Is Our Civilization a Bubble? Part I
Americans have become bubble-conscious and bubble-shy. A tech bubble in the nineties, a housing bubble in the aughts, and fear of a massive fiscal bubble soon to come have temporally darkened the horizons of the world’s most optimistic people.
Not that bubbles are anything new. Black Friday popped the stock market. Eighteenth century bubbles burst on the Mississippi and in the South Seas. Tulips even made one bloom in Holland. Whenever greed and mania combine, bubbles beckon.
Conventional bubble imagery captures the stance of an outsider who watches it swell, vent, and collapse. But to genuinely appreciate bubble dynamics the insider’s perspective is better. The bubble experience, from within, is more like that of being in a closed universe, wherein lines of sight curve back upon themselves, and recycled expectations reinforce one another until surrounding realities are eclipsed. Realties, of course, cannot forever be obscured, however hyped hopes or blinkered perspectives become. When their force proves irresistible, bubbles break, revealing the true dispensation, all the grimmer for its long denial.
Most bubbles occur within particular settings, however their consequences may ramify. Illusions vanish about stocks, real estate, the ability of governments to pay their debts, with concomitant spillovers as the soundness of related assets are called into question. An atmosphere of gloom then replaces euphoria, apprehension complacency, and the wheels of commerce timorously slow. But society’s mainsprings generally escape permanent damage. Its institutional infrastructure, its human resources, even much of its financial capital, survives intact. And as good feeling recuperates constructive activity assumes its normal pace.
But can a whole society bubble and burst, with the resulting fall more than just a ratchet or two, but into an entirely new and degraded state? Can runaway expectations fuel the blowout of an entire civilization? Could ours be at such a risk? There may be reason to think so.
Consider the inner logic of the bubble: skyrocketing expectations due to forgetfulness about life’s plainer facts. This usually starts in a process of habituation that spirals out of control — gradually at first and then with more and more rapidity. The price of a given commodity rises steadily, initially as the result of a well-founded belief in its growing value, then because its track record suggests a sensible investment, and finally in frenzied efforts to turn a quick, and seemingly inevitable, profit. As the process accelerates, behavior becomes more and more reckless, not only through a spontaneous upsurge of animal spirits, but because a multiplying number of intermediaries — brokers, merchandisers, politicians — come to profit off the profit-taking and pour further fuel on its psychological fires. At root the bubble phenomenon resides in a fantasy that becomes increasingly “real” to the fantasists as they share it ever more exuberantly with one another, and as it is stoked by those having a rational interest in sustaining the collective delusion.
No bubble can inflate without the help of anomaly. Typically, the anomaly is heightened economic value or opportunity. Technological breakthrough, the sudden availability of something otherwise precious, an unexpected upswing in demand, spike possibilities for gain, and produce spurts in investment, exploration, or acquisition. The dynamic growth of the Western world’s, and America’s, economy has produced many such anomalous episodes, each, potentially at least, the seed of a bubble. But all this has been encompassed in a far greater anomaly, which creates the possibility of a mega-bubble of colossal scale, one that might burst the entire modern world.
For about the last two hundred years (three in a few locales), the fundamental structure of Western civilization has been anomalous in a crucial way. The anomaly consists in this: whereas in the overwhelming majority of societies the dominant route to wealth and status has been through political control, essentially the use of force or threat of force to extract value from others, in the West it has generally been through exchanges in which the parties have choices, and in which value must be returned for value received if the transaction is to consummate. We’re so conditioned to this, to the fact that our great fortunes belong to entrepreneurs, inventors, magnates, entertainers, and athletes, people who make (or do) things that others want, rather than to royalty, nobility, high priests, mandarins, court favorites and military leaders, people who take in taxes and booty things that others would prefer to keep, that we — very much including historians, journalists, and social commentators of almost every stripe — give little or no thought to it, considering it pretty much the natural order of things. But our exchange-oriented social order does not represent the natural order of things, and what it anomalously results in is of enormous –though perhaps ultimately self-destructive — consequence.
No, there is too much global data and brain infrastructure to make a total: “Grinding corn in the noonday sun on the overgrown highways of a deserted Manhattan Island” scenario likely. I believe that with the solid state data storage technologies, more efficient renewable energy sources, and cheap durable, globally produced products western civilization would have a very hard time getting to rock bottom. Plus, we covertly control much of the world, whether our white man’s guilt will let us acknowledge that of not. That, plus all the guns ensures there will be SOME kind of order, despotic or not. It will be fine, I just tell myself, “If a catastrophic collapse of society happens, it happens. I have only one life to live, so why worry about inevitable events? Do the best you can with the people around you and in your area, and if you have to die, do it on your feet.” Yep, that’s my motto, sure is.
Excellently well put and very valuable. I have only two minor quibbles:
Well, actually it does. It’s contrary to the laws of economics, which are embedded in human nature, for a command-and-control order to prosper even over relatively short periods of time. However, for command-and-control-oriented predators to batten on an exchange-oriented order is also “the natural order of things.” That is, to expect that such predators would kindly leave us alone is what would be “unnatural.”
Indeed, and unimpeachable. However, let us not be forgetful of the extraordinary efforts our ideological enemies have exerted to produce that forgetfulness (cf. Gramsci), thus replacing the appreciation of opportunity with the sense of entitlement and resentment of achievement.
An aimlessly drifting essay written in a turgid style with no points of reference based on actual history. The first paragraph shows that the author is in a league well below that of the likes of Victor Davis Hanson. That the author belongs to an organization of professors and academic administrators is thus no surprise at all.
The author is projecting his fear of death to the whole world, to the entire assembly of cultures and economies of this planet. Each generation has its clique of arrogant intellectuals who believe that the Planet will collapse totally shortly after their demise.
Societies, civilizations come and go. And life goes on. Occasionally – in the wilderness of Asia, Africa, America – one discovers the ruins of some past and undocumented civilization. One can only imagine the joys, sorrows, triumphs and defeats of the individuals of said long-deceased civilization. Currently, many nations are at the point of population collapse (with fertility well below replacement levels) and other nations still fertile. There has been in the past – in many areas of the world – many “Dark Age” periods between the “Enlightened” times and there is no reason why there should not be any “Dark Ages” in the future. Humans are tough persistent bastards and life goes on.
question: what is the difference between a mathematician and a philosopher?
answer: mathematician uses paper, pen and wastepaper basket. philosopher uses paper and pen.
addendum to the answer: There are others (who shall remain nameless) who use only paper, go to the latrine and come out with a load on the paper.
Since this author’s essay is the first of a 2 part series, I will skip the second part.
While you are correct; there will always be another ‘Ozymandias’, the point of the essay is not to deny this but rather assert that the market / exchange model is also an ‘Ozymandias’ and may die.
Your contempt is misplaced. The author has a point. Our system, culture and the benefits it confers on us are not our permanent entitlement. They too, like other assets, can be sqandered and lost.
Prior to the United States, the two most obvious examples of such “free enterprise” states were England from Elizabethan times to the 19th century, and Holland after independence from Spain.
In each case, there was a sharp distinction between the private sector and the political one. And there was a sort of “gentleman’s agreement” between the two not to interfere with each other. As James Burke put it in “Connections”, in England, as long as you “kept your nose clean” politically, the government didn’t much care what you did with your money- in business or otherwise. The result was that the majority of mid-to-upper-class Englishmen became entrepreneurs, or if titled might spend a lot of their time hunting, unless they were of a scientific turn of mind like Benjamin Robins (who, while trying to determine the exact physics of cannonballs in flight, determined that the speed of sound was about 1,100 feet-per-second). Burke’s term for the society was “socially upwardly mobile”.
In the Netherlands, it was basically the same situation. Stay out of politics, make money, and be left alone. Or if in politics, leave your local businessmen alone, as their activities, unless illegal, are none of your affair. Some modern scholars didn’t get it; In “Cosmos” Carl Sagan opined that the Dutch “understood that unbridled commerce posed a threat to the soul of the nation”. (He came to that conclusion based on his own interpretation of a fresco in the Amsterdam town hall, by the way.) The reality was rather closer to England, actually. Which was why, again, people not in politics tended to end up making money, and often making scientific discoveries (Google “Christian Huygens”, “Anton von Leewenhoek”, etc.)
To those who look at such “bubbles” and wonder when the pop comes, the two in question really only generated three genuine examples of collapsing “bubbles”, one of which actually gave the phenomenon its name. England had the “Mississippi scheme” concocted by John Law in 1718-19, and about the same time the “South Sea Bubble” from 1711 to 1720. Both ended with those responsible either in jail for fraud, or fleeing the country to avoid same. (Law took that route, ending up in France, where he was welcomed on the grounds that discomfiting England made him a social lion.)
Holland had the “tulipomania” from 1559 to 1634, when entire fortunes were made and destroyed on speculation with tulip bulbs. While seeming bizarre in retrospect, it is no sillier than, say, buying 100 copies of “Omega Men” # 1, which numbers of comic-book collectors did in the 1980s. This helped set off the “multiple #1′s with foil covers, all instant collector’s items” craze that caused several comic-book publishers, and eventually the industry, to self-destruct in the 1990s.
In all of the above cases, the “bubble” rose, and then collapsed, with no appreciable damage to the economies of the nations in question, and with no “intervention” by government to “set things right”. The fact that a lot of people responsible ended up with empty pockets, and red faces, was generally considered sufficient punishment for their stupidity by everybody else. Except for the out-and-out fraudsters, who did indeed end up in quod, as the British say.
A free market, coupled with a free, democratic government that restricts itself to its proper role (see the Constitution of the United States), tends to be self-correcting and self-sustaining. And requires very little “supervision” by said government.
This probably explains why “progressives” resent the Constitution, and free market economies. Put simply, they aren’t in charge, and they desperately want to be in charge. Of everything.
References on England and Holland;
Burke, James. Connections. Boston, MA; Little, Brown & Co. 1978 (rep. Simon & Schuster, NY 2007). ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9955-8.
-. The Day The Universe Changed. Boston, MA; Little, Brown & Co., 1985. LC # Q125.B947 1986 509 86-10137.
Mackay, Charles. Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Toronto; Coles Publishing Co., 1980 (rep. of orig. edition pub. 1852)
cheers
eon
It’s interesting that Sagan blithely dropped that “unbridled commerce posed a threat to the soul of the nation” foolishness. Yes, that’s always a big worry with the people I know.
Unbridled government (aka “tyranny”) seems the absolute worst thing to befall a nation but the Sagan’s never let on about that danger. You can see what devastation communist tyranny wrought upon the souls of the Captive Nations. Sagan doesn’t have a clue about real threats to the soul, otherwise he wouldn’t have uttered that old chestnut.
You can bridle commerce but not government, as we’re learning to our sorrow. But Sagan and his ilk will never see that, regardless of how big a telescope they use.
Unbridled liberty (aka “license”) is also a big problem. We have it now and too many people who should know better use it to foul their own nest.
Sagans never . . .
Massive problems usually require drastic solutions. I am looking forward to reading part II.
This article is long-winded and overwritten, vague and confusing when it should be illuminating. This shows the sorry state of scholarship today, which itself exists in its own incompetent bubble. Physician, heal thyself.
The Jews of the Bible put stars on their doors to avoid destruction. I think many of us are huddling in our neighborhoods hoping we will be spared being crushed by an out of control government.
” — chairman of the National Association of Scholars — ” It sure shows.
You’re correct, but your virtuosity in verbosity kills the message.
Of course this is more or less precisely what happened in the fall of the Roman Empire and probably, more or less, the Babylonian empire before it. (http://www.amazon.com/Canticle-Leibowitz-Walter-Miller-Jr/dp/0060892994/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302184271&sr=1-1). These things seem to happen at about 2000 year intervals.
It is interesting to note that China is just as advanced (in most ways) as Western civilization, but has never collapsed – per se, probably because they never adopted our free-market ways. (Of course their scheme of things has its own problems.)
I suggest that we start building our fortified, remote, monasteries now. http://thunderations.wordpress.com/2010/03/13/the-irish-did-save-civilization-then-civilization-ground-them-down/
China has never collapsed?!
Re-read your history. They have multiple times, most recently in the 1930s!
And, no, this isn’t what happened to the Romans, as the Roman Empire only really ceased to exist in the 1450′s (though arguably was no longer a force in international affairs about a century earlier). Citing a post-armageddon SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL is not only unconvincing, it’s laughable.
On the Romans, – that empire was definatly gone by the sack in 450′s, and what made Rome Rome was probably gone earlier. To say the the Roman Greeks now called Byzantines were Roman would be grossly inaccurate.
There is a HUGH cultural differenece between Rome in AD 200 and Constantinople in even AD 600. Amung other things in AD 200 Rome had an army primarily of internal Empire men (both from Roman and conqured areas). At 600 Constantinople had external ‘barbarian’ mercenaries The shift was probably completed in about AD 400.
This came from a different view of virtue. The Roman republic and early Empire (pre 200) viewed military service by its men as a virtue and a thing to to and a way of advancement. For the Byzantians, it wasn’t a route to advancement. It was ‘hard work’ and very few people then (or today) want to work hard.
As for the Authors view point that is ‘Western Civ’ a bubble or not, this is unfortuantly a question that can only be answered after it pops, until then it can’t be. If it is then 2 observations, 1 the day of reckoning is coming and 2. that day can be hastened or pushed back by the people inside the bubble and what they do.
For a more considered view of Mr. Balch’s Bubble, see Plato, The Republic, and especially books 7-9. The old is new again.
It’s something I say all the time, civilization is a learned behavior.
Interesting article, but I wonder which ‘civilization’ are you referring to? Is this the Western Civilization, or any of the other ones out there today? For instance islamic culture (and do you treat civilization and culture interchangeably)? Or is your theory a ‘general theory of civilizational bubbles’?
If your basic premise is an analogy to the stock market bubbles, then one would expect a more thorough review of such non-linear economics/dynamics and qualitative equivalences between those and civilizational bubbles; and then, these would be just that: analogies.
The subject is quite complex and involved, and this isn’t the best forum to address these complexities. However, as a brief suggestion, just consider this: the before and after the bubble analysis, from the point of view of insiders, differ significantly. From a distant, in both space and time, observer point of view, the analysis is also very different. With social systems of such a space-time scale (civilizational in size), contemporary observer-type analysis is next to impossible. The remote observer premium is prohibitively high, not to mention the problems with rigorous empirical evidence and verification.
At the end, all such stories are really parables, some insightful some not so. To me, who has some suspicions about the marxist notion of ‘surplus value’ in economic transactions, the jury is still out. I would rather see a heavier emphasis on ‘speculative behavior’ over- and under-reactions, and of course technological innovation (or lack there of).
To Paul of Alexandria.
Chinese Empires and Governments have collapsed repeatedly, with lots of turmoil for the average Chinese accompanying each collapse. It is basic Chinese culture that has never collapsed, but that is only because the Chinese people have always been willing to become near slaves to whoever the new conqueror is, until they could gradually assimilate them and make them Chinese. The problem with our trade/commercial culture is it can’t exist in that type of slave society that the Chinese were willing to tolerate, unless possibly we would be willing to be under the thumb of a small aristocracy, with a free trade culture underneath. But that is not stable in the long run, since the aristocrats will eventually totally dominate the free traders, and loot the wealth they need to keep trade going.
Anybody who is willing to favor big gov solutions over free market solutions, must recognize that you will eventually end up with a ruling class of gov burocrats and politicians, in combinations with some few private entities that have enough clout to influence them, like big corporations, unions, and various political associations and lobbying groups. Each of these will then proceed to enrich themselves by looting the productive/innovative/trading class, until no productive class is left.
G. Gordon Liddy appeared in Miami Vice acting the part of
a ruthless smuggler who was shipping drugs back from Vietnam
in the bodies of US Soldiers KIA. The relevant dialogue is:
Strange. In our culture we say
I will pay you if you give me what I want.
In the rest of the world,
and throughout history, it was and is
Give me what I want or I will hurt you.
Kondratieff winter.
See also: Samuel J. “Bud” Kress.
“The Fourth Turning” by Straus and Howe.
‘The Rise and Fall of Civilization’ by Miller, Joubert and Butler.
“Winter is coming” by Jim Goulding
Google: “A Reader’s Resources on Systemic Collapse” (Parts of the bibliography are outdate by now, but remain relevant)
Even the much maligned Tytler Cycle is germane to this discusstion.
Rome lasted as long as it did in name, if not in political form, because it had few real ‘predators’ or natural enemies who were large enough to destroy it or to challenge it. However, because of hubris and the cognitive blindness of it’s citizenery, even Rome was invaded and sacked several times throughout it’s history. In political make-up? Rome changed approximately every sixty to eighty years, from Republic to dictatorship and tyranny and back again. Approximately every two hundred years it enduired some pretty dramatic upheavals. The same with Egypt and other large empires throughout history. There were periods when the Pharoahs had life and death power over their subjects and other periods when they had no more power than any member of contemporary royalty. The same with the Caesars.
Every empire you examine has also endured economic collapse during it’s lifecycle, sometimes, repeatedly throughout its lifecycle.
Today, as in times past, whoever has the biggest guns (military might) generally had the best lifestyles and greatest accumulations of wealth and enjoyed the highest levels of individual and personal income.
iow, an objective look at history reveals that nothing much has changed throughout mankind’s known history, from economics to politics to the urge to exercise power and control over other nations and cultures.
iow, contrary to the author’s conclusions, mankind hasn’t changed a damned bit in over six thousand years of recorded history.
In the tech world, there’s a term called Bettridge’s (sp?) Law. It states that any headline in the form of a question can be answered with “No.”
I think that applies here.
Just because a non-government power based society isn’t the norm, does not mean that it’s promotion is a bubble. A bubble means that its value is inflated due to irrational expectations of that value. That’s not the case here. The value of such a society does hold up to scrutiny.
However the broader point that such a society is at risk of devolving into one based on state power is valid.
The “bubble” analysis is better applied to the irrational value given to state power.
The article makes very good points. One reservation I have however is labeling anything as a bubble carries an implication that most of the gains associated with it are not real and based on illusion. However, the gains associated with the free market are mostly real and long lasting, except for occasional small bubbles. And even the bubbles often produce some lasting gains that are eventually used, like digital infrastructure from the tech bubble, or houses from the housing bubble.
The real bubble today is big gov socialism, and the idea that you increase prosperity by forcibly redistrubuting it. All that does is loot earlier free market gains, and the socialist bubble collapses once the free market is suficiently looted that it can no onger sustain both itself, and its socialist gov parasites, something we saw in the 80′s with the USSR, are seeing today with Greece, and would have seen here in 5-10 yrs if the Tea Party hadn’t stopped Obama/Reid/Pelosi.
Instead of characterizing our civilization as a bubble, why not say instead that any culture only lasts as long as people continue to beleive in its fundamental precepts, and collapses when too many people no longer beleive. Our free market and individual freedom culture will only last while most of us continue to beleive in the free market and individual freedom.
Of course the governing elite model described also produces some gains, its only problem that the gains are smaller and mostly confined to the elite, at the expense of those not in the elite. The free market produces at least some gains for everybody, admittedly more for some, the difference being that the some getting more gains tend to also match with those that produce more wealth.
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Excellent.
Excellent and thought-provoking thesis.
The key take-away should be the complete uniqueness of the American / capitalist experiment and the previously inconceivable riches it has showered on the world. Mr Balch rightly wonders whether it can explode in an even shorter moment in time than it appeared. To me it’s obvious that it can.
Balch suggests that the collapse would be the result of an ignorant acceptance of this unique moment as an inevitable norm, with a concurrent escalation of expectations that could quickly escalate to impossibility and a near-instant collapse.
I think that is by far the lesser reason for a potential collapse.
The far more likely cause would be the determined, organized, power-ravenous desire of the salivating lovers of the normal world order to destroy the one that showers the riches…so they can sieze all of the riches for themselve and rule without challenge. Their current wizard sits in the White House.
These ideas must seem particularly poignant to one who is surrounded every day by pompous leftist professors who want to topple the infrastructures of western civilisation as quickly as possible.
Excellent essay. Many here are incapable of understanding the pertinent points, and try to take analogies (eg bubbles) too far, but the underlying message of the fragility of a liberty-based civilisation comes through clearly.
Most of this article seems to be readily apparent to anyone who has observed our boom-bust cycles for 200 years.
Of partial relevance here is Bernard Baruch’s answer to the question as to how he was able to make so much money. “It was because of all the money I did NOT make.” Evidently, he was conservative and would get out of the booms long before the bust, thefore losing all the money that was still in there to be made, but always gaining some and never getting wiped out by the busting of the bubble.
Hedge funds were supposed to keep us from going bust, but it turns out that they were for the most part hedging in ways which led to the same bust.
I have no confidence that government or capitalism will ever avoid bubbles. The longer the bubble lasts, the more it seems like reality and all sorts of bad “common sense decisions get made by people who do not even consider themselves big risk takers.
Being ascared of most investments has kept me from being rich, but has permitted me to be comfortable. Works for me.
Most of the comments are directed toward approving or disapproving what the author was trying to establish. A fresh approach may be to really consider, if indeed the author’s scenario is accurate, what can be done to change the development of bubbles. Of course, the author has done a reasonable job of identifying the causes, hence the cures of bubble thinking. An idea that likely will never be discussed in these pages but, in my opinion is the real answer to such thinking, is the development of a Zion society (NOT Zionist), where everyone has the interest of his neighbor at heart. A novel approach.
If we handled things differently…became dependent on ourselves not others, we wold not have the problems we have.
We have a wonderful country, envy of the world…and they and our leaders are bringing us down to their level, and doing it reapidly…thanks to Obama.
It is aught, not ought, that is the name for the number 0. Why should one read further when the Author blows the Zero?
Ought is also correct.
Read “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley. He nails this issue cold. And the short answer is: it’s not a bubble if we can keep the bureaucracy in check. Trade and innovation take care of themselves if government stays out of the way.
We all might as well get ready, because it is coming. When? Who knows? But, the bubble will burst because….it was all prophesied thousands of years ago. Mankind does NOT know the way to TRUE prosperity, and therefore all efforts in that regard are ultimately doomed to fail.
One commenter brought up the subject of what happens next? It actually will be horrible, but temporary. God will finally step in. But, humanity has to learn a lesson first: like alcoholics, they do not change until they bottom. Well, the bottom is coming.
Western “civilization” post-ancient greece,has been nothing but a succession of murderous ideological “bubbles”, designed to justify the slaughter oppression and exploitation of the vulnerable by criminal elites.Look at the record of European pathologies:Roman Empire:slaughter; Christianity:religious wars(slaughter);feudalism,absolute monarchy( more slaughter);nationalism/imperialism/industrial capitalism,(industrialized slaughter);the millenial remedy for all of the above: Socialism,Communism (massive ideologically-based slaughters);and now multiculturalism,welfare statism (slaughter through declining birthrates, economic insolvency, and ethnic civil wars.Do you folks get the picture? All the “big” ideas of the West are murderous frauds,and whenever a genuinely good idea ( like Jeffersonian-style limited government) comes along,it is fiercely attacked by the dominant elites whose political economic interests, is threatened by a polity based on personal freedom and individual rights. The West is indeed a “botched” civilization, and we will have to seek a libertarian path where some of us survive the coming cataclysm through armed preparednes, and an utter contempt for,and rejection of, most of the political and cultural heritage of the West.
Your rant at Western Civilization (Athenian Democracy, Christianity and the Protestant Ethic of Capitalism being its foundations) leaves one to assume that you’re a muslim and an islamist. if this is the case, not only are you nuts but scared for what is coming to islam – rest assured the West will confront islam and it will be painful to islam.
Carter up there at 23 thinks he’s clever, but the dictionary reveals that the word in question is correctly spelled both ways, aught and ought. You would think that someone sitting in front of a computer that is linked to the world’s information could look up one word before ignorantly blasting an author’s spelling.
Simply put, the article establishes that the historical course of many governments led to the concentration of central power and the loss of individual liberty. The process continues today, the misery expands. America, where federal power is granted and established by the people, is an experiment against human nature. In order to remain free, the people must be vigilant, something we have not done. Now, the very republic is threatened, our future national solvency is on unsure footing.
I’m looking forward to the author’s next installment on this theme, and any input he may have on saving and maintaining our civil society.
Another writer on this topic, Richard Andersen, “Hurtling Towards Oblivion.”
Puts it into a little different perspective, (falleness of man/nature) but comes to the same conclusions.
“Historian” Not a very good one, since you couldn’t adress even one of my points.Go visit the Ossuaire at Verdun,or sit at a class in Deconstruction, or Pornography 101, in one of our leading universities,and then talk to me about the fraud that is the West. Actually, I happen to be a historian, and no, I am not Muslim, nor a particular fan of their civilization(though I admire their willingness to kill and die for an ideal,which really is part of the basis of a successful civilization).What Western civilization has to do with Athenian democracy, let alone the robust warrior values of the ancient Greeks escapes me. Any culture/ civilization/society, that makes madonna and her imitators multimillionaires for simulating public masturbation,and pays a worthless Skank like snooki 32,000 dollars for describing her slattern life style,while quibbling over teacher pensions,and outsourcing jobs overseas to save money,is worthy of destruction as a life-threatening, degenerate entity.The fundamental value of the West is greed:making money marketing squalor,which the Muslims rightly resent. No, the West will not survive,it’s a civilization of whores;take the US, whose electorate voted in a latent stalinist dictator (Obama)in the belief that he would pay their mortages for them,like I said, greed;and greedy whores can be bought orintimidated.Those Westerners who organize, train to fight, and reject the dominant values of the PC plutocracy,will survive the coming fiscal collapse and civil/ethnic wars,and build something worthwhile the West, as such, no.Good Riddance!
You ain’t no ‘historian’ – you are an uneducated islamist. Learn how to write, spell correctly and talk properly, you sound like a middle-easterner.
“HISTORIAN”You use “ain’t” and complain about my spelling and writing? What mail order college gave you your degree?The Hillbilly Institute for Half-Brained,Ad Hominen Studies? Are you, perhaps, an offended madonna fan who thinks that she’s a priceless product of western civilization? I got news for ya: she ain’t.
You obviously didn’t get it – middle-easterners, islamists: double digit IQers.
“HISTORIAN” We get that you are pathetic,and laughable:Try refuting my statements,instead attempting humor (funny you ain’t); BTW: Those “double digit IQrs” are in the process of defeating the western world’s best and most PC armed forces in Afghanistan;they also invented algebra, and preserved the writings of Aristotle,and the other Greek thinkers which the Christians were eager to burn,that is, until they discovered how to pervert them in the name of their farcical creed.Didn’t they teach you that at Hillbilly U?
You ovbiously haven’t figured out yet how to use the “Reply” function at the bottom RHS of a post. Too difficult for you?
Collin, he’s a troll, don’t waste your time feeding it.
COLLIN W.Groves: You obviously haven’t figured out how to refute an argument, so instead you quibble over internet functions.Perhaps, if you took your penicillin ,your tertiary syphillis might abate enough to permit your brain to function and construct a credible reply.Or is that too difficult for you?
Did you have bacon and eggs for breakfast this morning, mahmoud, and you’ve got diarrhea?
GBv (GONOCOCCUS BLOVIATIUS venerus) Better diarrhea than gonorrhea.Incidentally,the bacon and eggs were delicious,as for you,get thee to a VD clinic;I hear Dr. Mahmoud is giving discounts to infected infidels(the Koran mandates charity to afflicted).
“Black Friday popped the stock market. Eighteenth century bubbles burst on the Mississippi and in the South Seas. Tulips even made one bloom in Holland. Whenever greed and mania combine, bubbles beckon.”
All of these financial bubbles can be traced back to some form of credit expansion. Since the founding of the Federal Reserve Corporation, these expansions have always been rooted in the printing of money or the creation of money via the (fractional-reserve) banking system.
Only Austrian economic theory can plausibly explain that easy money causes people to “mal-invest”, as the Austrians call it. This means that business managers expand companies when they otherwise would not have, people bid more for houses than they otherwise should have, and investors pay more for stocks than normal metrics would justify. At some point, it quickly becomes a common realization that prices are way too high, that loans cannot be repaid, that homes can no longer be resold at a profit.
At this point, values fall to levels that can be justified by more normal metrics. Attempts to mitigate that decline only suck up financial resources and slow the readjustment. Such efforts may exhaust the government in the process. We are seeing this in housing at this very moment.
Maybe the only valid analogy is that socialists expand their power and disconnection from economic reality until their schemes utterly fail. If there is any bubble in power and hubris right now, we can see this is China’s abandonment of Marxist economics to feed, clothe and house their citizens. I see that Cuba just started down the same path. The only country that remains with a Marxist economy is The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, whose citizens are reduced to foraging for food to avert starvation.
“Black Friday popped the stock market. Eighteenth century bubbles burst on the Mississippi and in the South Seas. Tulips even made one bloom in Holland. Whenever greed and mania combine, bubbles beckon.”
All of these financial bubbles can be traced back to some form of credit expansion. Since the founding of the Federal Reserve Corporation, these expansions have always been rooted in the printing of money or the creation of money via the (fractional-reserve) banking system.
Only Austrian economic theory can plausibly explain that easy money causes people to “mal-invest”, as the Austrians call it. This means that business managers expand companies when they otherwise would not have, people bid more for houses than they otherwise should have, and investors pay more for stocks than normal metrics would justify. At some point, it quickly becomes a common realization that prices are way too high, that loans cannot be repaid, that homes can no longer be resold at a profit.
At this point, values fall to levels that can be justified by more normal metrics. Attempts to mitigate that decline only suck up financial resources and slow the readjustment. Such efforts may exhaust the government in the process. We are seeing this in housing at this very moment.
Maybe the only valid analogy is that socialists expand their power and disconnection from economic reality until their schemes utterly fail. If there is any bubble in power and hubris right now, we can see this is China’s abandonment of Marxist economics to feed, clothe and house their citizens. I see that Cuba just started down the same path. The only country that remains with a Marxist economy is The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, whose citizens are reduced to foraging for food to avert starvation.