The economic data is in, from America, from around the world. Every ticker tape report of stock markets in America, Europe, Asia, India tells the same tale. The Old Order is collapsing. The slowest recovery from a recession since 1945 sucks America down like quicksand. (1, 2, 3) The economy cannot grow at even the most modest rate required to hire back the unemployed, or to bring into the labor force young people entering adulthood or graduating from school (5).The unemployment rate stays at levels commensurate with social failure - 25 to 50% for youth and minorities (6) and farm labor and construction, 10 - 20% for broad job categories. The unemployment rate would be higher in all cases, except that, as it is defined as a technical matter, those who have dropped out of the labor forced are not looking for jobs and are not counted as unemployed. The labor force declines to its smallest percentage of the population in nearly thirty years.
American agriculture has become so onerously regulated, land so expensive, and harvest labor so difficult to obtain, that tens of thousands of American farmers have, literally, picked up roots and moved to Mexico and Brazil. There capital, cheap labor, and managerial freedom enable American farmers to grow the products efficiently and profitably that they "export" and sell in the US.(7 ,8) Meanwhile, great swarths of once-productive American farming regions become dust-bowls - visit the Central Valley in California, with abandoned land, abandoned farm towns, and hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers. New England once produced apples, maple sugar, and dairy - now these industries have almost entirely disappeared.
Manufacturing expands slightly - but mainly through foreign sourced plants. American workers find themselves unprepared for computer driven automated factories, or lacking training in old fashioned skills, such as welding and machine tooling.
Wealth accumulation has ceased. Broad based private property ownership has contracted - housing remains moribund, with one-third of homeowners owing more on their mortgages than the homes they live in are worth (4). Households try to save, but are punished for it, because the interest rate on savings is below the rate of inflation. The low interest rate constitutes confiscation by government.
The governmental sector expands, but by employment programs, like affirmative action, that target specific groups, who fill up redundant bureaucracies as functionaries, where their inexpertise and routine performance of complex, rule-driven tasks frustrate citizens and businesses requesting services from them. Citizen visits to agencies, such as (and like) the department of motor vehicles and the post office, are maddening experiences for the governmental inefficiency they reveal. Governmental regulation and content mandates and public unionization transform old professions, like teaching and medicine, into proletarian jobs. Excessive regulation, comatose governmental bureaucracies, confiscatory taxation destroy the "freedom" in the free economy.
Everywhere, in nearly every way, America is being dumbed down, driven into economic bankruptcy, sucked of motivation to achieve, to profit, to progress. All in the name of social justice, social democracy, and progressivism.
Yet everywhere, the socialist model of government has failed and fails again. In Russia and China, it was "communism" which failed and collapsed. In the free west, it was socialism-lite, social democracy or progressivism, that is failing. Based on the fraudulent philosophy of Marxism, but embodying the prescient barbarism of Leninism, social democracy serves only to perpetuate the rule of a self-serving political class whose only interest is staying in power.
The political class stays in power by two principles. 1. Confiscate money from those who vote against them and give that money to those who vote for them. 2. Rule by arbitrary authority through executive agencies which are in personnel and regulation bound to large private cartels which fund their political campaigns.
This is the old order: corrupt, lying, unrepresentative, thieving, authoritarian rule by executive czars; a fascist economy in which the political class controls the instruments of government and a cartelized so-called free economy; presided over by a president, Barak H.Obama, who learned the ideology of the Left and the New Left, from circles of secular and religious radicals and social science and humanities faculties in academia.
The old order has run out of money - in Europe, in Asia, in the US. Ignorant of economics, it sought to delay its collapse by printing money and borrowing money to fund the welfare recepients whose votes kept it in power. Since 2008, we have been watching, as if a slow-motion movie, the implosion and collapse of the old order. The data of economic decay, the signs of collapse, are all around us.
And in economic decay, as the Left used to say, lies our salvation. As surely as day follows night, a new order will replace the old order. A crisis is an opportunity that will not be wasted. A new order, resusitating free markets, will replace the old order as soon as November 2012, if the collapse is not falsely delayed by financial tricks by the money managers. Obama will be voted out. And his defeat will lead to the removal of his czars.
Long live economic despair. Hope and change are near.
Recent Comments