kunstler | You can’t overstate how fortunate this country was after the Second
World War. The mid-twentieth century was the apex of American industrial
wealth. We produced real goods and lived in extraordinary comfort. Now,
of course that has all turned around, the industry is mostly bygone,
the magnificent energy supply is getting sketchy, and all that’s left is
a false-front financialized economy based on swindling and
accounting fraud. Medicine and health care have become unabashed
rackets, and good luck finding a place to live for less than half of
your monthly income.
Things have changed, as Bob Dylan once noted in song, and the times
they are a ‘changing once again. This is probably the worst time in
recent history to go full-bore socialist. Look, it’s as simple as this:
the 20th century saw the greatest rise of global GDP ever.
The prospect of that is what drove the various socialisms of the period —
the belief that there would be evermore material wealth and that a lot
of it had to be fairly redistributed to the workers who brought it into
being. You can debate the finer socio-ethical points of that — and
indeed that’s what much of politics consisted of throughout the
industrialized world — but the stunning bonanza of wealth compelled it.
That is the world we are moving out of right now, despite the
fantasies of Elon Musk and the many techno pied pipers like him. GDP
growth has stalled, the implacable trend is toward contraction, and the
wizards of financial hocus-pocus are running out of tricks for
pretending that they create anything of value. In short: there’s no there
there. All that’s left are IOUs for loans that will never be paid back —
and that kind of loan (especially in the form of a bond) doesn’t have
any value.
So, the Democratic Party has embarked on a crusade to redistribute
the wealth of the nation at the exact moment when the “wealth” is
turning out to be gone. Good luck with that.
What intellectuals don't get about MIGRATION is the ethical notion of SYMMETRY:— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) June 30, 2018
OPEN BORDERS work if and only if the number of pple who want to go from EU/US to Africa/LatinAmer equals Africans/Latin Amer who want to move to EU/US
Silver Rule in #SkinInTheGame
Gabish?
