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Thread: the next Golden Age

  1. #1
    Banned Melonie's Avatar
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    Default the next Golden Age

    (snip)The Next Golden Age will blossom without the burden of the Savior State and its Elites and fiefdoms. (snip)

    (snip)"What I will attempt in this occasional series is to describe future large-scale changes: financial, cultural and material.

    1. The reduction of complexity and the end of marginal return. The chief characteristic of the U.S. economy and society is marginal return: ever-larger sums of money, energy, human effort, etc. are dumped into a "problem" while the return on that prodigious investment diminishes to less than zero.

    The reasons are not complex: one is complexity itself, fed by entrenched fiefdoms protecting their payrolls and perquisites, the pernicious effects of the entitlement mentality and an organizational bureaucratic sclerosis which can be defined as a focus on process over results.

    In the post-collapse-of-the-status-quo future, all the wasted motion will be lost. It will no longer be affordable, so it will go away.

    Results will matter, process won't--the reverse of today's cultural worldview. Nowadays, by following procedure you CYA--protect yourself from criticism--and also evade responsibility for the outcome.

    My favorite illustration of this may be apocryphal. Someone goes to Thomas Edison's laboratory and asks about the enterprise's regulations. "Regulations?" Edison is said to have retorted. "We're trying to get something done here." Precisely.

    The ultimate luxury and waste is a CYA focus on procedure to avoid responsibility for poor results (or negative results). That luxury will be gone.

    Let me illustrate the reduction in complexity and process with one example we can all relate to: going to the doctor. In the New Golden Age, everyone will pay for healthcare with cash. There may well be some limited forms of catastrophic coverage, but the entire mindset of entitlement ("healthcare is a right," etc.) will be gone.

    You choose the doctor, and he/she agrees to offer care for a sum (just like in the "old Golden Era" of the 1950s). You receive the care/treatment, and then pay the doctor in cash or equivalent.

    Currently, it is estimated 40% of the $1 trillion we spend on Medicare/Medicaid is squandered on shuffling paperwork/electronic files and fraud. Another 40% does not actually help the patient or is needless (defensive medicine, tests given for profit only, etc.). The opportunities for fraud in the sprawling bureaucracy are endless.

    Now compare it to the Next Golden Age. Where is the opportunity for fraud when care is paid for in cash? A "bad check" slipped in lieu of real money? Perhaps, but in general the staggering waste and fraud of the current system vanishes.

    How much of this transaction is "overhead," paper-shuffling, filing of insurance claims, arguing over who pays for what, etc.? Very little. If the doctor overcharges (i.e. charges more than other equivalent services) then his/her business will decline.

    What about poor people who can't pay for care? In at least some cases, "poverty" is at root mismanagement, carelessness and perhaps a self-destructive worldview. These people will either learn to manage their money better or they will have to wait for whatever care is offered by charity.

    In today's environment of Savior State entitlement, that sounds harsh. But the reality is the Savior State will implode or devolve to irrelevancy, regardless of whether your like it or not (see below for the inescapabale reasons why).

    Charity was and continues to be a vibrant, important part of American society. To belittle it as unequal to the task is to misunderstand the reality that the Savior State is unsustainable. The material wealth of the nation--the actual output--will be declining, and the Savior State, which only knows how to grow and wrest an ever larger share of the national income, will implode.

    In the New Golden Age, our rights will be simple: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Savior State will have dissolved in insolvency or shrunk down to irrelevancy. There may be all sorts of entitlements offered and promised, but no one will be offering those services for free.

    This reality will be familiar to those who have declared bankruptcy. Bankruptcy eliminates all the wasted motion in an organization; all the support staff, the layers of management, the meetings--all that disappears because there is no longer any money to sustain that wasted motion. In a household, the unsustainable mortgage, fancy car payments, etc. are all gone, and debt-serfdom has been thrown off.

    The enterprise which emerges is stripped down to its productive core. If it isn't, then it will wither and go extinct. No group, enterprise or State can live beyond its real output for long. The U.S. has been using the artifice of its currency, the hegemony of the U.S. dollar, and its soaring borrowing, to paper over the yawning gap between what the nation produces and what it spends. Eventually, reality intrudes and spending declines to match output.

    There is a great freedom of movement, purpose and innovation in a stripped-down enterprise. The bankruptcy blows off all the dead weight and sclerosis, the obsession with process/procedure and keeping up appearances. After a household, enterprise or nation loses its useless complexity, it can be energized by the freedom of no longer supporting the impossible burdens.

    Indeed, the argument presented in the excellent book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization is that productive people simply grow tired of supporting an economy suffering from terminal marginal return. Empires don't collapse as much as they are abandoned by the productive citizenry who must shoulder the rising burdens. At some point the "benefits" of Empire no longer outweigh the Empire's costs and constrictions.

    2. The end of the entitlement mentality. Being entitled is taken as a wonderful thing in today's crumbling status quo, but upon examination we find that entitlement is intrinsically bound up with resentment and passivity/complicity. The act of feeling entitled brings with it a latent resentment: against others who may be getting more, and against the authorities who now wield power over the entitled.

    If the Empire stripmines productive citizens and other lands, the entitled don't care; they are focused on "getting what's mine" and whatever evils and costs are perpetrated to obtain the swag that flows to the entitled are ignored, marginalized or dismissed as irrelevant.

    Everyone wants something for free, but few seem to notice that whatever is given free is squandered, unappreciated, and endless demands for more soon follow.

    The entitlement mentality is a prison of resentment, self-absorption and complicity in the "project" of enlarging the Central State and its Power Elites' share of the resources, output, wealth and income of the nation and the world.

    One of the key benefits of the disappearance of the entitlement prison is that people will start realizing the benefits of believing they have something positive to contribute to their community and nation. That is a powerful self-affirming idea. People will begin to feel better about themselves.

    Why will the Savior State implode/shrink to irrelevancy? Here are five inherent reasons which cannot be "solved" or massaged away:

    A. The accident of favorable demographics goes away as the citizenry age. Endless entitlement paid by "somebody else" or future generations seemed plausible when there were 10 workers for every retiree. At two workers for every retiree, it is revealed as impossible. You cannot support 100 million retirees on the backs of 100 million workers, as well as a global Empire and various vast fiefdoms.

    B. Exponential growth cannot be sustained. The Savior State must grow by 3-5% annually while the economy will fluctuate around zero growth or even decline. Please go to Chris Martenson's site and view The Crash Course for the end result of exponential growth.

    C. The hegemony of the U.S. dollar is not permanent. In the current status quo, the U.S. issues endless trillons of government bonds denominated in dollars, and the rest of the world is more or less beholden to accepting this phantom promise in exchange for real goods. Once the forward value of the promise is eroded, then this prop under America spending more than it makes will crumble.

    D. The underlying economy produces goods and services worth a certain amount in dollars, gold, quatloos, oil or whatever measure you choose. The status quo requires that the nation spend trillions of dollars more than the nation's output to support the Savior State, its Elites/fiefdoms and its global Empire. At some point gravity will take precedence over fantasy and the nation will have to live within its means. The Savior State already requires 11-12% of the GDP be borrowed every year to maintain the flow of swag/redistribution of the nation's income to favored hands. That percentage will rise as the underlying economy devolves and "the end of work" shrinks the taxpaying workforce.

    E. The entire project of the Savior State was dependent on cheap, abundant energy. When that goes away, so does the Savior State.

    What replaces the Savior State? Nothing. There may well be a Central State devoted to smaller, less complex projects such as national defense (as opposed to global Empire), but the Savior State which sends checks to 100 million citizens and supports vast complex systems like Medicare will no longer function.

    Most people seem to feel the implosion of the Savior State is something to dread, yet the nation survived quite well without a Savior State or global Empire circa 1781-1941. The Savior State only arose because of three specific circumstances: favorable demographics, World War II and the vast supply of oil which happened to exist within the national borders. Its passing cannot be stopped so why mourn it?

    In losing the false god of the Savior State, we will turn once again to community for security, to productive focus on results rather than procedure, and on resilience rather than exploitation. "(snip)

    from

  2. #2
    God/dess Golden_Rule's Avatar
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    Default Re: the next Golden Age

    Quote Originally Posted by Melonie View Post
    What about poor people who can't pay for care? In at least some cases, "poverty" is at root mismanagement, carelessness and perhaps a self-destructive worldview. These people will either learn to manage their money better or they will have to wait for whatever care is offered by charity.
    If they be poor best the learn their place or shuffle off this mortal coil and decrease the surface population.

    Charity was and continues to be a vibrant, important part of American society. To belittle it as unequal to the task is to misunderstand the reality that the Savior State is unsustainable. The material wealth of the nation--the actual output--will be declining, and the Savior State, which only knows how to grow and wrest an ever larger share of the national income, will implode.
    Charity sufficient to provide for proper health care for the poor, and let us be reminded a great deal of the impoverished are working poor who clock their hours of sweat and toil - they just don't make a living wage doing so, requires two things: 1) people with enough expendable cash to give who are 2) willing to part with enough money to make such a system work with some semblance of equity.

    Now, being a student of both philosophy, history and the human dynamics I can assure you there have been very few examples of societies that provided decent health care for the poor based solely on charity. Such few examples that do exist are of very small groups of individuals and not large countries the size of the U.S.

    In the New Golden Age, our rights will be simple: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Savior State will have dissolved in insolvency or shrunk down to irrelevancy. There may be all sorts of entitlements offered and promised, but no one will be offering those services for free.
    As someone who believes in the concepts of smaller, less intrusive, government I relate on multiple levels. As a pragmatic, practical, person though I know that folks are folks and nothing is going to get accomplished fairly without some level of enforceable regulation that commands that people play nicely with each other.

    Within small groups where people can be direct witness to each others humanity the ability to act fairly because we are direct witness to how our actions effect other people we actually know is an effective behavior modification tool sufficient to keep greed and other negative human traits in check. In large societies where our negative behavioral characteristics effect individuals only in concept, and we are never privy first hand to the damage we do, laws and regulation are simply required. Either that or the vacuum created by the lack of same will be filled by the law of the jungle.


    A. The accident of favorable demographics goes away as the citizenry age. Endless entitlement paid by "somebody else" or future generations seemed plausible when there were 10 workers for every retiree. At two workers for every retiree, it is revealed as impossible. You cannot support 100 million retirees on the backs of 100 million workers...
    Agreed. However a retirement program that has employee contributions is not an entitlement. It's deferred compensation.

    Now if the deferred compensation set up doesn't provide sufficient inflow to meet the outflow that is the fault of bad management. You don't, however, fix it on the backs of people who have already contributed to the system for decades and now have insufficient time to revamp their planning to account for retirement at a fair age.

    I found a way to legally opt out of the social security system in my early twenties. I saw it for the bogus system it was and did the math. It didn't add up. I set up a multiple tiered retirement program for myself and was able to retire at the age of 49. That doesn't mean I don't feel for individuals who don't have the option to opt out and do for themselves. They paid their premiums for what should have been a properly set up annuity. If the annuity provider is the government and its going to default those people have adequate reason to come looking for a pound of flesh to replace their promised retirement.

    Personally, I'd consider that stealing and I know what I have done in the past to people I've caught stealing from me.


    In losing the false god of the Savior State, we will turn once again to community for security, to productive focus on results rather than procedure, and on resilience rather than exploitation. "(snip)

    from http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10...-age07-10.html
    The answers are difficult but self-evident.

    While I concur with much of what constitutes Libertarian thinking. There is a glaring problem with its core concept. It roles back the clock to a period where responsibility for self has not yet been abdicated, even responsibility for immediate interpersonal connections, like responsibility for family, but falls short of recognizing we have a more generalized responsibility to each other. It fails to acknowledge responsibility to/for community.

    In a shrinking, ever more populous, world we need to understand that things done in Europe effect us here, even as the thing we do effect Asia and the things done in Asia effect people in Africa, vice-versa, sideways and upside down, etc, etc, etc.

    Good answers are there. They just aren't going to be as easy as we'd all like.

    Speaking of good answers, they aren't Conservative, or Liberal, or Libertarian. They aren't Republican or Democrat. Good answers don't need labels. They are known to be good not because of their connection to any given political line of thought but by the fact that they are effective. They simply work.
    Fiat justitia, pereat mundus.


    BTW, while we are on the subject, is it needed to point out the obvious: That it is just possible that if you are willing to judge the worth of someone simply by what you read on a website about them it might say a whole hell of a lot more about you than it says about the person you are judging?

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