Some depressing thoughts on our unavoidable economic future. I hope he’s wrong about the political will, and that we’re not quite past the point of no return.
35 thoughts on “Our National Addiction”
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Some depressing thoughts on our unavoidable economic future. I hope he’s wrong about the political will, and that we’re not quite past the point of no return.
Comments are closed.
The sooner things get worse, the sooner they get better.
This is why I’m an optimist.
Umm… since the age of the Founding Fathers, the USA went from 13 states to 50, the population rose from 3 million to 300 million, the majority of people went from living 50 years to 70 or 80, roads went from dirt paths to concrete superhighways, horses were replaced by automobiles and trains and aircraft, watermills and windmills were replaced by atomic power plants and windmills, modern hospitals went up all over the place, radio and television and movies came along, machines using electricity got invented, there’s this thing called the Internet….
And the only truly significant thing that has happened, which has ruined our lives and hopes for happiness, is the decline of Traditional Virtue.
Right!
Traditional Virtue? Where did you see that?
He means straw-men. However, straw-man production has never been higher!
The spirit of small government is best summed up in Little House on the Prairie s02e20 “Centennial”.
Hanson: You mark my words, some day they will tax a man on what he earns.
Thordsen: An income tax?
Hanson: Yeah…
Thordsen: Never happen in a thousand years.
Keep boiling that frog Mr tax man.
I wonder, if you truly believed this, how would you prepare short of leaving the USA or becoming a back-woods survivalist? Has the author done these things?
…as evidenced by the fact that only “back-woods survivalists” survived the Great Depression.
I do believe it. I fear it. I’m in a terrible position to survive it.
how would you prepare
Time to cozy up to a farmer. A poor self sufficient farmer, they will feel it the least.
The problem is that his assumption is that once we hit rock bottom, our traditionally libertarian attitudes will come to the fore and restore us to our past ways of viewing the world. It seems to me at least as likely either that we’ll enter an imperial age similar to Rome’s, or an imperial age similar to China’s, or collapse into 3 or more nations warring amongst themselves (at least one, and maybe two, of which might look like what he’s hoping for), or that we will collapse into totalitarianism. I often hear people say that if the conservatives fight the liberals, we have the guns. That ignores that it is the government which has the real firepower, and can generate overwhelming force in any given place and time.
In other words, it’s hardly a given, and probably not even the most likely scenario, that a collapse would result in a better place to live.
Adding to what Jeff says, the media would be willing accomplices to a government crackdown on ‘home grown right wing wacko terrorists.’
Jeff, when civil war comes to the US, everyone will have the “real firepower”. Military assets tend to be quickly appropriated by all sides.
And the end result, in this day and age, would likely involve lots of nuclear weapons and empires rising and falling as the global economy shatters.
I’m not saying Americans would necessarily be nuking each other, either; rather, such a massive decline in America as a military, economic, and political power would be almost certain to invite regional power grabs by dozens of states, fighting over the scraps of the global economy. Some of those conflicts would almost certainly go nuclear.
Short version: Demosthenes is wrong. We no longer have the luxury of “letting it burn and starting all over again”. Even Napoleon at his height would have been hard-pressed to invade, conquer, and garrison the US after it was formed, much less kill half the population and spoil most of their farmland. Nukes (in sufficient quantity) can do that, from half a planet away, with relatively little effort.
We have to work our way out of this mess, painful as it may be, or we condemn humanity to a new Dark Age.
Pessimist that I am, I can’t quite see it as dire as Big D.
The military in this country is never going to lose control of our nukes and any use of them against our own people would be an unlawful order not carried out.
Any country currently able to nuke us will be deterred knowing our military maintains control.
I agree with Trent regarding the distribution of ‘real firepower.’
I expect the main result of civil war 2 would be the cleaning out of many ‘anti-american Americans’ and a surge of the jingoistic form of patriotism. The bad news being some may see this as a good thing, encouraging CW2 to actually happen.
It may actually improve the economic situation. Our borders would definitely be enforced after that. But there would be years of hardship and the pendulum would continue to swing.
Even though our present situation can be characterized as a cold civil war (which our intellectually lazy ex-prez distorted without attribution), I sincerely doubt the next crisis war will be a proper civil war. More likely it will be WWIII with a trigger in the Middle East. The end-result will be similar (at least domestically): those who survive and are in power will decide what kind of nation the US will be and what role it will play in the world (at least until their children grow up and decide to, “bring it all down, man!”). Which way that goes is really anyone’s guess.
For the past hundred years, America has been slowly moving away from the principles of its founding. The ideals of liberty, individual achievement, limited government, and the equality of opportunity have been slowly supplanted by calls for security, class warfare, excessive regulation, and the equality of outcome.
The writer’s education in American history seems to have stopped in the third grade. Does he really think there was more liberty and equality of opportunity when women couldn’t vote, blacks were being lynched, Asians could not immigrate, and businesses could legally refuse to serve or employ Irish and Italians?
Things today don’t look so bleak if you stop looking at the past through rose-colored glasses.
Yeah, he should have omitted that “equality of opportunity” part. Otherwise, that statement works.
Ken: My point being, that “burn it all down” is not an acceptable solution to the issue, rather than the above being a prediction of the future.
Jim: So, instead of simply recognizing the inalienable rights of women and minorities, said parties being equal members of the human race… we decided that nobody had inalienable rights at all; but, rather, that all rights (including the “right” to housing, health care, and a college education) were granted by the government in its divine benevolence.
That’s exactly how a person harboring anti-black views would think! Jim decrees it!
“Things today don’t look so bleak if you stop looking at the past through rose-colored glasses.”
Especially if you want the gov’t to give you everything while contributing nothing.
Yeah, he should have omitted that “equality of opportunity” part.
And the “liberty” part — the least free American today is much freer than a century ago. And the “individual achievement” part — there are far fewer impediments to individual achievement today.
No, it’s all covered in the issue of “who you are.” Don’t conflate progress due to tech.
To be clear, WASPs always had it good in America, if not better (you’d have to go ask them.)
…and just to bring this back around OT, therefore we should continue to run 1T$ deficit per year in perpetuity? I’m missing the connection between the cessation of oppression and unsustainable economic policy.
Hey Titus, don’t feed the troll.
Sorry, got carried away.
Is it National Irony Day already? I just read Jim complaining about someone’s alleged ignorance of history. What’s next–Chris Gerrib complaining about someone’s ignorance of economics, or inability to think logically?
therefore we should continue to run 1T$ deficit per year in perpetuity?
No, but neither should we bemoan the death the American experiment, simply because today’s reality does not live up to an imaginary past.
Jim knows this because he was there.
…today is much freer than a century ago.
By what definition? We have more options, yes. We also have so many restrictions we can’t know them all and have come to believe they are a natural part of life. They aren’t. They are very much an unnatural part of life. Taxation itself is a form of slavery and it doesn’t stop there.
The consent of the governed is not only a fiction but a falsehood. We have become serfs rather than citizens. Subjects of the crown rather than free men and woman. Ridiculed when we ask a ‘public servant’ to provide the same identification demanded from us or we’d be punished, perhaps even go to jail.
Define freedom.
“So, instead of simply recognizing the inalienable rights of women and minorities”
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I’m missing the connection between the cessation of oppression and unsustainable economic policy.
A state powerful enough to protect women, minorities and the disabled doesn’t come free. The good news is that the state more than pays for itself, by enabling a modern economy.
Taxation itself is a form of slavery and it doesn’t stop there.
The life of a black sharecropper in 1910 was much closer to literal slavery than anything you will find today. The least free American is much freer today.
A state powerful enough to protect women, minorities and the disabled doesn’t come free. The good news is that the state more than pays for itself, by enabling a modern economy.
Utter nonsense. We’re currently spending something like half the budget on entitlements. None of those have anything to do with “protecting” anyone’s rights or “enabling a modern economy”. Those costs will go up greatly as well in the next decade or two, harming our so-called “modern economy”.
The life of a black sharecropper in 1910 was much closer to literal slavery than anything you will find today. The least free American is much freer today.
But where does it end Jim? I see us on a slippery slope to tyranny. We give the federal government more power and more control over our lives. Just because we aren’t currently as oppressed as a black sharecropper was, doesn’t mean that things will stay this way. One only needs to go back to the 50s to see that things on this front have been getting worse while at the same time, government has increasingly failed to deliver on its obligations.
“The least free American is much freer today.”
So why are you supporting efforts to make that person less free? We are becoming less free by more government intervention into our private lives. All you are doing is advocating a Socialist state. You want equality of outcome not equality of opportunity. Quit trying to foist your white guilt on the rest of us.
If you guys haven’t figured out yet that liberty isn’t high on Jim’s scale of values, you never will. Jim probably saw the new Robin Hood movie and wondered what the conflict was about. “That serfdom business doesn’t seem so bad to me–at least the serfs didn’t have to fend for themselves.”
When Jim talks about “freedom”, he’s not talking about freedom in the classical sense of natural rights, that is the right to be free from coercion and take whatever risks/rewards/set-backs may come. On the contrary, given that “women, minorities and the disabled” together constitute a majority of the population, there’s economy of scale for defending those rights uniformly.
What he really means is the “freedom” to accept largess from the public trough, and that is of course very costly indeed.