unreliable to assist in production and distribution. So, It isn’t colonialization. It’s containment. Americans spent the last century containing communism, and the result was a conversion of the marxist economies to totalitarian capitalism, and perhaps the greatest shift in human standard of living since the invention of farming. While communism was a religion masquerading as a political movement, Islam is a political movement masquerading as a religion, and is the current replacement for marxism – a means of the world underclass to counteract the effect of modernization on their primitive social orders. Like marxism, islam is a primitivist and economically destructive political movement – perhaps more destructive than was it’s prior instantiation, which we call Roman era christianity. The underlying military and political problem is that Islamic Civilization does not have a core state, and that of the core state candidates (iran, pakistan, saudi arabia and turkey) three choices are corrupt, despotic and terrible, and the fourth is unlikely. The impact of the schism is still with the civilization. From a strategic geopolitical position, Core states can be pressured to keep fringe states in line and out of military action. Islam (magian or perhaps magical civilization is a better term) cannot be contained without a core state. Therefore Islam is the new communism until there is enough of a reformation in one of the states that a reliable core state can be formed. THE STRATEGY IS TO DESTABILIZE UNTIL A CORE STATE CAN FORM DUE TO INTERNAL PRESSURE. This is probably too grown-up an analysis for people who think that people who have grown up, real jobs, and real responsibilities, are not acting on emotional or antiquated mystical fantasies like ‘colonialization’ rather than pragmatic economic and security concerns. But that doesn’t mean that the truth shouldn’t be told to those who actually have the capacity for such understanding. The best answer is for us to build 200 nuclear power plants and to get off of oil, and let the middle east fall back into barbarism until they are ready to abandon their magianism and join the modern world. CURT

  • No Surprises In Wikileaks: It Only Illustrates The Obvious: Overreach By Our Bureaucracy.

    SURPRISE? NO SURPRISES IN WIKILEAKS AT ALL. These are common diplomatic cables, written in the common business-language-of-state. Anything ‘shocking’ is simply the result of how people speak when they believe that their communications will remain private. Look at your own email, or personal conversations. We all trash-talk whenever we can. It vents our frustrations. For example: Everyone knows that Berscolini is a vain and incompetent man. But he’s a politician in Italy. Putin? We’ve all known Putin’s ambitions and position for years. Is confirmation something we needed? There is nothing so far in these docs that hasn’t been discussed to death. The docs only give legitimacy to those previously debated topics. *** Fools will always find a source of conspiracy in the natural incompetence of bureaucracy. *** WHAT WE LEARNED: There are only three things to learn from these docs:

    [callout]There is no competent leadership in washington, and it is possible that there cannot be competent leadership, that can develop a consistent policy across that divergent a set of interests.[/callout]

    1) The people who work on these communications are simple white collar government clerical bureaucrats, covering the communications of a vast and diverse state department, running a large naval empire during a time of enormous economic and political power changes. 2) The state department bureaucracy is too big, and american political and military reach is larger than the competence of the individuals in the State Department can coordinate — which is true of all bureaucracies. 3) There is no competent leadership in washington, and it is possible that there cannot be competent leadership, that can develop a consistent policy across that divergent a set of interests. HOWEVER The solutions to most of these diplomatic issues has been covered by Huntington in the Clash Of Civilizations. That is the only policy document necessary to coordinate the vast national interests abroad. We need a strong russia. We need a non-nuclear iran. Islam needs a different core state. We need to help south american, asian, hindu and the vast, ignorant, poor islamic states come into power, while we gracefully reduce our scope of responsibilities.

  • What Do The Elections Mean For The Economy?

    In a staff meeting the other day, one of our senior people asked me what the elections mean for the economy, since our business (advertising and marketing) is highly influenced by the direction of the economy. We are a leading indicator of both upward and downward trends. I responded that the question depended upon the time frame one was using. In the short term, the elections mean that a divided government will eliminate social and political tensions so that people will spend more time on meaningful activities at home and work, and that business people will feel less [glossary:REGIME UNCERTAINTY] Regime Uncertainty. That means that the small business side of the economy should improve. That’s about all. The common people assume that the quantity of political rhetoric is equal to the qantity of economic power that a state can exercise, and this is not true. A state as we currently have constructed it, is largely capable of USING economic wealth in the short term, but incapable of creating wealth in the long term. That is the primary change in government over the past hundred and fifty years. We have converted from middle-class wealth creation to lower class wealth distribution in the west, as the consumer economy and democracy put political power in proletariat hands. That trend was acceptable given our extraordinary wealth. But the current trend must reverse itself, and the power of government must switch from an ambition entirely devoted to redistribution, to one more concerned with increasing the intellectual capacity of our less-than-hard-working citizenry.

    [callout]A state, as we currently have constructed it, is largely capable of USING economic wealth in the short term, but incapable of creating wealth in the long term. That is the primary change in government over the past hundred and fifty years. We have converted from middle-class wealth creation to lower class wealth distribution in the west, as the consumer economy and democracy put political power in proletariat hands. [/callout]

    In the medium term, it means that middle class white people are beginning to act like a minority, as has been predicted for some time now by any number of public intellectuals (Buchanan). It means that our economic recovery will be slow and protracted and vulnerable to shocks, and that it will take a decade or more for the worlds distorted capital structure to realign. It means that unemployment will be persistent and chronic for that period of time. It means that the US will not likely return to previously comforting low unemployment levels. It means uncertainty will prevail. In the long term, in regard to the general economy in the united states, it is not likely that any government intervention on any scale that is politically tolerable, will allow the adjustment to education that is needed to alter our basic competitiveness. It is unlikely that US businesses will produce at 20th century levels, which were only possible because of factors outside of political action: the large land area, the high rate of breeding and immigration, the high transformation of the population into the middle class, the low cost of language and legal transactions due to cultural homogeneity, and the low cost of administration due to the use of the common law. The response to my statements was that they painted a gloomy outlook. I responded that there is a vast difference between objective reality, and the emotional experience that we attach to it. I read something the other day about african meat-packers, living a terrible and dirty life. But that during the day, as they worked, they were joyous, playful, enjoyed their friends and family, and in general described themselves as happy. For human beings, uncertainty, unpredictability, and negative environmental change are impediments to our rather fixed rate of adaptation. But people adjust to their circumstances when they can, and find good in almost everything. Therefore, the objective picture may appear gloomy, but the general sentiment will improve as people adjust to the new circumstances. What will happen is the perception of power, or excellence, which we refer to as ‘status’ will change, worldwide, and continue, as it has since the collapse of the soviet system, to be local and cultural, and less western or ideological. The world’s common people, will continue to return to it’s civilizational biases, and admirations. It’s business leaders and intellectuals will continue to explore each other. Consumers will adopt whatever fashion is relevant to them. But by and large, they will be more interested in their cultures than in western culture. The west will be less of a destination for the highly talented and upwardly mobile. And the western demographic problem (the high land occupation by white christians) will be under pressure, and white christians will increasingly adopt minority postures, just as their political leadership warned they would for the past century and a half. This is the meaningful trend. We will be less wealthy of a civilization relative to others than we have been since the opening of the atlantic trade 500 years ago. Our politics is just the daily expression of our sentiments as these shifts occur.

  • The Child Of Democracy And Secularism Is Stillborn

    (Posted in the comments section of the NYT) In response to the comments section of one of Paul Krugman’s articles: British Decline I felt that all the people that were commenting were right. They understood the failure of conservative policy. The same way that conservatives understand the failure of liberal policy. But they are working on different axis. Neither to do with one another. Our ideological war has now become a race and class war. New elites are emerging. They are less invested in the previous order. They are messianic. They are driven by the one force that is unstoppable: the loss of status and power, which no group will tolerate, and which whites only tolerated because of the combined guilt of slavery and colonialism, and the attack on men by feminism. The elites widthrew from society, participated in the commercial marketplace, left the arts to immigrants, and abandoned high culture. This was fine until the middle class was threatened. At this point, not only is the middle class threatened but so are the working class whites. Under duress people rely upon the mirror test: people who look like them. They are under duress economically. And they feel that their government, the very government that they surrendered, is against them. The ascendency of europeans and the protestant reformation is being undone. Classical liberalism is being undone. It is being undone for exactly the reasons conservatives stated it would be undone. The inability of conservatives to produce a cult (romanticism) and the abilty of conservatives to produce an economic and political model to compete with socialism and social-democracy, using the tools of monetary policy, and the state, to transfer power and advantage. RE: “Japan has a big asset: a leadership that honestly cares for its people. This caring (amateur sociology, according to professional economist), is due to their tribal unity.” This comment correctly states the issue: that despite hardship and demographic changes, the japanese remain under solidarity.

    [callout]Neither side wins. Period. We all lose. A nation is its cult. Economics is not a sufficient means of organizing a polity. Democracy wasn’t the only god that failed. It married secularism. And it’s child is stillborn.[/callout]

    This is scientific data, not amateur sociology: The japanese are a homogenous racist society. Economic success by any group will not lead to political disenfranchisement of another group, wherein the dominant group will lose privilege and opportunity, or the competing groups will not eliminate but simply alter the baises of privilege and opportunity. The USA is an empire. People of different races, cultures and religions, do not mix except under very rare circumstances at the margins, largely to do with status economies and the resulting access to mates and opportunities. The human accounting system is status, not money. Because intra-group status is more rewarding than extra-group status. We will not have multi-culturalism when different groups have the ability to obtain political power, and can undermine the majority status system. There was far more multi-culturalism under the great monarchies of europe than today. Simply because commercial excellence was the only status route available to minorities, because the political system was not open to them. Power is not meritocratic. It just is power, and the most important objective of power is to deprive other people of it. And the most important feature of western culture was that it allowed status gain by market activity even if denied access to political office which might alter that dichotomy. The conservative movement was a reaction to a violation of its core principle of long term group cohesion – a necessary component of land holding and trade-route holding – persistence which cannot be maintained through economic means alone. Only tribalism and pure military strength are strong enough to hold trade routes. THe conservative movement since the end of the war was a reaction against the disintegration of the sentiments of group-persistence, due to immigration, post-slavery political problems, feminism and anti-colonialism, as a coalition against the established political order. And instead of obtaining their ‘rights as englishmen’ of property, and market participation, these groups sought political power – political power is not meritocratic. It is just force. This process s playing out, and will play out, as materially important and highly predictive. Our culture will not assimilate and unify. It will not achieve the grand vision. We are demographically adopting the south american model. We will, and are, fragmenting to the point where the government may lose the ability to govern. If we get only two states to make use of nullification that will be the end of our multi-cultural, melting-pot fantasy. And three more years of low employment will almost guarantee it. Good economics is not macro economics. All economics is micro. Because the vast movement of human beings over time is determined by what they cannot sense by quantitative means, and what they can sense by qualitative means: the loss of their status and opportunity due to enforced competition, and competition from people who are no longer asked to integrate and to be ‘american’ and adopt american values, but to oppose those values and retain their culture at any cost, because en-masse, it is a way to obtain political power, rather than participate in the market and become an american by earning status in the market. All your criticisms of the free trade movement are correct. Conservatives were attempting to preserve the cult of american classical liberalism, preserve existing status hierarchies, and force people to conform to that value system – their cult – and therefore force people into the market under the monarchic classical liberal model. THe conservative policies that you are railing against are simply means of undermining the attack on the classical liberal cultural order. Justified as economic nonsense maybe. But pursued for precisely conservative reasons. Neither side wins. Period. We all lose. A nation is its cult. Because economics is not a sufficient means of decision making in a polity. Democracy wasn’t the only god that failed. It married secularism. And it’s child is stillborn.

  • “Extend And Pretend”

    I lost the source of this quote, but thought it captured the sentiment correctly:

    The government has been playing “extend-and-pretend” based entirely on the idea that pent up demand in consumers would grow until it busted out and the recovery would be on – fueled by consumers. What has happened is the exact opposite. This is very serious. We are running into 3 years now, and 4 if you look at what commodity speculation did to consumers starting back in early 2007. Remember the prices for wheat and such that were even driving the price of pizza up 30% or more? And then we have such things as “staycations”. And so the concern should be whether or not we have a permanent shift in consumer behaviors. Three or four years is plenty of time to break old habits and establish new ones.

    1) People forget. Their forgetting follows a ‘forgetting curve’. Knowledge is perishable. Habits are perishable. Relationships are perishable. Even wants are perishable. 2) People don’t ‘unforget’. They have to learn new techniques, develop new habits, and form new relationships. And it takes time. 3) People school or swarm on opportunities. Demand is created by those people who invent ideas then bait people into swarming on them. Developing swarms, especially large scale swarms takes time. Months, even years, because people have to learn from the person closest to them, how they can participate in the swarm. Then as the swarm grows, they must learn enough to break off from the main body and find and exploit new niche opportunities.

    This last swarming behavior is the general problem with the Keynesian approach to aggregate demand. People are infinitely acquisitive as long as their acquisitions increase either their entertainment, security or status. But opportunities are not infinite. And the less knowledge, the fewer resources available for risk, and the fewer relationships they have, the less likely they are to identify and swarm new relationships.

  • “It’s So . . . Complex?” Not Really.

    MEGAN MCARDLE at the Atlantic, posted an essay question by Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry.

    Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

    The thesis is false. Luddite on top of false. But false. 1) Governors are simply unable to possess sufficient knowledge. In the absence of knowledge governors do the one thing we charge them with: make laws. They make laws without knowledge. It is the system of regulations that breaks down, not technological complexity. Lawmakers cannot make good laws because they lack the ability to possess or integrate the knowledge necessary to make economic laws. Why this is the general critique of socialism (central planning) but we do not apply the same logic to republican government (central legislation) is an more interesting topic of study. Knowledge and incentives. You need both. Government has neither.

    [callout]Our current state of affairs is not a problem of politics and parties. It is a problem with the very structure of government, and the multitudinous myths that we live under, tell ourselves and use to justify our wants and wishes. Our government was very useful for selling off a continent in the agrarian era. In the post agrarian, dense-urban era, we are too sufficiently un-equal, to diverse, possessed of too fragmentary knowledge, for lawmaking as we understand it.[/callout]

    2) His analysis of complexity is erroneous. There is no evidence of marginal decreases in effectiveness. And any such analysis belies a misunderstanding of technical and epistemic progress. It is not LINEAR or STATIC. As is biology, innovation functions by punctuated equilibria. In other words, random, large shifts occur due to accumulated minor innovations, whereby all previous innovations are disrupted, and all social orders reorganize around the large shifts. 3) The context is erroneous. Western dominance rose because of changes in trade routes. The USA became dominant by selling off a continent to immigrants, and concentrating that capital in military and political conquest. A republican government is the only government dynamic enough (incorporating enough people) to sell off a continent. We did not make an excellent country. We simply sold off a continent and funded technological development with the proceeds. These proceeds are now in the form of intellectual capital. That intellectual capital is fluid, and open to unfettered replication. The world is copying that technology at a low cost. This low cost is allowing vast increases in population and vast increases in the structure of production, allowing people to move from subsistence farming to a suburban and urban working class. This migration is creating a vast pool of available labor. Since people are NOT EQUAL in ability, this means that the USA is specializing in productive efforts open only to the top two quintiles. It means that the bottom three quintiles are not able to participate in the production of the USA’s specialisms (creative marketing, medicine, education, product development, financial innovation) and the specializations are no longer sufficiently profitable to assist the lower quintiles by redistribution. Free Traders were wrong. Nations cannot specialize because people in them are unequal. CLASSES within NATIONS must specialize. Free trade is dangerous to the stability of advanced societies between whom differences are not sufficiently marginal. 4) We do not need simplicity. We need innovation and reorganization. We need the assistance of the government to concentrate capital in industries where we can be competitive, and to retain all possible capital inside the country, so that the lower quintiles do not so much suffer from the affect of increased competition from around the world. The Author of your essay is yet another Luddite. The way is not back, it is forward. 4) we have taken over the policing of trade routes from the British empire. We have built a political empire, if not an economic one. And we could afford that empire when Europe was in tatters, and the rest of the world languished in pre-capitalist technologies. We cannot afford to run this empire any longer. Any more than England could after the war. However, there will be no gains to be realize for the purposes of redistribution. The USA will no longer be able to borrow, nor productive enough to export it’s way to prosperity. We will not have either empire, nor our previous wealth. SUMMARY Societies failed because the were no longer able to coordinate. People must have coordinating myths. Myths are the means by which codify what we pay for social order: respect for some form of property or another. Every ‘respect’ of some form of property is a forgone opportunity. These forgone opportunities are costs. These costs are very expensive. The most advanced societies contain people who forgo great opportunities to ‘disrespect’ property. The primitive societies do not forgo those opportunities. This behavioral development is a very high cost. The first myths were simply conventions. They were formalized into Religions. Religions finally failed when the middle class developed, and societies became large enough that people could visibly ‘cheat’ with anonymity. Lawmaking developed in order, largely, to legitimize government (and it’s social order) by standardizing punishments for similar crimes against life and property. That technology of Lawmaking has failed (although our government does not recognize this.) Because laws are too many and too irrelevant and too impossible to police. Our politicians knowingly state that they do not understand nor have they even read, many of the laws that they implement. They leave this process to the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy serves it’s own purpose. And it is the bureaucracy that citizens learn to loathe. “Revolutions are built from the accumulation of petty violence by the bureaucracy, not the heinous crimes of a few politicians, princes, or kings.” The next form of government after lawmaking is banking and credit. The reason being that only that system will allow us to ‘sense’ the world, and only that system will allow the state to engage in the increase in capital so that redistribution is possible. Rather than the (current) assumption that capital will continue to accumulate and the government must simply confiscate enough of if to keep the citizens happy. To survive, we will become even more capitalist, not less. We must. Because only property, pricing, and numbers can provide us with the information to coordinate in vast division of knowledge and labor. THE STATE OF THE UNION Our current state of affairs is not a problem of politics and parties. It is a problem with the very structure of government, and the multitudinous myths that we live under, tell ourselves and use to justify our wants and wishes. Our government was very useful for selling off a continent in the agrarian era. In the post agrarian, dense-urban era, we are too sufficiently un-equal, to diverse, possessed of too fragmentary knowledge, for lawmaking as we understand it. This is why our society is failing. It is why previous societies have failed: the inability to regulate consumption and concentrate capital for production because the social orders did not develop a level of granular management. That management is visible to us in the private banking, credit and finance systems. Our governments must realize that they are banks first. You can’t redistribute something if you have nothing to start with. The first purpose is defense and property definition (order) The second purpose of the state is productivity (competition) The third is redistribution. (the result of order and competition) They must exist in that order. A state that does not focus on productivity will eventually be unable to redistribute, compete, or maintain order. SPECIOUS ARGUMENTS BY LUDDITES Arguments about complexity are specious. A division of labor is by definition complex. A market is complex, or we would not need it. Pricing systems are complex or we would not have had them. If we became less complex we would have to return more people to farming, and possibly, kill off billions of existing human beings. Complexity is our friend. The accumulated social and legal hindrances to reorganization, and the accumulated ERRORS in political philosophy that prohibit the concentration of capital behind innovative productive ends, is the problem. Our institution of government, as we practice it today, is the problem. It is predicated upon erroneous myths. It is structured to make laws for farmers. It is burdened with assumptions of productivity that may never be met. The institutions of government that are more socialist are even worse. They pretend knowledge of a future that cannot be known. And Luddite solutions are appeals to create a certain future, whose only certainty is destruction and poverty.

  • The Dystopian Future Of Cities – Concrete And Rubble VS Star Trek

    As I spend more of my time trying to understand the different ways by which the USA will degenerate from its position of trade-empire, I have been working on the future of cities, which will even more dominantly influence the future culturally, morally, economically and politically. There is a healthy literature on it. And it’s quite the opposite future that the libertarians fantasized about. Writings on our Dystopian Future: The Feral Cities Paper http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_4_56/ai_110458726/?tag=content;col1 (Local copy for reference)The Building Blog and Cities Under Siege http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/cities-under-siege.html The Books The Fires by Joe Flood Planet of Slums by Mike Davis Cities Under Siege by Stephen Graham Urban Nightmares by Steve Macek The Unheavenly City by Banfield

    Mike Davis wrote in Planet of Slums, “the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.”

    The future of the world is the south american model. It is quite different from the future envisioned by the Protestants, Libertarians and liberals. It certainly isn’t the orderly civility and sterility of star trek – as if the upper middle class ran the world rather than the proletariat.

    Frank Lloyd Wright’s oft-repeated remark that “the modern city is a place for banking and prostitution and very little else.”

    Be careful what you wish and plan for, if what you wish and plan for is counter to human nature. The approach to Natural Law combined with heroic aspiration is different from the myth of equality and heroic aspiration. We’re going to see the south american model.

  • Losing The Habit: We Will Not Return To The Consumer Economy.

    Loved this little paragraph today on “extend and pretend”. Although I can’t remember where I found it.

    The government has been playing “extend-and-pretend” based entirely on the idea that pent up demand in consumers would grow until it busted out and the recovery would be on – [a recovery] fueled by consumers. What has happened is the exact opposite. This is very serious. We are running into 3 years now, and 4 if you look at what commodity speculation did to consumers starting back in early 2007. …. And so the concern should be whether or not we have a permanent shift in consumer behaviors. Three or four years is plenty of time to break old habits and establish new ones.

    Three weeks and you can develop a new habit. Nine months and you can change your system of habits. Three years and you can forget what life was like in the past. In four years you can even forget a bad divorce, death or tragedy. The bonds that create an economy are perishables. People forget. They forget skills, relationships, ambitions, ways of thinking. They forget.

  • “What do you think about China?” I Think You Are Confused About The Virtues Of Political Systems

    Kenneth V. asks:

    I’m curious about your opinion on China’s future. As the democratic empire collapses in the west and power shifts its balance, do you think that the Chinese people will demand more political freedom, especially since libertarian books are bestsellers? Or do you think the oligarchy will be successful in suppressing dissent? What do you think of the demographic trends there? Chinese couples do a trial-and-error with childbirth where babies who are less than perfect are killed. The massive gender imbalance of 40 million more males than females. What do you think of this kind of extreme eugenics? I personally find it abhorrent, but I’d like to ask your opinion.

    Ken, The Chinese are driven by the conflict between northern government, southern trading prosperity, interior poverty, and hostile borders. The cultural tradition is ancient and it’s purpose is to avoid civil wars at all costs, simply because civil wars were so common for them, because they are exposed to what they see as threats (their country needs the china seas open in order not to be starved into submission), and because of natural conflicts between the regions. This history is as important to china as the sense of freedom is to the west. (a sentiment which is in no small part a reaction to the middle eastern model – which westerners considered horrid.)

    [callout]I suspect that they will never achieve the middle-class society as we understand it. They will bypass that phase of development. They will go from totalitarian rural poverty to totalitarian urban poverty, and maintain their corrupt bureaucracy. The reasons for retaining that bureaucracy will simply evolve to support a different set of objectives.[/callout]

    Now, to avoid drinking our own Kool Aid, we probably should understand that the west has always had an advantage of being a society filled with craftsmen rather than laborers, not the least of which was the result of widespread metal smithing, easy river trade, and the western agrarian cycle which was very seasonal. The importance of that sentence may not be obvious to you unless you think of the 360 day a year job of a rice farmer. So Romans conquered northern europe because the ‘barbarians’ were fairly wealthy by contrast, and presided over resources. While they exploited the warmer climes for food. But western wealth over the past 500 years, has largely to do with selling off the american continent to immigrants. Not to any particular western genius. IN fact, the continental view of exploiting the continent as they had the islands, by bringing resources back home paled by comparison to the money that could be made by settling, populating, and selling consumer goods to immigrants to the north american continent. In this broader context, our political order is more dynamic, and by that I mean, flexible, and the republican model with capitalistic institutions (for cooperation) is the only one that is effective for mobilizing enough people to accomplish such a task. China by contrast is simply doing the same thing without inventing it: they are selling off apartments, electricity, water, and food to immigrants to the coastal cities. Their model is better for doing their migration under their circumstances. Our model was better for doing our migration under our circumstances. The question is, for them, for us, what will happen when that’s done. Because we are going to have very densely populated cities, and in that model FARMER ETHICS AND MORALS EVAPORATE. Traditional religious principles, ethical constructs, and the ability to manage class differences become very difficult in those environments. The difference is that the chinese have the benefits of monarchy (long term thinking), the capital concentration of totalitarianism (which is very useful) and the institutions of capitalism (banking, finance, accounting, interest and credit, western laws), and they get to profit on the implementation of western technology – without having to have had to discover it. This is a very good model for competing externally. it is not a good model when you’re the ‘winner’. It’s a very good model for when you’re a century and a half behind the rest of the world. I suspect that they will never achieve the middle-class society as we understand it. They will bypass that phase of development. They will go from totalitarian rural poverty to totalitarian urban poverty, and maintain their corrupt bureaucracy. The reasons for retaining that bureaucracy will simply evolve to support a different set of objectives. But the damage that they will cause in that transition, to the world in general, if they are faced with uprisings, is substantial. I think your question begs the wrong assumptions: political models are utilitarian goods, not absolute goods. Societies need to concentrate capital in order to compete and cooperate with other societies. Then they need internal institutions for everything else. Complex market capitalism when combined with totalitarian command of large investments, with the least corruption possible is probably the most competitive form of political order. As long as investments are competitive rather than redistributive. Redistribution is the result of competition. Not a replacement for it. There is no inherent value in political freedom on its own. It’s not a virtue. It is an acceptable risk in a homogenous society. But it is a net danger in a pluralistic society. The struggle for power must never be available to factions or minorities. Only the struggle to compete in the market. Political freedom is the freedom to usurp the market. THere is no other reason for it. The only value of political freedom is in reducing corruption, which is an impediment to trade, exchange and capital formation. The problem for a people is suppressing corruption, not obtaining political freedom. People don’t really choose their political system. It’s determined by their circumstances and they are pragmatic in adopting it. They don’t pick idealistic things, and if they do, they fail (Iran). Democracy is just slow moving communism. As Schumpeter said, Democracy will just lead to socialism. Republicanism and oligarchy are rule by the middle classes (trade). Totalitarianism is rule by the upper classes (force). Theocracy by definition, rule by the lower classes (fraud). (IQ and Atheism increase with class structure, although under capitalism moral behaviors tend to emerge with the decline in religiosity.)

  • High Unemployment, or Normal Employment? It Depends On The Scope Of History You’re Considering.

    Over on Questions and Observations, Bruce McQuain questions whether we’re having another “Great Depression” or just a very slow recovery. An unnamed visitor pointed to a graphic from The Atlantic and commented:

    “The median duration of unemployment is higher today than any time in the last 50 years. That’s an understatement. It is more than twice as high today than any time in the last 50 years.”

    Which is a true statement that leads to false conclusions. Instead, how about you increase the period of time you’re considering even further and say, that: “The unnaturally low rate of employment for the past century, and in particular the past fifty years, has been largely do to the combination of selling off north america to immigrants and their children, the increase in consumer products consumed by these people, the collapse of european war economies, followed by the results of the monopolization of the world monetary system. The current unemployment level is the natural consequence of the loss of the US’s temporary economic advantage, as europe caught up, and china, india, russia and other developing countries have developed similar economic models and levels of production.” That’s the analysis that has meaning. Not medium term unemployment. The monetary policy since Reagan was an attempt to revitalize american entrepreneurship and individualism by using the US’s unique position in world history to borrow against future production. However, the winning of the war against ideological managed-economies made that borrowing impossible to maintain. Furthermore, the unregulated use of that credit to fund unproductive investment (housing) rather than relative competitive investment (innovation) led to a bubble, which has now compounded the overall problem. This is not to say that we had an alternative to the revitalization of the country. Or that the european model would have yielded better results in the domestic american empire than it did in the homogenous nation states. But we are now headed toward the south american model : the exact opposite of what both the left and right desired.