23 February 2023
In the long run, the whole world is screwed. It doesn't even require a spiritual outlook to see that. It's not that I agree with Doug Casey on everything he says, but that he has a clear view of what's going on with human behavior and the economic outcomes. His biases will keep you (and to some degree, himself) from knowing all the reasons for the way things are, but where it's taking us is pretty obvious.
Human economy rests on two things: natural resources (the fuel) and people working to exploit them (the engine). The existence of economics is the output of these two: the activity of humans exchanging things they have for what they want. Notice that the whole point is people doing stuff with the resources, and wanting stuff they can't produce for themselves. Without motivation/effort and some kind of expertise, there is no economy. There might appear to be a lot of economic strength in the virtual realm -- the means and activity of networking -- but it would not exist without the real world exchange of goods. The virtual realm is just a collection of services that piggyback on the exchange of real goods.
Networking could never be an actual economy itself. There is no information economy; it's just a means to enhance real economic activity. It's a wonderfully good enhancement, but cannot serve any useful purpose by itself. The economy has to produce enough stuff for humans to be comfortable and have leisure time for the social networking to have any value in itself.
The global economy is breaking down, and it's for the usual reason: too much scraping by the non-productive sector. Normal human economic activity can always withstand a certain amount of this, and it's utterly inescapable. There will always be a certain amount of inefficiency because of non-productive gatekeepers. Notice that it doesn't include actual middlemen; those provide a useful service. In many ways, networking is just a middleman, a broker in its own right. It actually improves efficiency of exchange. But there is always government and enforcement, which represent a natural brake on efficiency.
God says there absolutely will be government, or there will be no economy to speak of. That's what the Covenant of Noah in Genesis 9 is all about. It's the cost of fallen human existence. We will have social interaction; it's our nature. We have an instinct to seek out ways to persuade people to exchange things they have for things we have so that both are better off materially. And because no two of us think exactly alike, it requires someone to stand over us and decide how to keep us from killing each other.
Thus, the issue is not whether we shall have government, but what kind. This is where we start talking about something near and dear to Scripture: The closer a government is to you personally, the better it works for you. Thus, an unspoken assumption of the Bible is that nobody should rule over you who isn't related by blood or adoption (marriage, covenant, etc.). This principle shows up when the Bible talks about the dread of having foreigners rule over you -- they aren't family and they don't care about you. They have no moral authority to govern because the results of their governing does not come back to bite them hard enough.
Something should become clear immediately: If the disposition and customary behavior of the people is already rather peaceful and orderly, then it requires a whole lot less governing in the first place. In practice, this will always be controlled by the lowest common denominator in any society. If your bottom is high, then government is light. If your society is bottom heavy, then government will be burdensome. That is, for things to work economically, there has to be some kind of order, some kind of civilizing presence, either government of self or government imposed by others. That government might not exist for any number of reasons, and the chaos means very little economic activity. Or it might mean a big government that scrapes off an awfully large portion of economic activity. The net result for the people at large is the same.
The US was founded on a people who tended to need less government. They brought laws and customs that accounted for that. It's a system that doesn't rule much, but when it does, it can bite awfully hard. That works just fine for people who bear a high social trust factor. It doesn't work at all for people who lack that high trust factor, for whatever reason. Thus, we sit here today with a minority, that happens to be very large, of people who lack that high trust. They aren't used to the orderly behavior and strict rules, and keep wanting the system to change. They have succeeded in some ways, but the system hasn't really changed, just added a bunch of exceptions that pollute the whole thing.
The engine of the US economy is breaking down. It's not just the presence of a large minority that don't work the same way, but their influence weakens the resolve of those who could easily remain productive by the strict rules. In other words, the hellish atmosphere these people left behind to gain access to our very productive economy has come with them. You surely understood that already. They come from a Third World hellhole, arrive here and turn it into that hellhole they left. But it takes awhile, so they keep coming.
We honestly cannot nail it down precisely, be we can discern that there is a mixture of factors that make people economically productive, whether more or less so. It's partly culture and partly DNA. And some of it is a matter of curses that no one will bother to examine.
Anyway, the US is economically toast about ready to pop out of the toaster. We have resources that are now wasted more than exploited. Government is becoming more centralized and more involved in the details of life, even while it is fundamentally incapable of doing it right. Instead, we have a vast ocean of non-productive people scraping a massive amount, and they in turn enable a whole class of scrapers who aren't even in the government (like bankers). The people who actually think about these things are blinded by their reliance on short-term principles applied to a long-term course. It works for a little while, but it leaves the system shaky at best.
Worst of all, there is a significant presence of satanic people who actually want to destroy everything. They are in positions of power and influence to make their dreams come true. It's like a game for them; they enjoy the process. Otherwise it would have been destroyed in one fell swoop already.
And, as Casey notes in the linked article, our biggest competitor is no better off. You can treat Chinese communism as a religion. It is the moral grounds on which government stands. The Chinese people tend to act like a low trust society, and the Communist Party cannot see a path to change that. They tried. There have been some embarrassing outcomes with too much economic freedom, so they are cracking down, and the existing economic system is fragile. It's not a question of whether it will collapse, but when and how. Will it come before or after the US collapses?
I suspect ours will go down first, if only because I simply know more about our situation and less about China. Our situation is critical. Some breakage will pass unseen due to secrecy, but the results will become very obvious. And it will fall in chunks, not all at once. Our government may continue on life support for a very long time. The globalist dream will die hard.
The time for repentance is long gone, and the terms of repentance have always been far, far more than anyone would be willing to accept. Even today, when we see big revivals, it's very frustrating to see all that energy dissipated by lack of actual change. It's all ardor and no real approach to the Covenant. The Ohio rail disaster is just a down payment on the rest of our economic collapse.
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