America's Political and Economic Systems Have Failed, and They Should be Dismantled

The average American earns no more than he earned in 1970.  Yet, the supposed promise of American life is economic growth and opportunity. There has been no, zero, zip economic growth in 40 years.  What has occurred is that more Americans do more unproductive work on behalf of more  government and more social parasites.  The devil in the story is the government, of course, which has misdirected the economy and created income inequality, economic stagnation, lack of opportunity, and job flight.  In doing so, it has murdered millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of others around the world. America's great error has been assumption of an imperial crown; like Rome, America was a republic that became an empire in centuries-long decline.

The solution is not an even greater empire. The United Nations, whose land was donated by the Rockefeller family and developed by Progressive Robert Moses, is no solution, nor is socialism.  They are the problems.

America's empire building arises from narcissism.  The nation was successful not because of Hamilton and Lincoln but because of the anti-Federalist spirit, which imbued the individual with ambition, achievement orientation, and confidence to work in a spirit inherited from Americans' Calvinist faith.   The federalist--as opposed to Federalist--mindset limited central power and so permitted creativity and innovation.  State-oriented economic interests, including the slave interest as reflected in the writings of George Fitzhugh and, earlier, in Hamilton's reports to Congress, were from the beginning narcissistic.

Jefferson's legacy was powerful enough to restrain Hamilton's and Lincoln's narcissism for a century, until the 1890s; in the 1890s belief in the power of an elite to guide society--as opposed to the ideal of a spontaneous order created through the innovative capacity of all human beings--became the nation's bylaw.  From there, it was a simple matter to extend the narcissistic, rationalistic fantasy from Washington to the League of Nations. 

Like all human delusions, the rationalist, Progressive fantasy will fail.  The Roman system was based on rational self-interest and economic exploitation; so is the Progressive system.  The reason the economy has not grown, that the average American is not better off, is that the Progressive model cannot innovate. Planners' expectations limit progress no matter how smart the planners are.  The result is stagnation and then collapse as events outside the ken of rationalistic thought overtake the planners' mental models.  The process took four centuries with respect to the western Roman Empire, and 14 centuries with respect to the eastern one.  I give America a century.  The decline will be more rapid because advances in transportation and communication (that occurred in libertarian Britain and America) have hastened the historical pace of change.

The solution is, of course, decentralization--the dismantling of the federal government and the abolition of the United Nations.  Doing so would restructure the process of special interest extraction, creating a new, level playing field.  The costs of the United Nations have quickly exceeded its benefits (if there are any benefits), and the UN should be transformed into a global treaty organization like the World Trade Organization. Washington should be merged into Virginia, and the federal government should be closed.  The remnant of the federal government should also be a treaty organization similar to NATO.  In fact, the federal government could be replaced by NATO, with the states individually joining the World Trade Organization. 

Bliss Is Better Than Ignorance

A friend has been up in arms about slanted, pro-Obama coverage.  It is not that the media is liberal, corporatist, or mainstream.  The media is a dumb wasteland.  I advised her to avoid making herself ignorant and turn off the TV or close the newspaper forever.

M, why watch the bozos on television?  You know that they are propagandists, and often ignorant ones.  Why waste your time with the likes of the guy you’re writing to (whom I’ve never heard of, incidentally, and I am happy about it).  You know that the television, radio, and print sources are, with few exceptions, sources of lies, propaganda, ignorance, and stupidity—usually all of them combined—so why help their ratings by watching them?    I haven’t watched television or read a Wall Street-linked newspaper in years, and I am better informed for it. 

Is America a Moral Nation?

The American left lacks morality.  It is not that it is immoral; rather, America's elite, educated class does not know what morality is and depends on theft for its status.  That has been true of all elites with the exception of some of the American and British elites of the 18th through 20th centuries, especially the so-called robber barons, who, despite moral flaws, created wealth in proportion to their obtaining it.  All other elite classes in history have obtained wealth through criminality. These includes the socialist elites in Europe and Asia as well as past feudal elites.

Left-wing ideology is  therapy for the American elite's moral emptiness.  Left-wing Americans believe that other members of society are as morally empty as they are, so others must be regulated and controlled.  The left's lack of morality is elucidated in its power lust, for it sees itself as regulator and controller--the dictator to others of what is moral.  Because it does not know what morality is, yet claims to act in the name of morality, the left's aims are inherently unstable and illogical.  The instability threatens public well being.  Most Americans are not as morally empty as the left;  it is the left's power lust from which most Americans need protection.  Education has emptied America of morality, and the Progressive ideology in which America is indoctrinating its children is therapy for the teachers' moral nothingness. 

In business schools ideologies like corporate social responsibility are their therapy.  They transfer their basic, human need for moral belief and faith to empirical science, to the state, and to ideology.  But positivism cannot replace morality, and it cannot replace faith.  The grasping for power is desperate;  the left transforms the millions of human beings it has butchered into symptoms of moral nothingness.  In the American educational system, the left's holocaust never occurred; my students do not know the Soviet, Chinese, or Cambodian death count.

America's move to the left is a symptom of torn moral fabric.  This is no longer a nation that is tolerant, free, or righteous. This is a nation that aims to print money, to get something for nothing, and to use the rhetoric of democracy to extract wealth from its victims.The victims will be the Americans themselves--those who who have supported Progressivism and those who have opposed it.

Whither the Economy?

I have been pondering the gold and stock markets this week, and I am concluding that there will be another leg to the downtrend, then a nice robust rally in the stock market for about a year. The rally may be as much as 50%.  That will absorb some of the liquidity that the Fed has created.  I am waiting for another fall before getting in.  The same is true of gold, but the fall might be sharper.  I have been totally out of precious metals since early April.  I am about 35% in the stock market. If it falls another 5-10% I'm in.