Historians have noted that approaching crises typically take longer to arrive than the more prescient of the victims-to-be would expect. And then they are typically far worse than the more pessimistic of the victims-to-be would expect.
I fear the truth that might lie in the above claims because we of the West, and many in other parts of the earth, live with governments and allied business communities which have gone to the limits to push back what might have been a manageable crisis in order to save as much as they could of the system. As it became obvious that salvage job was Mission Impossible, they continued their ineffective programs which — whether they had anticipated this or not — had the side-effect of turning honest people’s money into politician’s money and crooked banker’s money. That certainly provided a motive to continue with actions which did so much damage to the United States and most of its citizens. I oversimplify a bit but not so much as I would have thought even ten years ago.
Why did our masters-of-reality decide to move in for the kill? Had matters reached the point where the parasites were better off feasting off the flesh of the suffering beast rather than returning to the long-term strategy of taking a few quarts blood on a regular basis? We can assume something of this sort, but the question then becomes: Why? What had changed? The United States, as a particular and interesting example of Western countries, was and arguably is an immensely wealthy and powerful country. Many are now inclined to speak of the inevitable decline of a great power, though it would have done a bit more good to have spoken that way and acted to deal with the problem 20 years ago when Paul Kennedy enraged many by suggesting the United States was showing signs of premature decline. Premature? I’ll get to that after noting that Hannah Arendt had forecast 20 years before that the United States would face a decision in the early years of the 21st century: accept a collapse back into poverty or become a more forthright empire and steal what Americans were no longer able to produce on their own. Why can’t we produce now what we seemed to be producing well in those early years of the 1970s? I’ll also get to that after noting that one prominent American commentator and man of the Old Right, Garet Garret, had noted around 1950 that the United States was the strangest empire in history. To put his insight into my somewhat more expansionist claim: we paid the price, morally and financially and in blood of Americans and foreigners, to conquer other countries and didn’t manage to profit, at least not at the level of our country as a whole, though clearly those heavily invested in the national security complex, in terms of careers or finances, have done well though not good.
All the while, right up to the seemingly minor recession of 2001, the American piles of wealth seemed to be increasing. Junior insurance company executives were building houses in my hometown at least double the size of the houses the doctors and lawyers and prominent business-owners had lived in when I was a boy in the 1960s. BMWs and Accuras and Lexus’s were suddenly common, along with such exotica as Cadillac SUVs and pickup trucks. Simple, Mom-and-Pop restaurants were struggling unless they specialized in breakfast, though the fast-food restaurants were doing fine. At the same time, the larger surface streets and even the blue-collar shopping centers were sporting a host of what might be called mid-scale chain restaurants allegedly bringing us some part of culture from Texas cow-country or from Australia or from some part of Florida, that peat-desert hell in the making. The upscale restaurants were also doing fine though some were so crowded as to weaken the pleasures of a revamped dining experience.
I’ve written of distorting an economy by confusing the transactions related to unhealthy living and the resulting ill-health: A Fraudulent Economy: Mixing Wealth and Illth and Mismeasuring the Mess. The problem is still larger and more general as that.
As we’ve grown richer, we’ve sought more services, especially luxury services as well as the illth services which keep our overfed, sedentary selves alive. We’re eating out more and convinced that each of us deserves the medical care and other benefits of the richest in society. While it’s certainly true that we have developed some technology beyond the dreams of our grandparents by enlargening the markets, that can only go so far. Rich people can afford rich people’s medical care, and that care might become middle-class medical care in another ten or twenty years. It’s the same with houses. Rich people can afford rich people’s houses and some of the enhancements to those houses might show up in the houses built for the middle-class and worker-class in another generation or so. As it was, over the previous 20 years, middle-class people allowed themselves to be suckered into buying these 5,000 square foot energy hogs and are now in trouble, as is the banking industry which made sheer silliness possible.
The moneys controlled by politicians and also the moneys paid as insurance premiums (how many pay cash for medical services nowadays) are still flowing though I’d guess the accountants at the average over-mortgaged, over-built, over-equipped medical center are worried. The next crisis will be manageable from the viewpoint of those seeking to keep the system alive only if the Federal Reserve Bank and Treasury Department can keep alive banks which are still gambling — in a casino dominated by bad bets, private and public pension funds in deep deficits, Medicare and Medicaid which are in deficit by about the value of everything on the face of the earth, an increasingly shaky insurance industry, and a medical industry which will start crumbling with major — or maybe even minor — disruptions to cash-flows. In general, you could probably find more problems by looking at any industry linked too closely to the Federal government or regulated by any level of government. Even well-run private companies are buying from and selling to these critters which are frozen and staring into the approaching headlights. It’s time to go into the road-kill meat business.
The Apocalypse isn’t coming but it’s time for those who would help their fellow-citizens to at least get some perspective by looking at other periods of economic and political collapse. Some of those periods are only a little tough and some are downright nasty and are linked with major drops in population and decades of hardship. Think wars, famine, disease. Think barbarian hordes on the move. Think slavery.
Let’s pray we don’t reach that point and the United States might suffer least of all even if we deserve worse — we’re behind the deepest and widest moats on the planet and we have a lot of resources which can keep us fed, clothed, and sheltered. But, at the least, we’ll be losing our nice cars and our summer visits to the Caribbean. And our diets will be simpler, perhaps a good thing since Americans don’t seem to be able to eat healthily so long as that ice cream is in the freezer and the steak restaurant is offering a special on a huge slab of beef with a two-pound baked potato topped with a quarter-pound of butter and a crumbled pound of bacon.
We thought we could afford to live above our means, and outside the constraints of wisdom, by pretending to increase our means and to pretend the doctors and drug-companies could cleanse our bodies for us as fast as we poisoned ourselves. We’ve committed ourselves to paying ever higher salaries and benefits for various workers, bankers and musicians and nurses and teachers and so forth, whose productivity has been — at best — stagnant in recent decades. We’ve done this at a time when it seems likely that some of those workers, bankers and teachers for sure, aren’t performing so well as similar workers in prior generations. Perhaps, they were forced to work against the grain by the changes I’m talking about, which have led to not only unrealistic expectations on the part of nearly all of us but also to severe damage to our moral character. Bankers, even from the most solid of local institutions, have to satisfy the needs and desires of those who want it all and want it now. The children of such human creatures have internalized this sort of moral disorder and have not the habits and attitudes to allow much in the way of real learning. This puts a burden on the best of teachers, to be sure, but the proper — if seemingly nasty way — to handle the problems is to send the children ill-prepared or ill-equipped to learn standard material to classes teaching more appropriate material or operating under more restrictive discipline. Maybe some should simply be sent back home. A more flexible system might accomplish this without unduly prejudiced bureaucrats making judgments on particular students. Perhaps the local communities could supply basic infrastructure and the teachers and classes for basic courses in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Then parents could contract with private classroom teachers or even tutors for individual instruction with perhaps some public subsidy to ensure talented youth with important talents don’t miss out.
I don’t really feel the need or the right to propose an entire system of reform because — and this links back to much of my recent work — we’ve messed up badly in many of these areas and we need to retreat and to start fresh development and experimentation. We needn’t and shouldn’t begin any reformation with strong expectations of what we should do. Once we’ve reached better ground, we can begin to respond to God’s Creation, cooperating with the processes of evolution and development which the Good Lord ordained for this world.
So, why do I say that the decline of the United States is premature? Is it something which could have been delayed, even for an indefinitely long time? There’s a graph found often on the Internet in recent months. This graph shows the length of time for which one country or another has had the reserve currency for the past six centuries or so. Nearly all those periods have been 75-100 years before the reserve-currency country began an economic and political and military decline. The graph itself is very simple and shows the U.S. dollar has been the reserve currency for about the same amount of time as the currency of Portugal in the 15th century. Portugal had great leadership but it was a very small country with little in the way of natural resources and her time of glory came before there was much capability to buy or steal needed resources from third-world countries. Surely, we have enough of a population and enough resources to stand as king of the hill longer than Portugal did.
Speaking very generally, the United States, which is remaining the dominant military power for now even as our economic might dwindles, surely should have lasted longer than Portugal as the reserve-currency country, which is essentially possible only for the dominant world-power. We were even reasonably well-liked before we made it clear we’d kill innocents all over the world to make ourselves feel good about ourselves. We had no real competition until we simultaneously outsourced our production and some of our skilled technical services to Japan, Taiwan, China, and other countries while also wasting our energies, morale, and money on wars that didn’t seem to have a real point other than convincing American leadership they were some sort of second-coming of the political and military geniuses of the Macedonians, Romans, and Mongols. We gave away the sources of our wealth and then spent it anyway. The evidence indicates our recent leaders in the U.S. learned strategy by watching Three Stooges movies, except our stooges had all those planes and bombs and tanks and high-tech guns. Moe and Larry and Curly poked eyes. They didn’t bomb the hell out of cities filled with civilians and the infrastructure they needed to live decent lives.
In any case, it’s likely that Nixon prevented the loss of reserve currency status, which loss would have been a good thing if we wanted to be a modest and peaceful people rather than the enslaved residents of a global power, by taking the U.S. dollar off the gold standard. He sold the American people down the river but protected the power of the American government and military-industrial complex. Nixon, acting not as an individual but as a cog in a machine which he had entered by his own choice, doomed us and put up government barriers to any efforts to revive American industry, which was a bit tired — as a real estate agent might say — in the early 1970s. We needed innovation and the nurturing of endangered skills, not luxury goods and exotic vacations along with Vietnam and then Grenada and Panama and Iraq-Kuwait and… The United States has become a obese predatory beast with poor muscle tone but still driven to invade and occupy and fight until it weakens of exhaustion and meets some sort of end.
Over the next week or so, I’ll be writing about some specific aspects of the ongoing decline in American prosperity and the inevitable decline in military and political power which will follow. I may or may not write about the related problem of the sheer lack of interest Americans have had, and still have, in taking on the role of leading a revival of Western Civilization.