You may respond by saying that not all government spending comes from taxes, it can come from bond sales and federal reserve printing. Debt spending worked alright for the past 40 years or so, until around three years ago when shit hit the fan. You always have to pay the bill some time- now there’s a scarcity of jobs and there will be for probably over a decade even by optimistic projections.

Additionally, government spending is more arbitrary than producer/consumer spending because the government is so much of a larger institution, it doesn’t have the same flexibility and doesn’t have the ability to average itself out like a large group of people spending small amounts of money would. And the government spending is less responsive to actual needs of constituents and more responsive to needs of friends of politicians (or worse- campaign contributors. Corruption much?)

People often say “I like taxes because I want roads to be paved,” or something along those lines. But, due to the internet, we’ve finally reached a point where a large group of people can organize, with real-time information, to carry these projects out themselves with their own money. It’s like purposeful, voluntary taxes. Which would kind of be like freedom and autonomy, as opposed to compulsory service to a machine existence where you only have a voice in how money is spent in the most tertiary, mitigated way.

I’m sorry to rant but I just saw that sentiment expressed one too many times not to respond.

The name of this post would be more accurate if it was “Man Has Finally Figured Out How to Copy Nature, A Little.” An organic being is still a mechanical one, just as much as a robot on a plant assembly line is a mechanical being. It operates according to physical forces and obeys physical and chemical laws. The machinery of nature was developed over millions of years of gradual improvement and sophistication through the course of evolution. Humankind, with all its intelligence and technology, can only make weak attempts at imitation, and even those imitations are only at the level of unicellular organisms. The bigger machinery our species has created, like cars and robots and whatever else, are mostly clumsy, inefficient, and obnoxious.That’s why I never bought into artificial intelligence being a threat to humanity- we’re simply better-adapted to life on planet Earth than any machine we create ever could be.

The whole distinction of this accomplishment rests on a false dichotomy between “living” and “non-living” matter. Anyone who’s taken a healthy dose of psilocybin realizes that there is life in all matter because existence is unified (“all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration”). There is life in all things, each aspect of existence reflects upon the whole, organic life is just one means of expressing the beauty of all things, of the only thing. Humanity is heavy with scientific knowledge but remains, generally, quite shallow.

When people talk about rights, what they’re really talking about is power. Rights are an expression of freedom, freedom from the restricting influence of others.  This is why the constitution contained a guarantee that the government wouldn’t make a law abridging the right to bear arms- it was a guarantee that people would still have recourse to forceful means of self-assertion after a hard-fought war for independence from a tyrannous regime.

So if you really believe in rights for certain individuals or groups or for you, I would suggest developing the means for guaranteeing those rights yourself. Money and political influence are helpful. Carry yourself in a way that will make people want to support you. Forceful resistance to attempts to violate your rights should at least be considered, although it’s obviously not always practical or appropriate. Remember: if somebody is powerful enough to violate your rights with impunity, and will gain from doing so, then violate your rights they will. It’s a fact which has repeated itself over and over through history: appeals to abstract justice are ignored in favor of tangible benefits. So… be practical!

Your life will improve by reading this piece!

It’s easy to make ignorant speculations without really knowing anything (RACISM!), but a little bit of context makes it clear that the answer goes deeper than one president’s skin. In fact, one doesn’t have to look too far to find a president as politically contentious as our 44th president… just look at our 43rd.

Hypothetical
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Country U is politically divided, roughly 50%-50%, between two political parties, D and R. Party R is able to gets its nominated candidate for the presidency, W,  elected. W has an active presidency: war is declared, government size and importance is increased, and a major shift in the government’s role occurs (W decided the government should be a transparent vehicle for cronyism, good man that he is). Party D is outraged at W’s heavy-handed, unilateral actions. W is hated, insulted, spit on, and called a traitor who should be impeached from office. W serves out two terms before party D’s candidate, O, wins the presidency and takes over.

With poetic symmetry, both presidents (W right as his term ends, and O just as his begins) pass legislation to give wealthy bankers in failing institutions billions of dollars.

O begins an active presidency: the wars continue, reforms are proposed, government size and importance are increased, and a major shift in the government’s role occurs (O decided government should be a vehicle for national property redistribution, good man that he is). Party R is outraged at O’s heavy-handed, unilateral actions. O is hated, insulted, spit upon, and called a terrorist who should be impeached from office.
—————————————————————————————————

Two presidents, one from each of the two relevant political parties, are elected in succession. The American public reacts the same way to both, the only difference being the people doing the criticizing (and that’s determined largely by a simple matter of who a person chooses to identify with personally). The half of the populace which chooses to identify with the “winning” side is silent or at best dismissive of their opponents. The other side expresses persistent outrage.

With an outsider’s perspective it becomes clear that the problem is less likely to be with particular political figures and more likely to be with long-term trends in the office of the presidency and the government itself (which is why that’s the non-partisan position I’ve consistently held).

What trends?

I’m pretty sure there was once a time when people didn’t have to gather in groups of thousands of people (whether war protests or “tea parties”) to impotently wave signs around in order to get the people making major decisions about their lives to stop and listen for a minute. Most of those decisions were being made at a much more local level- now the federal juggernaut makes most of the important decisions and we can merely stand by and watch it happen. No wonder people (people who don’t consider themselves “winners” in the short-term political scene) are getting outraged at the government’s actions.

Small government: don’t react ideologically. Rather, act logically.

People with bad news tend to be labelled pessimists and ignored because most people prefer feeling good to having a realistic perspective. Of course, this is only a temporary good feeling, because having a perspective at odds with reality will eventually cause you to butt heads with reality in a very painful way. This is about to happen on a global scale, but it happens in each one of our lives all the time: you dream that the one you love feels the same way, or you delude yourself into thinking that “things will just work themselves out.” In either case you could very well prove to be wrong, and the false assurance of your fantasy is no longer any solace.

Being realistic even when it’s painful to do so will, in the long run, lead to better and more satisfying results. Ideas which make people feel good but have no realistic basis are like addictive drugs: as long as there are more drugs to sustain the habit (or the “optimistic” illusion), the devastating effects of the drug will be ignored until confrontation is forced on the addict and it’s too late to recover what was lost.

“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.” -Emerson

I’ll go one step further and say that all lives are experiments. There are endless infinities standing before us, paths leading through life in every possible way; each of us is here to try one of them. There are two principal reasons why it’s incorrect to always take the lead of others or to ignore your inner voice for the sake of satisfying the demands of others. The first is straightforward: if you’re not living your own life and following your own potential, then whose life are you living? Quieting yourself for the sake of satisfying the arbitrary demands of others is a kind of suicide and slavery and should be avoided by people who believe they are capable of achieving anything at all significant.

The second reason is more abstract but perhaps more significant: if new ideas aren’t considered and attempted, if the experimenting stops, the static framework which results will inevitably crumble. It’s beyond the scope of a short blog post to get into alot of detail, but if you’re willing to indulge me for the sake of a hypothesis (experiment?), take this for granted: the modern American is hyperstimulated, first by media images; and second by other people who, having also been exposed to the same media images, tend to reinforce the media influence on an individual.

The result of this overstimulation is an atrophy of internal thoughts and desires- the self is sacrificed for the sake of social acceptability. This has worked well enough for the past few decades. Ill effects of this situation include strong personalities either becoming alienated or gawked at like zoo animals until they submit to normalcy, depression and suicide becoming more frequent, and counter-culture becoming its own mainstreamed milieu just as stifling to the expression of personality as the TV culture. However, the worst consequences of the herding of America are only just beginning to be felt. The bigger we are, the harder we fall.

When you look at history, the greatest innovations, the longest leaps forward, and the most important solutions come less often from planned and coordinated efforts and more often from individual creative efforts. For example, a small group of technicians in Silicon Valley have created a culture where there is a computer in every home and have allowed me and millions of others to publish our writings online quickly and easily. The human species adapted in a way where a small percentage of the total population was creative and innovative, another percentage can inspire people to follow them, another percentage is careful detail-oriented; together this soup of human ingenuity is capable of conquering any problem.

However, by surrendering our children’s personal growth and development to a television screen, drugging away their unique abilities, and pigeonholing their opinions into select groups of state-approved nonsense, we stand a very real risk of incapacitating the various problem solving segments of our population, like a lobotomy on a national scale. The system has been failing since, at the latest, the 80s; we’ve been able to get by anyway with debt-financing and worldwide optimism about our economic power. Neither of these things will last significantly longer.

If there’s a theme to this blog, it’s that you should NEVER, EVER MESS WITH A COMPLEX SYSTEM. YOU DO NOT AND CANNOT UNDERSTAND IT, NOR THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS.

• Proud, thoughtful, refined, moderate, communicative and articulate.
• Dishonest, cold, distant, passive-aggressive, sensitive (especially to conflict)

Irish

• Passionate, honest, humble, musical, welcoming, trusting, self-conscious yet eager
• Sensitive, compulsive, morbidly obsessed with suffering, self-abasing (shame), confrontational

Faced with the task of rationalizing conflicting impulses, I’ve married refined English taste with the Irish’ passionate thirst for life, conquered Irish excess with English moderation, used detachment as a means of understanding the nature of suffering, overcome shame and self-consciousness with honesty and pride of self (while using self-awareness as a tool in my endeavors), learned to confront problems which are correctable and accept those which are not and so overcame paralyzing sensitivity; created a unique soul from which to draw endless inspiration, the well springs eternal.

This is much more fun than ranting about “racists”!

The Republicans: Party of down-to-Earth realism and common sense.

If we truly want to be realistic, then we should face the fact that the two parties are fundamentally indistinguishable and in practice follow the same flawed policies, with only superficial differences designed to feed the image which the parties respectively decide to advertise to the American voters.

There is nothing intelligent about voting for a Democrat, nor is there anything sensible about voting for a Republican.

The chief example people use to show war benefiting an economy is the US’s economy before, during, and after WWII. The war did coincide with the end of the Great Depression, but that was because of the disastrous state of affairs in Europe, which led to increasing demands for US exports in the beginning stages of the war. This is what took the US out of the depression; the war itself was a lean time of rationing and living scarcely. The US came out of WWII wealthy and powerful because it joined the war late, the war was fought elsewhere, and almost every other western industrial power had been reduced to ashes.

Litigate
Litigation is often compared to war, and for good reason. Like war, litigation arises out of a dispute which words were unable to resolve (in political meetings and settlement discussions, respectively). Like war, litigation can ultimately be very profitable to one of the parties. And like war, litigation is prohibitively expensive to both parties, leaving the two parties together ultimately worse off than they were before (and the lawyers and politicians with the spoils).

Litigation is ultimately unproductive: lawyers are paid handsomely for work that is often damaging economically (litigation costs go to a product or service’s overhead, making the product more expensive and the productive process less economically efficient).  If lawsuits are filed only to address legitimate grievances when there is a real chance of prevailing, the costs are usually outweighed by the benefits. If, however, lawsuits are indiscriminately filed for the sake of profiteering or the legal process is abused for any other short-sighted interest, lawyering can become a cancerous growth on the economy, taking in resources at the ultimate expense of the whole.

Spend Alot on Advertising
In the good old days of economic simplicity, competing companies had two basic ways to out-do one another: quality and price. Together these two variable determine how much “value” you get for a product, how much quality per dollar, so to speak (this is an over-simplification, as is all theorizing). Marketing adds in a third variable, “image.” Money spent on a product’s image increases the overhead but doesn’t improve the product, therefore reducing its overall value. Notwithstanding this drop in value, large companies can squeeze out smaller ones with aggressive marketing campaigns which absorb a large percentage of the market share. (marketing is expensive so it automatically favors larger firms)

Beer provides an excellent example: would there be many Budweiser drinkers if Bud was just another tap at the bar? It’s over-carbonated swill, and there are much better cheap beers. But Budweiser sprays its logo over the landscape, in every bar window and all over TV (especially sports). How could it not have a dominant market share after all that advertising?

Advertising is like war; companies vie for the market’s attention as if it was enemy territory. In the meantime, people are manipulated into buying a product they might not have otherwise bought, further distorting the price/quality competition away from small companies and encouraging the propaganda-mindset of the people exposed to these messages. So you can see how advertising can be very damaging.

Redemption?
The difference between advertising on one hand and litigation and war on the other is that it’s possible for both war and litigation to have net positive effects. War is a part of the eternal process of creation and destruction, an aweful expression of nature’s brutality and a demonstration that “reasonableness” is mankind’s second law: necessity is the first. In a situation, for example, where there are limited resources with which to sustain a population, war’s destruction automatically becomes the deus ex machina by which the intractable problem of an overshoot growth solves itself (disclaimer:don’t shoot the messanger. I didn’t cause the problems, I just point them out).

Advertising, on the other hand, has no such possibility of a beneficial effect. Advertisers and marketers are fat ticks on the economy, taking lucrative paychecks for their work of distorting economic realities and helping to enslave us notorioiusly habitual humans to products and services for which we have no need. This contributes to the mega-sizing of the USA’s economic entities by favoring larger companies. Nothing is gained by any of this.

The more focused we are on image instead of substance and on waste instead of production, the less likely we are to recover from the current economic disaster without major suffering.