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.

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!

How far, how far removed from real life? Dusty apartment, mediated experience of the world. I read articles about things that happen all over the planet, which I can prove no more than I can prove the existence of black holes. All taken on trust. A gigantic base of knowledge built on the flimsiest veil of real experience. Absurd! And yet I could fly all around the world and experience these things for myself, but what would I choose? In this life we only ever scratch the surface, so much must be taken on faith. (Comforted by memories of magic; thank you psilocybin for this island of sanity)

This apparatus of which The I has been given control- built to adapt, as capable of loving and caring and peace as it is of brutal and unrepentant slaughter. And why? Biological imperatives, nothing better to do, one has a self and he can either express it or die alone (cf. story from Dostoevsky’s devil in Brothers, the soul doomed to walk for millions of miles before he was allowed into heaven; he rebelled, decided he would just lay down forever. But he got up (after millenia), walked, and rejoiced upon his entry into paradise).

And so this social meat machine, the human, can take a keyboard and write a blog and share ideas. Is there any one human who could carry the information of the whole hive? More and more in common with insects, a fact which has either gone unnoticed or has been accepted by the greater majority. But this strange hairless ape is not an ant, it has a nature, and that nature yearns to break through the modern veneer like tufts of grass cracking  suburban pavement.

Existed outside for a while, in the world of ideas, which against all logic seem more real than anything else (intuition so much more dependable than logic). No back to the indoors of the soul; there’s work to do and external demands to satisfy.

I think the bailout is everything in this speech and why meaningful change won’t happen.  (scare tactics: “I know you guys hate that we gave billions of dollars to people who are already rich and who caused the problems, but that had nothing to do with the millions they spend on taking us out to nice dinners; we HAD to do it or there would be a super-depression”).

He has a vague plan to send people to school and to help pay for college. However, government subsidy for bad public schools (through conditions put on federal education aid money) and for college tuition (through government-secured and insured interest-free loans) are major causes for the problem in the first place. Pressure needs to be put on schools to lower costs, but that won’t happen through presidential fiat; it will happen when people aren’t willing to pay exorbitant tuitions anymore. So Obama’s plan will exacerbate the problem by continuing to subsidize the payment of overpriced tuitions.

As fas as innovation of our workforce, it would be happening on its own if everyone who made money trading paper for the last two decades was homeless right now. Spearheading great economic change during a post-bubble collapse is EXACTLY what a market economy does best. So I have slim hope that throwing borrowed money at the areas that we GUESS will be the jobs of the future will create any real jobs.

This was going to be a disastrous recovery without government intervention because of the extent of the bubble that burst. But I don’t think this government, whether during Bush’s or Obama’s administration, has done anything but put the disaster off until later. It’s still lying just beneath the surface, and it needs to happen. Propping up a failed economic model for the sake of politics isn’t the answer. “Seven slim years,” in the words of Jeremy Grantham. Better seven than seventeen or more, which is what might happen if the government exhausts all its resources on preventing a depression.