If possible.
David Brooks hopes to find comfort in Barack Obama’s premise that “we cannot successfully address any of our problems without addressing all of them,” but can’t. The reason is that Brooks long ago learned to distrust people who thought they had all the answers. “The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly.” And Obama sounds like he’s got a big project for us all.
These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.
Brooks’ view is not inconsistent with the idea that the world economic and political system is facing a comprehensive crisis. It is a not a denial of the necessity of overhauling the way we do business. It is not an argument for piecemeal responses, nor for the exclusion of a government role in managing affairs. However, it is a skeptical view of the possibility that poorly understood complex systems can be successfully managed by rigid timetables and points of view. Brooks continues:
I worry that we’re operating far beyond our economic knowledge. Every time the administration releases an initiative, I read 20 different economists with 20 different opinions. I worry that we lack the political structures to regain fiscal control. Deficits are exploding, and the president clearly wants to restrain them. But there’s no evidence that Democrats and Republicans in Congress have the courage or the mutual trust required to share the blame when taxes have to rise and benefits have to be cut.
In short we don’t have any idea of what to do except to get back to the place we were before. But what if we can’t? What if the old ways have ended permanently and we’re on our way to someplace new? Fabius Maximus has described the recent crisis as “the end of the post-WWII geopolitical regime”. He argues it must end but without quite saying what will replace it. Gregor MacDonald believes that the US must inevitably repudiate its public debt; very well, but what do we do for a encore? The long and the short of the debate on the crisis is that while an increasing number of commentators now understand that we ain’t in Kansas anymore nobody knows where exactly we are now and what we should do. We can’t stay where we are. Which way is the Yellow Brick Road?
For example David A. Rosenberg of the Bank of America/Merill Lynch research unit says that despite all the huffing and puffing of government, the financial sector is still very, very sick.
Libor-OIS spreads have stopped narrowing and indeed have recently moved back above 100 bps, which is off the worst levels of the cycle but ten times higher than what the norm was during the positive economic cycle (2001 to 2007) – in other words, after all that has been done by Uncle Sam, the money market appears to be telling us that it thinks we are still light years away from reattaining a functioning banking system. …
How greater government involvement in major banks, with the prospect of future share dilution, is bullish is truly beyond us. The incremental and reactionary nature of policymaking in dealing with the financial crisis remains very disturbing to us and much more Japan-like than Sweden-like.
And for anyone who thinks the problem has been caused by government keeping its hands off the economy, Gerald O’Driscoll from the Cato Institute writing in the WSJ has news for us. The government already has its hands all over the economy. The major reason there is no free-market solution to the current economic problem is because government is already part of everything. Driscoll writes:
There are no good options and certainly nothing resembling a free-market solution. The government has put the taxpayer on the hook in a myriad of ways. First, there is deposit insurance. Second, there have been guarantees issued to certain creditors. Third, and most notoriously, the Treasury has invested taxpayer funds in preferred shares of certain institutions. Fourth, the Fed has lent funds on many of the dodgy assets of these banks. The Fed’s balance sheet should be consolidated with the Treasury’s in any cost-benefit calculation of alternative resolution strategies.
So with government an inevitable part of the problem, let us return to David Brook’s misgivings about the ability of government to solve things. One reason to doubt its ability has been its failure understand the crisis in the past; its inability to manage its early manifestations. Why, besides a new face in the White House, should we believe a batter with a .000 average can can now hit at .300? Driscoll believes government could improve dramatically if it could get politics out of the equation.
The example of the Swedish banking crisis of the early 1990s is most often cited by nationalization advocates. … In short, the resolution was handled professionally rather than politically.
The contrast with the current U.S. crisis could not be sharper. From the beginning, the handling of the U.S. crisis has been politicized. The partisanship is as toxic as the bad assets on bank balance sheets. Both parties are coming up with schemes to impede the process of foreclosing on homeowners who can’t afford their homes, which would get those homes into the hands of new owners who can afford them. Does anyone believe that a government bad bank will squeeze homeowners? To ask the question is to answer it.
Moreover, we know how the government runs financial institutions — consider Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Or IndyMac, whose management by the FDIC has been criticized for inflating the rescue costs through its liberal loan-modification program. A money-center bank in government hands would become a conduit for politicized lending and grants disguised as loans. That’s what’s happened at Fannie and Freddie. The government would never let go of its political ATM. You might as well consolidate such an institution with the Fed from the outset.
But even if the Obama administration could suddenly adopt the politics of Sweden rather than Chicago other problems would remain. One is the rigid nature of government itself. One of the reasons government has a hard time managing complex systems is that politics treats events largely like linear systems. Politics interprets events in the context of its mythology. But if politics is in the best of times the art of lying to ourselves in the broad day, politics in crisis is the vice of lying to ourselves while we are falling off a cliff. And when fables meet a changing environment disaster is often the result. The second difficulty is that government is a ponderous, elephantine beast. Bureaucracies are nearly always behind the curve. Part of the requirement is to get ahead of the problem and cut out those parts of governance which contributed to the problem. But what to do when government is already part of the equation; when only government has the legitimacy to do some of things which need doing? It’s like hoping a patient who shot himself can successfully self operate to remove the bullet. Nevertheless, government can maximize its chances of helping or at least minimize its penchant for hurting by observing a few simple rules.
Two ideas are necessary to keep in mind when dealing with complex systems. The first is that it will tend to evolve towards a new state whose characteristics we may not be able to predict but which we know exists. This is what Fabius Maximus refers to as the successor the post World War 2 political/economic system. We are going there and are going to find it by trial and error. We know enough to realize we’ve left Kansas but not enough to set our new course with exactitude. We’re going to have to sniff our way along. Once we get near there, things will start to settle down because that’s the way complex systems often behave. “An attractor is a set to which a dynamical system evolves after a long enough time. That is, points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly disturbed.” The important thing is not to charge blindly past it and over the Edge of the World.
The role of the government isn’t to mandate the characteristics of that attractor by fiat — it can’t — but rather to take the necessary steps to midwife a new world being born by taking common sense steps without the burden of ideological finality. They have to do what works unimpeded by mental constructs which cannot comprehend what is happening to the complex system. In order to successfully do this, government must embrace the second idea inherent in dealing with complex systems. It must shorten its OODA loop. It cannot be in the business of setting Five Year plans in the middle of a dynamically changing situation. Rosenberg points out that much of the so-called fiscal stimulus package is “back-loaded to the out years; that we think it will be next to impossible to meet the employment goals (which could never be verified in any event – how can anyone prove that a job was “saved’?) since much of the spending is aimed at products that are imported into the USA.” But if government wants to treat the situation as one undifferentiated bolus and shit it out in one go we may create more problems than we solve.
What government needs to implement is a succession of quick but well thought out interventions with the least possible lag, so that some kind of closed loop policy fire control system can be implemented instead of the insane method of World War 1 style battleship prediction plotting extending over a period of years. Whether policy will evolve in that direction remains to be seen. The public debate so far has been about the Big Solution; the magic bullet because leaders like to pretend that they have one. What leader can admit that he hasn’t? The day Barack Obama gets in front of national TV and says he doesn’t have the answers is the day we start getting them. Already people are losing confidence. David Rosenberg observes that a tax revolt, or at least something that threatens to be one, is now a possibility.
Well, we are starting to see the impact of policies that breed “class warfare”. And it is not about banks versus nonbanks or about the rich versus the poor, or service-providers versus manufacturers for that matter. It’s really about the government pitting prudent citizens against profligate citizens, in our view. And the IBD article is important because it seems as though we could be on the precipice of a tax revolt.
A tax revolt is good to the the extent that it militates against the ponderous central planning approach to managing the crisis. But to the degree that it encourages another, albeit alternate version of the big fix it may lead to equally bad consequences. The alternative to a bad Five Year Plan is not another Five Year Plan. It is something else. In reality the system will have to find its own new equilibrium. Capitalism is the economy’s reconnaissance in force into the uncharted economic future. The reason capitalism works is that it can try different things. Unlike government, it is not obliged to do one Awesome Thing. As we venture into the unknown some businesses won’t come back. Others will, with news of a new and boundless vistas. But we have to let them go out. We can’t strike out in a central direction determined by bones cast upon a shaman’s cape. It could lead us to the promised land, or out into the desert.
In conclusion: all interventions should be immediate, nonideological and subject to change given the arrival of new data and the speed at which we close our OODA loop should be improved. This is the way our mammalian ancestors overcame the dinosaurs. If we remember nothing else, we should remember that.
Tip Jar
– New York Times: Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending –
September 30, 1999
In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.
Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
”Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990′s by reducing down payment requirements,” said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae’s chairman and chief executive officer.
”Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.”
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980′s.
”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”
Full Video Nineteen Eighty-Four – 1984 -
“Freedom is Slavery“
Most of the public hasn’t really woken up to what is happening yet because they are still living in a dream in which fairy stories tell them what’s really important is ‘environmentalism’, or ‘political correctness’, or a ‘living wage’, ‘spreading the wealth’, ‘social activism’, ‘progressive transportation policies’, etc. Over the years these have all become just so much smoke to fool voters into supporting ever more government employee parasites. And, to be fair, the voters have voted for them and so for the moment we do have to put up with them.
In truth though what is really important comes down to just two things: getting government out of the way of our citizens’ opportunity to earn a living, and a democratic government which is effective yet small enough not to bankrupt us all.
We appear to have a way to go before most voters see this clearly, but the present debacle as it continues becomes more and more likely to point towards that end.
Thanks for the mention, but you did not quite get my message (which might not have been clear in this post). The key element determining what comes next is choice. Harsh times require difficult trade-offs, and these decisions, made around the world, will collectively shape the new order.
Everyone gets a vote; not all votes carry equal weight.
We do not know how we — America — will react to what might be hard times ahead. We know even less what the rest of the world will do. At this stage we can only sketch out alternatives. Default is on the list; I agree with MacDonald that it is likely (but can take many different forms).
I agree that it is about choice. But I’m not sure how the choices will be made. Some things will be chosen explicitly. That is, we’ll have selected A and not B. But more often then not we’ll find ourselves in a state before we understand it. Like Eliot’s metaphor about arriving at a place and recognizing it belatedly. Where we get is partly a consequence of what we do, but many of the outcomes we experience will be unintended, or perhaps even unavoidable. When we do get out of the woods it may be due to a heuristic rather than a conscious optimization.
One of my worries about mega-plans is you don’t have a diversified portfolio of outcomes. You bet the farm on black or red. David Brooks came near to it in his article when he said that while he didn’t believe that any man could plan his way out of the current fix, he would be happy if Obama would prove him wrong. If your shirt is riding on the turn of the wheel, you hope against hope that the pointer lands on the jackpot. I better keep quiet now as I’m not sure if I’m making sense.
I read somewhere that our current economic situation is analogous to a tsunami, i.e. first the tide pulls back from the beach exposing various marine life flapping around (the initial deflation) then the tidal wave comes roaring back and wipes out everything (the hyperinflation).
Prior to this recession/depression, the US was already in debt up to its eyeballs due to the abusive use of credit. Now we’re piling on trillions of dollars of additional debt through these various bailouts and socialist programs.
How are we going to pay for all of this?
I suspect the tsunami of hyperinflation is inescapable.
How do I prepare for it?
I suspect(?) that simply buying Krugerrands is not the answer. Five years from now, will the guy selling ammo and MREs accept Krugerrands as payment? (You can’t eat Krugerrands)
“The Foreclosure Five.”
When President Obama discusses his $275 billion mortgage bailout, he talks as if it was a national problem, caused by a national decline in home prices. “We must stem the spread of foreclosures and falling home values for all Americans,” he says. But there is no national market for homes and no national price for homes. Instead, most of the United States will pay for the folly of few.
Even though California home prices fell 20.8% over the year ending in the fall of 2008, however, they were still 50% higher than they were just five years ago. In Florida and Nevada too, the bust in home prices obviously followed a speculative boom. Back in April 6, 2008, a New York Times graph showed that default rates on only the riskiest subprime mortgages had already reached 21% in Merced and Stockton, California, and ranged from 19% to 24% in Fort Myers and Naples, Florida.
So what’s happening now? By looking at sales, you can see the free market is working very well. Sales of existing homes over the past year have soared in four states where home prices fell the most. Reducing the inventory of unsold homes, foreclosed or not, makes it easier to sell remaining homes and thereby works to arrest falling home prices. Falling home prices are not the problem, they’re the solution.
In reality, the “Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan” compels taxpayers in most states to help those in just a few. Aside from Michigan’s unique dependence on autos, the other four states’ problems are already being solved the old-fashioned way:
If something becomes too expensive, cut the price.
Or move.
W
As we venture into the unknown some businesses won’t come back.
I’m in solution mode tonight.
One of the businesess that won’t come back will be the banks. An emerging non-attractor (a repulser?) of the current crisis is the realisation of the extent to which a bank is a bluff, with the fallback underwritten by the taxpayer.
This was always the case, but did the taxpayer get a dividend for underwriting the bluff? Of course not – masters of the universe are their own attractor, especially for themselves.
The banks will never be the same again.
Our mission is to ensure that a new banking non-political framework, similar to the courts, with its own constitutional backing of freedoms and responsibilities, controls how the banking system works, and more importantly, setting the boundaries to thus far shalt thou (= Govt interference) go, and no further.
My bet is that the Euros will create an unaccountable banking Czar. The USA will get it right.
ADE
5.Wretchard.
One of my worries about mega-plans is you don’t have a diversified portfolio of outcomes.
Neat notion, Wretchard.
“One of my worries about mega-plans is you don’t have a diversified portfolio of outcomes. You bet the farm on black or red.” – Wretchard
Just one second, Obama is not betting “his farm” he is betting the American tax payer’s farm – and their children’s farm.
Obama and crew will be handsomely rewarded either way. Remember Obama and crew are net tax recipients. They get their pay checks from the US Treasury.
The likely out come will be higher inflation and then crushing deflation. Obama will enrich is buddies and impoverish business owners and business risk takers.
In other words, nobody knows anything. Or to put it another way:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. (h/t Y.B. Yeats)
We shouldn’t completely discount the possibility of another American Revolution, in some form or another. It seems to me the current circumstances might someday be seen to have lead rather naturally and inevitably to that result. After all, we’ve thrown off the shackles of an oppressive and incompetent regime before and if any government can be said to have destroyed the confidence of the American people and shredded their trust, it’s this one (and I don’t mean just the current administration).
That’s really the question, I think. How much more time, energy and resources are we the people going to invest in the same incompetent and corrupt people and institutions that got us to where we are today? Something has gone seriously wrong.
We do know something, but the reliability of that knowledge declines the further out you have to project it. If the economic system were sailing along in a stable way, all you have to do is take a protractor, ruler and divider and predict a future position with considerable accuracy. But if it’s jinking all over the place, then your knowledge of the future is unreliable except over short intervals. You can shoot skeet with a shotgun, but the problem becomes harder if you use a 16 inch government cannon laid at a point where the target will be in two year’s time.
But the important insight is that we can do something meaningful if we act quickly and heuristically — move towards an improved solution without worrying about dressing it up with closed form, analytical solutions which isn’t worth a predictive damn anyway.
Besides, we will gain information by acting soonest and observing the fall of shot. Doing something is a way of learning, a way of getting on the curve ASAP. If we take too long to load up the cannon, our knowledge will come late. Perhaps too late.
“This is the way our mammalian ancestors overcame the dinosaurs. If we remember nothing else, we should remember that.”
As Lyndon Johnson once said, “I don’t want to hold out any hope to you that I don’t hold out for myself.”
One way to know, for certain, that the current efforts are doomed to failure at least and probably to catastrophe is to see what’s being attempted as an effort to create a closed system out of one that is open. These systems, as Bob has harped over at One Cosmos, are organic and, as such, are evolving.
The attempt to wrest control and manage the change that is occurring is like what it would be like for me to try to arrest or manage change in my own body. As we have seen, when people do this they eventually turn themselves into monsters.
As for the Yellow Brick Road, we all know what it is, whether we consciously recognize it or not. It was laid out 2000 years ago. America will get back on it, when this forest fire clears out the dead wood, or we’ll have to hope someone else in a galaxy far, far away has done a better job.
Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live. Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
–Leo Tolstoy
Eggplant: Hyperinflation destroys the middle class–the small and medium size, independent business owner. Why would the democrat want anything other than this.
Wretchard: The problem with your notion about iterative methods are 1) you are assuming good will (and along with it honest communications and informaton), 2) you are assuming a consensus on goals, metrics, outcomes and definitions of success, etc., and 3) you are assuming that you can use the full power of that method.
Iterative methods are wonderful when part of the loop is getting rid of problems, but when those problems are bad decision makers, incompetent government structures and a corrupt–even treasonous–political class, iterative methods may devolve down to just repeating the same thing over and over again with the same results, and we all know what that is a definition of.
Politics in the USA (mostly) heretofore have had obvious control mechanisms for feedback to break out of this insanity. Are they still in place?
Are the people so stupefying stupid to let the Republic and all it stands for and has stood for fall out of their hands? With the MSM like it is we may never know the answer to that question. We may be at the greatest crisis point in our history as a Republic.
The solutions to this financial mess, of course, are quite simple: Tax relief, regulatory relief and a pullback of government spending. All ths is obvious on the face of it. This is what we should be iterating on. Instead we are iterating on the New Deal–iterating on the collectivist totalitarian state–and the likely outcomes are quite well known.
Iterating with this sort of mind set will not get us out of this, or if it does odds are that the destination would be worse than where we are now.
It is sad that the GOP has let the Democrat’s get away with this “failure of capitalism” and “caused by deregulation” agitprop.
The crisis is becoming an almost metaphysical one now.
Mongoose is right –the reason everything ”feels different” is because it IS different. Our new government is burning away the resources of American Individualism deliberately, behind the cover of an arcane accounting rule and a charismatic speechifier.
Entropy Lives.
Details after the Project Owner’s Weekly Meeting
Yes, you can’t get more political and less professional than to try to take over the country’s cultural, political, and economic systems.
The Dems have embodied nothing other than the naked will to power for most of the last decade. That force ALWAYS slides in to fill cultural and spiritual vacuums (Satan is entirely trustworthy, it’s Man that is unreliable.), and we’ve all seen this movie before.
“The long and the short of the debate on the crisis is that while an increasing number of commentators now understand that we ain’t in Kansas anymore nobody knows where exactly we are now and what we should do. We can’t stay where we are. Which way is the Yellow Brick Road?”
There is no Yellow Brick Road. This guy calls it a Big Reboot.
If it’s only a reboot, then how’s that ‘fix’ anything? But what goes on while the “system is down.” Are we talking about updating ROM on a circuit board, or changing the OS, or some hardware?
I think we are approaching a societal, technological, and evolutionary fork in the road. A bifurcation. It will be interesting; but there is no Yellow Brick Road.
Wretchard asks “Which way is the Yellow Brick Road?”
In the “Wizard of Oz” the yellow brick road to the Emerald City did not bring Dorothy to the wizard with the answer she sought. Is it possible that, even in theory, there are no wizards? Nouriel Roubini may seem to be a wizard at the moment, but his foresight could be just by chance.
I know little about non-linear, chaotic systems and attractors, and so I simply ask for information. Is it possible in a chaotic system to know if one is in a fairly stable state of that system? I am not asking if attractors exist in chaotic systems. I am asking if within such a system it is possible to know at the time whether the state will be stable for a time or whether it is just as possible at any moment to be carried off by a new tornado.
Wretchard, Thanks for an excellent discussion.
Best wishes,
Jim
Mongoose and maineman get right to the real source of the problem.
To quote Brooks again: The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly.
Where Brooks goes fatally wrong is when he says “well-intentioned people.” The social-engineer in the 20th and 21st centuries has never been “well-intentioned.” He has always been out for power, power and more power, and quite willing to crush whatever gnats get in his way. In that sense, most such projects have been successes. The New Deal never went away, did it?
You can’t solve the problem when the people in charge want the problem to get worse because it accrues power to themselves.
stupefying stupid=stupefying irresponsible
(but, on reflection, I actually like “stupefying stupid”)
For a light moment, search [ wizard oz gold standard ] –you’ll see the question of where is that yellow brick road while printing trillions before breakfast, is akin to the question of where is that iceberg while treading water in the North Atlantic.
Mongoose gets it right. Finally a clear and concise answer to our problems. It has been in front of us all along but as many solutions that are cast aside it seems too simple. As it contains few ways for our treasonous politicians to acrue more power in its implementation, it is of course, rejected out of hand. Reboot of the political class, big media and some types of self interested elites will shortly become necessary. The Republic which many of us intend to keep will require a reboot but not a disk crash.
the yellow brick road starts over there by that lampost
peterike: I would go as far as to say that social engineering can never be “well intentioned” for it must perforce reduce man to less than what he truly is. Generally in living memory “social engineering” and its errors have sprung from the moral and intellectual errors of positivism and materialist and economic determinism, but it can certainly take place where some bizarre metaphysical assumptions are guiding principles,as the Nazi’s well show.
A lack of self knowledge is not innocence. It is ignorance.
The matter is one of metaphysics colliding with ethics and morality.
The point is that the true nature of man as an idividual spirit (dare I say “soul”) with free will, self ditemeination and assent to being must be ignored in order for the social engineer to even begin concpetuialiszing his project. A mere aspect of mankind, which is to say a mere aspect of being itself, must be the focus, and all the rest ignored, not merely made dependent on the primary focus, but completely ignored.
Otherwise, the remove of the engineer vanishes and with it any notion of superiority of the engineer over the object of his “work”.
So aside from the moral and psychological aspects, flaws or errors of embarking on programs of social engineering, the metaphysical aspects–the entomology and ontology of the assumptions themselves– make good intentions almost impossible.
To continue once this is seen means the shunning of morality and the mere pursuit of power and self interest.
It is philisophically and morally self-selecting for those inclined to evil.
Buddy: you mean the one that big rabbit is leaning on?
mongoose, you mean the one that isn’t there? you can see him too?
PJ O’Rourke had it right about the “big idea”. To paraphrase, he stated that when your mother asked you “What’s the big idea?”, were you doing something that you should be doing?
Wrichard writes:
“Why, besides a new face in the White House, should we believe a batter with a .000 average can can now hit at .300?”
Baseball, with its long season and complexity of parts that contribute to the whole, is probably a good analogy for politics and the economy, as opposed to football which thrives on the ‘big play’ in a sixteen game season.
I suspect that Obama will soon be hovering around the dreaded “Mendoza Line,” i.e. the .200 batting average. That’s where President Bush ended up. No pitcher is afraid of the Mendoza line guy. (In this case, i.e. Obama, the batter and sportswriters will claim the pitcher on the other team is a racist and will demand a .300 base batting average for the Mendoza guy.)
Mongoose asks why Democrats would want any policy that did not entail the destruction of the middle class and small business. Let me think. Hmmmm…..well, I can’t think of any reason. Parasites don’t want to kill the host, but they certainly do want their benefits.
Democrats successfully introduced noise and static into the information loop via media pressure and Alinsky-ite shock troop political theater. Until similar noise emerges from the middle into the Obama loop, we’ll continue to see his smiling face,hear his adverb-laden verbiage, and watch the wealth waft away.
This would be a good time to buy a Stradivarius if you could afford one. The value would most likley endure beyond a recession, and you would have an exquisite instrument on which to play as the economy burned. And someone like Chavez, or Putin, or Diane Feinstein will always have cash to buy it from you need to access some liquid assets.
This is all very interesting, even though some of it is way beyond my pay grade, as it were. However, one thing I cannot imagine is the current political class getting out of the way, surrendering their mucking-up power, or having anything resembling good intentions. I’m not even sure what such good intentions might be, or how we would recognize them if they were there. I am, though, pretty sure that, if we are to retain anything like a self-governing system, these guys are going to have to be removed. How? What/whom to replace them with? I don’t know. We need a leader who is a warrior, it seems to me, because we are going to be in for a helluva fight. I hope there is such a leader, and I hope we will be able to pick him out from the mob. Right now I don’t see a likely candidate anywhere.
Well it is not surprising at all as it is a small town, and everyone knows everyone else.
Wish he could stop our collective clocks for a bit and the electorate could take stock, you know what stinkers they are.
(my all time fav, BTW, bar none.)
And someone like Chavez, or Putin, or Diane Feinstein will always have cash to buy it from you need to access some liquid assets.
Say, Mark, how many moons are there on that planet you live on?
Over here where there is only one: These jackals do not buy it, they steal it at gun point, and then they shoot you.
(Well ok, maybe DiFi would buy it, but you would be robbed, just the same.)
Buying a Strad just makes you a target, unless you can play it oh so well–then you become a tool. Better do some sound recon before you make up the program too.
About parasites and hosts: this metaphor really breaks down as collectivism advances. The hosts become slaves. That is really the whole point. It is about power, darkness, and the degradation of the human. The sort of souls that pursue this will never know when to stop. After all, one “cannot get enough of a good thing”. Their gods are power and hatred and vanity, and these gods never forgive, have no mercy and are insatiable.
Here lies the body of William Jay
Who died maintaining his right of way;
He was right, dead right, as he sped along,
But he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong.
Man, there is some great thinking on this thread. I wish D.C. had one-tenth of this intelligence.
I agree with the comment that the current crop in charge in Washington has no intention of giving up power, or in dealing with the current dilemma in good faith. We are stuck with them for at least two years. They will do everything in their power to try and establish their utopian version of America, with NO plan on how to pay for it. Add to that the voter percentage that now rely on D.C. for their “income”, and you have the real possibility that there is no getting off this track we are on.
As the post suggests, we cannot know what is down the tracks because we have never been there before. But we are heading there nonetheless.
When I think of solutions I always try and keep as my base the core belief in liberty, freedom and personal responsibility. If enough people stick with those beliefs, I think we can meet anything that appears before us.
This is what the toxic culture and government schools have brought us to. (I’m sure you all watched the interviews with the Obama voters.) Bravely led by the Ivy League Nincompoops and the Eurocrats. Since “the crisis” leads to them accreting more and more power the worse it gets, don’t look for it to get any better on their watch. They certainly won’t let go without a fight, and they seem to own the younger generations who were more brought up on toxic boomer cultural product.
Somebody cheer me up please.
A Holy Ash Wednesday to the Belmont Club.
jjmurphy:
When I think of solutions I always try and keep as my base the core belief in liberty, freedom and personal responsibility. If enough people stick with those beliefs, I think we can meet anything that appears before us.
Indeed. I think it is crucial that we never abandon what our core beliefs are no matter what the outcome. This is of the very essence of what we stand for. We should treat these are elemental, fundamental aspects of our lives in our nation, traditions and civilization. If we do not keep them alive in our hearts, minds and deeds, we have nothing left but to mourn their departure from the earth.
WeSinger: A Holy Ash Wednesday back at you. Good to remember this. Perhaps you can offer your doubts to him there?
weSwinger, it’s life in a strobe light –which is which, if the guy is duly elected, then how can a good American Constitutionalist mutiny ?
“Here lies Lester Moore,
Four slugs from a forty-four.
No Les,
No Moore.”
Boothill Cemetery, Tombstone Ariz.
You know, I don’t actually think the problem is how to pay for what these guys are about to try to pull off. The cost is just a side-show, a by-product. The real problem is that what they want is control of the American citizenry. We are facing the end of a free society. They expect to be able to tell us how to live every aspect of our lives, including what we are permitted to think, and they will implement enforcement mechanisms. It’s not that I would favor it if only it didn’t cost so darned much money. And yes, I think the Boomer generation (my generation, I’m ashamed to say) has been near-deadly for this country. This is their revolution, the one they’ve been wanting since the ’60s. And it’s going to be more Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort than Dorothy and the Wiz. “Hang on, it’s goon to be a boompy ride.”
mongoose/36; that last para –it’s true –it’s not that those people are criminals –it’s that criminals are those people.
Election is not the only criterion for legitimacy: treason comes to mind (not to mentions the legitimacy of the election it self).
The Soviets had regular elections. Collectivists always play fast and loose democratic and republican systems on order to pervert and destroy them.
THe issue is one of critical mass…now about that COB?
I felt like I was standing on the edge of an abyss when I heard the man at the podium say that there was no pork or earmarks in the bill. It is one thing to share and admit to limited knowledge but it is another entirely to not speak the truth.
How does the governing body expect the “chattering class” to have any confidence in their decisions and proposals when the likes of Rangel and Dodd continue to sit in the front row and cheer?
Last week Doug provided some quotes from John and his son John Q. Adams regarding morality. At this point morals seem so 18th century. Like the idea of a Republic.
Peterike said: The social-engineer in the 20th and 21st centuries has never been “well-intentioned.”
Never underestimate the ability of the most depraved to see themselves as virtuous while stepping over corpses.
Te me it’s clear the Founders mandated that a President have two American citizen parents. He doesn’t. He’s a usurper. The courts have failed us.
weSwinger writes:
“Somebody cheer me up please.
A Holy Ash Wednesday to the Belmont Club.”
Well, we certainly are getting our ashes. If there was a bright spot last night, it was in Bobby Jindal’s response to the Obama speech. Jindal understands the fundamental economic role of government, which is to provide, in the words of John Paul II, a widening sphere of exchange and prosperity.
I’ve noted Mancur Olson’s “Power and Prosperity” previously. Here’s a quick review, which perhaps provides elaboration of the insights of Mongoose and others in this thead:
“From Publishers Weekly [March 2000]”
“Olson, whose ‘Logic of Collective Action’ stands as a landmark work of political economy, died in 1998 before putting the finishing touches on this book. . . . Olson examines the complex relationships between the role of the state and economic performance, arguing that “there is no way of explaining the extreme poverty of many nations without taking account of the extent to which they are misgoverned.” The lay reader will . . . . value his excellent analyses of the economic machinations of Soviet-type autocracies, including a fine reading of Stalin’s diabolical manipulation of Russia’s tax structures. As the world attempts to salvage what’s left of the post-communist economies, it must contend with disablingly high rates of inflation and inefficient, state-owned businesses. The challenge ahead is not merely to hasten privatization, Olson says. Instead, economists must work to ensure that a “market-augmenting government” first secures individual rights to private property and guarantees the impartial enforcement of contracts–in his view the two essential ingredients for prosperity.”
Obama seems to be promising a “brave new world.” To which anyone who knows history might say, as Prospero wryly says to Miranda, “New to you, perhaps.”
The brave new world, i.e. of government in charge, seems to end in the way that Orwell envisions: a boot in the face.
But, hey, let’s spread that wealth around!
US will walk away from its debts the same way it did in the 1970s, and Germany did more dramatically in 1923. Of course that is also walking away from its middle class, but as many posters have noted, it does not appear this will really be a big concern to the powers that be.
As for what we know and don’t know, Kipling said it all in 1919 in ‘Gods of the Copybook Headings.’ Everything else is technical details, the validity or usefulness of which is conditioned by circumstance. As for truth, read that poem.
And a Holy Ash Wednesday to you too, weSwinger. I did not listen to Obama’s speech last night. In fact, I have not listened to ANY of his speeches. Ever. I refuse to on the grounds that I have higher standards for what I expose my time and attention to. I’ll read about the content and fact from sources I trust.
There’s just no way of knowing in exact detail what will be meeting us down the tracks. Logic, combined with what we know about economics and history, can give us a general outline of what could be there. If these people are not voted out in the next two elections, it stands to reason what most definitely will be there.
Almost everything in life depends on our decisions. While individually we are powerless to change where things are going right now, collectively we can recover from this. Thus, when looked at in this manner, all depends upon the “we” of our culture and body politic.
We know the hardcore collectivists are about 20% of the population. Opposing them are the traditional, classical liberals (in the real understanding of that term) who I think are about 30% of our people. It’s the 50% in what I call The Middle Muddle who really decide this thing. At least half of them have to go our way in order to recover from this encroaching nightmare.
The Middle Muddle, I think, has been effectively swayed over to the collectivists’ side by two institutions: the educational establishment and the media, which the collectivists effectively own and have owned for decades now. But during the Bush years The Middle Muddle had been hammered daily by the collectivists’ transmission belts with the mythological evil of President Bush and his party. Thus, we can see that these people can live in a fantasy world where there are no consequences for their not well thought out fantasy world.
Now, there are going to be consequences for living in a fantasy world for these people. Thus, it will all devolve to whether or not there is enough intelligence, rationality, and love for one’s country to correctly appraise what is happening and then the humility to admit that one was wrong when one went into that voting booth in 2006 and 2008.
fred. Well said. Yes, humility and self examination will play a large role in turning this around.
“…if the guy is duly elected, then how can a good American Constitutionalist mutiny.”
As has been said elsewhere, the Constitution is not supposed to be a suicide pact.
We’re good Americans and we like to believe our problems arise in the implementation and not from the design of our system of governance. But perhaps it’s time to examine that assumption more closely.
Maybe we should be asking ourselves, what would the founders do? if they were here today?
To summarize gently:
!. Do no harm. Let the beast crawl to a comfortable corner so that it can rest itself first. You can help it get to the corner if you know that the corner is safe. You can defend the corner for the beast once it gets there.
2. Only fix what you know is truly broken. You may not know the anatomy of the beast. Bleeding and broken bones – OK. Cancer, poison,dementia – you have no clue. Dehydration – probably water is OK.
3. If the beast dies, well OK, it was just out of your hands.
4. What if the beast really was a ship and it was sinking. Either run it aground, patch the hull, or bail it out.
So you see even if the metaphor is wrong the fixing of the obvious and doing no harm still are the best choices.
You don’t have to be a genius to be a good government worker. It’s the politicians who want to ride their surfboards in a hurricane. Something about a crisis as being too good a thing to waste.
The word from Washington today is “Surf’s up”.
“the Constitution is not supposed to be a suicide pact”
I agree. Plus, our representatives in government haven’t really been keeping to the Constitution for about 60 years now.
JJ Murphy #38
I agree in principle. However, I don’t think that DC lack intelligence. I do,however, doubt that the denizens of DC have the wisdom and honesty of those at BC.
BTW, a blessed Ash Wednesday and Lent to all. Maybe 40 days of self-discipline and prayerful reflection will help us to see through the fog.
Do we really have a choice to make?
Some choices made now seem to me close a whole lot of options down the road.
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are-a changin’
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changing
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times are a changin’…
Bob Dylan
blindman/54; re which metaphor; the beast is voracious and it’s already eating everything we can throw to it. Soon it won’t be enough. That’s when the beast will turn into the rotten ship DC and rats will pour down the hawser ropes and disappear back to hometown, dragging sacks of gold. So, whenever the thing no longer gets enough sustenance, that’s when we break free. Thank goodness our SSBNs with their own launch authority will still be at sea while the commotion is making us vulnerable.
The vision of the anointed turns out to be a nightmare for the peons. I don’t think we’re getting out of this thing with much intact.
The strad mention reminded me of a scene in “Band of Brothers” where the 101st enters a town in bombed out Germany to find a group of musicians playing a classical concert standing in the rubble.
The standing O for Teddy Kennedy who “never quit asking what he could do for his country” during the Messiah’s Sermon on the Anthill is a Kodak moment. Sad the Lion of the Left has a tumor, but his career is symptomatic of everything the political class has done to drive us into penury. Besides the body in the river.
“I don’t know ,but I’ve been told
It’s hard to run with the weight of gold
Other hand I heard it said
It’s just as hard with the weight of lead
I don’t know whose back that strong
Maybe find out before too long
One way or another
One way or another
One way or another
This darkness got to give..”
-Robert Hunter
“New Speedway Boogie”
Just another data point for judging BHO’s integrity/honesty: When he was calling out all the malfactors – greedy bankers, ninja (NoIncomeNoJob-a) borrowers etc… there was no mention of profligate local, state, federal politicians spending to the edge and beyond during the unreal boom/bubble years…
Mongoose (@ 13)has the prescription: 1) reduce the drag of gov’t on the system and 2) let the bubble go and I would add a technical 3) manage the short term credit market so it doesn’t freeze-up (like we were close to last fall and in the early 30′s).
By way of analogy after a debauched drunken bender you recuperate, you don’t immediately renew the episode with an eye to “outdoing” yourself – that way lies madness and self-destruction…
#53 Sally
I fear that before or after an economic collapse your last paragraph will come down to an old song called Jefferson and Liberty</em:
First verse:
The Night of Fire is yet to come,
The Tyrant’s Shadow on the years,
Demands we kneel or take the gun,
And go shed blood instead of our tears.
In addition to the ‘either/or’ decision boxes in flowcharting the current economic crisis, there are going to be a large number of irrevocable decision boxes in the political reaction. One of these is going to be, of course, whether the Tyrant wins.
But even if the immediate Tyrant loses, there are going to be choices that will have to be made by the people and by the individual(s) who are the victor. One of the main choices will be whether or not the victor understands the stories of Cinncinatus and George Washington; and will be guided by them.
This is not to say that we must not fight the evil that is in front of us, for fear of evil resulting in the future. Life is by its nature uncertain, and every moment in our lives we make decisions that knowingly or otherwise determine our future.
But it does show what the result of our 40+ year journey away from the Constitution, the rule of law, and individual responsibility is. Before we plunge into the maelstrom to come, it is worth a moments reflection on how different our fate would be if we had not made that journey.
Subotai Bahadur
#64 Me
Got to stop trying to do HTML tags before the first cup of coffee is done. Italics should have ended after the song title “Jefferson and Liberty.
Sorry about that.
Subotai Bahadur
Our single biggest problem is the degree of corruption that is present.
Barney and Fannie and Freddy are a high level example, but the many, many lower level ones are the biggest problem. The policies they created in DC would not matter so much if there was not so personal corruption at lower levels. The people who bought those houses knew what they were doing, and if they did not it, was just as bad.
For example, my brother, a pharmacist in Georgia, reports that fat young black girls are coming in and getting prescription drugs to increase their appetites and get them into the really obese category. This is so they can then claim social security disability, kick back, and live off the checks that will come in. It is a way to get around the welfare reform of the 90’s, which Obama, in the stimulus package, effectively did away with anyway.
It is hard to say if the few Bernie Madoffs inspire the actions of the many, many fat porkers, or vice versa. But either way, we need to cut them off.
W pleads for an heuristic . The problem confronting our nation is our leadership isn’t interested in the solution… They want to use the “crisis” for other ends ( per Rahm Emanuel)
The Truth only serves its slaves. – A. G. Sertillanges
Our leaders don’t care about the Truth, fact is they “can’t handle the Truth” (thank you Jack)
So, how can we insert ourselves in their OODA loop? At a minimum, write/call your representitives, your local paper, your friends (and not just the “choir” you’re a member of)… this is an outstanding blog – with many great thinkers – but, these ideas need wider, MUCH WIDER circulation. “BC-’ers” – exercise your influence. The “last, best hope of mankind” needs you gifted folks to weigh-in, here to be sure, but elsewhere too. If “America” – the nation based on an idea – of Adams, Jefferson and de Tocqueville goes away where are we (from around the globe) to turn?
In conclusion: all interventions should be immediate, nonideological and subject to change given the arrival of new data and the speed at which we close our OODA loop should be improved. This is the way our mammalian ancestors overcame the dinosaurs. If we remember nothing else, we should remember that.>>
Intuitively this seems right to me.
It also seems, I hate to say it, impossible with the people currently leading Congress (Reid and Pelosi) who look like they are in so far over their heads. There needs to be a change there. What we need are practical people who have a sense of service, some natural humility, some real outside the beltway experience earning a living, and who can see clearly the difference between what is and what ought to be.
This situation calls out for new leaders. I think this will happen. Eventually some will rise above because they seem to grasp the situations, and see ways forward that make sense.
I also think the Stimulus package should now be re-examined. It was passed because the leaders in charge felt more risk in not knowing what to do, and appearing to dither, than in doing something bold. Anything, but something bold and fast.
But there seems to be agreement that the Stimulus is not targeted and much of the impact is out in the future. Some think it will work. OK, we have a plan A. We should now look at the alternatives and consider alterations to the Stimulus bill which might improve it. This would also be an opportunity to give the Big Solution a more diverse thrust. It would be an opportunity to refresh the debate and introduce factors which were missed in the first one.
Comment 16:
Thread winner. Kudos, dude: well spoke.
Two weeks ago a guy at the gym where I work out announced he planned to go to Hawaii. He works as a court illustrator in the supreme court. He’s a liberal. His plan was to make a round of the islands and maybe find a place where he could let some sensimilla grow in his brains. Maybe enter the dream time. All on a ten day junket. I told him the best acid trip he could get would be to rent a car during his 12 hours on the big island and drive up to the top of Mauna Kea and enter the observatories. Its an experience to be high up in snow near the equator. Very otherworldly. Like walking on Mars. Or Walking On The Moon The young adventurers you run into are future corporate leaders –or if they’re from the third world–future dictators. They won’t actually let you look through any of the cluster of telescopes–so I told him the best he could do would be to read up on the issues and interests of the people in the observatories before he went up there so he could imagine what they were thinking about as he was driving and walking around. Things like exploding supernovas half way across the universe, planets circling stars within a 100 light years of the earth. Comets flying by. Getting grants. Getting glory. Getting laid. Getting tenure. Asimov. Heinlein. Herbert. Numbers. You can see the curve of the blue earth below and the blue sky above while standing amid the cold rocks and snow on top. The weight of space time bears down. The air is thin. So you’ll breathe hard after any exertion at all.
After doing that, drive down the mountain in the rented car, drop it off and return to the cruise ship. Next day when the ship drops into Honolulu rent another car and go to the bishop museum. Go to the exhibitions that show the hawaiian voyagers, as well as captain cook. Coastal sailing has been around for 50,000 years or so. But cross ocean sailing has only been around +-4000. In terms of deep time — people groups from all over the world learned how to cross ocean voyage at almost the same time.
Then go to the planetarium in the bishop museum. And sit below the starscape show beside that wierd space ship like contraption that projects the images onto the dome above. The star show links modern astronomical techniques with the astronomical techniques of the ancient hawaiian voyagers.
Link the images provided by the Bishop Museum and the experiences atop Mauna Kea.
In order for the US to have a successful 21st century new sources of cheap water and power need to be found and scaled up. I believe that’s happening right now for power. (But not so much for water.) A lot of private capital to move these technologies forward has been destroyed. Its being replaced by public capital.
The profligate borrowing can be made good by first keeping oil prices low by reducing consumption and increasing production.And then over ten years eliminating US dependence on foreign energy/oil entirely. In doing so the US would create a template for the rest of the world to follow. (The Aussies are doing a better job with water right now.) Brazil should be given credit for getting energy independence first. Their energy independence is what’s behind the strength of that country.
Brooks knows about The End of The World, Brooks knows the History of The World, in fact he knows whether To Be or Not To Be but Lubitsch and Benny knew it better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NnognNifY0
#64 RWE
Agreed that systemic corruption is a major portion of the problem. I do not rule out both calculated treason and stupidity also, but corruption is endemic. The Nomenklatura cannot be brought to justice for any crime. Which leads to a question. If the system is corrupt, and there is no way under the no-longer-existent “Rule of Law” to clean it up, what recourse within that rule of law remains for citizens/subjects/serfs to restore the rule of law? And if that is a null set, what options remain?
Wretchard, you cut your teeth opposing Marcos’ dictatorship. While we are not yet at the phase where the force of the State is being deployed against those who do not submit; it appears to be a mere matter of time before both statutory and extra-legal applications of brute force by the State are in our future. Given your experience; could you comment on our situation in that light?
Subotai Bahadur
By getting energy independence the US will redirect capital flows so the US isn’t running enormous trade deficits. That will keep the US dollar from going weimar.
The worst part about these fundamental changes to the American system is that we don’t have another alternative. Where can those seeking freedom from government interference flee to now? What can a family burdened by excessive taxation do? The U.S. used to be that country, unique amongst the nations of the world.
But we’re traveling on that long road to serfdom, and I feel like the changes are such that they have become irreversible. When voters are choosing between a 1) Democratic politician offering voters free health care, free housing, and welfare for life, and 2) a politician on a crusade to cut entitlements, the choice is so easy as to almost not be worth voting on. And eventually, maybe they will be so kind as to relieve us of that burden of voting, too, just to make things easier for everyone.
Victor Davis Hanson has a new post up on “Perverse Thoughts about This Perverse Recession.” Good stuff.
Subotai: The answer I come up with is that when the King comes to collect the lion’s share of the serfs’ harvest, make sure that there ain’t any to collect. If they insist that you cough some up anyway, well, that’s where the 2nd Amendment comes in.
I am very uncomfortable about saying this, but probably the only way to fix this is to impoverish ourselves in the traditional ways. That is why I wish I had the guts to cash in all my mutual funds and buy gold, silver, guns, and ammo and bury it all in the back yard. I will probably do this to some small degree but I sure wish I could send a message to Wall St. and DC and yank it all out.
The Socialist looks upon Capitalism as a cow to be milked. The Communist looks upon Capitalism as a cow to be slaughtered. As someone who joined the US military at a very unpopular time, 1970, and who served for over 25 years, I really hate to say this, but perhaps the best thing would be to make sure the slaughtering of the herd comes as soon as possible. That might prompt another kind of slaughter, at worst, or wake people up, at best.
“”"”"”"71. Charles:
By getting energy independence the US will redirect capital flows so the US isn’t running enormous trade deficits. That will keep the US dollar from going weimar.”"”"”"”"”"
No such thing as energy independence for a large, industrialized country like ours. I am not knocking your sentiments, I am just scaling down your projections to a more realistic substantial (even dramatic) lowering of dependence on foreign energy sources.
Totally off topic, but it would be off-topic on any thread. It concerns all the failed HTML tag-closing around here. Until we get a “preview” option, here’s what you do (this is Windows-only, sorry Mac guys).
1. Create a file in Notepad, call it “belmont.txt” or whatever.
2. Write your post in that file, with the HTML tags.
3. When done, change the file name to “Belmont.html”
4. Open the file with your browser (i.e. Internet Explorer) or simply drag the file to an open browser window. It will display as formatted text, letting you see if you missed a tag.
5. Make any corrections needed, rinse and repeat until it looks right.
6. When done, rename to belmont.txt, open again in Notepad and cut and paste into the Comment area on Belmont. Make sure you cut and paste from the TXT version in Notepad, so it includes the HTML tags.
You can use the same file again and again. Just delete your last post and write the next.
It seems like a lot of steps but it’s really pretty fast when you get the hang of it. And you only have to do it for posts where you use HTML.
The US military oath of allegiance is to the Constitution, not to any branch of the government. One could invision a future General Petraeus simply doing a Cromwell and telling the pols, “You have sat here too long for all the good you have done. In the name of God, now go.”
In the waning days of the Soviet Union, many people there learned to live “Na Lyevo,” “On the Left,” an ironic expression considering the ideological tilt of their rulers. The black market/underground economy was what kept many citizens just above the poverty line.
We may evolve a similar, but actually more thriving and dynamic version of this in the coming decades if the current trends are not reversible for many years. There of course, is already a thriving underground economy is the U.S., patched together by criminal organizations and people living on the margins, and recently swollen in size and importance by illegal immigration. The ranks and size and complexity of the underground economy may swell dramatically again, with many honest citizens trying to hang onto as much prosperity as they can by not handing it over to government. Joining such an “economy” is perilous, but many new people may choose to brave it when they realize that even an expanding and “watchful” government won’t be able to stop most of them due to huge inefficiencies and dramatic increases in bureaucratic corruption.
Ironically, increased corruption by lower-level government functionaries may be the best way for many ordinary citizens to engage in economic self-defense. The vast sums of money about to be tossed around by federal, state, and municipal governments are a guarante for an explosion in corruption and malfeasance. If it’s cheaper to buy off a bureaucrat than pay a series of license fees and taxes, then that will prove to be an attractive choice for many Americans. If those same Americans can operate underground businesses with large customer bases, then the alternate economy will do just fine, thank you very much.
Richard,
Beatifully cogent. Here’s hoping. However, all those remedies require the complex system be able to be modified. And willing. HAL. HAL? G*ddammit HAL! HAAAAAAAAAAAL…
Or, it’s a rewrite.
As a systems guy, albeit bygone, what I see being implemented is a very efficient, extremely sophisticated viral design (I call it malignant chaos), upon which no expense will be spared in its use to assemble the apparatii(?) necessary to boil all the frogs, at will; whereat the effects have already infected over half the system, including the alarms, safeguards and voting circuitry.
No doubting Marx, now. Viral at gunpoint. That’s a really effective market-penetration strategy. It’s got monoply advantage – no budget constraints or quality demands – 24/7 free national advertising – cost-of-switching nearing infinite – universal subscription at some point and total legal immunity. What’s not to like? The “killer” app.
Recall Chernobyl – turn off all but one safeguard, in order to determine if that last one works, and then push TEST. That last safety device worked perfectly…for about 35 nanoseconds, until the by-then critical pile exploded, negating its utility.
I remember dicovering the first “virus” on my company LAN. Again, I’m feeling like the now aged shepherd screaming FIRE at my loudest; because no one comes anymore when I cry wolf.
75. Roderick Reilly:
No such thing as energy independence for a large, industrialized country like ours. I am not knocking your sentiments, I am just scaling down your projections to a more realistic substantial (even dramatic) lowering of dependence on foreign energy sources.
So Brazil could do it and not the USA? what’s wrong with this picture. As it happens, US renewables are growing as a percentage of total US energy output at the rate of 1.5% annually. Obama proposes to double that rate to 3% annually. Most of the growth will come from biofuels in the next three years. Should be doable given the amount of money they’re going to be throwing at the problem. I write about this extensively in this post
Heyhey – this is pretty interesting…
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_pakistan
Charles: “Public capital”? There is no such thing.
Mea culpa and apologies to all, for repeating @70 what so many others said better before.
Speaking of the end of the world, does anyone know the Constitutional process to follow if — or perhaps when — its proven that Oblarney was never eligible to run for President? Does Biden just get it? That doesn’t seem right.
Do we re-do the election? Can we not pick McCain this time?
And what if Omighty just says “I ain’t going.” How do we oust him? Even physically, who has the jurisdiction to drag him bodily from the White House?
Or is the most likely outcome everyone just saying “yeah, whatever, he still won the election” and we proceed as if normal but with the Constitution officially a dead letter?
Wretchard said:
“What government needs to implement is a succession of quick but well thought out interventions with the least possible lag, so that some kind of closed loop policy fire control system can be implemented instead of the insane method of World War 1 style battleship prediction plotting extending over a period of years.”
What this boils down to is the need for a Control Law. The WW-I’s battleship used a simple control law, i.e. The targeting calculations assumed the enemy ship was travelling in a straight line at constant speed. Socialism assumes that large economies can be managed through central planning. Central planning assumes that one has a valid model describing the economy. However we know that macroeconomics doesn’t work well. Central planning based upon macroeconomics was one of the many reasons why the Soviet Union imploded.
The mathematics of large systems tends to be very nonlinear and often chaotic. However if one zooms in to a fine enough scale then linear models work. The microeconomic model describing my purchase of a loaf of bread is a fairly good one. Again, this gets back to Wretchard’s point about shortening the OODA loop, i.e. draw a circle around the problem that is small enough that one can actually model the process and then predict the outcome.
What is to be done when one is compelled by politics to draw a circle around the entire world’s economy? I suspect(?) the problem is “too hard”. Let it fail, reboot the system and then focus on controlling the different components separately as they come back on line.
We are witnessing the end of an era. However we can influence the creation of a new one.
82. Mongoose:
Charles: “Public capital”? There is no such thing.
You’re right. Your money.
Roderick Reilly:
Suggest you read the P.J. O’Rourke book “Eat the Rich.” Aside from the fact it is hilarious it probably also is the best book on economics ever written. He wrote it because every book on Capitalism he read he judged to be trash.
P.J. goes to Sweden (good socialism), Cuba (bad socialism), Albania (bad everything), China, and Russia. He points out that the real, thriving Russian economy was out in the public parks where people had stands where they sold all kinds of stuff. He contrasts this open underground capitalist economy with the stumbling steps of the Russian government to create capitalism.
The best definition of Capitalism I ever read is “It’s what you get when you leave people alone.” Based on that, my definition of Communism is “It’s what you get when people leave governments alone.”
One Small Step For USA Mankind
Oklahoma House passes sovereignty bill. Expected to pass Senate too.
“while an increasing number of commentators now understand that we ain’t in Kansas anymore…”
Well, it is my opinion that we are well on our way to an American version of “The Wizard of Marx.”
“if politics is in the best of times the art of lying to ourselves in the broad day, politics in crisis is the vice of lying to ourselves while we are falling off a cliff. And when fables meet a changing environment disaster is often the result. The second difficulty is that government is a ponderous, elephantine beast.”
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” George Washington
“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.” Thomas Jefferson
I fear we are on the verge of criminal government – Chicago style – and we no longer have our Constitution – the real one – to limit its power.
bob said:
“Oklahoma House passes sovereignty bill. Expected to pass Senate too.”
That’s an interesting “bolt out of the blue” failure mode, i.e. all of the separate states simply say “thanks for all the fish” to Obama and the federal government, begin printing their own money and adopt their own foreign policy. I guess that’s how the Soviet Union fell apart.
Others here are right. This has never been about the economy, or the environment, or any other “crisis.” This is about the accumulation of more power to the central government. If they get the power, it really doesn’t matter if the problems are solved or not.
It cleared up a lot of things for me when I realized that North Korea wasn’t a failed socialist state, it was a perfected one.
I hope Oklahoma’s Sovereignty bill passes, and I hope many other states pass similar bills. It will be a shot across the bow of the federal behemoth and maybe wake people up and have them take a closer look at the Constitution.
Eggplant, Using a linear model to fit and forecast a nonlinear system can work well until the system bifurcates and the forecasts crash and burn.
Swedish conservatives are getting more and more political power. The left relies on the Muslim freeloaders to get left seats. When the Swedish kroner crashed and the government pension system crashed as well the middle class government workers such as my engineering friends switched to private pensions for their retirement. But at least the Swedes did not inflate away their citizens savings as our leftist political gang is going to do except for their stashes.
88. bob
secession?
Three cheers for Oklahoma!
States rights are real – the governing power of our states comprises everything not listed in the actual Constitution; which means that the “New Deal” (a very bad deal) is un-Constitutional, and so are the entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, and all federal government involvement in the education of our children. I’m not against entitlement programs; I’m just against Federal entitlement programs. There should be 50 Medicares and 50 Social Securities – that way when one state becomes corrupt in their governing of these programs people can either reverse the corruption through elections, or they can simply move to a state which has good government. This is what the founders laid down; but it is not what we have. What we actually have is un-Constitutional federal government.
The South was correct to assert states rights, but not any rights which violate the Declaration of Independence. That sacred document, in addition to the actual federal powers listed in the actual Constitution, is all that limits the governing power of our states.
Storm-Rider (#95) Well said!
#88 Don’t think that’s what they have in mind. Hard to see how it might work, except for maybe Hawaii and Alaska, states that might conceivably make it on their own, Hawaii on tourism, Alaska on natural resoursece. The lower 48 are too tied together. I think they are just making a statement, hopefully to be followed up by the rejection of D.C. stuff they don’t like. I’m all for a new states rights movement without the old racism.
Charles said:
“”So Brazil could do it and not the USA? what’s wrong with this picture. “”"”
Brazil’s a big place, but the U.S. is much bigger, and I’m not talking geographical size either. Keep in mind that I think it is possible for America to give itself a much larger share of its energy from home resources, even to the point where — if there were an anti-American oil embargo — the U.S. could ride it out with little distress and disruption for some time. That latter scenario can be defined as energy “independence,” because I believe the point is for America to not have to depend on large foreign sources to maintain a thriving economy.
Well, W, you’ve outdone yourself. There’s so much good thinking in this post that I feel like I need days instead of hours to contemplate all the lessons.
Two things occur to me regarding government intervention, though:
1. Intervention is never as good as incentive, partly because intervention needs to be right or it will just invite constant course-corrections and ante-upping, and admitting it was not right is something government is just not prepared to do. The better method is to put out incentives that lay out where we want to go (increased home ownership is an acceptable one) without spelling out how to get there (giving loans to people who do not qualify). The incentive path would not say “go ahead and give high-risk loans and the government will guarantee them,” it would say something like “find ways of making risky loans bankable and we’ll give you a tax break” or something like that.
The second thought is that we need to find a way for government to say “back to the drawing board.” Too often (MUCH too often) the answer when a program does not work is to throw more money at it. If private enterprise operated that way it would be out of business. We should try to get the government to work under the same guidelines: stop programs that fail instead of just increasing their size and scope. Of course this requires a certain amount of humility, which is not available in grand measure in D.C.
F
82. Mongoose:
Charles: “Public capital”? There is no such thing.
On the surface, that appears to be so, but:
Can we agree that no individual or company can truly own a ‘natural’ resource? The means of production…sure. But the resource itself?
We can and do act as if that’s true but as you ‘can’t take it with you’ you can’t really own, nor arguably, have a moral right to the claim that you ‘own’ the tides, or sunlight… or for that matter, oil and coal resources on public lands. Unless positing that discovery is equivalent to personal creation of that resource.
The distinction of ‘public lands’ is important, as privately held land is another matter.
So, in a capitalistic economy, when we say that Chevron ‘owns’ it’s oil fields, oil fields that are on public lands, what we are saying is that they have paid for the right to search for and, to develop and implement production of any ‘discovered’ resource …they ‘own’ it.
The fees they pay to explore and the taxes on production of that resource, in fact are ‘public capital’ are they not? For no other individual or company can lay claim to ownership of those fees and taxes.
Whether US natural resources, upon public lands, should always retain a ‘public ownership’ component is arguable, pro and con, but public capital, at least to some degree, does exist.
The Oklahoma news is shocking, and much needed. The article notes that Alaska is among the states considering such a move (rots o’ ruck getting it here in NY).
Could this reassertion of the 9th and 10th Amendments be the horse that Sarah Palin can ride in on? I don’t think she’s ideologically constructed that way, unfortunately. But she ought to embrace the movement regardless and add her voice to the chorus.
Obama’s approach to the economy is like Al Gore’s approach to the world climate – they believe puny humans can control it.
please, please… no more sarah palin. she’s hot and i like her but the crisis calls for a little more gravitas, i’d say.
The problem Wretchard is that we have a political elite and cultural elite that refuse to face reality and tells itself pretty tales.
Technology proliferation in all sorts of ways empower previously inept, pathetic, and powerless bandit-thugs to now become city killers.
Lack of manufacturing base in the Western world leads to lack of wealth creation, and bubble economies.
Modern single-life living leads to endless status competitions for the best shoes, computers, cars, and arm-candy. Fueling a narcisstic approach to any crisis.
Entertainment and news feeds a fantasy world-view instead of ugly but true facts.
Obama is doubtless over-reaching, his collapse is likely to produce a third party Perot-like guy, with an enourmous backlash against the Gentry.
Jay said:
“Using a linear model to fit and forecast a nonlinear system can work well until the system bifurcates and the forecasts crash and burn.”
That’s correct. A system needs to be at least 2nd order to describe a bifurcation. A system can be modelled as piecewise linear only up until the bifurcation. On this topic, the Wikipedia article about Henri Poincare is of interest (another amazing genius).
This is what the toxic culture and government schools have brought us to.
I was listening to Rush today, and one of his callers said that her “gender studies” textbook (mandatory for all graduates) made the claim that women wouldn’t have jobs under capitalism, that only by government directly employing women can women ensure they have jobs. If this is what women are learning in college these days no wonder young women are so liberal. They believe they have no future employment without government!
“Entertainment and news feeds a fantasy world-view instead of ugly but true facts.”
And elects a TV character as POTUS.
I’m thankful to have Wretchard and the BC Crew who to hear from when our real-time version of Bizarro World drives me to mental overload. While I don’t underestimate what challenges we are up against, I’m encouraged to know that there are intellectual allies like you all out there.
Fascinating.
I read Fabius Maximus, and I agree. Every attempt in the last few months has been to recreate what was gone.
There are a number of serious walls that have been hit. The world found out how much oil it can consume before the price is forced high enough to kill the economy.
We have found out that Wall street, the UK financial marketplace, the European banks are functionally equivalent to the Vancouver Stock Exchange. Look it up. Speculative, manipulated and crooked. No one in their right mind will entrust their money to them for a generation. It’s gone.
We have found out that personal, corporate and government will show absolutely no restraint when it comes to borrowing money. All without any intent of repayment. The only thing that will stop the borrowing is no lender.
There is a generation of people who made the whole thing work retiring. The world is going to be run by youth with no experience, no idea how badly things can go wrong. They will learn.
We have subverted the rules of survival of the fittest for three generations. What that has done is breed in weakness, which leaves the population vulnerable to disease.
Read histories of the second world war. The naval battles, the air battles, the bombing campaigns. The technology allowed people to hide in weather and distance. How long would the naval battles of the north atlantic, or the pacific naval war last with today’s military might? 3 hours? Without nuclear weapons the second world war devastation would take about 3 months. With, 15 minutes.
We saw how easy it was for Al Queda to foment civil war in Iraq. A few well placed and publicized bomb, assassination and the like almost irreparably destroyed any future in that country. Give us a few more months, and a well planned campaign of terror.
Derek
tbrosz #91
Your insight that N. Korea is actually a “perfected” socailist state is brilliant. The “Dear Leader” and his minions have exactly what they want. The rest, as long as they can be contained, can be damned. I fear that our “Dear Leader” could find himself thinking the same way.
G. Britain: With all due respect, your point seems to me irrelevant here. of course people can own a resource. If you buy a gold mine, you own it. This is the essence of property rights and capitalism. Resources, however, do not, per this discussion, equate to “capital”, per se., though granted that they can be “capitalized” (i.e., one can take out a loan based on ownership or access to them). As to the public/private divide here, this notion of “public resources” is a collectivist distortion of property, capital, markets and liberty foisted on us by FDR and continued ever since then by the Democrats . There was no original notion that the governemnt would keep “lands” or “resources” in perpetuity, hold them a “resources” to be used by the citizen. This is a perverse misuse of the term “public resource”.
Whatever Woody Guthrie may have meant when he wrote the lyrics “This land is your land”, the impetus and intent of the founding documents was that indeed, the part of it you owned is your land, and the part of it I owned is my land, and stay on you side of the fences until told otherwise, thank you very much. In that sense “this land belongs to you and me”. It was not meant in the sense that you hold property and resources at the whim of the government.
(My guess is that this is not what old Woody had in mind at all.)
Those resources should be reverted to the States, and the States should be forced to sell them such that they are owned by the citizens and not government. This is part of the problem, this collectivist notion that there are “public lands” and “public resources”. They are government lands, not “public lands”. This is a part of the statist direction started by FDR and continued to this day, mostly by the Democrats. Google a map of “pubic” ownership in the West. This is a national scandal. It is just one more noxious outcome caused by the cancer of an oversized federal government.
As an aside, let me point out that we would not have the urban problems we have, and the attendant political problems of corrupt Dem urban fiefdoms if the country opened up its public lands for homesteading. Yes we would lose some scenery and the West would be more populated, but we would have a much healthier society.
In any event, I was obviously not referring to oil wells on public land when I was talking about capital. They most properly are resources that may be capitalized. But the government cannot capitalize it for it has no capital. It has tax receipts. The Government is not, or should not be a business. I do not recall getting any dividends from these oil leases. Do you?
It is a racket. Leases should not be granted, the lands should be sold. Period.
The government should just have government building, military bases and ranges, and perhaps some research facilities. I would go for a few national parks.
It should not have “national forests” or “public lands” or “mineral rights”.
Period.
Obviously telecommunications has special problems, but I would argue that with modern frequency shifting and packet technology, that there is more than enough spectrum to go around such that even this could be privatized.
One can talk about waterways and coastlines, and I am sure that there are grey areas, but they should in any event be the province of the States, and there is planty of common law and common pratice basis for handling this sort of thing. Same for roads. This is more a matter of “public utility” rather than a “public resource”.
We have simply allowed the Federal government to have more power than it was intended to be, and this is especially true since the New Deal.
Ultimately, to turn around the structural problems facing the USA in the long term, we may have to turn back to the federalism that was the original intent of the Framers. There seems no other way to limit corruption and the consolidation of power.
The Federal governments main responsibilities should be security, facilitating the interactions of the sTates, and enforcing the Bill of Rights in the States.
I am sure in the modern world and the needs of things like “Big Science” and “Big Technology” there are, again, grey areas. So long as the general principal is seen as a primary and guiding political lodestar, there is no reason to be rigidly doctrinaire about this matter, and that there are all sorts of pragmatic compromises.
But the central point is that the government is the servant of the people, and one of the primary vessels of the people’s will is the governments of the States.
The State legislature should be the primary forum for political discussion and actions that have the most impact on the citizens lives, not the national one. This militates against the professional politician crooks and tyrants that so bedevil us today.
@peterike, re comment #84 above:
You are kidding yourself if you believe the Obamassiah cannot produce a “genuine”, to all appearances, birth certificate (even a Hawaii state vault copy), on demand, now that he has the resources and at least limited complicity of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, not to mention that praetorian guard, the Secret Service at his disposal. The time to force the matter of legitimacy was after the election and before his hands grasped the reigns of power. It may have been late even then. Because of this, the circumstances related to your inquiry will never occur.
I’m afraid the best available way out of our current mess is for things to become substantially worse for U.S. citizens over the next couple years. I hope a slow and continuing deterioration of our economy will encourage record voter turn out at the next election and record turnover in both the house and senate at that election. A President Obama hamstrung by solid conservative / libertarian majorities in both houses may prove to be just a disaster like Carter, as opposed to the slavering maw of national obliteration that appears to be gaping for us at the moment.
Buckets @ #72:
“The worst part about these fundamental changes to the American system is that we don’t have another alternative…I feel like the changes are such that they have become irreversible. When voters are choosing between[...]”
Agreed totally. Except, I think that the “worst part” is the choices. Our politicians aren’t offering any, really.
Heck, even Republicans are trapped in the Liberals’ sticky discursive net. As conservatives discuss health care, social policies (like illegal immigration) and education, they are stuck juggling well-worn governmental-ist solutions. On key issues like Federal mandates for public education and funding mandates for increased welfare roles (both are key channels for Federal “creep” into States’ rights), both parties argue out of habit from the “safe,” discursive grounds that FDR, Brown-v-BoE, and LBJ marked, flagged, staffed and cordoned-off for them decades ago.
I’m reminded of a line of varied cattle stomping down the same well-worn path to the watering-hole. Despite sporting many outward differences like a white spot there or a cleft hoof there, it’s rare to find that individual cow in the herd who’ll dare to cut her own path though the grass.
That’s the definition of “herd animals.” As things stand, both parties are towing the same line.
What? Belmont Club goofs deferred to a dypso, philanderer who declared, “islam is peace” as 3000 of his countrymen were being pulled out of the WTC and Pentagon. Prudence isn’t a BC trait.
My apologies, viz the “goof” comment. You would have to step up 10 grades to become a goof, thus, my apologies to bona fide goofs.
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville
Amen
“The second difficulty is that government is a ponderous, elephantine beast. Bureaucracies are nearly always behind the curve. Part of the requirement is to get ahead of the problem and cut out those parts of governance which contributed to the problem.”
Perhaps that is the very strength of entrepreneurship. He is not that necessarily the smartest are at the helm of business, though he often is, especially so for small business, but that those at the helm make all the decisions and assume all the risk. Complex systems may not be governed by deterministic formulae that can be ‘known’ by a bureaucracy. Being close enough to the source gives one precious insight but even those insights can be overtaken by events so luck favors those who move quickly and at times arbitrarily. This hardly seems the dynamic of bureaucracies. And unlike the entrepreneur, the bureaucrat never sees fault within itself. It may find fault in another bureaucracy but is likely to keep mum. There is an honor amongst thieves and one thief is not likely to rat upon the other.
“It must shorten its OODA loop. It cannot be in the business of setting Five Year plans in the middle of a dynamically changing situation.”
The problem here is that the incumbent administration is in the position to determine what projects are “shovel ready” and it turns out that they are the same doomed liberal agendas that were rightly denied by congress and the last two administrations. Porkulus is not an economic stimulus but a winners gorging on the spoils of their self-made disaster. This was not exactly a peaceful transfer of power but a violent interruption of the status quo with the laughable metric that we can prove how many jobs would have been lost if the “drastic measures” were not taken. And the proof is what we say it is and if you don’t like it get your own damn messiah.
“What government needs to implement is a succession of quick but well thought out interventions with the least possible lag…”
My vote is for 50 new nuclear reactors in 10 years; none for Hawaii and two for California.
“In conclusion: all interventions should be immediate, nonideological and subject to change given the arrival of new data and the speed at which we close our OODA loop should be improved.”
Bankruptcies would have solved all of these problems if the federal government had not whored itself to foreign money. The US has lots of problems but California has legislated itself out of business altogether. No business plan will reanimate the rot. The government has been playing favorites with its unions for so long the pensions that have paid for unfettered mediocrity in return for unwavering political support have placed an execrable burden on the taxpayer. Slavery was an evil but conscripting the unborn masses into indentured servitude is a blessing, not God given, but tributary to the state that has allowed life where god not lightly tread but the power of state itself.
Great post, Wretchard.
As to the US becoming energy-independent in the manner of Brazil in the next decade, that’s a pipe dream for a variety of reasons, with one small asterisk that may allow it to happen.
Brazil is ethanol-rich because they can grow sugar cane, with 8x the ethanol potential of corn, and they can do so with labor costs no American would tolerate. Secondly, you have to consider the per-capita energy usage of the average Brazilian versus the average American. Seeing as we’re #1 in energy consumption worldwide, we have to be using more joules per person than Brazil is, so we would need not only their infrastructure but proportionately more. The question is not energy equivalency (at least, not right now), it’s what other tangible benefit we would get for the investment. At the moment, biofuels have nothing to offer.
Thirdly, if you subscribe to the biotic theory of petroleum/natural gas origin, we are hauling up from the sedimentary depths thousands of years of compacted, heated and chemically-transformed sea bed and plant material at a time. We are literally burning the past, likely many times faster than the material was accumulated in places and conditions whereby it could be turned into petroleum and natural gas. From this perspective the rate-limiting step is our topsoil, which is finite. If your intent is to grow something like corn, or even assume a viable cellulosic ethanol system and grow switchgrass, you cannot replace 70% of our petroleum consumption with organic matter indefinitely. The resources in our soil were deposited there over thousands of years, drilling for oil is in effect using the product of the topsoil of eons ago but trying to have our current batch supply all our needs is bound to fail. We have to eat, too.
If we went hard into nuclear, and went heavily into coal gasification (Fischer-Tropsch) for transport fuel we might make it in 10 years, albeit at a very high cost. The only way that we wouldn’t end up at a competitive disadvantage with our world peers would be if they were really serious about paying more than they need to for fuel for “climate change” reasons. Quite frankly I trust more in their ability to seize an exposed jugular than I do in their concern for Gaia, so I expect that any cost we might incur that was higher than their prices they would exploit as an economic advantage.
The only biofuel way out of this I see is algal biodiesel, and to get that to work we’ll need a) sunlight, b) CO2, c) copious amounts of water and d) a very, very special algae. I think it’s doable, the magic bullet is an algae that loves water we can’t use anyway (saltwater, brackish water, wastewater) and still grows like a beast. I think we’re close, but we aren’t there just yet. Algal biodiesel is one of those things I hope comes along before The End starts, it would be one of those things that can stave off collapse, but there’s a lot of development between here and there and I am becoming increasingly convinced that the folks steering the ship of state are lost, yet firmly convinced of the rightness of their course.
Most liberals I find to be entranced by what they know. They are inspired by BHO and what he knows, it is taken as given that he knows more than GWB ever knew and it is taken as given that knowing more will equate to better performance. The more I look at the world around me, though, the more thankful I am to Nassem Taleb for pointing out to me that what I don’t know is much, much more important. We are well and truly living in a “fat-tail” world and our leaders do not show much in the way of cognizance of that fact and their limitations. If only the world were Harvard Law School, I would feel our government was in the right hands. It is not, and the less the world resembles an Ivy League institution the less important that credential becomes. To me, anyway.
“…no more sarah palin. she’s hot and i like her but the crisis calls for a little more gravitas…”
Like, ummm, say, Joe Biden?
///
I read something in passing a long long time ago. The claim that what really pulled America out of our Depression was going to war and WW2. The government started building ships and making bullets and developing nuclear bombs, and that put a whole lot of people to work, while simultaneously rolling a whole lot of federal funds back down the ladder to the little people. People didn’t have to sell apples on the street corner any more because they could either become part of Patton’s army, or go to work at Boeing making planes to ferry Patton his tanks.
What would happen if America declared a serious boots on the ground fighting war some place and went into the same sort of peddle to the metal manufacturing frenzy as we did after Pearl Harbor? Wouldn’t that simultaneously take care of unemployment AND the gross national product AND a whole host of other issues that currently ail our country?
Now, the only problem is — who is there out there in the world that we could fight against that the war would last more than a couple of weeks? (For the sake of this argument I’m going to claim that in both Iraq and Afghanistan it has *not* been a full-fledged full-effort war … thus far.)
Montana has something in their compact when they joined the union to the point if you screw with our guns, we can walk out of here—-
Montana talks of leaving the Union over gun rights !
HELENA—Secretary of State Brad Johnson joined the many other Montanans who have weighed in on the DC v. Heller case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. A letter to the editor from Johnson appeared in today’s Washington Times, urging the court to protect an individual’s right to bear arms.
“This is an important issue for Montanans,” Johnson said. “Many of Montana’s elected officials spoke out on this issue; I am proud to be among them.”
The letter can be found at this link.
Johnson’s letter argued that Montana’s agreement with the United States to enter the union included Montana’s constitution at the time, which guaranteed the right of “any person” to bear arms. He urged the Supreme Court to uphold an individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, rather than a collective interpretation, as best in keeping with Montana’s Compact with the United States.
Many other elected officials around Montana have concurred in a statement of the same argument, in a bipartisan effort to defend Montanans’ individual right to keep and bear arms. The list of officials, as well as their resolution, can be found at: http://www.progunleaders.org.
@30/31
Who names their rabbit “Lilli Marleen?”
Nahncee: The let’s do WWII over again solution won’t work. It is different now. In the 1930’s the problem was that government decisions and controls severely limited private industry and the money supply. Banks failed primarily because the smaller banks wanted and got a law that prevented big banks from competing with them and that meant that most of the banking system was very shallow.
The problem today is that we built a huge number of houses and condos for which there is no market. In the county in which I live there have been 14,000 foreclosures in the last 2 years and most of those places are sitting empty. No one wants them. That amounts to a 15 year supply of new housing. Add to that the fact that all the easy loans and house flipping have driven up prices artificially. I looked up our old house in my hometown and its price went up by a factor of 3 in a period of less than 10 years. The one we lived in before then went up by a factor of 10 in 30 years, which is still horrible.
So cranking up the plant at Willow Run to build a B-24 every hour again won’t do it. As George Carlin famously said “We got too much stuff!” not too little. And that stuff is way overpriced.
I say again – why would you not FIRST in a severe recession identify the laws and regulations that restrict the economy and suspend them for a time? INSTEAD they are adding NEW laws!
The real killer is the real breakdown has yet to occur: commercial real estate and Alt-A loans are baked-in loan defaults. Their scale completely dwarfs the sub-prime fiasco and they take the poison to every bank in the country.
Bankruptcy seems just…
But as the Lehman Bros bankruptcy shows cleaning out a stable that large… you may never get to the pony.
Hence the Fed and the Treasury have that ‘deer-in-the-headlights’ testimony whenever on-the-record.
To rupture this knot: synthetic CDO’s need to be unwound ‘nunc pro tunc’… as soon as possible. As it stands, they are ticking down to global detonation.
There are many, many, many synthetic CDO’s but they are so inbred that they are clone finance.
http://tinyurl.com/Syn-CDO
The horrifying aspect of the synthetic CDO market is that they will all turn into a pumpkin upon the exact same triggering event. In which case trillions of dollars will be removed from investor’s accounts at the speed of light.
The triggering event is that one-bankruptcy-too-many among the financial titans of our day.
Such an event would be a world ending blow to investor confidence and make all our current troubles a minor dust-up.
The 25-mile-wide-asteroid-heading-for-Wall-Street is scarcely recognized by the media.
After zeroing out the syn-CDO market the next move must be to eliminate all CDS trades that lack ‘Privity of Contract’. As it stands, hot money can buy ‘lottery tickets’ which pay off if a major financial entity defaults. Right now, a stupefying amount of money is riding on a failure of Citicorp or Bank of America. The same players that bought the CDS are to be found running naked shorts on the common shares. Since confidence is critical to a financial firm, such a play permits the malefactor to lock in astounding profits in a short raid all without exposure to the regulators.
The end of the shadow banking system is actually a boon to Citicorp and Bank of America. The correct course is to direct high quality corporate borrowing towards all commercial banks and away from the direct market. Next, for the period of distress, the limits on SBA lending have to be raised six orders of magnitude.
These SBA loans have two levels of security: agency insured, and not. The fraction of the loan that is insured would be securitized and offered to investors. These would be tradable: I favor a new electronic exchange for them with margin requirements and the rest of our accustomed investor safeguards.
This procedure places the commercial banks back in the business they know well and gets the government out of blow by blow loan meddling.
It is to be expected that the uninsured fraction of the loans be retained by the commercial bank.
The above mechanism favors critical public policy: private decision making where economic logic and legal liabilities drive the players towards optimal outcomes of risk and reward.
It permits the broad sweep of capitalist America access to credit even during this radical downturn: 80% of the debt would trade at modest premiums to Treasury Debt.
Most critically, it provides a mechanism to restore the viability of our commercial lending institutions in as much as their spread margin on these super-SBA notes will permit them to absorb tremendous pain elsewhere in their portfolio. It is this lack of future profits able to cover the bad paper that the banks are holding that has the market totally spooked.
Permitting the banks to go under may feel good but it will just play out like LB until the asteroid strikes.
You don’t even want to think about it.
@bob re: States Rights:
I think any message of warning sent from the legislatures of states advocating stricter adherence to the Constitution will be ignored by the current administration. None of these states are reliably “progressive” and many are positively Neolithic in their politics and attitudes toward “progressive” causes. I’m ignoring the addition of the Peoples Republic of California to the list because the proposal has no realistic chance of becoming law there. All of these states have low populations, and none are centers of important infrastructure or industry. None of these states are big spenders when it comes to filling Democratic National Committee coffers either. In short, most of these states don’t matter to the current administration. Just a bunch of bible hugging, gun clinging hillbilly hicks in flyover country!
I hope the reaffirmation of states rights by Oklahoma, Montana, New Hampshire, Alaska, and others will give the administration pause in its breakneck pursuit for ever more concentrated power at the expense of individual liberty, but none of these proposals have even become law yet.
Even if they do become law, it is unlikely the states governments will have the balls to take the feds to court for unconstitutional activity.
It is almost unthinkable that a state governor or attorney general will direct state police or militia to interfere with unconstitutional federal activity or to detain federal representatives whose conduct is unconstitutional, even if their oaths of office require them to do exactly that! But it sure would be a wonderful change and rebirth of liberty.
I hold myself ready to aid any state that has the gumption to push the issue, and I pray the federal government will have the forbearance necessary to prevent the necessity.
On a lighter note, here is a link to some related, non-politically correct fiction set in the near future.
http://waronguns.blogspot.com/2008/07/absolved-banner-connector.html
#114 “anti-goof”
You possess neither the intellect nor the patience to truly understand the fine writing and thinking that goes on here. Apparently, you dropped into this forum by accident and discovered you were not at the DailyKos. So, instead of humbly admitting TO YOURSELF that you were inattentive and goofed as to your desired destination, you spat at us. Moreover, we can see that our despair over the poor quality of our education system is justified in you being Exhibit A of the typical under-30 indoctrinated, useful-idiot.
How about a soft tax revolt? Ideas like this are spreading…
This plan is not for everyone, really only those who are forgetful. It is a way to leverage your absent-mindedness in a way to hit the government where it hurts. And by so doing, send a message that Atlas will indeed Shrug.
We can continue to organize taxpayer protests across the country, and that is a good thing. But the press will always misreport the event or not cover it at all. We can, and must, continue to put forth candidates at the local level who believe in limited government. But that takes time.
This plan is for people who want to take a more direct approach towards a true tax revolt. Government is like a drug addict and its addiction is our money. It can always print more money and inflate us into misery (which is happening). But its lifeline is the continuous collection into the Treasury of tax receipts. Most significantly taxes from individuals as over 40 percent of gross collections come from individual income taxes. Government has to have our money in order to function.
This plan seeks to limit Washington’s ability to waste our hard-earned money. Limit the damage they can do. Cut their lifeline.
Washington thinks taxes are for the little people. They expect us little people to play by the rules, even when they do not. It is high time we send a message that two can play at their game.
This will not work if only a few thousand taxpayers participate. It requires millions of us to shrug.
This is not a request that you do not pay your taxes. That is illegal. Or as some in the Administration might say, unpatriotic. But what this plan acknowledges is what everyone already knows: that sometimes you forget things. Like forget to pay your taxes.
The IRS just released their annual survey of what most Americans think of tax cheats, and not surprisingly, those of us who play by the rules dislike those who do not. 9 out of 10 surveyed think it is “not at all” acceptable to cheat on their taxes (http://www.treas.gov/irsob/press-posting_02022009.shtml). But what the survey did not ask is whether it is acceptable to forget to pay your taxes?
Well, we have leadership by example in Washington, and there are now strong incentives for ordinary tax-paying citizens to become more forgetful.
The Plan
Itemize all you can on your tax return. Maximize all possible W-4 allowances. Limit what you give the Looters and Moochers of your hard-earned money. The government already takes it and uses it interest-free during the year. It’s time for payback. As you complete your return and discover you owe money – when your tax bill hits – file your return, but forget to pay it. Simple as that.
By filing your return by mail (or electronically), you are on record as acknowledging what you owe Uncle Sam. But as sometimes happens with other bills, you include the paper invoice, but forget to put the check in the envelope. Happens all the time.
At first you may get letters from the IRS asking what’s going on. If you receive such a letter, then pay what you owe. You simply forgot. Things like this happen.
If you keep forgetting to hand over your money to the government so they can redistribute it, you might get audited. If that happens, you should apologize for the inadvertent mistake and agree to pay what you owe plus interest. But no penalties! The “Geithner Rule” has set the precedent that simply paying back what you forgot plus interest is OK. You have as your guide, leadership by example from the head of the IRS.
Those initial letters might take 3-4 months to go out. In that time alone, a big part of the well in Washington will dry up. There are not enough IRS staffers to keep up with millions forgetting to pay their taxes. And as we watch the obscene spending going on in our nation’s capitol, it’s apparent our government is over-extended. They need our money.
This should cause a great deal of fear among the elites. When the well dries up, Washington will notice very quickly. Pay your taxes. But fight piracy with forgetfulness.
Yours in spirit,
Ragnar
“When robbery is done in open daylight by sanction of the law, as it is done today, then any act of honor or restitution has to be hidden underground.”
– Ragnar Danneskjöld [from Atlas Shrugged]
Dagny…
It’s much simpler than that: just increase your exemptions to a reasonable amount on your paychecks. At the last moment file estimated taxes due such that you’re not liable for penalty… and then pay the final amount on April 15th.
The pinch on the Federal float will be quick and dramatic.
Every single taxpayer can do it, and not have to sweat the law.
It’s the perfect way to send a message to the Congress.
@39
The Left arose from feudalism, it desires to return there taking every other human being with it.
To do so requires everyone to be able to believe anything.
To achieve that, they must not be able to understand or apply the philosophical concept of causality (cause and effect).
In its place, false correlation through association.
Superstition
Here comes the cheering up…
Monty Python “She’s A Witch”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g
I rest my case.
I strongly agree with Darren #117. Darren said:
“if you subscribe to the biotic theory of petroleum/natural gas origin”
Darren, does this imply that you have doubts about the biotic origin of petroleum? Often times, actual fossils are found embedded within the petroleum/natural gas strata, e.g. the Ghawar oil field was based upon marine organic material from the Jurassic age. It has been demonstrated that natural gas can sometimes have nonbiotic origins since we’ve found methane in Titan’s atmosphere (Saturn’s moon).
I also agree with RWE #121. Buying too much stuff on credit was the root of our current economic crisis.
Waging war will not get us out of our current economic predicament unless we opt to become Nazis or human locusts, e.g. go to resource rich countries like the Congo, slaughter/enslave the existing residents and seize their natural resources.
Blert, your comment about “clone finance” is spot on. I have a friend at Citi and his view is that the bureaucracy there is nearly government-like. So when someone within the firm finds a new finance vehicle that will actually be approved by all levels of the firm’s bureaucracy in order to write new business, what happens next is massive copy-catting within the firm of the same deal structure. My thought would be that something like Citi would be a big diversified portfolio, but apparently it is simply a very large concentration of a few similar bets.
I agree with your point in that all lending needs to be regulated by the same rules and capital requirements. May not make for anything other than utility-like lending, but the loss of innovation at the margin is probably a good price to pay to prevent blow-ups like this in the future.
With regard to the China Trade…
A huge factor in our current situation is the staggering thirst China had for our Currency Exports.
Since only America can authentically gin up currency and computer entries in USD…
The rapid expansion of the Chinese economy compelled them to import international money / reserve currency.
Absolutely no one in any state of mind would trust his commercial litigation to Chinese courts. Instead, alternate security is required: typically a letter-of-credit collateralized by USD on deposit in London or such. Of course, the big players eventually move away from letters of credit, but pledge money or flash money is still a big part of establishing confidence that the Chinese have what is takes to complete the bargain.
China is hardly in a position to spank America when it is America that determines if China will even have access to the world. America can blockade any country on earth as a practical matter.
So it’s from a point of weakness that China must make her way forward.
Proper American policy should be to encourage imports… as long as the price is right.
Time to tank up the petroleum reserve and back-stop our oil industry… and establish favorable conditions for alternate energy… price collapses are not in the interests of producers or consumers. The price swings inherent in the oil trade crush one and then the other.
Time to load up on hard commodities… as long as the price is right. We should scoop up everything from copper to palladium at buyers-market prices.
We are, in fact, not importing enough. Our failure here is causing global distress of the most extreme magnitude.
It is also essential that we re-work the Mexican attitude towards economic co-operation: their paranoia about the oil sector must be treated. As it stands, Mexico is screwing herself and us by perverse non-exploration of oil in lands and seas near to Texas.
And as for Peak Oil: give me a break. I still can’t get the Club-of-Rome bunk out of my brain from more than three decades ago. Then as now the arrogant hip folk were preaching the end-is-nigh: the world would run out of copper in 1994 and all that stuff.
Peak Oil is destined for the same ridicule because it’s driven by the same cultish neo-religion that seems to have sprouted in eastern liberal academia.
For a taste of that check out some of the TED videos:
. http://tinyurl.com/Mushrooms-Save-Us
In this clip you’ll see that mankind finally has a way to cure the common cold and rid the house of ants or termites.
@ Dagny & blert, re: Tax Revolt:
I wish it were that easy, but in today’s computerized world, with an administration willing to go to great lengths without first consulting either the courts or congress; it will be quick and easy for the IRS to collect any late or missing taxes from most U.S. subjects if there is a perceived need. If you are like many U.S. subjects, and use direct deposit, as a great number of our societies “producers” (in Randian terms) do, the FedGov, which now owns shares of major banks, has access to those computerized records. I predict that I.R.S. garnishment of wages from each check, up to some arbitrary percent, can quickly be made a government / banking “administrative action” requiring no writ from a judge or new law from congress. I’m afraid the only effective way for Atlas to shrug is to take a great deal of economic activity off the books thus blinding FedGov to its existence, like many cash only restaurants, tailors, grocers, and most illegal alie….excuse me, I meant undocumented workers already have. We can either move much of our income under the table now, in an attempt to thwart our rapid slide into socialism / Marxism, or we can wait until we are forced to do so by economic necessity under the heels of our socialist overseers as was done for decades by nearly everyone behind the iron curtain.
Eggplant,
I have no real better explanation than the biotic theory, it’s my working theory right now, which has essentially no bearing on my life or work being that I am in actuality a radiologist. But I also realize that it took decades for the tectonic plate theory to become widely accepted, and the abiotic theory is about where that one was a few decades after it was originally proposed. In medicine, things reverse themselves all the time, for example, estrogen went from promise to peril about 10 years ago. I expect it will flip again in my lifetime, if for no other reason than perversity.
I preach neither biotic nor abiotic, nor do I wish to be drawn into a fight regarding either. I simply don’t believe our topsoil will be the source of any real meaningful biofuel and the US still be able to feed itself and the millions around the world who depend on our surplus.
I don’t believe that the energy crisis at any time is anything but a political animal.
Boycotts are power politics.
Ditto warfare.
I do chuckle at the extreme folly of so many bio-fuel schemes.
Just reading the Oil Drum can send me into the shower screaming: talk about displaying brain damaged collegians.
Just on the general trend in the rocks, Mexico figures to have as much oil as America ever did. She refuses to explore her best prospects: they’re too far north.
Mega-deposits in the Caspian seem to have never registered in the femto-brain of the MSM.
And right around the corner, we have every prospect of converting oil shale into crude in-situ and without draining the West dry.
Between the rapid explosion of battery driven transport and the use of smart roads with inductive pick-up power transference…
The demand for motor fuels is simply not going to follow the old trend line.
AR @ 132…
A Federal Cash Panic works for me…
That would mean that the message had been sent.
Further, any such ham-handed grab would be met by howls of protest. I’d be a media circus.
Any real tax revolt would crash the dollar, the T’ bond market and likely set the stage for financial civil war.
Of course, financial war on Whitey is EXACTLY what the Obama mal-administration has in mind.
5. wretchard:
One of my worries about mega-plans is you don’t have a diversified portfolio of outcomes. You bet the farm on black or red. David Brooks came near to it in his article when he said that while he didn’t believe that any man could plan his way out of the current fix, he would be happy if Obama would prove him wrong. If your shirt is riding on the turn of the wheel, you hope against hope that the pointer lands on the jackpot. I better keep quiet now as I’m not sure if I’m making sense.
//////////
This is called the federal government “choosing the winner” in the emerging energy game. The new administration has already X’ed out coal, oilshale, offshore and anwar oil–because they believe in the carbon arguement–even though all of these energy sources would increase total US energy supplies.
How could the government “choose the winner”? They would do it by going whole hog for one strategy or another before all the data was in as to which were most effective.
This has become an especially important point as private capital dries up.
What has not emerged yet is that with the stock market down now almost 50% –the endownments of colleges and state pension funds — are going to be in for a severe hit. When big banks like citibank go down to nearly nothing you can believe that they are taking college endownment and state pension funds with them.
There will be a lot less college money available for R&D.
Here are some ways for the federal government to leverage federal research dollars.
Frugal Research: Toward Harvesting Research Unknown Unknowns
Frugal Research: Harvesting Known Unknowns by Crowdsourcing R&D
Finally, how does a research administrator best deploy his capital between projects competing for research dollars? Choosing rightly between known knowns is difficult. In fast paced industries companies use something called prediction markets. I discuss this strategy here.
Finally, the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld:
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
…..
blert @ 135:
I really hope Obamassiah is just an ignorant, idealistic fool. Any intentional and effective financial war on “Whitey” may quickly snowball into a very different kind of push back from “Whitey”, and Whitey’s concervative & libertarian cousins of all ethnicities as well. I find it hard to believe Obamassiah really wants that. Most of his supporters either gave up thier guns back in the late 60s / early 70s, or the younger ones never learned to handle them because they’re ikky and scary!
The conservative & libertarian “producers” most effected by Obamassiah’s ongoing idiocy are armed, and becoming more heavily armed all the time according to news I’ve read. Someone once said “Don’t bait the bull, you may get the horns!”
Blert,
Wouldn’t you get the same effect of tasering .gov by about 180 million of us wage earners going into HR and changing our W-4′s to maximum deductions or as high as you could stomach it. When the quarterly tax receipts don’t come in. The bean counters will have a stroke.
Buddy,
“which is which, if the guy is duly elected, then how can a good American Constitutionalist mutiny ?”
When the duly elected choose to pervert the constitution and openly defy it’s restrictions on power. Then it they who have mutinied and all good Americans should do their duty to put it right.
Now where did I leave that rope?
Jim
76. Peterike
Try an online HTML WYSIWYG editor:
http://htmledit.squarefree.com/
Instapundit is keeping watch:
In a letter to Obama on Wednesday, Byrd complained about Obama’s decision to create White House offices on health reform, urban affairs policy, and energy and climate change. Byrd said such positions “can threaten the Constitutional system of checks and balances. At the worst, White House staff have taken direction and control of programmatic areas that are the statutory responsibility of Senate-confirmed officials.”
(but there’s only four czars –who unlike cabinet secretaries can’t be called before Congress –over little podunk side-issues, “health reform, urban affairs policy, and energy and climate change”. How bad can it be?)
Also the new AG Holder calls for assault weapons ban.
This all makes me think to a Twilight Zone episode where Harry Morgan plays the eccentric uncle. Eccentric uncle is always searching for odd trinkets – spoon bent just so, a rocking horse with a missing left leg, etc. Finally nephew visits Eccentric Uncle to see what is up. He is greeted by a giant and tangled mechanism. Eccentric Uncle is sitting down and all of a sudden gets up with a mission to get something. Nephew follows and asks why it is so important to get XYZ. Eccentric Uncle responds XYZ in the machine is out of order and if a new XYZ isn’t found in ALEPH time then NATION ZETA is going to be struck by a tsunami. Eventually Eccentric Uncle is committed and Eccentric Uncle starts to tell Nephew what is wrong and needs fixing. Every time, the predicted disaster happens and eventually the Nephew is on his way to eccentricity.
The only difference being Eccentric Uncle knew what to do, our government I am not so confident about.
Man, I hate coming to these great threads late in the evening…
Re: Shortening the OODA loop
This is intriguing as a potential heuristic. What this would tell you is that monetary policy can achieve a short enough OODA loop. Fiscal policy is simply too damn slow.
To see why, consider the difference between monetary (the Fed) and fiscal (Congress) approaches to the chaos:
Monetary Policy
Fiscal Policy
So, in summary:
Monetary policy has a very short OODA loop, since you get immediate market feedback and can make quick adjustments on the fly. They are reversible.
Tax policy also has a short OODA loop, since there are millions of small, autonomous investors who make decisions, gather feedback, and react quickly. They are harder to reverse.
Spending policy has a very long OODA loop, rendering it virtually useless in times of financial crisis. They are also virtually impossible to reverse.
FWIW.
L3
911 gave Bush extraordinary authority to create new agencies and unprecedented federal powers and now that the genie is out of the bottle the lib’s are going to use their mandate of a sucessful elolection to irrepairably rewrite the constitution.
Noting those three new “unofficial” advisory positions in the White House, I am dumbstruck by one thing: how AGW is driving energy and economic policy. It’s out of the bizzarro world, since AGW is a discredited hypothesis. There is something utterly unreal about it all, even though it very much is real. At least the socialized medicine thing (which I am against) has some practical end to it. But AGW and the carbon tax/cap and trade system is a monstrous hoax and scam being perpetrated upon the Republic by people who simply want to rape the wealth of this nation. And we are letting them do it!
If they put that system into place – and it appears it will be done – then our economy can only be saved by throwing these rascals out and repudiating the Kyoto Protocols, and any other international spiderwebs in place that point back towards Maurice Strong over there in Beijing.
Folks, we are about to be a** raped by some very evil people and our kids and their kids will curse us for not acting to stop it.
I really enjoy reading your comments, Mr. Linbeck.
I agree with fiscal policy being too blunt a tool for this situation. It struck me reading your response that Hayek and Boyd might have enjoyed each others’ company.
And now for something completely different: a pair of off-to-bed limericks:
——
When Obama was feeling the heat
He commanded his fellow elite
To follow his plan
But depression began
‘Cause they’re dupes of his fatal conceit.
——
David Brooks, the incongruous scribe
Was beginning to get a bad vibe
When stock prices sink
He gets pushed to the brink
Like his bosses, the Sulzberger tribe
——
Good night all.
L3
haw –L3 got da disease
thinks he can sleep as he please
he’ll climb in the sack
but the rhymes will attack
like the nightmarish disco Bee Gees
Monetary policy has a very short OODA loop, since you get immediate market feedback and can make quick adjustments on the fly. They are reversible.
Tax policy also has a short OODA loop, since there are millions of small, autonomous investors who make decisions, gather feedback, and react quickly. They are harder to reverse.
Spending policy has a very long OODA loop, rendering it virtually useless in times of financial crisis. They are also virtually impossible to reverse.
FWIW.
L3
Bravo.
L3 @ 146…
fetal conceit ( sp?)
yeah…
that’s it….
JFS @ 138…
Bingo…
We have a winner….
Stay within the law…
But DO NOT GIVE OBAMA FREE ADVANCES…
That is all…
Don’t get that tricky with the IRS…
Jusu MINIMALLY conform…
So that TPTB have to completely change their game plan and be the socialists/ Commies that they are.
There is NO WAY my former neighbor wants to play it straight.
You can bet your last Roube an Yuan that BHO will stay on the campaign trail until the Constitution is effectively unwon.
Interesting comments.
Subotai said: “Wretchard, you cut your teeth opposing Marcos’ dictatorship. While we are not yet at the phase where the force of the State is being deployed against those who do not submit; it appears to be a mere matter of time before both statutory and extra-legal applications of brute force by the State are in our future.”
Quickly:
1. There seems to be a grass roots movement afoot:
Anti-stimulus “Tea Party” = http://newamericanteaparty.com/
It is time to take to the streets and let our voices be heard. It can’t hurt. It might help.
2. 10th Amendment resolutions at many states
http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/
Text of the Amendment:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
A movement to let Fedzilla know that we are sick of being misrepresented by DC? I support this.
There may be things stirring in the country to fight the take over by the forces of darkness.
I want to hear more from Wretchard about what he thinks will work. We have to do something before the inmates burn down the asylum.
“Wretchard, you cut your teeth opposing Marcos’ dictatorship. While we are not yet at the phase where the force of the State is being deployed against those who do not submit; it appears to be a mere matter of time before both statutory and extra-legal applications of brute force by the State are in our future.”
In the decade before Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law and proclaimed himself dictator of the Philippines in 1972, it was clear that the Philippine Republic established in 1946, created in the aftermath of the devastation of World War 2, and based upon a thin crust of autocracy, had not long to live. The storm clouds were building, but when exactly the tempest would make landfall and where precisely it would strike was still unclear. Yet by the early 1960s a number of political movements were clearly girding themselves for the struggle ahead.
But none of this was clear to me as a teenager in high school. But I could feel the buzz. Now I know from history that a zero sum contest was brewing between what you would call extremists and reformists. The extremists, which were represented by the Communists, believed that the existing society had come to a dead end. They were willing to overthrow it by any means necessary. I do mean any. The reformers, on the other hand, were alive to the value of democracy, however flawed, and of Christianity, which served, and still serves, as the single unifying glue of that society.
Leaving aside the vast differences in between that distant Third World country and America in the 21st century, it’s reasonable to suppose that a similar process may now be occurring. There’s a sense of crisis; and an unfocused debate over what to do about it. I suspect that as things develop, a race between quite dangerous political elements and those who wish to preserve or work through the Constitution will develop.
In the case of the Philippines both Marcos and the Communists decided it would be in their best interests to murder the republic. At a stroke the choice would be between two extremes. Marcos would benefit by making the sole alternative to his dictatorship the Communists, who were as reprehensible as he was. The Commies would benefit from making Marcos the alternative to them. The reformists were amateurs and when Martial Law was declared, using the bombing of an opposition convention (analogous to car bombing the Republican National Convention) as a pretext (historians now know that the Communists did it) the clandestine war was on.
During the subsequent years, the Bolshevist methods by themselves proved incapable of defeating Marcos, and just as the Abimael Guzman has failed in Latin America, so would Jose Maria Sison have failed in the Philippines. But what ultimately destroyed the Marcos regime was a vast, viral organizing effort that created a dense network of NGOs, church groups, grassroots organizations, etc all of whom worked within the law — though some only just — that eventually made the regime culturally illegitimate. Pivotal to the this viral organizing campaign were the efforts of the Zone One Tondo organizers who showed the way and developed a model which was widely emulated, both consciously and unconsciously, until it was widespread. When the Aquino assassination occurred there was enough dry tinder on the ground to sweep the reformists (represented by Cory Aquino) into power. This was an immense strategic surprise not only to Marcos, but also to Sison, who rues the day he pooh-poohed that outcome.
The mistake most amateurs make when faced with a crisis that may involve violence, etc is to become obsessed with underground activity, illegal actions, etc. Bringing down even a dictator is 95% legal organizing and 5% clandestine work. The reason for this is that most people are too scared or unwilling to break the law and rightly so. So the most effective resistance to tyranny happens when you take the law at its word and demand your rights. Eventually a real tyrant must either yield or show his true colors. We used this ploy time and again to force the crisis. It’s always a lose-lose for the dictator; and an aggregate win for the rebels. I must say though, that the fact that you are acting legally doesn’t mean you are risk-free. If things get bad, there’s really no distinction between acting legally and acting clandestinely because the dictator doesn’t split hairs.
But returning to 21st century America, the only advice I can give is to maximally use the liberties allowed under the law and the Constitution. There’s a lot of space there and I believe it has hardly been used. From the courts, to local politics, to media campaigns, to civil disobedience — there are lots of levers yet to be pulled. I think it would be immoral for anyone to go all apocalyptic on the Republic and take to the hills like some kind of militia group, besides being impractical, because there are lots of things that have yet to be pushed to their fullest legal extent. But there’s another reason for exhausting all the remedies under the Constitution. Afterward.
It will be a hollow to gain a political victory at the cost of destroying the framework you were trying to preserve. One day there will be another party, another political movement, another set of views in Washington. And on that day you want the Constitution whole and inviolate; because that scrap of parchment represents a hard won set of rules which by common consent defines legitimacy.
We are in the path of the storm. Men of goodwill should get involved; they should prepare to pay some price for their involvement. But for the moment, it’s all hands on deck and none below.
Wretchard: all interventions should be immediate, nonideological and subject to change given the arrival of new data and the speed at which we close our OODA loop should be improved. This is the way our mammalian ancestors overcame the dinosaurs. If we remember nothing else, we should remember that.
That’s great in theory, but I don’t believe that the federal government is capable of performing it. You’re using terms applicable to flying a jet in a dogfight, not to a bloated bureaucracy and Congress.
For this reason, I think that Keynesian stimulus measures should be outlawed. Too few people understand how they’re supposed to work and yet are willing to rush into them at the drop of a hat.
This whole mess was caused by unwarranted risk in the form of debt. So how does that justify our borrowing multiple trillions from generations yet unborn? When do we have to just face up to our obligations?
“And on that day you want the Constitution whole and inviolate; because that scrap of parchment represents a hard won set of rules which by common consent defines legitimacy.”
Wretchard – I like you that sentence. Gives me hope.
Perhaps if enough people use the Constitution to fight “the powers that be”, combined with the recent freedom rallies, it would be a good start. As you and others wrote earlier, as bad as things might get, “something” will emerge on the other side. We should lay the groundwork now to help make sure the Constitution is the bedrock of the renewed USA. Chaos breeds opportunity for those that are ready.
Perhaps if enough people use the Constitution to fight “the powers that be”
It may be our last, best hope. But what worries me is that all such battles will ultimately bubble up to the Supreme Court, in which case all our fates lie in the hands of that unreliable, so-easily-stroked twerp Kennedy. Too bad Ginsburg’s cancer didn’t croak her while Bush was still President, or that Souter didn’t disappear up his own a**hole, that pathetic schmuck. It goes without saying that the O’s Supreme picks are going to be monsters in robes.
Let’s just hope Kennedy is a real American when the fat’s in the fire.
Wretchard re your post #153 and original post.
Your comments confirm some things I’ve been mulling since the financial crises began.
-The financial crises is the tip of the iceberg
-Deeper and less obvious (at least to the MSM and the liberal elite)are political and cultural trends increasingly in conflict.
-These trends are mostly value/philosopically/religiously (I include Atheism as a religion) based and to a large extant mutually exclusive. One side or another will eventually predominate.
-Like the Filipino Communinists many in left see these trends as opportunties to reshape American society to more closely match their vision.
-Slowly but increasingly, the right is recognizing the threat from the left.
-The vast middle focusing on their parochial concerns aren’t really paying attention. They won’t until things get bad enough.
-Since things are not yet bad enough the liberal elite are still confident that their world view and skills will dominate. When reality shows them otherwise the crisis of confidence will be as far reaching as that in the late term Soviet Union.
-The real battle begins when that occurs.
-If the right is smart the battle will occur in the context of a constitutional convention. In that forum the unaligned middle will be the arbiters determining which vision is legitimate.
-The left fears they can’t win in that venue and so will essentially attempt (in various ways) to buy votes. Doing so, they believe the inevitable inertia and inattention of the middle will at some point provide them a fait accompli.
-The right likely has the tougher job. They win by appealing to people’s values and principles. This often involves sacrificing individual benefits for the whole. The left can win be paying off supporters, emphasizing envy and increasing chaos fatigue.
Wretchard is right. Legitimacy is the key to victory. The side that undermines legitmacy will ultimately lose.
That’s why I believe the ultimate solution is a constitutional convention. A convention is a constitutional mechanism that permits dramatic change immune from future judicial, legislative and judicial fiat. Because it was provided for by the founders any changes will resulting from the convention will be seen as legitimate as long as they conform to core American values.
Con-cons are the perfect storm for the left and it’s memes.
A Con-con can only be held AFTER the defeat of the neo-feudalists.
Remember this: the original Con-con was held as a technical exercise to resolve trade problems and such with a relatively like minded crowd.
A Con-con during a cultural and economic war is like tossing twenty tom-cats in a bag and kicking it. The fur will fly.
This constitutional con stuff is nonsense. The left will prevail overwhelmingly, and if it did not, it would never follow that new constitution should it become the law of the land. They can not and will not follow the current one, which is the clearest, most straightforward and profound articulation of the relationship between the rights citizen and government ever made in history, and one that has 150 years of stunning success to validate it as a workable foundation. The Neo-Communist is the Democrat Party have shown nothing but contempt for it for over 70 years. They have contempt for anything but totalitarian Communism and rule by decree from on high. To even contemplate good will or good citizenship on their side is to behave like an ablosute imbecile.
Moreover,What we really need to do is to restore the Constitution as it is, and firm up the areas that have been abuses–areas like the abuse of the commerce clause, income tax and limitations on the Federal government. All modification should be through the standard amendment process, and these modifications should mostly be affirmations of what is actually in the Constitution.
We could no more create a document as profound as the US Constitution in this day and age then we could build a better building than the Capital, or write better symphonies that Brahms. We must face our current decadence. A completely new constitution would be fatal to liberty.
I would also add that the electorate needs a great deal of time to grasp what is at stake. Collectively they are far behind the BC curve on what the issues really are.
The key points are that they have to understand what the issues truely are–what is the true agenda the Neo-Communists in the Democrat Party, and how Academia, Unions and the MSM have aided them in advancing that agenda.
No progress can be made until the people understand the true choices.
This is the real struggle before us: Arriving at sober assessment of the American Neo-Communists and their agenda by the people of the Republic.
It may not be possible, but it would appear that the Republic has to go through much turmoil and suffering for this moment ever to arise.
#157:
Constitutional convention? Are you mad? As the other responders to your post have weighed in, that is a suicidal idea. Forget it.
Such a notion plays up to the most glaring weakness of modern American governance: an obstinate unwillingness to enforce existing laws and abide by long-standing legal and governing conventions. Can you say “McCain/Feingold?” Mechanisms for dealing with election finance violations already existed when the 96/97 scandals erupted, and people went to jail under the old laws (but not Al Gore, who should have — see what I mean?). The principals in the Enron and Worldcom scandals went to jail as a result of those debacles, so there was no need for Sarbanes/Oxley. Hate crime statutes are a testament to the glaring failure to take unprovoked physical assaults and major vandalism seriously even though laws existed on the books to deal with such things, and so on, ad nauseam. Re-doing the Constitution to “make things better” would immediately be seized upon by America’s worst elements — remember that a couple years ago Obama lamented that the Constitution as it stands is not a redistributionist document — do you want America’s internal enemies to make it one by handing them a “convention?” Have you ever seen Obama’s people take over a primary caucus?
Tea Parties and tax protests may capture the imagination and sound romantic – as W indicates we have hardly begun to exercise our rights under the law…
As I understand it O won largely because a significant swath of conservative/religous republican voters just didn’t show-up in 2008. The reasons were primarily 1) dissatisfaction with profligate Republican leadership over the last 8 years (the cons) and 2) McCain’s lack of connection with the religous conservatives (though Palin diffused this some)… Point being that there is considerable political strength on the right.
I go back to my previous admonition to engage your Senators / Rep’s and local elected officals by all means necessary. Support local candidates that that are reform minded and game-changers. Obama blew past the Republican establishment that was operating from a sense of entitlement and success at “gaming the system” (a la Rove’s technical electioneering prowess) rather than principle.
Those on the “right” need to really get serious at the drudgery of grassroots politicking – win neighbors, confront pols with hard questions, shape media through comment sections in the paper and ombudsmen to networks etc… maybe not as “fun” as writing here on BC but it wins elections.
How can we match the efforts of the netroots of new on social media (facebook etc) and the church-ladies of old that doorbelled, licked stamps, placed yard signs and mailed letters? Are we “too cool”, “too smart” to roll-up our sleeves and work?
Suppoort was pulled from the Republicans and they cratered… now we have an existential threat to our Republic – can an effective political response be built?
Stan @161
Even if those conservatives who did not show on November 4th were to show up, it would not have made a difference, because they are mostly in red states anyway that went to McCain. In the blue states the overwhelmingly urban areas carried the vote. Not enough of us rural folk to overcome that. I live in a blue state, but reside in a rural area that went Republican. There just are not enough of us to overcome the collectivist rabble in the cities.
Fred – It’s not just showing up on Nov 4th, it’s contributing and campaigning so as to influence the squshy middle. By not engaging on behalf of McCain (and the down ticket races) they yielded the middle of the field to Obama and Dems. House races, certainly Norm Coleman and other Sen races… would have turned out differently. How would the Stimulus legislation have looked if the R’s had two more Senators…
Elections, like wars, are often close run things – it’s only afterward that we ascribe a sort of istic inevitability to the outcomes. No, the political landscape would have been much different even if Obama had still been the President with active participation by all Republicans.
I live in Washington state, near Seattle, a hotbed of “netroots” – yet I still have my part to play articulating, in a winsome way, the principled opposition to the madness of the current administration. This is my point – it is a cultural war on behalf of principles – not some Rovian political online game where only battleground states (& Con. Districts) matter. In a battle, the whole front is pressed even though the breakthrough will occur only at a few points. The planners rarely know precisely when or where they will be so everyone needs to do their part.
Interesting sidenote re: little things have large effects (and this in a Blue state -Ill.):
If Senator Ryan’s divorce proceedings are kept sealed as requested by both him and his ex then likely he retains his seat and no Senator Obama…
I’m with Roderick and Mongoose: Constitutional Convention = Pandora’s box.
Warning: Do. Not. Open. It.
Like teenagers at a hot-tub party, it is guaranteed that the transnational left will pee deliberately in the spa.
The left’s Like a skunk at a picnic, or a drunk at a wedding…we all know how the event will end.
Stan speaks hard truth.
If Senator Ryan’s divorce proceedings are kept sealed as requested by both him and his ex then likely he retains his seat and no Senator Obama…
Obama has never won an election legitimately. His first election he mau-mau’d all the other candidates off the ballet. His Senate election he somehow got an out-of-state judge to unseal divorce records. Was that even legal? Funny, but there was no investigative journalism on that. And he effectively stole the caucuses from Hillary through Bolshi intimidation tactics using his band of roving thugs.
And of course against McCain he took in massive amounts of illegal campaign money, and the disparate treatment of O and M by the MSM goes without saying.
Imagine if Michael Moore decided to do a “documentary” on O’s campaign history? Such a story he could tell!
Obama will not bring us out of this. I’ve suggested elsewhere that he is a high functioning autistic. He is not capable of understanding the obvious consequences of his actions, beyond the simple dynamics of division and the politics of the bold lie of a con artist.
It delays the recovery — if recovery is possible to entertain the theory that the fix will come through Obama. It is like hoping that a group of leukemia cells can be convinced by some magic microbiology to kill off all the other leukemia cells.
Yet Brooks is correct when he asks if we are operating far beyond our economic knowledge. And he’s right only for the reason he seems to tie to that statement, where he says “Every time the administration releases an initiative, I read 20 different economists with 20 different opinions.”
That extreme diversity of opinions in the class of elite experts in the field indicates not only a complete failure of common sense, but a Babel situation, that no one can hear each others words any more — everyone is on their own, unable to communicate! Yes they use words and proper grammar, and educated compositional structure, but any wisdom is hard to find, because a common basis for economic discussion is missing. It is as if all the learned wisdom of ages is forgotten.
Time for the return of the Gods of The Copybook Headings. Or worse — what will be in ten years, chaotic breakdown among the whole of the world’s societies leadership and elites is rare. Babel was one, perhaps the fall of Rome another. But even the collapse of the Roman Empire could be a minor event compared toteh speed and force of our current collapse.
Where is the system reactance? Normally some major reactance develops to such dynamics, yet we seem to be almost without it. ALL, or close to, the men and women in power and authority seem to have no energy, be corrupt, or be, well, high functioning autistics.
Also I posted a question at Yahoo!Answers to get a temperature measurement of sorts.
Interesting results.
Yet sad. The fundamental rules of economics are simple and humble, yet inviolate. And who can state them? Too many believe in magic. History records most, if not all of the current failings, nothing is new under the sun.
Please forgive my poor writing skills but I think some of the responders to my post (#157) missed my two points.
1. As Wretchard stated legitimacy comes from working within the legal framework of the society. To repeat his point, by doing so you put the antagonist in a no-win situation. If the mass movement is legal and large enough the antagonist cannot indulge in repression without confirming the grievances alleged against him.
2. Because the constitutional convention is provided for in the constitution it confers legitmacy upon the outcome. If this were tried now I agree the effort would be highjacked by the left. They currently have to much popular support.
But my point is we should be preparing now for the next crisis (economic melt-down, WMD used on U.S. soil or something else monumental but unanticipated) to propose the convention. When that occurs, the liberal elite/MSM will be discredited and will lose both confidence and support. Then the inattentive middle will be open to the proposals of the right. While the middle is not strong on specific policy proposals I believe they will respond well to core American values such as free speech (no speech codes), equal protection under the law (no affirmative action), economic independence (no long term welfare) and choice (no single payer government health plan). The hard left will still try to high-jack the convention but will be perceived as mouth pieces of the ancien regime that didn’t prevent the crises.
I think we can agree some form of my anticipated crisis is likely to occur. If the right can’t win under those circumstances I think it safe to say the war is already lost.
Don… the criticisms hold: the liklihood of anything superior to our current Constitution coming out of a ConCon is nil. This is the case whether the current Left, Middle or Right controls it – we don’t have the quality of leadership nor intellect that managed that first go around. (nb- the literacy rate in New England at that time was like 97% and the population had an attention span somewhat beyond a few seconds)
wretchard – Thanks for the reply. I think you are right. We must use the system to work within it and use ALL of the tools we can find/invent to get our views a decent hearing before it is too late.
Tax Protests
10th Amendment resolutions
Support the Constitution Party, GoP and all local vetted candidates from our side of the fence.
Join the NRA and support 2A issues to the best of our abilities. (This one is important as the Left is trying to demonize gun owners as radicals.)
And on, and on….
Also:
bvw @ #168 said:
“Obama will not bring us out of this. I’ve suggested elsewhere that he is a high functioning autistic. He is not capable of understanding the obvious consequences of his actions, beyond the simple dynamics of division and the politics of the bold lie of a con artist.”
Or I prefer the take of Ali Sina from FaithFreedom -
http://www.faithfreedom.org/obama.html = Obama as having a narcissistic personality disorder.
Stan (#171): Don… the criticisms hold: the liklihood of anything superior to our current Constitution coming out of a ConCon is nil.
Indeed, the most unsettling thing about a Con-con is the message it sends: The very act of convening a Con-con – no matter what comes out of it (my guess: probably a lot closer to the EU’s infamously bloated constitutional proposal than to what we have now) – amounts to a tacit admission that the current Constitution has either become obsolete, or somehow failed to serve its purpose.
Here’s the thing though: What happens when a critical mass of people reach exactly that conclusion – that the best model of government in world history just isn’t good enough anymore? They may well opt for something new – anything new, as long as it isn’t the Constitution that they perceive to have failed them already. After all, it wouldn’t exactly be the first time Americans have blindly embraced change for its own sake.
D’oh! I only meant to bold that first word “anything”. But in retrospect, that whole passage does bear emphasis.
This thread is pretty dead, but here’s a tidbit to tie it up.
I just saw RoboHobo’s link to the article about “Obama as having a narcissistic personality disorder.” Well I clicked on it. And well I’m at work. And what pops up on my screen but: “This web site blocked because of category:hate speech.”
Things to come, eh?
It’s working now, peterike. Scary as hell too. BTW i think you mentioned being a New Yorker –take a look at this, New Yorkers having at it in the comments. It’s a Rich Kaarlgarde article, linked by instapundit earlier today, “The Coming Blue State Collapse”.