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The Praetorian Guard Must be Paid

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A Patriots Manifest June 12 2008

William White

As everyone from Washington  to Mao Zedong  and all frank politicians at points in between have been  saying for years:  Government is ultimately based on force. But if a government doesn’t want to be replaced the survival of the politicians running it depends on using force lightly and wisely. The failure points are:

Debt load. The breakpoint in American Independence was the debt load of the British Empire. The Stop of The Exchequer in 1672 and the bursting of The South Sea Bubble in 1720 were simply the two most  famous crises of imperial insolvency prior to American Independence. What would become the US was a British tax haven to escape imperial debts. The UK is still paying off debts dating back  to at least the Anglo-Dutch wars of the 1600s that led to the conquest of, among other things, New Amsterdam. Those debts are call ed consols short for consolidated debt issues. Consols have no due date.  Consols predate the American Revolution and were the major indirect cause of our fight for independence and more recently the collapse of the British Empire due to tax flight to the dominions.

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Conquest is always possible and can be profitable but the costs are upfront and the revenues are downstream . The reason  the UK could not afford to hold onto what would become the US was that imperial debts were so high that the imperial treasury could not meet military payrolls. This problem spun out of control in 1797 with the Nore and Spithead mutinies right in the middle of the French revolutionary wars when the crews of 113 naval ships mutinied. The major complaints were: salaries were not being paid and that issued rations were so old that they had to be carved into works of art and sold in order for the sailors to buy food that could be eaten. Those revelations aided population growth in the US, Can ada and to a lesser extent Australia. The East India and Hudson Bay Companies were hiring and they did pay their people.

Crony imperialism or administration to avoid debt and taxes causes unexpected problems. The Sepoy  mutiny is famous as a failure point. What is less well known are the North American fur wars. The Hudson Bay Company fought a shooting  war with first the North West Company out of Montreal and then after winning that war in a hostile takeover on the London stock exchange the HBC came after the American Fur Company of  the Astors. This is a long and complicated story and I highly recommend Peter C. Newman’s history of the Hudson  Bay Company “Caesars of the Wilderness” volume for better understanding.  The short version  is that a financial shortcut taken by the British Crown in the 1600s to pay off debts from the English Civil War of the 1640s soured  American-British relations until at least the 1930s. (The HBC was a payoff t o the royalist  cavalry leader Prince Rupert for back wages in much the same way Pennsylvania was a payoff to the Penn family and Maryland a payoff to Lord Baltimore’s family.)

Taxes have to be collected at the point of a gun. The reason for the 2nd amendment is that armed tax revolts cause less longterm damage than capital flight. Taxes are needed to pay debts.  Because the level of taxes needed to pay legitimate government expenses : deterrent defense levels, the usual dominance  games of foreign policy (Barbary pirates, Monroe doctrine, Jay Treaty crap that even neutrals have to deal with), border security, coast guard, customs, courts, congress and miscellaneous;  runs 5-10% GDP and needs relatively little force to collect. A 2nd amendment is not needed for legitimate government functions to be performed because fees, fines, lotteries and other relatively painless means of getting cash account for at least half of all needed revenues and starting a tax re volt over a 2.5-5% tax bill in hopes of getting a better deal is self-evidently stupid. Debts are incurred by either bread and circuses or imperialism which except for defense against someone else’s imperialism is not a legitimate government function.
Sticking to legitimate government functions is boring in the extreme and leads to second rate people going into politics. Second rate politicians do stupid things to keep from being bored and that usually gets the nation into the above problem areas. This is a major and largely unexplored problem of politics in general: boredom as a cause of political catastrophe.

Except for point 5 whole volumes have been written on each of these points. The reason point 5 is largely unexplored is that the ability to resist boredom has only been a survival skill since the start of major civilizations. Only since the invention of dispersed mass entertainment with penny dreadfuls in the 1800s leading to the modern computer games and 100 chann el TV  has this area of behavior really been subject to selection. And this is not the only area of selection that is leading  to failure of the NWO.

The idea that selection in humans is not happening , is not happening rapidly and  has no political effects is false. Where these effects become important in the political field is in the enforcement of policy. Take the feared and ridiculed New World (Imperial) Order or NWO of Bush the elder.

There are three major visions of an imperial future;

Global: the UN and other international organizations will bring about world peace and prosperity with how being undefined.

Regional supranational bodies: NAFTA, the EU, the Arab League, ASEAN and others.

Linguistic/cultural unions: French, English, Arabic, Slavic, Chinese or Spanish speaking nations banding together.

None of these ideas make much sense, they pull in different directions and as mentioned in another commentary other than i nsisting that American representatives to such bodies be directly elected they should be ignored. They should be ignored because like a two year old telling a parent where to stick it, these imperial bodies lack the means of enforcing their will because they can’t afford a Praetorian guard. Rather than take on all these many international bodies, explaining each of them and going over their individual problems it is easier to show how  this works in the US because increasingly the US government is facing the same problems:

Most cops work for the local or state governments and with tax revolts in most major states plus movement from high tax states to low tax states the long run trend is towards more private security and less reliance on the civil service. Cops are one source of a Praetorian guard and that source is drying up.

Another but less reliable source of internal force is the military. Using the army (or navy or whatever) as the source of internal force f or non-legitimate government functions requires two things the bureaucratic state gave up a while back: racially or regionally segregated units and widespread violent hatreds or at least antipathy based on race or religion. Given the level of intermarriage both regionally and racially this ain’t an option.

Outsourcing to avoid corporate taxes, expatriation to avoid individual taxes and perverse incentives to hire non-citizens is destroying the tax base so paying for the Praetorian guard is both becoming more difficult and its loyalty to the state is being eroded. Afterall FBI, BATFE and DEA agents have relatives who are seeing their jobs outsourced and/or are being replaced by non-citizens. Place yourself in their shoes and ask yourself how you would feel about your mom holding you in contempt for you or your spouse’s job, particularly if you need a passport to visit her?

Then there is the elephant in the room. Self inflicted reproductive selection is starting to have major effects. Until the latex condom made its debut in the 1920s pregnancy and venereal disease  (as STDs were then known) forced a much more chaste life on most people. But now sexual life styles are taking their toll in strange ways.  

Survival of the fittest is usually thought of in terms of the smartest, strongest and/or fastest but there is a much simpler and more accurate definition of fitness: whoever gets the most great grandchildren is the most fit. Every penny you spend on something other than getting the most great grandchildren or the equivalent such as grand nephews/nieces or first cousins  is a penny spent reducing your own genetic fitness. A penny spent on security from internal or external enemies is well spent if it is worth the cost in terms of increased genetic returns. Money spent to support the reproductive fitness of others, much less money spent to pay for a politician to hire a Praetorian Guard to ram policies down your throat is mone y wasted. And that simple tautology is catching on.

Declining revenues for sperm and ova donors, declining real revenues for host mothers who use their own ova and an increasing surplus of adoptable children who are not being adopted argues for furious selective pressure based  on who wants the most kids and grandkids. This has kicked in less than a decade after virtually all sociobiologists  and  evolutionary psychologists pronounced it would not happen. What I think has happened is that 30 years of reading up on sociobiological strategies has changed behaviors. The partial bifurcation of human behaviors into hedonists and breeders is confusing  and angering politicians. But other selective pressures based on human caused changes in the human environment are also adding to the confusion.

One of the most important human caused environmental changes from a political standpoint is a more educated and informed population. Joe or Joan Sixpack is at a m uch smaller disadvantage in judging their “betters” than at any time in history. Take the supply and demand model used to set “counter-cyclical” economic policies. Suppliers raise prices when demand goes up, which is true if there are no economies of scale or scope (basically technology = scope for most purposes) nor volume based revenues. In other words the supply model used by politicians does not conform to the observations of voters in very large chunks of the economy. The demand curve: more is purchased as prices go down; used by politicians also has problems but generally this is restricted to the financial markets: debt instruments and investments. With credit and investment becoming an ever larger part of the economy these exceptions are becoming less trivial by the minute. But free-market advocates think this does not apply to their policies. Take opening up ANWAR to oil exploration to end the energy crisis.

If I am the head of say BP I am going to be very reluctan t  to sign off for a deal that  yields say 15% because including 12% gross profits the oil market has to be fairly steady or rising  for 12 years for me to make back my investment. Worse yet it will take 2-4 years to get everything online so I am going to look very hard at anything and everything that might make this a bad deal. And in fact there are all sorts of things that can upset this applecart. (In case you were wondering stock pickers almost never recommend buying oil stocks. Even when the socialists in congress start talking about nationalization the dividend yield on oil companies is a joke and the prospects of higher stock prices are dismal. Even the village idiot realizes that that oil companies are one energy innovation away from effectively worthless, although some of our representatives are not that smart.)

For example I can tell you with nearly absolute certainty  that no later than 2028 fusion energy  will be technologically available in the sense that energy output will exceed energy input for He3 fusion. What I can’t tell you is whether the costs of mining the moon for He3 deposited by the solar wind will be low enough  to make fusion electrical generation economically sensible. I can give you a date because China is already setting up the infrastructure for such a mine and has established a damn the costs project to get such a mine up and running by 2020. I can assure you that it will be technologically possible because even though He3 is insanely expensive here on Earth enough does exist to show that  He3 fusion can produce more energy than it consumes with existing technology. I have no idea whether  fusion will ever become a major energy source but that base will cause reduced oil prices as oil producers dump soon to be worthless groundwater contaminants. For all I know a matter-antimatter reactor may be up and running  before the bugs get worked out on fusion or Solar Power Satellites may turn out to be the way to go. In current dollars the energy of the future will have to be cheaper than fission reactors and that  is less than 30% of the cost/kwh of its current competitors. But given all of the possible solution sets  the probability of something working approaches certainty.

So electrical energy will be available at 20-25% of what you are paying  now  (in real terms) 20 years from now but what does that mean? I am clueless. How will your electrical utility repay its investment in current forms of energy generation? Really good question. How soon will returns from ANWAR be affected? Immediately. So Ron Paul pulls off a miracle and wins the presidency this fall. One of his first acts is to open up Anwar. First the auction will be a disappointment but not as big a one as speed of development. Oil companies are disinvesting in hopes of liquidating before the innovation tsunami hits. Eminent Domain lawsuits in the trillions will greet a ny attempt to open up more coastal waters anywhere near Florida and California is nearly as bad. Why should people on the west, gulf or east coasts reduce their own reproductive fitness by decreasing their home values in order to increase the fitness of people who live where orange trees don’t grow? An immediate switch to a free market in energy will be disappointing. Everyone is waiting for the next shoe to drop in the form of an energy breakthrough. Current free market reform movements ignore some pretty obvious facts:

The ability to govern in any sense of the word is weakening, not strengthening. Overestimating an opponent particularly to the point of interfering with his own self-destruction is an error.
Human nature not only can change it has to some degree changed already due to better fertility treatments and contraception. In most cases a quite comfortable life can be lived at below average income. Homeless bums with working cell phones are no longer considered&n bsp; remarkable at least in this country. Disconnecting wealth, sex and reproduction is having all kinds of side effects that  the welfare state handles  poorly.


The economy is no longer predictable on the upside. Old style massive investment in the same old  same old is being replaced by a well founded fear of being economically annihilated by innovation. Since the 1960s slow investment in computers has been rewarded both by an annual 41% increase in memory per dollar multiplied by more useful software coming out each year while the expense of upgrades increases annually. Medical costs are exploding because of the Genome project and the continuous increase in drugs and medical equipment have made it clear to everyone that innovation will blow up the current medical field sooner and later and no one knows when.. This has already  happened with polio. Claims that is also true of cancer and cardiovascular disease with those who use EDTA causes general heartburn in the medical field. Big Pharma is still battling claims of deliberate contamination of tryptophan in order to promote SSRIs like prozac likewise GHB analogs that cannot be used as daterape drugs vs. the newer sleep aids that caused a Kennedy to drive in his sleep stokes paranoia all the way around.

These areas of concern will cause transition problems.

The views expressed by William White are his and his alone and may not be the views expressed by A Patriots Manifest. Thank you .... Michael Roller...

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