The Market State idiocy is the fantasy of too much money and security, for too long. It’s the intellectual equivalent of Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid in a marble palace.
Here are more flaws in the market state and the idiot assumptions that only an intellectual like Bobbit could make:
1. Technology gives failing, failed, and chaotic groups/states/people the ability to simply take by conquest money, power, people, and resources from wealth, modern states. Today, Georgia. Or Kuwait as with Saddam. Or perhaps, Israel. Tomorrow, maybe Spain. Or Italy. Or Poland. All near poorer neighbors, not shy about killing people to take things.
In 1941, the power of the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army was awesome, and threatened the US with defeat in the Pacific for two and half years afterwards. Now, Pakistan, a nation that cannot keep the street in front of the Presidential palace from becoming an open sewer during rainy season, has in each of it’s more than 100 nukes, nearly 100 times the total combined destructive power of the entire armed force of Imperial Japan in 1941.
2. Effective disarmament allows even a weak state, to dominate more modern neighbors, if it retains any military force at all. Russia is reputedly using 50 year old pilots, and elderly aircraft, in it’s Georgian campaign. No matter, something still beats nothing.
3. The Nation State, Ethnic/Religious solidarity, Patriotism, Chauvinism, and more are STRONGER not weaker, the greater the social change in other aspects of life. The more people feel uncertain, threatened economically, and culturally, the more changes seem to negative rather than positive events for them (they get poorer not richer), the more that people will “cling” to institutions that are proven by history to work, and amplify their collective power. The Nation-state and patriotism, are among the biggest and most proven institutions that work.
It is no accident that rightist groups are rising in Europe, precisely where change threatens to erase national identity and disadvantage the average person.
4. The “Market State” is a FANTASY BUILT ON CHEAP OIL. This is the big one. Once oil becomes expensive, economic activity comes to a grinding halt, people become poorer, “market states” degenerate into mercantilist empires, extracting raw resources and exploiting slave/serf labor in closed economic systems.
Market States cannot and do not survive economic downturns, which are bound to happen when critical resources (energy now, which means oil) are constrained.
Oil at $150 a barrel for sustained decades means closed economies, resource wars, high inflation, very little business investment. The 1970′s, in other words.
