What China’s Doing Right that the US Got Wrong

 

 

While the US is hopelessly racing toward economic suicide, with continued spending, printing of fiat paper money and setting up the scenario for the mother of all defaults, China has been slowly introducing elements of free enterprise in its economic system and the results have been the creation of significant amounts of wealth. They’re accomplishing this by rewarding, financially, the producers of real wealth–engineers, producers, people who actually make things.

Case in point: An engineer who lived in the UK all his life, spent nearly two decades trying to achieve wealth in business in the UK, but remained a pauper because of the onerous taxation and laws that kept his business forever struggling. He moved to China four years ago, and today he’s well off, his business is making a generous amount of money, owns a large villa, a Mercedes and has a beautiful Chinese girlfriend. He’s an engineer. A profession that is looked upon with disdain in the UK, and even the US, but in China, engineers are highly-valued for their ability to create products and thus wealth. China’s culture values the product of work and thus work itself as the source of wealth.

According to this engineer, China’s economy is being completely restructured, to focus on domestic consumption and evidently it is working. The only issue of concern is that they are also moving in the direction of universal health care.

China’s leader ship says that China must develope strong brands and intellectual property for international consumption if China is to be taken seriously in the world. China understands wealth creation. Industry, manufacturing and construction create wealth. China may well (if only by default) be set to become the wealthiest nation by the end of the next decade.

Meanwhile, the US government is essentially bankrupt from the day it stopped redeeming its currency for gold. Meanwhile, foreigners are buying up physical assets in the US, such as farms, real estate, food supplies, financial institutions, hotels, factories, casinos, retail businesses and any other valuable assets located in the US with their hard-earned currency. If we stopped this exchange of title to US property (instead of gold) for foreign earned dollars, the buying power of the US dollar would decrease the the point that it may take a full days’ wages just to buy a loaf of bread.

We are selling our children’s legacy to foreign owners and the fed calls it “investing in America”. We’re racing to print paper currency and sell titled to everything on US soil in order to keep from doing any actual work. A nice analogy is that it’s like selling off our body parts to keep from working.

Economic value is created when you grow, build or manufacture something that is consumable and useful. Printing money to pay people for environmental cleanup, mortgage bailout, union retirements, TARP, business failures, etc., to stimulate the economy ujust makes the existing money have less buying power, yet does nothing to improve the economy in the long term.

If this situation, where we sell US gold, currency and assets to foreign nations, continues, we run the risk of becoming like post WWI Weimar Germany, economically. We need to produce and export a lot more than we do now, in order to balance this situation and reverse the flow of US property to foreign owners. These products would have to be cheaper, better in quality, technologically superior to those products made in foreign countries or the foreigners won’t buy them.

If foreign investors suddenly stop buying our printed US T-bills, bonds and securities at close to their face values and start buying these at equivalent of a few pennies on the dollar, the government checks, social security checks, government payroll checks and private paychecks will not buy very much food or anything else. One’s life savings might only sustain you for a month or two. The US is committing economic suicide. And that leads to the US becoming a “banana republic”.

China has a real GDP, whereas our thinking here is short-term, based on micro-political self-preservation which perpetrates an unending cycle of corruption. China doesn’t have rampant credit infiltration; the people live within their means and their consumption is real, not based on credit card or HELOC illusions of wealth.

On the current course, the US is headed into a hyper-inflationary depression, dollar collapse, federal, state and municipal debt default and the status of a banana republic. For a picture of what life in the US will be like, if this course is not changed, look closely at post-2001 Argentina.

 

The Broad Spectrum

 

From Broadcast Regulation to Medicine Regulation and More (From my writings of 1997, reprinted here)

The problems we experience with broadcast regulation are merely a symptom of a much broader problem in our society. We live in a nation regulated by special-interest groups, empowered by public opinion. This is a situation brought about by default; apathy and tolerance for mis-deeds on the part of the public. When we look at the picture of how our society operates in broad terms, several common facts appear: special-interest and big business lobbying our congressional leaders, and an attitude that favors the streamlining of the justice system to favor convenience to the system over justice for the individual. Examples of corporate lobbying of Congress resulting in legislation which restricts the freedoms of individuals to choose lifestyles, medical treatments, and livelihoods, are prevalent today: the food and drug administration, the Federal Communications Commission, the banking commission, trade and industry laws requiring individuals who are self-employed to have licenses, and the list goes on. In the course of daily life, we are witness to a shift in what is considered lawful and unlawful behavior. In the earlier days of this nation, proactive acts of mis-deeds were considered unlawful. If you went out and robbed someone, or if you assaulted someone, you were a criminal. If you sat at home and did nothing, you were a “good citizen”. Today, that is no longer true. In today’s America, the failure to perform is a crime. Today’s government makes demands upon you that exclude the option of sitting home and doing nothing if you please. Today’s government demands you pay taxes and maintain insurance on your motor vehicles, and respond to demands made by local ordinances. The failure to acknowledge the government’s demands on any of these counts results in violations of our fourth amendment rights to various degrees. The folks at Waco, Texas stand out as one of the more extreme examples of what happens when a citizen fails to perform on the government’s behalf. A failure to file a tax return can have dire consequences. A failure to allow a building inspector into your home can result in a very sudden inrush of law enforcement. A failure to do the whim and will and every capricious wish of the government ruling party can result in various forms of unpleasant reprisals, all of which are funded by your tax money. A very dangerous problem in our society today is what I call knee-jerk journalism and its attendant public response. One clear case of the situation is the recent increase in the number of reported school shootings and other public acts of violence by lone gunmen. Such media has worked wonders for the anti-gun lobby. With each new report of a shooting, we hear ever louder calls to action for increased legislation and laws against gun ownership, for more legal action taken against gun manufacturers, and more justification for giving up our constitutional rights as Americans. The part that is never mentioned is the causes for these acts of violence. It is easy to blame gun owners or manufacturers of guns for these problems but guns have been around for a long time and the height of violence we’re now seeing is unlike anything we’ve seen in the past. We need to look beyond the symptoms of the problem to see what is causing this dramatic change in behavior. When we do, we’ll see an alarming fact: the increase in the misguided use of antidepressant drugs to combat the symptoms of hypothyroidism and a parallel alarming increase in violent behavior. The public could easily accept this fact if we’re talking about illegal drugs. But government approved, legally prescribed drugs are totally different situation. No one contributes more campaign money or has more political influence than the pharmaceutical industry, and you can bet that the drug companies don’t want this information going public. Once again, we have a situation where extreme greed and lust for profit at any expense without regard for moral implications has led us on a one-way path to disaster. In each of the cases were there has been a school shooting or other public outbreak of violence by an individual, it has been discovered that the perpetrator was under medical care and receiving the drug Prozac. Antidepressant drugs work on the same mechanism in the human brain to elevate one’s sense of well-being, as the portions of the brain which control violent tendencies. It is a known fact in the medical community that such drugs remove the barriers to violent behavior, when consumed. And how ironic it is that we defend the war on drugs, while we prescribe Ritalin to our children in school such that it is now so prevalent that 1 in every 5 students is on this drug. While I’m on the topic of children and their behavior, it needs to be said that government interference with parental discipline is a formula for disaster. When a parent cannot spank a child who will not respond to reason, there is no alternative left by which to effect a correction of the child’s defective thinking patterns. To add insult to injury, when children know they are “protected” from the consequences of their mis-deeds, they will act out these behavior patterns even more blatently, with an “in your face” attitude to spite their elders. These kids know they are protected from punishment, and hence have a free hand to commit all the evil they want, without fear of the consequences that kept older generations in line. As a good friend of mine once pointed out about the terrible behaviour of our youth today, one line in particular is so appropriate, “the problem with this world is the fact that we now have an entire generation of kids that have never been spanked.” How utterly true. And when these kids grow up and try their shenanigans in the real world, reality will have a harsh blow to deal them. There is no doubt in my mind that another major source of the problems we are now experiencing with our kids is due to the lack of parental supervision, caused by both parents having to work to support the family. By eliminating income taxes, we are no longer faced with this problem. Even more unsettling are the lengths that the medical, pharmaceutical and government agencies are willing to go through to suppress the truth. One such case is that of Dr. Stanislow Burzynski. Here is individual who has come with a cure for a certain type of cancer which affects mainly young children. Due to the fact that his treatment works, word-of-mouth has spread quickly, resulting in an influx of parents from other parts of the United States bringing their children to his treatment center. Unfortunately, his success has also drawn the wrath of the medical industry. This has resulted in a long chain of harassment by the FDA, and even the Justice Department. Dr. Burzynski has endured multiple raids upon his office, physical arrests, lawsuits, and just about every known form of harassment the government can come up with. It was only through the tremendous outpouring of thousands of parents whose children’s lives depend upon the treatment that only this particular doctor was providing, that the government has recently dropped their charges and allowed him to continue practicing. Here again, we see that public opinion is influential on the government. What controls public opinion? When we consider that the vast majority of information we as citizens receive comes from media like newspapers and television and radio, those of us who have given this issue deep thought realize the extreme danger in central control of such media. Yet, as in every rising dictatorship or tyranny, government control of the media overall, was the first step. The more dictatorial the government, the harsher the punishment of those who attempt to create their own media outlets containing independent views not approved by the big corporations, the few influencial and powerful individuals who drive the opinion of the nation, and the government. As the government relies on the nation’s schoolteachers to mislead children right in their own classrooms, so too does the government rely on and utilize the nation’s media–converting it into a virtual monolithic government propaganda agency. This vast media network is harnessed to work the American public into a virtual income tax filing frenzy around April 15th, little realizing that it has been actually duped into duping the public in like manner. We are now at the stage where we are beginning to see some of the exact situations happening as were described in Ayn Rand’s famous novel, Atlas Shrugged. We see examples of government dictating personal decisions everywhere. And we will soon see a form of poetic justice as the subjects of these Draconian government rules begin to disappear from society. For example, we have the mayor of New York City mandating, by law, that cab drivers should have to pick up passengers in any neighborhood, no matter how dangerous or how much of a threat the cab driver feels to his own personal safety. The logical outcome of this is that eventually cab drivers will not accept this law and will find some other line of work. The practical outcome will be that one day the New Yorker will be unable to find a cab and will have to rely on other forms of transportation. Here again we see politicians chasing after the symptoms of a problem, rather than dealing with the root of the problem. The U.S. government’s war on drugs has been a major boon for the law-enforcement business. Here again, through the manipulation of public opinion by the government-controlled media, we have taken what could have been a relatively harmless situation and turned into an excuse to wage warfare right on our own city streets. The mere act of prohibition of controlled substances creates market demand. Cold and calculating drug cartel industry figures regularly weigh the cost of human lives against the higher profit motive and have decided that lives are expendable because the profit is so large. As long as the profit motive exists, marketing efforts for spreading drug usage among our young population have a reason to exist. Thus we have the impetus for perpetuating the production and sale of narcotics. If the government wanted to end the war on drugs, then simply de-criminalizing them and making them widely available through multiple outlets would put the drug cartels out of business almost overnight. Once you put the drug cartels out of business, their vast network of marketing agents have no purpose and will no longer have reason to interest future generations in the purchase of controlled narcotics. I think the public at-large is, for the most part, aware of the negative effects that narcotics have upon people. Public opinion is moving away from favoring the behavior of the drug culture. There is little need for government to dictate moral code in this matter. A shocking fact is that legal prescription drugs cause more illness and death than illegal controlled substances. That is, if you don’t count the deaths caused as a direct result of government agents acting in the war on drugs. Another shocking fact is that there are more deaths due to automobile accidents than from these illicit drugs. But why don’t they ban automobiles? It is a matter of economics: government has learned that a populous with mobility earns a higher taxable income than a populous without mobility. How about the environment? Now here is another hotly debated issue. And, entire industries have been born on the junk science that supports public opinion on environmental issues. It is true that man’s existence is detrimental to the natural state of the environment. There is only one real solution to that problem: reduce the population. However, this runs counter to the goal of any government. Since government power relies on having large populations to support it, then when the public becomes concerned over the environment, other scapegoat issues must be found. Inevitably, the solutions to these issues always result in the production of additional revenue streams for government and for industries that lobby government for favoritism. Most of us are familiar with motor vehicle emissions testing and its attendant fees and ever tightening standards. The vehicle repair shops make additional money off these unnecessary repairs to bring vehicles into compliance with emissions rules. In addition, sales of new vehicles are driven because the cost of repairing older vehicles is artificially set at high values. Now here is one irony: the invention of the catalytic converter, a device which is supposed to burn off any partially unburned fuel residues in auto exhaust fumes. While it is effective at reducing solid particulates, it, like many prescription drugs, as untold side effects. One of these unpleasant side effects is the release the chemical gas H2SO4. This is a substance which rises up to our upper atmosphere and comes down in the form of acid rain. The acid rain effects the ability to plant life to absorb certain essential trace minerals. For instance, vegetables are recently in the past 20 years, showing a deficiency in selenium. Farmers were forced to figure this out recently when their cattle began to have an outbreak of cancer. Once again, due to the profit motive of the farming industry, it was necessary to accurately identify the cause of this cancer outbreak. The result was that farmers found it necessary to add selenium supplements to the cattle feed, since the corn alone no longer contained this trace mineral which is so essential in fighting off cancer. Meanwhile, the public at-large is being kept in the dark about the recent rise in cancer in humans. Now we have the American Cancer Society, which takes in millions of dollars in donations every year, working on chasing after that elusive treatment for a problem that was partially created back in the 1970s by government mandate on behalf of the environmentalists. Such foolhardy government intervention has cost the American public untold amounts of money, loss of time and health. I submit to you that it is a false brand of patriotism (and an insult to our Founding Fathers and our Constitution) to allow this situation to continue. The latest new attack on individuals by the environmentalists in the Northeast is an attack on in-ground residential oil tanks. During a time when the oil industry manufactured a phony oil shortage as a direct form of poetic justice for President Nixon’s wage and price controls, many homeowners acted wisely and installed large underground oil storage tanks and began to stockpile fuel oil. Recently, there is talk in state government about the passage of another law mandating that homeowners in possession of such tanks should be forced to remove them at the homeowner’s expense. This cost would be on the average of 4000 to ten thousand dollars. The cost of disposing of any oil contained in tanks to be removed will be about 50 cents per gallon. The alleged justification for this gross violation of private property rights? Environmentalists are now claiming that underground oil tanks can leak into the aquifer and pollute our water supply over great distances. There are two glaring flaws with this claim: one is they assume that all oil tanks leak. This is simply untrue. Metal, which is in contact with oil, does not rust or corrode. I have spoken with a number of individuals who are in the business of removing oil tanks from the ground. One such individual has told me that in 20 years of this type of work, he has only seen one oil tank that actually leaked. It was explained to me that if oil tank is properly installed, it can last without leaking nearly indefinitely. The one case where an oil tank actually did leak was a situation where the tank was improperly installed such that its side was gouged by jagged rocks. Proper installations involve lowering the tank into a bed of sand which protects the tank from damage which later results in corrosion and rust. The second glaring flaw in the attack on in ground oil tanks is that, regardless of whether the tank leaks slightly or not, any small seepage from such a leak will not travel very far from the origin of the tank. Then here is the irony: when the town maintains the public roadways, what do they put down on the road surface in quantities of hundreds of thousands of gallons? Oil. Crude or re-claimed oil. While state government worries about a few ounces of oil per year leaching from homeowners’ underground tanks, state and local road construction crews are dumping thousands of gallons of the substance onto the ground everywhere! To quote a recent pop song from the 1980s, “who’s zoomin’ who?” While we’re on the issue of environmental regulations, how about recycling? Imagine this: in an increasing number of communities, it is now mandatory to wash thoroughly, your garbage before you dispose of it. The ludicrousness of this would have the average American laughing ten to twenty years ago, but it is taken seriously today. What happened to the days when the $30-$40 per month you pay for trash pickup actually resulted in the garbage collectors doing their job? Now we as citizens are to assist them in their work by pre-sorting and washing “recyclable” items that we dispose of. And we still pay outrageous monthly pickup fees. What’s the matter with people? The average American spends at least 8 hours a day on the job, 2.5 hours commuting to and from that job, and several more hours fulfilling the various administrative, maintenance and family business issues involved in daily life. Short of time and energy, the citizen is now being asked to work for the garbage men. Absurd. And more absurd is the irony of increased energy wasted to wash all that garbage individually, instead of at some central plant where it could be done for a fraction of the cost. The electricity to pump the water that is used to wash out those bottles has a specific price in terms of pollution that is produced. So recycling and washing our garbage before throwing it in the garbage is all rather political “feel good” behavior for our self-agrandizement as a society. Returning to the general issue of crime, it is not the fault of guns and gun manufacturers. We have too many gun laws already. We do not need additional gun laws. We simply need to enforce the laws that we do have. Hardly a day goes by when some wacky anti-gun nut doesn’t come up with some new idea for an ordinance to prevent gun owners from exercising their duly recognized second amendment rights. Some municipalities have gone so far as to outlaw the discharge of firearms on one’s own property! This is a roundabout way of outlawing guns without a direct technical attack on the second amendment. The notion here is that if you can’t outlaw them, then you can outlaw the use of them. The effect is the same: a complete prohibition on deriving the benefits of gun ownership. We live in a nation that is so bored with freedom that it continually engages in the sport of destroying that freedom in the public interest. Pragmatism is at work every day on this front. Any group of short-sighted people who don’t like what another group or individual is doing can petition the government for action against those parties. This is what we’re seeing with the case against Microsoft and with the case against gun manufacturers and even cigarette manufacturers. What they forget, is that the so-called victims of the these corporate enterprises willingly bought their products. The software buyers did so because of the open standard that Microsoft provided. The gun owners because of the safety and security and the need to hunt for food that the gun manufacturers provided a solution for. And the smokers who had an emotional need to take a drag on a cigarette, that the tobacco industry has filled. While I don’t necessarily endorse the goals and purposes of these industries, I do believe that it is immoral to interfere with the personal choices of those who wish to utilize these products, whether it be to their personal benefit or to their destruction. Free persons have the right of personal choice, including the right to choose suicide. A major underlying cause for the denial of human rights is the philosophical premise that the individual is not sovereign; that the state knows best and that the state owns the physical body of the individual. This is what socialism is about. You, your children, your property and even to some extent what you’re allowed to think and believe are either the property of, or controlled by, the state. It is the notion that every man is his brother’s keeper, which justifies the act of taxation. As with every good intent turned bad, each new law, brought about under the guise of public good, knows no limits to its intrusive existence on the lives of the individuals which it affects. The mere principal of taxation opens the door to slavery. We may have abolished one form of slavery in the late 1800s, but we have brought about a broader more sinister form of economic slavery which affects every man, woman and child in America today: the system of taxation. Taxation, by its very nature, removes the citizen’s right to say no. Herein lies the danger of taxation, a perilous condition where a government holds a gun to the very citizens that government is bound by Constitution to protect, and can extract, without limit, taxes from those individuals, resulting in property confiscation when the tax rate exceeds the individual’s ability to pay. A system of taxation is a self perpetuating vicious cycle where bureaucracy is needed to manage the tax collection, and more taxes need to be collected to support the bureaucracy. Such easy money promotes the frivolous use of tax funds on new, varying social projects which are foisted upon the public by using the news media as a tool for social engineering to convince the public they need the next wonderful new government program. Furthermore, our school systems have become the breeding ground for socialism. While the Constitution may be clearly written as to proscribe such collectivist as activities, the new left will go so far as to alter the definitions of words in human language so as to change the meaning of our Constitution without technically violating it. The important point to remember is that taxation removes the power of the people to control government and invert this so that government now has the power to control people. Once this happens, there is little hope for freedom in such a nation. That stage has come about some 60 years ago. So I am afraid, that without a bloody revolution, we Americans will not be able to enjoy freedom ever again. But, as with all governments and tyrannies throughout history, the rise and fall is cyclic and inevitable. The unfortunate aspect of this is that the process IS cyclic– it seems that people do not learn from history because they continuously make the same poor choices over and over again. My thoughts on the military draft: it is a gross contradiction in principal to take one’s freedom away in the cause of freedom. Again, we have the doctrine of every man is his brothers keeper– the doctrine of self sacrifice for the sake of others. This is a deadly contradiction. The ability to easily make war because of government has easy access to military personnel is a danger only paralleled by the similar principal behind taxation: control is removed from the people and placed in the hands of the government. When you have a military draft, there is little to stop governments from engaging in war to serve the interests of private groups, such as the oil industry. America has had a consistent policy of engaging in military skirmishes while publicly proclaiming that is our interest in protecting human rights abroad. What good as protecting human rights abroad when we’re violating the human rights of our own citizens, whom it is our government’s primary obligation to protect? Ultimately, several years down the road, the true intents of these small military engagements often surface, and they are often strategic economic wars intended to serve the economic needs of big corporations. Readers of this WebSite can probably easily ascertain my views on radio communications and the right to exercise constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. So I’ll say a few brief things about this topic: the notion of freedom of speech is meaningless when no one is able to hear that speech. No act should be illegal unless the carrying out of that at violates rights of other individuals. Therefore the act of exercising one’s mind in the creation of a broadcast facility and the responsible use thereof, is not a crime. On the other hand, the willful violation of the right of expression by individuals, as guaranteed by our Constitution, is criminal. The federal government has engaged in this crime called the doctrine of prior restraint or prohibition. Prohibition, as I have witnessed all through the 1920s and early 1930’s, did not result in sobriety or an improvement in the modesty of society as a whole. On the contrary, it resulted in the creation of an excuse for the government to engage on blatant violation of the fourth amendment by giving it an excuse to engage in acts of violence and wanton destruction of property of individuals. There was nothing inherently evil about the distillation of alcohol from fermenting grapes. Again, it was a case of knee-jerk reaction by a few politicians, at the occasional harmless display of drunkenness outside of saloons. The result, like the war on drugs, has been the creation of crime and many acts of violence on the part of taxpayer funded government agencies. And as taxes increase, isn’t it interesting how the size and terrible power of government increases too? Those who have read my words before, will realize that the only proper status of airwaves is like that of the discovery of a tangible natural resource, such as land. Ownership of an untapped natural resources is the right of those who applied the brain power to make that otherwise useless resource, in this case the spectrum, into a useful and valuable quantity. It becomes private property. The government has no business in regulating private property. Access to the airwaves becomes a matter of being first come first served. While some may argue that this is unfair, how is it any different than the current system we have today? The only difference today is that we have a system that is so financially bloated that it must support itself by prostitution to the lowest common denominator: the lust for maximum profit at the expense of morality and at the expense of the individual. There are scientific formulas for profit maximization, and these formulas have had consistent results, which we perceive as the homogenization of program content broadcast on the airwaves. Instead of becoming a medium for individualism and diverse ideas, thanks to the governments unconstitutional involvement in private affairs of business, such business is forced to maximize profits because of the artificially imposed high costs of running a radio station in our highly regulated economic environment. I have engaged in arguments time and again with people from the radio industry proclaiming that you cannot run a radio station for just a few hundred dollars a month. This is evidence that bureaucratic thinking is so heavily entrenched in these individuals that they cannot see the reality of the situation. A radio transmitter is an electronic appliance like any other electronic appliance: it uses a fixed amount of electricity, has a certain amount of required upkeep and maintenance, and has a certain purchase price or cost of construction. Yet, through government regulation, a falsely inflated market value can be attached to the physical facility of a radio station. While the physical facility might have 50,000 dollars worth of equipment, the “market” might have a value of 80 million dollars. Now I don’t resent that people are able to make a lot of money with radio. There’s nothing wrong with making a good honest living by providing service to others. What I object to it is that this system is run like a private club, something akin to organized crime clubs in which the entrants must conform to certain skewed policies, as well as be capable of paying astronomical amounts of money by which to gain membership. The whole system is a political shell game in which prospective entrants try to buy favor by kowtowing to the demands of the agency that dole’s out the spectrum. This is not a healthy way to have laissez-fair capitalism. When the government denies a natural right to the people, it sets up a condition by which crime can be invented. It seems however, that this is a desirable condition for the government, as it provides government with a sustainable reason for existence, at least so far as it can publicly claim in which many of the population accept. I have been slowly reaching the conclusion that all crime is the result of society denying the natural needs both emotional and physical, of individuals. The few individuals who do not follow the conventions set forth by society are labeled as criminals and often physically separated from the rest of society and stored in buildings called prisons. It is no great secret that America has the greatest percentage of incarcerated citizens of any nation in the world. In fact, the prison industry has become big business of late. While we set back at home and complain about how we buy products built by Chinese slave laborers, here on the other side of the Pacific Ocean we are engaged in the worst form of hypocrisy. A growing percentage of our prison population is being used for slave labor. Does anyone remember of the “chain gangs”? Well today a more industrial form of slave labor is emerging in our prison system: that of commercial manufacturing. Prisoners are being forced to work for wages on the order of 50 cents a day so that products can be manufactured for use by the government. It used to be just the manufacture all of license plates but now it is expanding to furniture and other things that can be made with an un-educated prison slave labor. The privatization of the prison system creates further economic encouragement to incarcerate increasing numbers of individuals regardless of their crimes. A large prison population translates into a large industrial manufacturing workforce– a workforce that is cheaper than any workforce available on the free market. Meanwhile, the taxpayer is paying for all of this. A similar parallel exists with the forfeiture laws. Sweeping changes to the law have enabled so-called law enforcement officials to freely confiscate private property under the guise of association with a criminal act. And due to the fact that the government now defines many harmless activities as criminal, that opens the doorway to the wholesale theft of millions of dollars worth of private property by government every month. This is a dreadfully dangerous trend, and if it is not stopped, will eventually lead to the destruction of traditional American values totally. Have you noticed recently the sudden emergence of roadside motor vehicle stops without probable cause? While masquerading under the guise of checking for motor vehicle emissions stickers and seat belt usage (another case where we are being told that we are not responsible adults able to decide whether or not we wish to wear seat belts), these motor vehicle stops provide the police with an excuse to search the vehicle without a warrant or without any probable cause. The symptoms are already very apparent. The rights of the individual have been subverted and we are rapidly becoming a police state. The harboring of an adversary relationship between citizens and government is probably intentional. This leads to social unrest eventually, the very condition and excuse that government looks for to justify further expansion and invasion into our privacy. America has cancer. And that cancer has metastasized. Like the once strong and great oak tree, aged and glorious, but rotted from the inside slowly over the decades, the outward signs of decay have been well concealed for most of this time. At some point, in the slightest wind, that oak tree, undermined by the internal decay within its trunk, will collapse and fall to the earth. America, like that oak tree, is on the path to a similar fate. The people at-large are ignorant to this, and, being the good stimulus response creatures that they are, will only react when it is too late– when the effects of this internal decay reach them on a daily and very personal level. By then it will be too late. I can only be thankful that I will not likely be around to witness the day when this ultimate collapse occurs. The rest of you will have to deal with this hell created by your own ambivalence– your own unwillingness to believe in the existence of the problem and to take the effort to deal with the problem.

 

Valuable Insight from an ex-Muslim

 

A number of people of the Socialist-Liberal view seem to find the notion that Islam is a violent religion to be preposterous, so the best sources of information to demonstrate that point are the writings of ex-Muslims who have an understanding of Islam from the inside.

One such individual is Bosch Fawstin, who has written a number of books on the matter.

In a recent Front Page Mag article, David Swindle interviews Bosch Fawstin on the topic in From Mohammed to Ayn Rand. Some pertinent quotes from the interview stand out as particularly interesting:

Hugh Fitzgerald is right in saying “the atmospherics of Islam” can affect even the least devout Muslim in a detrimental way. A strong thrust within Islam is to see any and all things outside of Islam as worthless, most particularly non-Muslims. When we did go to mosque there was never any real sense that something important was taking place. The majority of us who were involved in this pretense had no idea what to do, unless we followed the imam’s prayer moves (and many in attendance were fooling around anyway). “Islam” was the name of the thing that was held as ‘the good’ in my household, and it was that vagueness which helped keep it at bay. It was only when I started taking morality seriously that I realized Islam had nothing to offer me.

There is no “Political Islam” or “Totalitarian Islam” that is distinguishable from Islam itself. Islam is normatively political and totalitarian. We have evaded the true meaning of Islam in the name of respect for religion. But we cannot avoid the consequences of doing so. Mohammed was a Muslim and his religion was Islam; he was not an Islamist practicing Islamism. He was a Muslim who practiced Islam and engaged in its violent Jihad, forcing Islam into a world it failed to get into on merit. And any Muslim who is peace-loving and tolerant is by implication condemning their violent, intolerant “prophet” and the means by which their religion was spread. How Islam spread tells us exactly what Islam means. When the moral standard for an entire culture is a bad guy who crossed the line as a way of life, it explains why his most devout followers are the most violent among Muslims. We can try our best to stay clear of Islam, but Muslims have proven that they will never keep Islam to themselves unless they are forced to.

If 2,996 American politicians were murdered on 9/11, do you think Washington would have been interested in exonerating Islam and allowing this enemy to kill again? We all know the answer. Our politicians are so disconnected from the American people, that they now do everything but their job. If they can’t defend us, they’re good for nothing. They think that their job in this war is to win hearts and minds that already belong to Islam. And while they dispassionately wage a war on “terror”, not jihad, they allow the two greatest state sponsors of jihad terrorism, Saudi Arabia and Iran, to remain in business. For now, our government goes big on us and small on jihad, while telling us that we are not fighting a war against Islam, even though Islam is fighting a war against us.

Those who’ve sworn to defend us have decided that there are more important things to them than defending us. As I wrote in my introduction to ProPiganda, “Our leaders have decided that, while the protection of America is optional, the defense of Islam is absolute.” Our government has waged war the way the enemy wages peace and has never given the enemy a reason to end jihad. This enemy has been out for blood for over a thousand years.

But today, when Muslims are given the choice between Islam and freedom, they choose Islam. They did so in elections in Iraq, Afghanistan and “Palestine.” A “Palestinian” terrorist even thanked America for giving them the weapon of democracy after his terrorist group was voted in by those who celebrated 9/11. In any given culture, there is always a small minority of evil people. In the Islamic world, however, that small minority established Islamic rule and holds power to this day.

Women are considered a necessary evil in Islam since they are the only way to deliver male Muslims into the world. I was shocked as a teenager to see that the reaction to the birth of a girl in my family was the same as if someone had died. It was mainly Muslim women who responded this way, no doubt because they understood too well the mistreatment these girls likely would receive. For others, it could have been that Islam got to them so deeply that they really did believe women were just no damn good.

Well there you have it, straight from a former Muslim, who, when he discovered Ayn Rand’s writings, chose Reason over Faith. Now he is a formidable alley of freedom and an enemy of Islam and all the evil that it stands for.

Whom We’re Dealing With

 

If there is any doubt about the Islamic view with regard to Western civilization, watch this video by a Kuwaiti professor, who is supposedly a “moderate” Sunni:

Socialism in One Lesson

 

One day last year a Texas Political Science Professor was teaching his class about the failures of Socialism in world governments. A bright young student arose to challenge the Professor and insisted that Socialism does work in certain areas of the world and indeed is working now in the good ole US of A as well! The Professor said “Ok class if you all agree we will conducted a live experiment in the merits of Socialism, but you must all agree to accept the results of this experiment”. The class all agreed, they were very eager to precipitate in the Professor’s experiment; which was:

1. Quiz on Wednesday, Test on Friday, the grade will be on an average.

If the average score in the class was an A then everyone gets an A.

If the average score in the class was a B then everyone gets a B.

If the average score in the class was a C then everyone gets a C.

If the average score in the class was a D then everyone gets a D.

If the average score in the class was an F then everyone gets a F

2. This experiment in Socialism would last for one month.

The first grade on the Quiz was a B, so everyone in the class got a B. Some of the A students were complaining, but the C students were happy to get a B. The A students started to study less and complain more. The results of the Test on Friday was a C, now the A students were really complaining to the other students about studying and they were trying to encourage the C students to bring up their grades, but the C students did not respond. The next week the grades were a C and D, the former A students lost interest and did not bother to study because now there was no incentive for them to excel and the former C students were mad at the A students for not helping the C students with their studies, so the C students just quit studying. The result was that at the end of the month the whole class got a F. The Texas Professor said, “This is perfect example of how Socialism does not work and why Socialism fails people as a whole!”

Being Aware: The Threat of Islamic Fundamentalism

 

 

Can Islam rule America one day?

 

Before you laugh, consider Fitna, a 2008 short film by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders. The Netherlands is in the process of systematic takeover by Islamic fundamentalists. This process is being abetted by a Dutch court that seems frightened by the power that Islam holds already in its nation, and seems to be ruling in a manner that it thinks will protect its judges from death threats by Islamic fundamentalists.

You see, Geert Wilders is being sentenced to prison for making a film which illustrates the violent nature of Islam, using direct quotes from the Koran.

The film in question, Fitna, may be viewed HERE.

Information about this film and it’s author are on Wikipedia.

In a bit of irony, Geert Wilders wants to ban the Koran from the Netherlands. So in a way, he’s guilty of the same kind of censorship that Islam wants to impose on Europe and then the United States.

Now that we have a president in the White House whose allegiance we can’t be certain of (not that we could be certain of the last four presidents either) the danger of this kind of takeover in America is formidable.

 

If America Had No Enemies

This seems a novel notion, but the founders’ approach served America well; de Tocquville described America’s military preparedness as simply pitiful, but observed that Americans lived without fear of their enemies, because they had none.

The following quoted from a post on mises.org:

Besides, I also think that, nearly every time the “pro-freedom” side takes on the forces of tyranny on the killing fields, they will inevitably have to make alliances with questionable parties. The U.S., for example, had to fight alongside Stalin to eradicate Hitler. Then, we had to support puppet government in Africa, Central America, and elsewhere to protect against the Communists; then, the Islamic mujahadeen we had supported became our enemies in the Middle East. We can expect this cycle, the cycle of cleaning up the political mess from the last war by starting another one, will continue indefinitely.

Every time soldier come home from war, many of them are in terrible health, physically and psychologically. We ruin the lives of our own troops by wasting their efforts in ill-conceived, unnecessary wars.

Now can you understand why we shouldn’t send our young men and women into foreign countries where they don’t need to be?

As the above suggests, the US would not need so large a military today if it had not stuck its nose into foreign nations’ affairs. However, during WWII, with the Nazis spreading their influence all over Europe, what might have happened if we did not enter that war? Would Europe today be under Nazism? Would Hitler and his descendants threatened the US with invasion? If so, then it was inevitable that the US take a position in the war. Defending our freedom entails often making enemies.

A Russian’s Advice on the US Collapse

 

 

It seems that the Russians are hard at work trying to imbue hopelessness in the American people.

Let the following excerpts serve not as instructions on what to do in a collapse, but as a warning for what we’re headed for if we don’t wake the people en masse and stop this social rot right in its tracks now.

Here are excerpts from a speech given by a Russian software engineer, now living in the US. The whole sordid affair can be read HERE. The talk was in San Francisco, about a week ago, that bastian of rational thinking and careful social planning:

Social Collapse Best Practices by Dmitry Orlov If there is one thing that I would like to claim as my own, it is the comparative theory of superpower collapse. For now, it remains just a theory, although it is currently being quite thoroughly tested. The theory states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have collapsed for the same reasons, namely: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt. …. Other factors, such as the inability to provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens, or a systemically corrupt political system incapable of reform, are certainly not helpful, but they do not automatically lead to collapse, because they do not put the country on a collision course with reality. … …I traveled widely around the country, and so I also have a very good understanding of the US with all of its quirks and idiosyncrasies. I traveled back to Russia in 1989, when things there still seemed more or less in line with the Soviet norm, and again in 1990, when the economy was at a standstill, and big changes were clearly on the way. I went back there 3 more times in the 1990s, and observed the various stages of Soviet collapse first-hand. By the mid-1990s I started to see Soviet/American Superpowerdom as a sort of disease that strives for world dominance but in effect eviscerates its host country, eventually leaving behind an empty shell: an impoverished population, an economy in ruins, a legacy of social problems, and a tremendous burden of debt. The symmetries between the two global superpowers were then already too numerous to mention, and they have been growing more obvious ever since. … When the Soviet system went away, many people lost their jobs, everyone lost their savings, wages and pensions were held back for months, their value was wiped out by hyperinflation, there shortages of food, gasoline, medicine, consumer goods, there was a large increase in crime and violence, and yet Russian society did not collapse. … How was that possible? It turns out that many aspects of the Soviet system were paradoxically resilient in the face of system-wide collapse, many institutions continued to function, and the living arrangement was such that people did not lose access to food, shelter or transportation, and could survive even without an income. The Soviet economic system failed to thrive, and the Communist experiment at constructing a worker’s paradise on earth was, in the end, a failure. But as a side effect it inadvertently achieved a high level of collapse-preparedness. In comparison, the American system could produce significantly better results, for time, but at the cost of creating and perpetuating a living arrangement that is very fragile, and not at all capable of holding together through the inevitable crash. Even after the Soviet economy evaporated and the government largely shut down, Russians still had plenty left for them to work with. And so there is a wealth of useful information and insight that we can extract from the Russian experience, which we can then turn around and put to good use in helping us improvise a new living arrangement here in the United States – one that is more likely to be survivable.

 

Some of his points are valid: the fact that the US is on a collision course with reality, th effects of collapse, etc. All historically demonstrable.

What we need are examples of things that have been shown to work in the strange, unfamiliar, post-collapse environment that we are all likely to have to confront. Stuart Brand proposed the title for the talk – “Social Collapse Best Practices” – and I thought that it was an excellent idea. … Here is the key insight: you might think that when collapse happens, nothing works. That’s just not the case. The old ways of doing things don’t work any more, the old assumptions are all invalidated, conventional goals and measures of success become irrelevant. But a different set of goals, techniques, and measures of success can be brought to bear immediately, and the sooner the better. But enough generalities, let’s go through some specifics. We’ll start with some generalities, and, as you will see, it will all become very, very specific rather quickly. …prior to collapse having high inventory in a business is bad, because the businesses have to store it and finance it, so they try to have just-in-time inventory. After collapse, high inventory turns out to be very useful, because they can barter it for the things they need, and they can’t easily get more because they don’t have any credit. Prior to collapse, it’s good for a business to have the right level of staffing and an efficient organization… … First: growth, of course! Getting the economy going. We learned nothing from the last huge spike in commodity prices, so let’s just try it again. That calls for economic stimulus, a.k.a. printing money. Let’s see how high the prices go up this time. Maybe this time around we will achieve hyperinflation. Second: Stabilizing financial institutions: getting banks lending – that’s important too. You see, we are just not in enough debt yet, that’s our problem. We need more debt, and quickly! Third: jobs! We need to create jobs. Low-wage jobs, of course, to replace all the high-wage manufacturing jobs we’ve been shedding for decades now, and replacing them with low-wage service sector jobs, mainly ones without any job security or benefits. Right now, a lot of people could slow down the rate at which they are sinking further into debt if they quit their jobs. That is, their job is a net loss for them as individuals as well as for the economy as a whole. But, of course, we need much more of that, and quickly! …

He seems to be right about the above. He’s basically outlining Obama’s plans for the US economy. A dismal truth.

Right now the Washington economic stimulus team is putting on their Scuba gear and diving down to the engine room to try to invent a way to get a diesel engine to run on seawater. They spoke of change, but in reality they are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don’t have any idea what to do next. So, what is there for them to do? Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” What should their realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms. Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. When it comes to supplying these survival necessities, the Soviet example offers many valuable lessons. As I already mentioned, in a collapse many economic negatives become positives, and vice versa. Let us consider each one of these in turn. The Soviet agricultural sector was plagued by consistent underperformance. In many ways, this was the legacy of the disastrous collectivization experiment carried out in the 1930s, which destroyed many of the more prosperous farming households and herded people into collective farms. Collectivization undermined the ancient village-based agricultural traditions that had made pre-revolutionary Russia a well-fed place that was also the breadbasket of Western Europe. A great deal of further damage was caused by the introduction of industrial agriculture. The heavy farm machinery alternately compacted and tore up the topsoil while dosing it with chemicals, depleting it and killing the biota. Eventually, the Soviet government had to turn to importing grain from countries hostile to its interests – United States and Canada – and eventually expanded this to include other foodstuffs. The USSR experienced a permanent shortage of meat and other high-protein foods, and much of the imported grain was used to raise livestock to try to address this problem. … In the United States, the agricultural system is heavily industrialized, and relies on inputs such as diesel, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and, perhaps most importantly, financing. In the current financial climate, the farmers’ access to financing is not at all assured. This agricultural system is efficient, but only if you regard fossil fuel energy as free. In fact, it is a way to transform fossil fuel energy into food with a bit of help from sunlight, to the tune of 10 calories of fossil fuel energy being embodied in each calorie that is consumed as food. The food distribution system makes heavy use of refrigerated diesel trucks, transforming food over hundreds of miles to resupply supermarkets. The food pipeline is long and thin, and it takes only a couple of days of interruptions for supermarket shelves to be stripped bare. Many people live in places that are not within walking distance of stores, not served by public transportation, and will be cut off from food sources once they are no longer able to drive. Besides the supermarket chains, much of the nation’s nutrition needs are being met by an assortment of fast food joints and convenience stores. In fact, in many of the less fashionable parts of cities and towns, fast food and convenience store food is all that is available. In the near future, this trend is likely to extend to the more prosperous parts of town and the suburbs. Fast food outfits such as McDonalds have more ways to cut costs, and so may prove a bit more resilient in the face of economic collapse than supermarket chains, but they are no substitute for food security, because they too depend industrial agribusiness. Their food inputs, such as high-fructose corn syrup, genetically modified potatoes, various soy-based fillers, factory-farmed beef, pork and chicken, and so forth, are derived from oil, two-thirds of which is imported, as well as fertilizer made from natural gas. They may be able to stay in business longer, supplying food-that-isn’t-really-food, but eventually they will run out of inputs along with the rest of the supply chain.

 

I particularly like the reference to Washing putting on scuba gear and trying to figure out how to make a diesel engine run on seawater. It’s a good analogy to what the US government stimulus plan really is.

The part about industrialized agriculture is not so brilliant. Do we really want to go back to subsistence farming? Granted, ‘industrial’ agriculture under Communism is not very efficient, nor earth-friendly, but industrial agriculture by a rational farmer, who is not bound by irrational federal laws, is what brings a nation out of starvation and into prosperity, allowing the division of labor to make room for great minds to achieve
inventions that lead to great wealth creation and a standard of living that increases with each innovation.

In the next paragraph, he talks about the high fuel-to-food production ratio. It’s a fact of the business, which could be mitigated to some extent by further innovation. The rest is simply a statement of the obvious, about fast food.

Can we think of any ways to avoid this dismal scenario? The Russian example may give us a clue. Many Russian families could gauge how fast the economy was crashing, and, based on that, decide how many rows of potatoes to plant. Could we perhaps do something similar? There is already a healthy gardening movement in the United States; can it be scaled up? The trick is to make small patches of farmland available for non-mechanical cultivation by individuals and families, in increments as small as 1000 square feet. The ideal spots would be fertile bits of land with access to rivers and streams for irrigation. Provisions would have to be made for campsites and for transportation, allowing people to undertake seasonal migrations out to the land to grow food during the growing season, and haul the produce back to the population centers after taking in the harvest. An even simpler approach has been successfully used in Cuba: converting urban parking lots and other empty bits of land to raised-bed agriculture. Instead of continually trucking in vegetables and other food, it is much easier to truck in soil, compost, and mulch just once a season. Raised highways can be closed to traffic (since there is unlikely to be much traffic in any case) and used to catch rainwater for irrigation. Rooftops and balconies can be used for hothouses, henhouses, and a variety of other agricultural uses. How difficult would this be to organize? Well, Cubans were actually helped by their government, but the Russians managed to do it in more or less in spite of the Soviet bureaucrats, and so we might be able to do it in spite of the American ones. The government could theoretically head up such an effort, purely hypothetically speaking, of course, because I see no evidence that such an effort is being considered. For our fearless national leaders, such initiatives are too low-level: if they stimulate the economy and get the banks lending again, the potatoes will simply grow themselves. All they need to do is print some more money, right? Moving on to shelter. Again, let’s look at how the Russians managed to muddle through. In the Soviet Union, people did not own their place of residence. Everyone was assigned a place to live, which was recorded in a person’s internal passport. People could not be dislodged from their place of residence for as long as they drew oxygen. Since most people in Russia live in cities, the place of residence was usually an apartment, or a room in a communal apartment, with shared bathroom and kitchen. There was a permanent housing shortage, and so people often doubled up, with three generations living together. The apartments were often crowded, sometimes bordering on squalid. If people wanted to move, they had to find somebody else who wanted to move, who would want to exchange rooms or apartments with them. There were always long waiting lists for apartments, and children often grew up, got married, and had children before receiving a place of their own. These all seem like negatives, but consider the flip side of all this: the high population density made this living arrangement quite affordable. With several generations living together, families were on hand to help each other. Grandparents provided day care, freeing up their children’s time to do other things. The apartment buildings were always built near public transportation, so they did not have to rely on private cars to get around. Apartment buildings are relatively cheap to heat, and municipal services easy to provide and maintain because of the short runs of pipe and cable. Perhaps most importantly, after the economy collapsed, people lost their savings, many people lost their jobs, even those that still had jobs often did not get paid for months, and when they were the value of their wages was destroyed by hyperinflation, but there were no foreclosures, no evictions, municipal services such as heat, water, and sometimes even hot water continued to be provided, and everyone had their families close by. Also, because it was so difficult to relocate, people generally stayed in one place for generations, and so they tended to know all the people around them. After the economic collapse, there was a large spike in the crime rate, which made it very helpful to be surrounded by people who weren’t strangers, and who could keep an eye on things. Lastly, in an interesting twist, the Soviet housing arrangement delivered an amazing final windfall: in the 1990s all of these apartments were privatized, and the people who lived in them suddenly became owners of some very valuable real estate, free and clear.

 

Switching back to the situation in the US: in recent months, many people here have reconciled themselves to the idea that their house is not an ATM machine, nor is it a nest egg. They already know that they will not be able to comfortably retire by selling it, or get rich by fixing it up and flipping it, and quite a few people have acquiesced to the fact that real estate prices are going to continue heading lower. The question is, How much lower? A lot of people still think that there must be a lower limit, a “realistic” price. This thought is connected to the notion that housing is a necessity. After all, everybody needs a place to live. Well, it is certainly true that some sort of shelter is a necessity, be it an apartment, or a dorm room, a bunk in a barrack, a boat, a camper, or a tent, a teepee, a wigwam, a shipping container… The list is virtually endless. But there is no reason at all to think that a suburban single-family house is in any sense a requirement. It is little more than a cultural preference, and a very shortsighted one at that. Most suburban houses are expensive to heat and cool, inaccessible by public transportation, expensive to hook up to public utilities because of the long runs of pipe and cable, and require a great deal of additional public expenditure on road, bridge and highway maintenance, school buses, traffic enforcement, and other nonsense. They often take up what was once valuable agricultural land. They promote a car-centric culture that is destructive of urban environments, causing a proliferation of dead downtowns. Many families that live in suburban houses can no longer afford to live in them, and expect others to bail them out. As this living arrangement becomes unaffordable for all concerned, it will also become unlivable. Municipalities and public utilities will not have the funds to lavish on sewer, water, electricity, road and bridge repair, and police. Without cheap and plentiful gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil, many suburban dwellings will become both inaccessible and unlivable. The inevitable result will be a mass migration of suburban refugees toward the more survivable, more densely settled towns and cities. The luckier ones will find friends or family to stay with; for the rest, it would be very helpful to improvise some solution. One obvious answer is to repurpose the ever-plentiful vacant office buildings for residential use. Converting offices to dormitories is quite straightforward. Many of them already have kitchens and bathrooms, plenty of partitions and other furniture, and all they are really missing is beds. Putting in beds is just not that difficult. The new, subsistence economy is unlikely to generate the large surpluses that are necessary for sustaining the current large population of office plankton. The businesses that once occupied these offices are not coming back, so we might as well find new and better uses for them. Another category of real estate that is likely to go unused and that can be repurposed for new communities is college campuses. The American 4-year college is an institution of dubious merit. It exists because American public schools fail to teach in 12 years what Russian public schools manage to teach in 8. As fewer and fewer people become able to afford college, which is likely to happen, because meager career prospects after graduation will make them bad risks for student loans, perhaps this will provide the impetus to do something about the public education system. One idea would be to scrap it, then start small, but eventually build something a bit more on par with world standards. College campuses make perfect community centers: there are dormitories for newcomers, fraternities and sororities for the more settled residents, and plenty of grand public buildings that can be put to a variety of uses. A college campus normally contains the usual wasteland of mowed turf that can be repurposed to grow food, or, at the very least, hay, and to graze cattle. Perhaps some enlightened administrators, trustees and faculty members will fall upon this idea once they see admissions flat-lining and endowments dropping to zero, without any need for government involvement. So here we have a ray of hope, don’t we. Moving on to transportation. Here, we need to make sure that people don’t get stranded in places that are not survivable. Then we have to provide for seasonal migrations to places where people can grow, catch, or gather their own food, and then back to places where they can survive the winter without freezing to death or going stir-crazy from cabin fever. Lastly, some amount of freight will have to be moved, to transport food to population centers, as well as enough coal and firewood to keep the pipes from freezing in the remaining habitable dwellings.

 

Whoa! He’s hoping to make the USA lifestyle become just like the post-Soviet collapse style of meager existence! The fact is, we don’t have to live this way. Unless we continue to insist on being irrational and demanding government to be the source of our sustenance and even our mental inspiration.

The rest is like a ‘Mad Max’ world that he’s describing. We, as the once greatest society on earth, must not resign ourselves to this fate.

All of this is going to be a bit of a challenge, because it all hinges on the availability of transportation fuels, and it seems very probable that transportation fuels will be both too expensive and in short supply before too long. From about 2005 and until the middle of 2008 the global oil has been holding steady, unable to grow materially beyond a level that has been characterized as a “bumpy plateau.” An all-time record was set in 2005, and then, after a period of record-high oil prices, again only in 2008. Then, as the financial collapse gathered speed, oil and other commodity prices crashed, along with oil production. More recently, the oil markets have come to rest on an altogether different “bumpy plateau”: the oil prices are bumping along at around $40 a barrel and can’t seem to go any lower. It would appear that oil production costs have risen to a point where it does not make economic sense to sell oil at below this price. Now, $40 a barrel is a good price for US consumers at the moment, but there is hyperinflation on the horizon, thanks to the money-printing extravaganza currently underway in Washington, and $40 could easily become $400 and then $4000 a barrel, swiftly pricing US consumers out of the international oil market. On top of that, exporting countries would balk at the idea of trading their oil for an increasingly worthless currency, and would start insisting on payment in kind – in some sort of tangible export commodity, which the US, in its current economic state, would be hard-pressed to provide in any great quantity. Domestic oil production is in permanent decline, and can provide only about a third of current needs. This is still quite a lot of oil, but it will be very difficult to avoid the knock-on effects of widespread oil shortages. There will be widespread hoarding, quite a lot of gasoline will simply evaporate into the atmosphere, vented from various jerricans and improvised storage containers, the rest will disappear into the black market, and much fuel will be wasted driving around looking for someone willing to part with a bit of gas that’s needed for some small but critical mission.

…

So, what can we do to get our little critical missions accomplished in spite of chronic fuel shortages? The most obvious idea, of course, is to not use any fuel. Bicycles, and cargo bikes in particular, are an excellent adaptation. Sailboats are a good idea too: not only do they hold large amounts of cargo, but they can cover huge distances, all without the use of fossil fuels. Of course, they are restricted to the coastlines and the navigable waterways. They will be hampered by the lack of dredging due to the inevitable budget shortfalls, and by bridges that refuse to open, again, due to lack of maintenance funds, but here ancient maritime techniques and improvisations can be brought to bear to solve such problems, all very low-tech and reasonably priced. Of course, cars and trucks will not disappear entirely. Here, again, some reasonable adaptations can be brought to bear. In my book, I advocated banning the sale of new cars, as was done in the US during World War II. The benefits are numerous. First, older cars are overall more energy-efficient than new cars, because the massive amount of energy that went into manufacturing them is more highly amortized. Second, large energy savings accrue from the shutdown of an entire industry devoted to designing, building, marketing, and financing new cars. Third, older cars require more maintenance, reinvigorating the local economy at the expense of mainly foreign car manufacturers, and helping reduce the trade deficit. Fourth, this will create a shortage of cars, translating automatically into fewer, shorter car trips, higher passenger occupancy per trip, and more bicycling and use of public transportation, saving even more energy. Lastly, this would allow the car to be made obsolete on the about the same time scale as the oil industry that made it possible. We will run out of cars just as we run out of gas. Here we are, only a year or so later, and I am most heartened to see that the US auto industry has taken my advice and is in the process of shutting down. On the other hand, the government’s actions continue to disappoint. Instead of trying to solve problems, they would rather continue to create boondoggles. The latest one is the idea of subsidizing the sales of new cars. The idea of making cars more efficient by making more efficient cars is sheer folly. I can take any pick-up truck and increase its fuel efficiency one or two thousand percent just by breaking a few laws. First, you pack about a dozen people into the bed, standing shoulder to shoulder like sardines. Second, you drive about 25 mph, down the highway, because going any faster would waste fuel and wouldn’t be safe with so many people in the back. And there you are, per passenger fuel efficiency increased by a factor of 20 or so. I believe the Mexicans have done extensive research in this area, with excellent results.

 

Hello, post-2001 Argentina! Does he REALLY expect Americans to live like that? I think what he really wants to see is the return of the Stone Age.

…why not bring back the venerable institution of riding the rails by requiring rail freight companies to provide a few empty box cars for the hobos. …hobos are almost infinitely compressible, and can even ride on the roof if needed. One final transportation idea: start breeding donkeys. Horses are finicky and expensive, but donkeys can be very cost-effective and make good pack animals. My grandfather had a donkey while he was living in Tashkent in Central Asia during World War II. There was nothing much for the donkey to eat, but, as a member of the Communist Party, my grandfather had a subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and so that’s what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest any kind of cellulose, even when it’s loaded with communist propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street Journal.

If ever there was an anti-Capitalist, he must be it. Living as hobos on train cars? Breeding donkeys? Okay, the newspaper-as-food bit was funny, but overall, there is nothing funny about what he’s proposing here!

And so we come to the subject of security. Post-collapse Russia suffered from a serious crime wave. Ethnic mafias ran rampant, veterans who served in Afghanistan went into business for themselves, there were numerous contract killings, muggings, murders went unsolved left and right, and, in general, the place just wasn’t safe. .. One interesting observation is that once collapse occurs it becomes possible to rent a policeman, either for a special occasion, or generally just to follow someone around. It is even possible to hire a soldier or two, armed with AK-47s, to help you run various errands. Not only is it possible to do such things, it’s often a very good idea, especially if you happen to have something valuable that you don’t want to part with. If you can’t afford their services, then you should try to be friends with them, and to be helpful to them in various ways. Although their demands might seem exorbitant at times, it is still a good idea to do all you can to keep them on your side. For instance, they might at some point insist that you and your family move out to the garage so that they can live in your house. This may be upsetting at first, but then is it really such a good idea for you to live in a big house all by yourselves, with so many armed men running around. …

This is so absurd, it’s becoming hilarious! It isn’t even quite this bad in Argentina.

A couple of years ago I half-jokingly proposed a political solution to collapse mitigation, and formulated a platform for the so-called Collapse Party. I published it with the caveat that I didn’t think there was much of a chance of my proposals becoming part of the national agenda. Much to my surprise, I turned out to be wrong. For instance, I proposed that we stop making new cars, and, lo and behold, the auto industry shuts down. I also proposed that we start granting amnesties to prisoners, because the US has the world’s largest prison population, and will not be able to afford to keep so many people locked up. It is better to release prisoners gradually, over time, rather than in a single large general amnesty, the way Saddam Hussein did it right before the US invaded. And, lo and behold, many states are starting to implement my proposal. It looks like California in particular will be forced to release some 60 thousand of the 170 thousand people it keeps locked up. That is a good start. I also proposed that we dismantle all overseas military bases (there are over a thousand of them) and repatriate all the troops. … …. As municipalities run out of money, police protection will evaporate. But the police still have to eat, and will find ways to use their skills to good use on a freelance basis. Similarly, as military bases around the world are shut down, soldiers will return to a country that will be unable to reintegrate them into civilian life. Paroled prisoners will find themselves in much the same predicament. And so we will have former soldiers, former police, and former prisoners: a big happy family, with a few bad apples and some violent tendencies. The end result will be a country awash with various categories of armed men, most of them unemployed, and many of them borderline psychotic. The police in the United States are a troubled group. Many of them lose all touch with people who are not “on the force” and most of them develop an us-versus-them mentality. The soldiers returning from a tour of duty often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The paroled prisoners suffer from a variety of psychological ailments as well. All of them will sooner or later realize that their problems are not medical but rather political. This will make it impossible for society to continue to exercise control over them. All of them will be making good use of their weapons training and other professional skills to acquire whatever they need to survive. And the really important point to remember is that they will do these things whether or not anyone thinks it legal for them to do be doing them.

 

It isn’t happening quite like that or for the same reasons. Demand is down because people are in fear of losing their jobs. Industry is shutting down because government regulation has made it just about impossible to make a profit in the US.

Closing the prisons? My wife had an interesting solution: “Shoot all the prisoners.” At least that way you won’t have hardened drug criminals and gangs back on the streets.

We will probably have a lot of unemployed armed forces and domestic police, if the severity of the collapse is severe, but I don’t think that’s a realistic scenario, and not in America, which hasn’t quite yet lost all of its idealism.

Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. Security is very important. Maintaining order and public safety requires discipline, and maintaining discipline, for a lot of people, requires the threat of force. This means that people must be ready to come to each other’s defense, take responsibility for each other, and do what’s right. Right now, security is provided by a number of bloated, bureaucratic, ineffectual institutions, which inspire more anger and despondency than discipline, and dispense not so much violence as ill treatment. That is why we have the world’s highest prison population. They are supposedly there to protect people from each other, but in reality their mission is not even to provide security; it is to safeguard property, and those who own it. Once these institutions run out of resources, there will be a period of upheaval, but in the end people will be forced to learn to deal with each other face to face, and Justice will once again become a personal virtue rather than a federal department. I’ve covered what I think are basics, based on what I saw work and what I think might work reasonably well here. I assume that a lot of you are thinking that this is all quite far into the future, if in fact it ever gets that bad. You should certainly feel free to think that way. The danger there is that you will miss the opportunity to adapt to the new reality ahead of time, and then you will get trapped. As I see it, there is a choice to be made: you can accept the failure of the system now and change your course accordingly, or you can decide that you must try to stay the course, and then you will probably have to accept your own individual failure later. So how do you prepare? Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of high-powered, successful people about their various high-powered, successful associates. Usually, the story goes something like this: “My a. financial advisor, b. investment banker, or c. commanding officer has recently a. put all his money in gold, b. bought a log cabin up in the mountains, or c. built a bunker under his house stocked with six months of food and water. Is this normal?” And I tell them, yes, of course, that’s perfectly harmless. He’s just having a mid-collapse crisis. But that’s not really preparation. That’s just someone being colorful in an offbeat, countercultural sort of way. So, how do you prepare, really? Let’s go through a list of questions that people typically ask me, and I will try to briefly respond to each of them. OK, first question: How about all these financial boondoggles? What on earth is going on? People are losing their jobs left and right, and if we calculate unemployment the same way it was done during the Great Depression, instead of looking at the cooked numbers the government is trying to feed us now, then we are heading toward 20% unemployment. And is there any reason to think it’ll stop there? Do you happen to believe that prosperity is around the corner? Not only jobs and housing equity, but retirement savings are also evaporating. The federal government is broke, state governments are broke, some more than others, and the best they can do is print money, which will quickly lose value. So, how can we get the basics if we don’t have any money? How is that done? Good question. As I briefly mentioned, the basics are food, shelter, transportation, and security. Shelter poses a particularly interesting problem at the moment. It is still very much overpriced, with many people paying mortgages and rents that they can no longer afford while numerous properties stand vacant. The solution, of course, is to cut your losses and stop paying. But then you might soon have to relocate. That is OK, because, as I mentioned, there is no shortage of vacant properties around. Finding a good place to live will become less and less of a problem as people stop paying their rents and mortgages and get foreclosed or evicted, because the number of vacant properties will only increase. The best course of action is to become a property caretaker, legitimately occupying a vacant property rent-free, and keeping an eye on things for the owner. What if you can’t find a position as a property caretaker? Well, then you might have to become a squatter, maintain a list of other vacant properties that you can go to next, and keep your camping gear handy just in case. If you do get tossed out, chances are, the people who tossed you out will then think about hiring a property caretaker, to keep the squatters out. And what do you do if you become property caretaker? Well, you take care of the property, but you also look out for all the squatters, because they are the reason you have a legitimate place to live. A squatter in hand is worth three absentee landlords in the bush. The absentee landlord might eventually cut his losses and go away, but your squatter friends will remain as your neighbors. Having some neighbors is so much better than living in a ghost town. What if you still have a job? How do you prepare then? The obvious answer is, be prepared to quit or to be laid off or fired at any moment. It really doesn’t matter which one of these it turns out to be; the point is to sustain zero psychological damage in the process. Get your burn rate to as close to zero as you can, by spending as little money as possible, so than when the job goes away, not much has to change. While at work, do as little as possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden on the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and jump off.

 

The first bolded paragraph above, is probably quite true. Oppressive government regulations make people angry and more prone to drug abuse.

The second bolded paragraph just might come to pass, as more homes are foreclosed and there are not enough wealthy left to buy them. Detroit could well lead the pack here.

And in the third bolded paragraph, he reveals his TRUE nature, as a hater of Capitalism and an environmentalist whacko. You have to be willing to separate the wheat from the schaff here.

If you still have a job, or if you still have some savings, what do you do with all the money? The obvious answer is, build up inventory. The money will be worthless, but a box of bronze nails will still be a box of bronze nails. Buy and stockpile useful stuff, especially stuff that can be used to create various kinds of alternative systems for growing food, providing shelter, and providing transportation. If you don’t own a patch of dirt free and clear where you can stockpile stuff, then you can rent a storage container, pay it a few years forward, and just sit on it until reality kicks in again and there is something useful for you to do with it. Some of you may be frightened by the future I just described, and rightly so. There is nothing any of us can do to change the path we are on: it is a huge system with tremendous inertia, and trying to change its path is like trying to change the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare ourselves, and each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences, and scaling down our needs. It may mean that you will miss out on some last, uncertain bit of enjoyment. On the other hand, by refashioning yourself into someone who might stand a better chance of adapting to the new circumstances, you will be able to give to yourself, and to others, a great deal of hope that would otherwise not exist.

The following talk was given on February 13, 2009, at Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, to an audience of 550 people. Audio and video of the talk will be available on Long Now Foundation web site.

 

What can I say? I’ve been reading an awful lot of this post-apocolyptic writing of late, and I must admit, it’s pretty depressing. I think the best use of these kinds of articles is to serve as a warning to Americans, that this is what their acceptance of Socialist/Statist government has in store for them. All the more reason to work to educate the public, to replace their non-values with real, rational, individualist values and to bring about a restoration of the original goals of our nation’s founders.

Tidbits from Around the World

Swiss Banking No Longer Secret

This found in ObjectivistLiving.com:

UBS signals the end of the secret Swiss bank account
By Lynnley Browning Published: February 19, 2009
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/19/business/ubs.php

UBS Agrees to Pay $780M, Turn Over Swiss Banking Records
AP Wednesday, February 18, 2009
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/02/18…anking-records/

[Lest you think that words have meaning, here's a dose of oxymoron.]
Bank secrecy maintained despite UBS deal: Swiss FinMin
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUST…ndChannel=10452

From The Times July 18, 2008
UBS closes Swiss accounts of US clientsTom Bawden in New York
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/busi…icle4354321.ece

 

On Savagry

Geography and economics used to isolate Western culture from the idiocy of Islamic fundamentalism so much more than today. They were over there and we are here. They were mostly poor and we embraced technology and free enterprise.
Now, technology has connected us all, immigration brings them to Europe and America. Decades of using the oil revenues from nationalized American and British firms gave them the means to make troubles they could never could have made before.
It makes me sick that we are funding their crimes with our gas purchases from the oil wells they stole from us, and from the foreign aid we give to Pakistan who will eventually turn on us like the Taliban did after we had supported them. And that they use the technology we invent to make their evil happen.

– Steve Wolfer as quoted from Rebirth of Reason

 

I couldn’t have said it better myself!

 

Several US States Ponder Secession Bills

Here’s the text/summary of the bill:

That any Act by the Congress of the United States, Executive Order of the President of the United States of America or Judicial Order by the Judicatories of the United States of America which assumes a power not delegated to the government of United States of America by the Constitution for the United States of America and which serves to diminish the liberty of the any of the several States or their citizens shall constitute a nullification of the Constitution for the United States of America by the government of the United States of America. Acts which would cause such a nullification include, but are not limited to:

I. Establishing martial law or a state of emergency within one of the States comprising the United States of America without the consent of the legislature of that State.

II. Requiring involuntary servitude, or governmental service other than a draft during a declared war, or pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law.

III. Requiring involuntary servitude or governmental service of persons under the age of 18 other than pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law.

IV. Surrendering any power delegated or not delegated to any corporation or foreign government.

V. Any act regarding religion; further limitations on freedom of political speech; or further limitations on freedom of the press.

VI. Further infringements on the right to keep and bear arms including prohibitions of type or quantity of arms or ammunition; and

That should any such act of Congress become law or Executive Order or Judicial Order be put into force, all powers previously delegated to the United States of America by the Constitution for the United States shall revert to the several States individually. Any future government of the United States of America shall require ratification of three quarters of the States seeking to form a government of the United States of America and shall not be binding upon any State not seeking to form such a government; and

That copies of this resolution be transmitted by the house clerk to the President of the United States, each member of the United States Congress, and the presiding officers of each State’s legislature.

On Current Events – February 2009

The Housing Crisis

We’re getting well into the new year and the holidays are long forgotten, as the nation faces some of the toughest economic times since the Great Depression.

I’ve been doing a lot of information-gathering on the issues of the day, both from the present-day perspective and from 70 years ago. I found that, once again, the old addage that "history repeats itself" holds true. People felt the same dread about the future then as people are beginning to feel lately.

How are prospects around the country? Well in Detroit, the average home price was $18,513 and some 45,000 properties were in some form of foreclosure. A recent listing of tax foreclosures in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, ran 137 pages long in the Detroit Free Press. Just take a moment to picture that.. 137 pages. Most big city newspapers have what–40-50 pages? The Detroit paper has 137 pages devoted to tax foreclosures! Well that certainly serves to illustrate that the local county governments aren’t helping the situation any by taking people’s homes away.

Some say that the percentage of home ownership in America is artificially boosted by government policy of low-interest loans. An interesting theory arises from this: it is said that increased home ownership increases unemployment. The reason is due to the decreased mobility of homeowners. Let’s face it: it takes a while to sell a house and relocate. Renters are more mobile and can follow opportunities as regions ebb and flow in terms of employment opportunities. But there is the matter of leases. What if a renter has several months left on his/her lease? How many renters can just pack up and leave at the drop of a hat? Granted, with the lease, one has a pretty good idea of how soon they can exit the contract. But whether exiting a lease property or selling a home, there are no garantees of time. Can the mobile renter find another place to rent within a reasonable time and for a rate that works with the family budget? Perhaps the notion that homeowners are immobile is not as large a disadvantage compared to renters, as one might think?

The mortgage crisis is worse in the newly-established regions whose growth relies almost exclusively on real estate expansion and less intense in regions whose economies rely on other other, more productive economies, such as information technology.

Hopefully Not Just Another Blog…

 

Day One

 

For many years, I have been unofficially ‘blogging’ via published web pages stored on my server. These had no means of being indexed or tracked, so, with the addition of Adobe Contribute, I decided to see what it would take to set up a real blog. If this works out, I will be doing most, if not all, of my official blogging here.

I do have a blog of sorts on www.Basspig.com, but it’s topically technical and I have purposely avoided politics there for a reason. This will be more general, and I won’t limit myself to discussing acoustics or audio.

This will take some getting used to, but I have some degree of optimism that it will work out okay.

Some of the topics I have wished to discuss are ideas on how to run a moral government that upholds individual rights while maintaining a free and secure nation in a changing world. Ideas on economics, resources for information that I rely on for my news, etc.

I am writing this page from a newly-commissioned quad-core workstation that will be employed as a backup video production machine plus general use machine. It is already a big relief on my eyes to use the 30″ HP display for writing. My eyes are too old to deal with smaller CRTs and tiny, fuzzy text. This is far more comfortable to work with.

Bear with me while I discover how this thing (Contribute) works, and get up to speed on features and functions.

Until next time…