by Demon of Undoing » Sat Jul 16, 2011 5:36 am
RE: Worst case scenarios
The kind of situation a default would cause will indeed bring some categories of events to fruition that all libertarians may like. Want a dramatically reduced US military/forward presence? The end of entitlement programs in any meaningful sense? End of DOE? DEA? ATF? IRS? Handouts to deadbeat allies? Mohair subsidies? We can have all that. Just let the rest of the world become convinced we are too batshit crazy to be trusted with their money ( may have already occurred), and you will get all that, to one degree or another, fairly quickly. Such a strategy will work.
But the problem with America is the Americans. What will a mostly unskilled and completely uncompetitive guy with a family do when he loses his job, has no unemployment, loses health care, and his kids get hungry ( note, this happens in hours, not days)? Will he suddenly become his leaner, keener ancestor circa 1935 and just power through the new dustbowl with hope in his heart and a gleam in his eye?
Or will he completely lose it, have nowhere to turn, start hurting people to live and join the most effective local thug? Maybe ( and I think we will see a boatload of this, kind of already are) he will simply blow a gasket and go out in a blaze of anger out of a pure inability to cope. Maybe he becomes a refugee in his own country. Maybe lots of things. But certainly, there is little reason to believe that he will suddenly become tougher, more self reliant, better informed and more independent. From whom will he learn this? From what wellspring of family and community tradition will he pull massive guts, two generations out from a nuclear family? What circle of kin and friends will he fall back on and work with? These things, these characteristics are no longer present in this culture in the amounts that will be needed to wire this piece of shit back together when the current troupe of syphilitic baboons lets it come apart.
This is a culture of addicts. We are addicted to ease, to cool, to fun, to challenging, to entertaining. I hate that, I really do. There is no nobility in suffering, only in the man that suffers. We do not posses that kind of nobility. Could it be taught, can it be relearned( if ever it was really known)? Probably, yes. What one man can do, another can do, and it has been done before. But smack addicts can relearn sobriety with little or no assistance. It's just that generally, they don't , and death awaits. What do you think awaits a nation of 320 million, with essentially permanent, high -caliber unemployability and higher-caliber firearms to the tune of about two per adult? In a nation that has historically looked to violence as the multitool of the spirit? That will become increasingly disjointed from the positive structures that make things, in the end, work as well as they can be expected?
This is the black secret of where I go when I think on all the things that make me rage, the things that I would rather do without even while knowing the consequences of doing so. Be prepared for a die-off, a pretty good one. It will manifest itself in things like elevated rates of addiction( I mean , over the elevated rates we already experience), higher homicide/suicide rates, more orphans/sex abuse victims, more wandering mentally ill( damn your zombie jokes, sir, more than one in ten Americans is on a prescribed pharmaceutical designed to tame personality. Three guesses what happens when mother's little helper disappears). More old people dead from stupid things like falls. This is a statistical certainty. And that's the start. Let it go far enough, fast enough, and you get body counts. Serious ones. Ask Mexico what happens when nonstate actors predominate.
Kill this government, yes. Kill the shit out of it. But with what will you replace it? Something better step in. Cold turkey will kill the patient. I advocate getting to the point where there isn't enough of a Federal presence to mess with you, and where the locals are selfishly activist enough to hang people that take advantage of them. I think that's a fine way to be. But to get there, I know better than to create power vacuums in their life. There needs to be a weaning process, and there can be. We can learn a new way to group, or better yet, fully grow into older ways that can be updated for modern usage( why reinvent the wheel when the car is in motion?). But it takes time, it takes support, it takes willpower that damn sure may be flagging or nonexistent . Like it or not, it will take all the resources we can scrounge under this mode of economy( petrodollar/Bretton Woods thing, now dying on a front page near you). It will take shrewd management to have a soft landing, and a willingness to see long terms and sacrifice accordingly. It can be done.
But not practically overnight. It can't be done with a shattered currency and an economy with better than 30% unemployment ( in real terms, that is seriously not all that far off. Don't think it can double? Keep watching.). You can't just pull a hard core junkie off the junk without significant medical support. It will likely kill him. At best, treatment will fail. It's a near statistical certainty. Well, fail here doesn't mean the people will just decide to go back to accruing debt. They will be unable to do so, unable to reacquire that junkie lifestyle. Choosing relapse will not be an option. Choosing death will be, on a failed-state scale that America has no experience of, except in the South ( and even then not in anyone's living memory). This time, though, there will be no magnanimous Federal troops to keep the bulk of the lawlessness down.
Am I building frightening castles in the air? On one level, yes, I sure am. Mr P did in fact warn several months back that there would come a fight( he was thinking a couple of months ago, actually) where the dems and the left would pull out all stops. His conjecture was that it would be over health care, and Dems would start holding pictures up for the camera of grannies that had already been killed by Republican policies, literally using dead bodies for press gain( where have I heard that happen before? Oh, yeah. Everywhere). I might be that very thing in a new iteration.
However, the fight isn't health care. If it were, and the Dems were doing that, if that were their final line of defense, I would say go ahead and load Gran Gran in a trebuchet, launching her in the direction of the CBS press pool to land with a bounce. Why so callous? Because Gran Gran has been made to feel ( so have we all) that we are owed something that was in fact purchased on war -based largess. Sure, the victors can afford solid gold shitters. Why not? The victory wears thin, though, any way you cut it. Under the present system ( or any one envisioned that I have seen), GG becomes aerodynamic, inevitably. That fight Mr P predicted is inevitably going to happen and inevitably going to go one way. Statism can't pay for a nation as large as ours to have the things we expect. I would have that fight based on inevitability, and would shrug off weeping Congressmen like Mama Cass shrugging off a salad( what? Too soon?).
But this is not health care. Health care is a fraction of the enormity of this issue. This whole thing flies on our POS currency, and that is why I have been losing it semi-regularly in a most unmanly fashion, as the professional weasel wranglers destroy the tender they are constitutionally and legally obligated to defend. Bad health care policy can get you pretty far in the toilet ( see where we are now in that respect), and maybe eventually get you all apocalyptic. Currency collapse, on this scale, one never before even dreamed? Oh, that gets you Armageddon on a hot plate. I'll whine a bit about that possibility, thank you very much.
I want less government. I want practically no federal government. Hell, if we're making wishes, you people GTFO and leave me with all the dope , BBQ and redheads. But I don't want decentralization to happen overnight, and I don't want it to happen accidentally, and I don't want it to happen without the people understanding going in exactly what such a maneuver will entail. It's not just a matter of courtesy in wanting their assent. If they are thrown into it, if one day their paycheck doesn't buy a loaf of bread or a DVD or, God forbid, pay the internet bill, shit will be broken, big time. There is a better way to get there. I have argued for those ways, so have a number of conservative/libertarian thinkers way, way smarter and better informed than I. But I don't think a single one of them would advocate doing something that easily could lead to national suicide.
This is where I am as someone that prefers sleeping with dogs on dirt rather than a bed in air conditioning, as someone that understands full well that a dieoff might include him and his, and is still willing to do that if that's what it takes to pull us back from a future that may make Orwell and Malthus look like wide-eyed school children. If that's the alternative Mr P is afraid of, I share his fears, and probably have more of a desire to tear things down to zero to prevent it than he does. For me, it would be payback.
But even saying that, even admitting what a modern perspective must call insanity, I say it doesn't have to be on or off. It doesn't have to be all that, right now. Take a long view, understand where the soul of man lies. It's not going to adapt overnight, or even in a year or five years or ten. There are good arguments to be made that as of now, even the best case scenarios envision a very tough twenty years. And that presupposes no truly suicidal acts like shattering confidence in your currency by choice. If we can lean out and pare down artfully, America can indeed come out on top and so forth and so on, and we can all fart red white and blue confetti at the 4th of July parades.
This, though. This is nuts.
Oh, yeah, content. I don't have any. All I got is this article. There, let's try that. It's slightly less dumb.
Don't know what it is, but I'm agin'it.