A Patriots Manifest June 23 2008
William White
Currently the US is an imperial nation but pretty much everyone is operating on the assumption that we are transitioning to something else. So here are the possible outcomes:
Ossification: the UN, WTO and so on end up running the world and most political conflicts end. The desirability (FTNWO is becoming a common slogan/acronym) and/or practicality of this option is doubted by just about everyone.
Continuing imperium: from the US prospective this comes in two flavors: geographical (NAFTA) or some sort of cultural union of the English speaking nations. Those who favor one of these ideas tend to oppose the other. It remains to be seen if either of these ideas can transition to separate elected representatives, if not tax mandates by unelected officials will lead to failure. Also there is the strong possibility that a two body legislature in either case would quickly lead to the dissolution of the central government for the US and Canada plus partners to gain more seats in the senate of the new body: 150 (100) senators is better than 3 (2). The probability of subdivision of large states such as California and Texas into 10 or more states is also large.
Pre or early-imperial forms: for the US this means a reversion to a pre-civil war style decentralized regime. As a stand alone solution this strikes me as unlikely. As part of a NAFTA representation deal that eventually expands to cover the American landmass from pole to pole it is more likely but Mexico City and DC are avoiding this solution for precisely this reason. The Canadian constituency for such a solution is much stronger particularly in Quebec and the western provinces.
Dissolution into a state system. I think this will happen as part of another solution.
Industrial feudalism. Start up companies with stock for everyone right down to the assembly line and loading dock is becoming more common and this is industrial feudalism with Microsoft being the prime example. However Microsoft, Google and other companies are backing away from this model.
Obviously I tend to be more inclined to a nominal central government that is little more than a free trade zone and military alliance which a Pan-American Union would be. With 5 relatively major languages; 100 or more English speaking nations, 80+ Portuguese, 150+ Spanish , at least two French and one or more Dutch nations; and various other difficulties this too would be a transitional form that hopefully would make DC a cypher before collapsing. So why not just go straight for shrinking DC down to size? Because the assumptions behind each of these five outcomes are close to right:
At the cost of 1-2% additional unemployment and some loss of economic growth {see below for why I use no figure for economic growth , (post-) Keynesian economics has in fact reduced the speed of economic oscillation. At the turn of the last century panics every other year were the rule. Is the free market better? Yes but greatly and immediately better, no. There are transitional costs and once a free market is operational economic growth will not double, a measured 25% increase from 4-5% to 5-6.25% is more likely as in the economy as normally computed will double every 12.8 years instead of every 16. Going from a doubling range 14.2-18 years to 14.2-11.52 years doubling range only gets the most wonkish of wonks excited. Better yet the economy is being driven more and more by innovation which is not only deflationary but very hard to measure. Software is getting easier to use but each year the number of types of software increases as well and likewise hardware. The 41% growth rate in hardware/$ is a lowball figure because it does not include new types of hardware that makes the old hardware more valuable while it goes down in price. Trying to compute economic growth with input like that can drive you crazy so economists generally ignore such inputs as I did too. A big, perhaps the biggest, reason why liberal economic policies are working ever more poorly is that economic measurement is becoming a lot more difficult to do.
Or take the definition of political man which is based on genetic motivation. Humans are pack predators who engage in a high level of investment in offspring. As long as that is kept in mind individual, good of the species, good of the group and good of the gene models differ at the margin. A bigger and better military is needed for civilized human success, defection is quite possible and human history can be studied without jumping through hoops no matter what model is used. In another column I mentioned that due to supply and demand cash revenues for sperm and ovum donors were going down along with adoption rates. I gave my explanation of why this was happening in terms of kin-selection but a good of the species or individual selection explanation could also be used and while I can’t think of a way of explaining the results in terms of group selection I would not be surprised if it were possible.
Because innovation is under measured as an economic engine and any model of genetic motivation will come up with a similar answer the advocates of NWO can in fact show evidence that their vision of the future is correct.
Or evidence to the contrary is ignored to make a conclusion seem correct. Take “The Nurture Assumption” by J. R. Harris in 1998 it highlighted something that has changed in the last three or four generations. Up until 1900-40 parental nurture and peer group influence mostly happened within the extended family as did most adoption (and it still does) so the influence of parental nurture was grossly mismeasured. The scientists quickly started quantifying matters as soon as they realized Harris had not literally been ripped to shreds so Eric Turkheimer presented his “Three laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean” in 2000
All human behavioral traits are heritable.
The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.
A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.
10% or less of behavior can be attributed to parental behaviors as in your kids may inherit a tendency to addiction from you but almost always it is one of their little buddies that get them started on drugs. This is ignored in the setting of government policies.
There is no provable benefit from headstart or preschool in general beyond keeping the TV off. The young and stupid stage objection to most schooling is often accurate. Beyond language, math and history most theoretical instruction is in fact useless at best and usually counterproductive. Learning Chinese, Arabic or Russian can put money directly in your pocket as say an oil rig roughneck or a janitorial supervisor but the way language is taught in American schools is provably ineffectual and grossly inferior to what is available at the local bookstore. Similar critiques can be made of math and history instruction. (Explaining the tactics used in the American Revolution is best done with rifled flintlocks, don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.)
The key problems with NWO fanatics is that they buy into several propositions that are significantly false:
That hereditary variance can be completely ignored due to human behavioral pliability.
That exploiting the more pliable over the millenia of civilization has had no selective effects.
That early intervention works 100% of the time.
That they know what type of intervention to make.
You may notice a slight difference between these assumptions and the three laws given above. As pack omnivores human behavior is pretty pliable but it doesn‘t approach the infinite by any stretch of the imagination. It appears to be getting less pliable but more polite over time but relatively slowly. A more significant factor is that faking pliability is a trait that has been actively selected for and we have all witnessed this. The results of such selection have not been pretty as witness the current real estate crash. Nothing is 100% efficient. Since the human genome has been known for less than a decade and no one has any idea of how to work out more than 10 to the 80,000th power interactions (17,000! gene interactions is a minimum figure) how is it possible to know what intervention is the right intervention for little John or Jane?
This is why even advocates of the UN and WTO are a bit nervous over their proposed solutions.
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...