Where liberty is, there is my country.
Benjamin Franklin
Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic
The builders will be in the driver’s seat.
Debt is any enemy of government’s perfect ally. The more a government borrows the more it’s weakened. The consequences of debt, required repayment of principal, and compounding interest are inexorable, forestalled by central bank and government machinations but never prevented. The longer they forestall the more severe the consequences. Central banks and governments have fostered the world’s greatest debt bubble and promoted negative interest rates to facilitate it. An unprecedented tsunami of debt has creditors paying borrowers to lend them money. This weird and anomalous combination, impossible in a world without central banking, portends global disaster.
The enemies of government have only to wait. When the reckoning arrives, governments will find they no longer have the means to wage war or control their populations (see “The Illusion of Control,” Part 1and Part 2, Robert Gore, SLL ). Their demands on their nations’ productive taxpayers and their depreciation of currencies have stripped their countries of their wealth and ability to produce. Be it by creditors, revolutionaries, or invaders, or some combination of the three, these governments will be toppled and replaced by something new. It’s a story as old as human history.
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A graph of global economic growth versus the much steeper graph (in both percentage and absolute terms) of global debt growth above it conveys an obvious message: something has to give. When that something gives it will lead to the greatest deflationary depression in history. The trillionsin fiat debt that governments and central banks will conjure in response will be no match for the quadrillions(one quadrillion equals one thousand trillions) in debt, unfunded liabilities, contingent liabilities, securitized collateralized-debt, derivatives, and other promises—all counted as a liability or quasi-liability on one set of books and an asset or quasi-asset on another—that will unravel and implode.
Governments are meeting the ongoing economic and financial crisis—whose “official” start will probably be placed at the 2008-2009 implosion, but whose roots stretch back to at least 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window—the same way they always have: stealing incomes and wealth, keeping for themselves or giving to favored recipients, issuing debt, “encouraging” or outright forcing their central banks to buy that debt, and debasing their currencies. This bag of larcenous and fraudulent tricks produces nothing, leads to no voluntary, mutually beneficial trade, and retards savings and investment, the foundations of economic growth and progress. It is how Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt turned what should have been a garden variety recession and financial reset into the Great Depression.
It is why a Greater Depression is at least ten years on and the worst is yet to come. Anyone who doubts that we’re in this Greater Depression should reflect on one fact: across the developed world national governments’ debts are growing faster in both percentage and absolute terms than government-calculated gross domestic products. In other words, the “growth” we now have is more than completely offset by the greater growth of those national governments’ debt. The disparity yawns even wider when growing individual, corporate, and political subdivisions’ debts—which mostly fund consumption and so generate no offsetting return—are added to national governments’ debt.
One positive thing about the Greater Depression going forward is that it will hit an inflection point and its pace will dramatically quicken. That inflection point will be crashing equity and debt markets, heralding the depression’s severe economic contraction. Default, bankruptcy, and deflation will be the order of the day and much of what the world now considers wealth—debt and equity claims, title to land and tangible assets pledged as collateral for multiple loans—will simply evaporate.
Broken promises, vanishing wealth, and contracting economies will inevitably lead to social disorder and chaos, which severely resource-constrained governments will be unable to control or contain. Current political arrangements and geographic boundaries will not survive the stress, with larger entities shattering into smaller ones. The parasitic monstrosities that are today’s governments will be unsupportable. Future generations will look back in wonder that they were able to expropriate so much of the world’s production and wealth while being responsible for so much of its misery.
Necessity is the mother of invention and inventive thinking. Collapse will lead not just to a wrenching political, economic, and financial reordering, but an epochal reset in human thought. Most of what most people now believe will be seen as tragically wrong. Today’s impervious-to-facts-or-reason worship of governments, rulers, and their minions will certainly stand revealed as the folly it’s always been.
Sand is sand until somebody figures out how to make glass, semiconductors, and solar panels. For centuries petroleum was considered a nuisance. It didn’t become valuable until somebody discovered its constituent elements could be used for, among other things, light, heat, and powering internal combustion engines. Gold was just another rock until humanity discovered its many virtues, which make it ideal for, among other things, jewelry, microcircuitry, and money (see “Real Money,” Robert Gore, SLL).
A resource, natural or otherwise, is a resource because it has at least one use. Resources are not the ultimate source of wealth, the minds that discover uses for them are. Very few wealth-creating ideas are tabula rasa, without antecedent. They build on prior discoveries and ideas. Innovation, when allowed to proceed, is a compounding, exponential process, creating new possibilities that lead to more innovation. It epitomizes organic adaptation, the bottom-up, decentralized progress that humanity makes when it’s not smothered by its diametric opposite—top-down, centralized command-and-control.
Reality-based intelligence, competence, and innovation will be prized as the world is forced to organically adapt to economic collapse, entropic decentralization, and much smaller political subdivisions. Those who would build new societies will need builders. Engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, farmers, plumbers, electricians, mechanics, carpenters, computer programmers, machine-tool operators, doctors, technicians, etc.—people who know how to do useful things—will find their skills, ingenuity, and industriousness in demand. Politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, lawyers, crony-socialist executives, administrators, college professors, think tank propagandists, criminals, celebrities, safe-space students, perpetually aggrieved whiners, a menagerie of misanthropic misfits, the indolent, the entitled, etc.—people with little or no useful skills—will be so much disposable baggage. Ironically, within this latter group there are numerous proponents of population reduction. Without an exercisable claim on the talents and production of the former group, they may well find themselves at the head of their own line.
The first question those who would found new societies may ask is: What must we do to attract the builders? The proper question will be: what must we notdo to attract the builders? For once builders will be in the driver’s seat, and it’s not difficult to imagine their answers. They’d like to hold on to what they earn, so forget theft under the euphemism of taxation. Why should they fund senseless wars or the lifestyles of people they neither know or care about, and probably despise? Bye-bye warfare and welfare states. Forget the frauds of fiat debt, legal tender laws, and central banking; individuals and markets will decide the accepted medium or mediums of exchange.
Builders don’t cotton to people who know less than they do about their occupations telling them what to do, so you can toss hundreds of thousands of laws, regulations, and codes out the window. As a matter of fact, they don’t particularly like other people telling them what to do, period. Isn’t there an ancient parchment somewhere that says: that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? What must be done to attract the builders? Leave them alone to pursue their happiness!
As the world splinters into a thousand or more enclaves, they will be experiments into what works and what doesn’t, confronting two basic issues: supporting their populations and defending themselves. The most successful at the former will undoubtedly be the most successful at the latter because both stem from a common source—productive human minds that are free to innovate, produce, and voluntarily cooperate and exchange, and thus have a stake in defending what they build from armed invasion, parasitic immigration, and internal corruption and subversion. The multiplicity of enclaves will give builders the option to leave failing ones and find or start ones more to their liking.
When humanity proceeds from one epoch to the next, there are usually precursors within the prior epoch of what’s to come in the next one. Hong Kong after World War II offers a glimpse of what’s possible in the coming age of decentralization. It is smaller than Rhode Island, has a population roughly equal to Washington State’s, and no natural resources other than the natural shelter and deep waters of Victoria Harbor, which enabled the construction of one of the world’s leading ports. Yet, in a span of fifty years it went from scattered farming and fishing villages emerging from Japanese occupation to a commercial and financial powerhouse with one of the world’s highest concentrations of both skyscrapers and ultra high-net-worth individuals.
It capitalized on capitalism, which unleashed the skills, ingenuity and industriousness of Chinese immigrants fleeing Communist China, attracted to its low taxation and minimal government interference in the economy. Hong Kong is, of course, a nightmare to all those bleating about wealth inequality. The lower bound on wealth is zero, the upper bound in a Moore’s-law world where science, knowledge, and technology are exploding exponentially virtually infinite. Such will be the gap in the new era’s most successful enclaves, with their dramatically reduced or nonexistent taxes and minimalist or nonexistent governments. The bleaters will be apoplectic, well-advised to find an enclave of their own kind to shelter themselves from the horror—someplace where everyone is poor, but equally so.
Hong Kong is also a nightmare to all those statist collectivists who insist that freedom is impractical and can’t work in the present day and age. What they really mean is that individual rights, self-interest, market competition, voluntary interaction, and free exchange among builders can’t work, but force and fraud can, as long as they’re on the business end of the guns and the checks are made out to them. A bankrupt world plunging toward ruinous chaos is the end result of barrel-of-a-gun political power. It is only the power to stymie, stop, cripple, enslave, corrupt, plunder, destroy, and murder. If people cannot handle freedom for themselves, they sure as hell can’t handle power over other people. If the last century has demonstrated nothing else, it has demonstrated that. Just consider the bloodbath perpetrated by the author of the barrel-of-a-gun quote.
Imagine a group of several million people from around the world signing a petition to the United Nations or whatever global governance organization the globalists foist on us. They ask for a small area, say no bigger than Rhode Island, or maybe Rhode Island itself, in which they are allowed to set up their own country and live in freedom, with a minimalist government or no government at all. They volunteer to pay the expenses for anyone who doesn’t want to live in Freedomland to move to the location of their choice.
If you’re shaking your head at the impossibility of such a proposal, are you doing so because people could never live together in freedom or because the world’s powerful would never allow it? The former answer involves such a dim view of human nature it’s a wonder those who believe it even get out of bed in the morning. The latter answer is based on a clear understanding of the world’s powerful.
Mel Gibson shouted it in Braveheart: Freedom! It’s an ideal that’s animated the best of humanity for centuries, the discussion of which is the first thing repressive regimes censor. If discussion is impermissible, then a real-life test of that which they hate and fear is out of the question; its success would be an irrefutable reproach to their professed politics and their psychopathic psyches. Freedom and tyranny can’t live under the same roof. The chaos and violence engulfing Hong Kong was foreordained in 1997. Gibson was drawn and quartered.
However, the dinosaur—predatory government—faces its extinction. Those who worship and those who hate state power both sense that titanic forces are at work, that earthshaking changes are coming. Real power, the power to create, invent, build, and produce—the power of the mind—awaits its full liberation. The war for freedom will be bloody and chaotic, but it’s a war that must be fought…and won. On the other side of that valley, havens will emerge in which humanity is finally free to reach its vast, glorious potential. That’s worth fighting for.
Very insightful article. Tom Woods likes to point out that those-asshole professors mostly-like to study why people are poor. They usually have predetermined and half baked bromides about discrimination, cultural deprivation-the usual suspects. Tom heads in the opposite direction-how do people get rich. As it says here be a builder. Do something that will make a difference. Add value. Von Mises called it Human Action. This article travels in that direction. Great stuff.
Abolish patents and non-competes then stand back watch builders build. Fill in the moats, tear down the walls.
abolish patents?
explain that one to us,wip–
Wipper- Taking the money out of inventing is hardly motivation for creativity ….no?
The patent system has been terribly abused….I have seen this repeatedly as an attorney…They should be limited to 7 years max, and no renewals
Time is not a good solution. The time may not capture the value. However limiting the total compensation allowed might be reasonable. Removing patent protection once the ‘inventor’ has been compensated enough, say $100 million net above the R&D might just do.
Or 7 years then a royalty for 100 years…..
Tampa, I read a book a few years back but I cannot find it now. I remember being convinced patents are not a net positive. I wish I could find the book. The patent system is broken. One example is how drug companies can get new patents on drugs that have been slightly changed. So slightly that it makes no difference. I’m looking for data on that and will have to get back to you.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080318/004156568.shtml
“…but I wanted to focus on why the downsides to patents are so often worse than the upsides.
At one level, it goes back to basic fundamental economics. Any given monopoly is going to be bad. There are economic rents associated with a monopoly. It limits the supply available and increases the cost, acting as a deadweight loss to society. That’s absolutely true with patents as well (as much of the research has shown). However, there are a few more reasons why patents tend to be a net negative. First, let’s focus on why the reasons in favor of patents aren’t particularly strong.
The first is that it should act as an incentive to create the product. Yet, as the research has shown, that’s almost never true in practice. More innovation tends to happen with weaker patent laws, and when stronger patent laws are put in place, the pace of innovation decreases. The reason is that real innovation almost never happens because of patents. Very few people invent stuff “to get a patent,” but because there’s a need in the market and they can help solve it. That’s true with, or without, patents. Furthermore, it’s that need in the market that is the real incentive for innovation. If you can serve a market, there’s a way to make money from that market, and that acts as plenty of incentive.
The fears that an “easily copied” product will damage the original inventor are also wildly overblown. Study after study after study has shown that there is a distinct first mover advantage, and even things that are easily “copied” doesn’t mean that the copycats get success in the market. People put a premium on buying from the original creator. Furthermore, they often believe (correctly in many cases) that the original creator has a better understanding of the market, and is likely to continue to innovate faster and with better solutions. Finally, in the worst case scenario, where a copycat is able to do a better job, that’s also not a bad thing, because the societal benefit is still a better product. It’s called competition, and is generally considered a good thing in a market economy.
Another popular claim is that patent benefit us via “disclosure.” Because patents require the inventor to “disclose” the invention, the idea is that these patents will spur additional innovation as others learn from the patents and build on them. The idea is that there’s obvious benefit in keeping the idea secret, so in exchange for disclosing the idea, the government gives the inventor a monopoly. However, this is easily shown to be false. First, very few patents these days are written to the point where they actually disclose enough to be useful. They tend to be broadly written in a way that can cover as much as possible. However, there’s an even better simple logical rationale for why disclosure is a myth when it comes to patents. If the inventor truly believes there’s tremendous value in keeping the idea secret, he or she will still keep it secret. There’s no real benefit to disclosing it to get the patent. You get just as much benefit from keeping it secret. The only benefit is if you think that others will be able to figure out the same concept in less time than it takes for the patent to expire. In other words, if you realize that others will be able to come up with the same thing in that amount of time. So getting a patent prevents others from doing that. But if you truly believe that it would take longer than the length of the patent to figure out its secrets, then you’ll keep it quiet anyway.
As for why the downsides to patents are almost always present, it’s based on a fundamental understanding of how innovation works. If most innovation was a single burst of inspiration, then patents could make sense. However, in a scenario where innovation is an ongoing process of building, trying, adjusting, building, trying, adjusting — then patents are likely to be harmful. They add a cost and a hassle at many of the steps along the way. They add a series of hurdles that involve time, money and effort for each step of that process. That, alone, significantly slows down innovation. Studies have shown, in fact, that most innovation is an ongoing series of innovations rather than a single burst of inspiration. Furthermore, great breakthroughs tend to come not from a single mind, but in different people looking at the same problem, learning from each other and building on each other’s work. By throwing tollbooths into that process, you slow down the innovation.
Thus, the supposed benefits of patents rarely are all that beneficial, and yet the downsides to patents are quite large and show up quite often. So, it should be no surprise that the research shows patents tend to do quite a bit to slow down innovation, rather than accelerate it.”
“If you’re shaking your head at the impossibility of such a proposal, are you doing so because people could never live together in freedom or because the world’s powerful would never allow it?”
I’m shaking my head because I don’t understand why anyone should have to ask permission of the UN of the beast.
I’ve been thinking lately about how exactly the country could be broken up, from actually petitioning the government to militia border control, ports, ending fiat currency, non-immigration laws, etc.
Good point…. ask permission of the BEAST to avoid the beast?
Great article ! Thank you. Finally a positive outlook of our chaotic future.
Only problem is… human history. What is a king? The guy who ran the crew that conquered those builders and held what he conquered. Or the descendant of that fellow. Raiders practice raiding. All the Middle East, North Africa, most of Indonesia and north Asia under the thumb of the raider’s creed, many in little enclaves of hostility to all, subject to the vicissitudes of a stronger enemy at all times. Very little building going on.
To protect the people from the raiders requires an army. Thus a government. Thus the parasite begins its life, but there its life does not end.
That’s one of the main problem s with tribalism.
Doesn’t the ‘last gang standing’ rule us now? Or is it perhaps the kakistocracy that retains full spectrum dominance from times past?
i enjoyed this very much, robert.
i believe it’s the first real bugle blast i’ve heard announcing the “beginning” of what most (here at least) already know is coming. this was inspiring.
not sure why the idea popped into my head a few weeks ago, but it’s similar to something you wrote in the article: I was thinking of new declarations of independence being written. i believe many of the coming enclaves will do this. not that they would have to, but want to. and not even as a nod to the original. not as a way of making anything legal, because screw them/to whom they are addressed, but as a worthy exercise.
i would (will?) love to read the various ones that come forth.
A far more likely formula for success would be secrecy. Consider this: once an enclave declares independence from D.C., they immediately become targets for conquest. The supply lines would be short, the barriers insignificant; those who want to control us all would make examples of the first few, until command and control were totally lost / armies depleted and force made infeasible (most likely by attrition). The first few new republics would be sitting ducks.
Now consider 1000 men / women / children who decided silently to be free. They pay token taxes, keeping the rest to improve their enclave; the discrepancy with previous receipts is explained to the Feds as “lower population due to migration out”, “bad crops this year”, “sales down due to local unemployment”. The local officials are chosen by the enclave; the state officials get the same story the Feds did, “we’re having a tough year, and when are you going to pave that highway / put in that electrical plant / transmission line / new school system?” The state officials will then promise the world and high-tail it out of town. Meanwhile, the enclave grows stronger.
After the Feds and states exhaust themselves duking it out with the Blue Mountain Free State, the enclave still holds its’ peace while retaining its’ resources. Once a year or two past collapse, they can then announce “to prevent crime, strengthen the community and plan for tomorrow, the Western Republic now assembles its’ first Community Board and the Board of Supervisors is standing for election, all candidates welcome”. Once it becomes clear that neither remaining Feds or State forces want to rumble, they can turn their Community into a Free State and do their best.
James,
Write an article on this idea.
Bob..
Most excellent. reminds me of cruising your archives way back. Too many good lines to repeat but the one about proponents of population control finding themselves at the head of their own line is a good one.
About those quadrillions of Fairy Godmother dollars. We seem to be the only ones willing to even mention them let alone discuss the possibilities when they collapse. I remember how bad it was in Nam when they changed the Scrip overnight and the locals woke up to discover the money was worth zero. Suicides were pretty common for several weeks afterward and that was just a small country. We will most likely have much longer but the outcome will be the same.
The good news is anyone left will be a conservative. By choice or necessity. Liberal mindsets can only exist when fastened to someones neck.
Fleabaggs
Thanks for the comments. After months of struggle with writing about Vietnam for the next book, I think I’ve found the way forward. It’s not exactly original, Joseph Heller got there first, but that war, and I think most wars, just turns everything completely upside down. The only thing a writer can do is chronicle the insanity and use it for his larger purposes. I bring it up because I think we’re seeing the world turning upside down everywhere–war and non-war alike. Chaos is coming like most people have never seen and can’t come close to even imagining. Writing about Vietnam’s insanity is a good warmup for the future, a valuable exercise as it were. Yes, people could very well wake up one morning and find that everything they considered wealth is worthless. If they had an index on the suicide rate like they do on stocks and bonds, and you could actually place bets on it like you can with the stock and bond indexes, I can’t think of a better speculation than going long the suicide index.
Bob.
I think you’re onto something. Maybe copy the theme of a family’s history like in the Pinnacle.
Financial collapse with or without war will rearrange any ones mind and soul. How could it be otherwise.
In Nam, the ones hurt the most were mid level down to poor people. the old lady with a small cigarette stand whose G.I. scrip she took in yesterday that she needed for more tobacco most likely now had to find a loan. However small it may seem to us she may have had to pledge something for it or sell her little portable case to a lender and rent it back from them. The real tragedy might have been seen only by a fly in her hair who followed her home to her mat in the alley where her only remaining relatives were waiting. Maybe a sister and a toddler who represented their entire future, even their DNA. We have escaped the harshness of life in this country. For now.
Fleabags… there is a little cluster of trailer homes I thought abandoned a few miles away. I’d joked to my husband that it looked like a bunch of elderly trailers had hobbled off into the woods to die.
I was shocked when I drove by not long ago and saw there were actually some people there.
I’m afraid to slow down to take a picture there. I won’t take that “shortcut” any more.
Maggie.
They might be squatters or these young kids called travelers. I call them granola nut bars because they eat granola and refuse to bathe until Mother Earth is avenged. Some call themselves Rainbows.
I think squatters is most likely. Probably locals cooking up a few batches, you know?
We got those too.
move to vegas and start a suicide betting market? 30 seconds at duckduckgo shows lots of available suicide stats.
I bet on 1987.
You’re doing it again.
Obsessively posting a fragment without context will never successfully open anyone’s eyes to whatever point you are making- and you have some very valid points.
You have to flesh this idea out in a long form essay or people are just going to keep skipping over your posts. Please don’t let that happen.
Be careful what you wish for….
War is like a forest fire. Once the conditions are right it can start, but once started it will follow the physics of conditions, place and time until it burns itself out.
It might be that the liberal mindset is an excape mecahnism, a reaction to the coming doom and a denial of that possibility. Conservatism is not the natural response, cooperation and rejection of the conservative vs liberal dichotomy seems more likely. Because politics will have cost too many lives by then to be taken seriously. The civil war whetted the north and south thirst for blood and eventually the fighters became sick of the carnage. Revolutions die fast when the leaders are put to the guillotine.
EC – whelp, you talked me out of being a leader.
Robert says this:
“Reality-based intelligence, competence, and innovation will be prized as the world is forced to organically adapt to economic collapse, entropic decentralization, and much smaller political subdivisions. Those who would build new societies will need builders. Engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, farmers, plumbers, electricians, mechanics, carpenters, computer programmers, machine-tool operators, doctors, technicians, etc.—people who know how to do useful things—will find their skills, ingenuity, and industriousness in demand.”
The corollary to this is what will the unskilled, etc. do? Right now, there are 53 million unskilled, poorly paid workers in the US, according to articles abounding. Those 53 million folks are NOT builders. They do not now nor are they likely to ever have those builder skills. They will live outside the walls of Freedomland, no doubt, but they, like hordes of zombies, will be banging on its walls wanting to take the produce of the builders. Just as even now, hordes of the undead swarm Europe from Africa and the middle east.
This will have to be addressed. And I suspect it will be addressed in blood in the end. There will be no peaceful solution.
But in the end, the builders will thrive.
Llpoh..
I suspect it will be somewhat like the depression where the local sheriff will round up those non workers and rent them out to farmers, miners and other hard labor enterprises and just work them till they drop or get good enough at the task to be worth promoting. The real world cannot carry liberals and losers.
llpoh
I agree with you that there will be blood, but the builders will ultimately thrive (if they don’t, nobody does). Some of the blood won’t actually be blood, it will just be the wasted carcasses of people who had no idea how to fend for themselves and could no longer can suckle at the government teet.
I also want to say that I liked your most recent article. I didn’t see it until after you had a gazillion comments so I didn’t add mine, but it was a good article. I hope you post more in the future.
I was listening to David Morgan last week and he mentioned that it takes 10 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food under this system. That has to correct itself.
That reality of mechanized farming has been pointed out a good decade or longer.
Not unlike the “It now takes 3 barrels of oil to extract and refine 4 barrels” thing.
It seems like that will be the only way to Red-pill the masses in a timely manner;. Most people are just too obstinate and intellectually lazy to grasp it,
This reminds me of Galt’s Gulch and the story of Atlas Shrugged.
I’ll take that as a compliment.
Yes
i used to believe decentralization was best. at heart i yearn to be free and so used to loosely self-identify as anarcho-capitalist. but my brain now knows better. the natural order will always be some form of government, waxing and waning between strong and weak. the world where every man is a king is utopia. specifically it is a white utopia. other races and groups have their own best-suited organization. but like the ending of the dark knight movie, decentralization is not the hero whites need right now. our enemies outnumber us significantly, including traitors within our own.
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decentralization in the u.s. has been used by our enemies for our destruction which is exemplified by democracy, especially the universal suffrage flavor. everyone gets a vote is as decentralized as it gets, so they’ll just bring in 150 million people who will vote how they want them to.
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when your enemies are organized and you aren’t, you lose. without organization they will just take your shit and who will be left to build after that? right now our people are disorganized, and there is no over-riding direction or protection and so we die by a thousand cuts. look at the u.s. politically. whites are not allowed a congressional black caucus, or an naacp or la raza or any of the hundreds to thousands of non-profits and ngo’s which directly serve to progress non-whites at our expense. even the purportedly ‘white’ political party cares nothing for demographic replacement and is full open borders. and so americans have been losing ground for decades: street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city, state by state. because whites are supposed to see past colour and be individualists. who will be left to build?
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all the muds? they’ve fled to and been brought to our countries because they are such great ‘builders.’ and after the coming cataclysm there might not be enough of us left to have enough builders anyway. we can worry about decentralizing after we’ve won. after we’ve survived.
Daniel, clan up.
White neighborhoods have been decimated by the diversity created by organizations and governmentS. These diverse neighbors movE in refused to cut the grass park their cars and their abandon cars on the grass bringing home values down. Then their friends move in at reduced prices and the spiraling continues until that neighborhood becomes the ghettO. If you were to move to the ghetto and make your home and yard beautiful, you would not affect the neighborhood values in a positive way because no other ghetto neighbor would follow your lead. It is a one way downward spiral. Called equal housing. This happened exactly to my grandmothers neighborhood from 1990 to the year 2000. $120,000 home sold for $46,000 and only half the neighbors were of diversity. The last one sold for $18k. Now the entire neighborhood is the ghetto full of crack pipes
“… etc.—people with little or no useful skills—will be so much disposable baggage…”
As “the center cannot hold” and farming re-localizes during the crisis, there will be a labor shortage. Won’t ‘the useless’ be the perfect subjects to learn organic gardening with stone age tools? Guarded by their very own Antifa? Owned by the builders? After all, the early settlers had to import and buy “farm equipment” from Africa! Who now learned chutzpah from the tribe and are demanding reparations! Perhaps they need repair and re-use instead?
The money changers don’t care. Two things 1) their crimes are working 2) they believe the solar micronova for 2046 is true. They want their line to live and yours to end in that great solar system wide cleansing. Why should they care when their criminal fraud is successful? You won’t do anything.
Their response is something like HAHAHAHAHA. AH HAHAHAHAHA GET BACK IN SQUALOR SLAVES!!! HAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Excellant analysis! However, I do have one minor quibble. No society can long endure a winner take all scenario. Oracle’s Larry Ellison even said ‘No one should have as much money as I”. I agree. Colossal fortunes that run into the tens of billions of dollars are simply incompatible with ‘freedom’. Some constraint must exist to limit the private wealth accumulation of those who won life’s lottery.
Long ago I recall I graph that displayed wealth as a function of height. It assumed the average man was about 6 feet tall. The problem was that the outliers were not just ‘taller’ they were astronomically taller. How in the world can you have a society where CEO’s are 20,000 feet tall and the plutocrats are millions of feet tall and have freedom? Who pays for all the supernumeraries and useless politicians when wealth is distributed like that?
Robert, I postponed the reading of this because, while you are a great composer of prose, you use a lot of bigass words that make me think.
“Collapse will lead not just to a wrenching political, economic, and financial reordering, but an epochal reset in human thought. Most of what most people now believe will be seen as tragically wrong. Today’s impervious-to-facts-or-reason worship of governments, rulers, and their minions will certainly stand revealed as the folly it’s always been.” Robert Gore, quoted from “The Builders”
(rayray? write that down for posterity)
I think you should have put “gut” before wrenching because that is what it feels like.
We live, as you probably know, in the Ozarks, Missouri Territory. A lot of the larger cattle and horse ranches around are owned by old family names, recognizable even to a transplant like me (75 miles to the farm). But most of the small farms, like ours, are owned by people somewhat like ourselves, retired or retiring while building, or are occupied/rented by the underclass of the community. Someone said the poor will always be with us…
The working class of laborer around here feels lucky to work “up to the factory in Perryville” for $12 an hour or get hired on for seasonal expansion at Procter & Gamble, north of Cape. The average income in the county is less than 20K annually. There’s a long line at the food pantry on Tuesdays here. Most people are self-sufficient to some degree, but without gasoline to get them to a store, they wouldn’t survive long.
I try to think of my own situation as a microcosm of what you discuss. Someone might think I am really lucky to be retired here at 58. I certainly do feel blessed. But, I know that I scrimped and saved and worked hard. But, mostly, I had a goal and my husband and I teamed up and he became the financier and I moved to Missouri and became the “building supervisor.” I got to know all the people in the community firsthand by hiring them to dig the basement, lay the concrete, install the safe room, dig the plumbing lines, drill the well, and so on. I learned who the local builders were by hiring them based on word of mouth from others in the area who knew them. Out here, reputation and family name generally mean something: A Welker drilled my well and a Welker sold me a Jeep and another Welker removed and replaced our transmission. And I’d recommend a Welker any day of the week, whatever business they are in.
So, yes, an enclave of people can actually develop a community way of life that really doesn’t involve a lot of government regulations. My Mennonite builder was so glad we didn’t have to have an inspector sign off on his work, which is amazing, by the way. Not because he doesn’t meet or exceed “code”, but because having to have a government inspector come at various stages wasted his time because it is a work stop. (Omer Yoder is in Wisconsin now if anyone wants a log home built. I’ve got his card.) I hired a retired plumber living around here to “supervise” the laying of lines for the barn and under the basement, but Nick plumbed the house and the barn. And the little house. Oh, he wired the electricity in all those, as well. My old friend is an electrician and he brought the breaker boxes and helped install them. Nick did the rest.
So, that’s probably about a hundred grand I saved us by marrying well.
I’ll wrap this up here, Robert Gore. I hope someone capable of rational thought manages to convince the others to sit down and shut up.
Thanks for a another thought provoker.
“across the developed world national governments’ debts are growing faster in both percentage and absolute terms than government-calculated gross domestic products.”
Imagine you get a bank loan for $500k and then proudly brag you are worth $500k. Your net worth is zero. Our govt is funding our economic growth via debt and politicians claim they are doing Great! I feel the bloodshed will be on the banks when they try and foreclose on 100m americans in the next great depression. Many will burn their homes vs giving their equity and home to a fraudulent bank and fed reserve. They will say “here ya go, take it all, all the ashes you bastards. Now go and resell that!” People will take a scorched earth policy in relation to debt, especially secured debt backed by real assets like homes. They will not stand for another bankster fraud in the same generation. Are they supposed to squat in tents in their yard while their home sits foreclosed gathering mold? The banks could allow them to remain in it until a buyer comes along but people wont stand for that either, next time.