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.

Votes formerly represented our freedom and autonomy- however the obvious reality is that  the American people are not free and are not autonomous, so your vote can’t represent freedom and autonomy because those things are largely non-existent in this country. Otherwise it wouldn’t be necessary to gang up in groups of tens of thousands of people and march around impotently with signs in order to affect the decisions which will have a dramatic influence on our lives. The people who make those decisions are largely beholden to powerful moneyed interests, who care nothing for community, interpersonal reactions, or satisfying lives. They care about “growth,” because the international monetary/capital system requires perpetual exponential growth in order to continue to get returns out of an economy.

In the late 1950′s, one man working 40 hours a week could make enough to buy a home, feed a wife, two kids, and a dog, take vacations, and still have some money left to leave to the kids when all is said and done. Obviously I’m not saying that the 50′s were perfect or that everything that’s happened since then was bad. But consider now that a married couple, each working well over 40 hours a week, has to sink itself deep into debt in order to afford things that were once considered basic accommodations. Certainly many people are living beyond their means, but the fact remains that after 60 years of “growth” we are a poorer, less functional country, more like slaves and less like sovereign independent people deciding the courses of their own lives.

People mock me for saying that Americans aren’t free, and I can admit that we’re certainly lucky for our many physical comforts. So far. But consider that we’ve been growing into a soft fascism since the 80′s, and now we have cameras in all urban centers and, since the passage of the humoursly-named “Patriot Act” (quite Orwellian) the government has unfettered access to information once considered private, may tap your phones without a warrant, and may hold you indefinitely as an “enemy combatant” if it considers you to be one, and that there’s no judicial oversight over these decisions. Also consider that, if this depression continues for over another year (it will), the middle class will be well on its way to disappearing entirely.

So the American social strata will look like this: roughly 90% of Americans will be poor debt slaves working hard for subsistence with literally no hope of upward social mobility, and probably 3-7% of people (those working in the upper echelons of the few large corporations which survive the depression, plus their government and military enforcers) will be extremely wealthy. It’s not difficult to imagine how citizens will react to this, so police presence will be increased (for your own protection, of course) and any unrest will be put down with as much violence as is necessary. Does this dynamic look familiar?

What does all of this have to do with voting? Votes and democratic change are the opiates which allows people to continue to feel free, and continue to feel powerful. But, as, I discussed, the people of the USA are neither free nor powerful. And, even though for a while we were able to delude ourselves into feelings of material comforts using debt, the reality is that we are already an impoverished nation, and it will only get much, much worse from here. The best actions you can take right now, with so much uncertainty, is first, not do anything to perpetuate the current money-hungry power structure whose demands for exponential growth have  destroyed the landscape, impoverished this nation, increased the incidence of cancer dramatically, polluted the environment, destroyed indigenous peoples and native species, and generally made the world worse while increasing “wealth” (as discussed, for most Americans this wealth was an illusion anyway).

That means, first of all, don’t vote. Don’t put your money in banks. Don’t buy from faceless, soulless corporations with no connection to your community, if you can avoid doing so. Don’t work as a paper-pusher or administrator or data-entry clerk for their corporate monarchies, if you can avoid doing so.

The second, longer phase of our economic cleansing will not be merely economic but also psychological, spiritual, and philosophical. Capitalism disclaims all value except monetary value… and the results speak for themselves. Look around you right now and think of all the ways the space near you could be better. Look out your window- can children play in the street near you? Would their parents feel safe about that? Is your neighborhood suitable for real human life? Or is it a mere habitation unit with plenty of roads and cars to take people from one gear in an economic growth machine to another? These are the important changes, the difficult ones, and it will require new values and perhaps even a new religion. But it’s what’s necessary, it’s possible, and it is the future. It’s up to you, and other individual people acting within their own local sphere, to make sure that there even is a future for us to create.

Have hope, embrace change, don’t vote.

However, in order for democracy were to work in practice, it requires effort. This is why it inevitably fails: people are lazy. In order for democracy to work, everyone would have to devote, minimally,  5-10 hours a week to understanding the most important things effecting our country, because determining the cause and therefor helpful attempts at solutions to those things is a very complicated process. In order to elect and hold accountable competent leaders capable of dealing with real world problems, especially in a world where change is happening so much faster than the bureaucracy can keep up with it, the public needs to be constantly educating itself in order not to fall prey to the manipulative wiles of self-serving ideologues who distort facts in order to serve their own shortsighted agenda.

Instead, people watch television for an average of 28 hours per week, using up plenty of time that could be spent being a responsible member of the electorate, while at the same time filling their heads with propaganda in order to be more easily cowed into a state-approved point of view. Time not spent watching TV is usually occupied with consumption, whether of alcohol or some other drug in a setting totally devoid of responsibility for anything or anyone.

None of this would bother me in other circumstances; how one spends her time is not really my business if it does no harm to me. But it does harm me, and everyone, because it is the endorsement from these people in the form of their votes that allows the criminals in our government to assist the bankers and institutionalized investors to bleed all of the fucking money out of the world with no sense of accountability for all of the damage they do. The bankers and insurers and pharmaceutical companies harnessed an ignorant, fat, and irresponsible middle class in order to create a new tyranny out of what is still nominally a democracy. And you let it happen.

So fuck anyone who thinks that merely voting is enough to be a responsible citizen. You’re only harming yourselves with your ballots because you’ve made no effort to understand the actions of your government and their consequences, or if you have it was likely only a superficial survey that kept you well within the bounds of conventional thinking (i.e. slavery).

America has the leadership it deserves, and when this country finally finishes its thrashing, shrieking, pitiful death throes, hopefully ignorant, lazy people will know enough to stay the hell out of its government, for their own sake.

AB

To be honest, we didn’t even fight this one like we wanted to win it.

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.

Causality is a tricky thing. Understanding why an event happens after the fact can be difficult and even impossible, given the complexity of reality, and given that any small contingency can have a massive effect upon the whole (the Butterfly Effect). This is why government solutions mostly fail: because problems are addressed without being understood. The government’s proper role is not to solve everyone’s problems, it’s to execute the general interest (e.g. military defense). When it extends itself beyond its proper bounds it balloons and then collapses, the way a star might burn brightest just as its fuel runs out and it burns out for good.

No revolution will be necessary to bring down this government. What’s scary is the question of who will be in a position to step into its shoes once the collapse happens.

“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.

Can it just continue to finance social programs by selling debt forever? No, but empires always fail by assuming the opposite. How long can this debt-financing last? I optimistically predict two years, but anticipate it will be much sooner than that. How? The US’ bond rating will be lowered, causing bond prices to drop dramatically. They’ll be more difficult to sell and won’t get us as much money. This will cause a cascading effect which will disrupt the very foundations of US and world society as funding for government programs dries up.

No, Obama, that’s fine, spend more money. Spend our way out of the depression. Spend our way to a better healthcare system. Ignore that cliff ahead of us and hit the gas.

Nobody listens, nobody listens, nobody listens, the US is dead and we let it happen. We let parasites chew her away from the inside, and now she’s just a beat-up shadow of her former glory. Guys, there are disasters coming. Please listen, please try and take steps to prepare yourselves and protect yourselves.

That is why the government’s power must be limited: it’s a tool of manipulation which can only be wielded by the extremely wealthy, at everyone else’s expense. The problems are not limited to one evil company (as this recently popular article suggests) but rather is systemic and related to our entire government-economic superstructure. GS is just the best manipulator, but all the most successful companies are vampiric manipulators.

Important stuff, ya know?