Things to Come: Gloomy Dancing View 684 20110720

View 684 Wednesday, July 20, 2011

· The Deficit Debates: outcome

· Doom, Gloom, and the future

· Albert Jay Nock on liberty

Things to Come

The Deficit Dance will continue. When it’s over, we will raise the deficit limit. We will pledge to cut spending, and there will be a great deal of self congratulations over the pledges. Some programs will not increase quite so much, and that will be called a big cut. We will raise taxes in order to get the pledge to cut spending.

The Department of Agriculture will continue to send out inspectors to see that stage magicians who use rabbits in their acts have Federal Permits to do so. People who sell rabbits as pets will continue to be shaken down for Federal Permits, although those who raise rabbits for restaurants, or who sell rabbits as food for serpents, do not need the permit. Incidentally, the simplest way to continue to sell rabbits out of your back yard is to get each purchaser to certify that this rabbit will be fed to a snake or a komodo dragon or a human gourmand, but will not be loved and kept as a pet. Show that to the Federal Inspector, and contemplate that the Inspector probably makes more money than nearly anyone who is selling rabbits out of his back yard. And probably more than the stage magician.

The Department of Education will continue to maintain a Special Weapons and Tactics team, which it can use to raid people’s houses at dawn in search of education fraud perpetrators whether they live at that house or not. It will probably hire some new people as the Department gets automatic increases.

Whoever enforces the Consumer Products “safety” standards will hire more people to harass bicycle and toy makers, driving what little manufacturing that still exists in the United States out of the country. Retailers will be harassed as the standard goes from the present 300 parts per million of lead in bicycles to 100 parts per million, and those involved in the toy industry, already shaken by the imposition of the 300 parts per million rule on everything in their inventory will have further burdens as they try to prove that everything they have in stock meets this new standard. More inspectors will be hired. The number of firms they inspect will decrease as more are driven out of business. Big companies will absorb the new costs, and chuckle as their smaller competitors fold. Toy prices will rise. Employment in the toy industry in the United States will fall.

The unemployment rate will continue to be officially at 9% or so; the real rate will continue to be higher as more people stay unemployed year after year.

More regulations will be promulgated. More federal employees will be hired to enforce them. No one will ask much less answer the question “Is this something we ought to be borrowing money to do? Could we get along without this?”

All over the government life will go on. Some government workers will get less overtime and will have to find other income or actually cut back on their standard of living. All will get smaller cost of living increases, but they will keep their jobs and pensions and health care.

Taxes will rise, and the economy will continue to suffer from high energy costs and excessive regulation.

Gloom

I don’t mean to be excessively gloomy. This is what will happen this year. The only remedy to this mess is a return to sanity. The present Administration believes that hope and change means more government control, and that any cut in government is a threat to meaningful change; bunny inspectors are part of progress, as are inspectors to be sure that children can safely eat bicycles and children’s books, and unsafe old CAT IN THE HAT volumes printed before the new benign regulations will be destroyed. Government is good, and more is better. So long as this sentiment prevails in the White House, the Kabuki theater will continue.

Obama will insist on strings to be attached to any permission to raise the debt limit; those strings will let him spend more money, not do drastic cuts in spending.

I don’t know the details of what will happen, but we will survive it. America is going to get the government it deserves and it will get it good and hard. We are going to have to take an economic dose of salts. We will have to stop Washington from spending all that money. If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.

As to our overseas adventures, if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. The Kabuki dance can’t go on forever. Hope and Change can’t go on forever.

If you have not seen Albert Jay Nock’s essay on just what happened with the New Deal, it may provide you with some illumination as to what is going on now.

I believe that when the historian looks back on the last 20 years of American life, the thing that will puzzle him most is the amount of self-inflicted punishment that Americans seem able to stand. They take it squarely on the chin at the slightest provocation and do not even wait for the count before they are back for more.

True, they have always been good at it. For instance, once on a time they were comparatively a free people, regulating a large portion of their lives to suit themselves. They had a great deal of freedom as compared with other peoples of the world.

But apparently they could not rest until they threw their freedom away. They made a present of it to their own politicians, who have made them sweat for their gullibility ever since. They put their liberties in the hands of a praetorian guard made up exactly on the old Roman model, and not only never got them back, but as long as that praetorian guard of professional politicians lives and thrives – which will be quite a while if its numbers keep on increasing at the present rate – they never will.

There is considerably more. Nock understood that freedom is not free.

You wrote: "America is going to get the government it deserves and it will get it good and hard."

I vehemently and strenuously disagree. America — or more correctly my generation and the next few — will get the government the Boomers deserved. It takes time for decisions to take effect

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Nock would disagree: the decision to trade in liberty for something else was made long ago. There were several opportunitied for recovery and trend reversal, particularly with Reagan, and later with the Gingrich recovery of Congress, but the opportunities were squandered in favor of “big government conservatism” whatever that is. Now we continue to learn: freedom is not free. Free men are not equal, Equal men are not free. The universe is not always fair. All too often

the race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.

We believed that with enough government all things would be possible: that inequality is a “social problem” and all social problems can be “solved” with government action. Alas, the only actions government can take involve creating bureaucracies and spending money. Bureaucracies act in their own manner through the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Once created they may or may not do what they were created to do, but they will do. They will continue to do long after the need for their original creation has vanished. They will do even if their very existence harms the purpose for which they were founded. They will protect their existence at nearly any cost. Das Buros stehen immer.

The prevailing sentiment in this country, both the Boomer generation and yours, appears to be that there are “problems” and they can be “solved” by government; that government is the answer, not the problem. Over time some become enlightened. Perhaps we are learning. Perhaps we can cease to sow the wind; but the current Deficit Dance is not encouraging. The only encouragement I see is that more and more of the population is beginning to understand that not all “problems” can or even should be “solved” by government action: That that is not only a limit to the power of government to fix things, but good reason to believe that too much government breaks things. There may be a trend back toward freedom. We’ll just have to see.

In one of my science fiction series I postulate the CoDominium, a formal arrangement in which the United States and the Soviet Union divide the world (and the small part of interstellar space accessible to them). They hate each other, but they fear outsiders more. They have devised a system to maintain power. One part of it is the Bureau of Relocation, which moves large groups of people, sending some out to interstellar colonies. There is also a Bureau of Science whose task is to suppress inventions that might threaten the CoDominium. Unlicensed scientists may be turned over to BuReloc.

Now it appears that the demise of the Soviet Union may not have precluded the formation of BuReloc.

CoDo BuReloc?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/
environment/2011/jul/20/
un-climate-change-peacekeeping

Jim. crawford

Note that once such a Bureau is created, it will be governed by the Iron Law. Will our Legions be involved in enforcement? We may be sure that we will not invade China to close unlicensed coal plants, of course; but an international bureau would be happy to use the US Courts to accomplish the same thing in West Virginia. It is not known what will be the fate of AGW Deniers under the new peace keeping mandate. Could Deniers be charged and transported to The Hague for trial and imprisonment? One is tempted to laugh at such absurdities, but stranger things have happened.

Incidentally, there is an explication of the Iron Law in action in a discussion of net neutrality here. Participants include John Dvorak, Leo Laporte, Larry Magid, and me.