A Patriots Manifest Sept. 24
William White
Ideally the Dems and Reps would prefer a nice placid economic and foreign policy situation where the winners could boink their opposite sex or in some cases same sex staff and admirers while the bureaucracy runs everything. Domestically this requires a few things to be true:
A competent bureaucracy. This criterion is good enough to work and slightly better than necessary. When incompetence is discovered it is rooted out rapidly while everyone denies it ever existed.
The tools needed to do the job must be made available. This is a problem area. Money spent on funding safety labs is money not spent on earmarks and memorials for the congress creature in Michigan’s 15th congressional district. Worse yet the labs use supplies but a bridge to nowhere is forever with just minor maintenance costs.
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A lack of innovation. Where alas and alack are the carriage turnpikes from the Confederation era (1783-9)? What’s the point in building a monument to last forever if everything is subject to obsolescence ?
No nearby enemies, luckily no one has yet figured out how to launch an air attack on say New York and DC and no enemy fleet can bomb the US fleet at Pearl or lob shells at a refinery in say Santa Barbara. Mexico is never going to invade the US and claim it was done by bandits, Canada is never going to send intelligence officers in civilian clothes into the US to map out invasion routes.
In this hypothetical case hypothetically speaking the proximate cause was a politician put in charge of the Canadian army to keep him happy and away from important things. Unhappily this mythical idiot could not read a map and did not realize when he ordered planning to make up war plans without consulting the navy or anyone else he was ordering preparation for a Canadian invasion of the US. If higher ranking politicians found out about such a plan for national suicide the whole thing would have been repudiated. Of course only if the US established bases in blocking positions along the planned invasion routes as would have seemed, merely by coincidence, to have happened in the period 1923-34 would the higher ranking politicians ask if one of their boys had done something rash. Keep in mind a lot of logrolling with bad economic consequences would have been needed to get the financing for all the bases out in the middle of nowhere and a fair amount of economic unpleasantness was seen in 1931-41but it was still better than war.
This ideal is never going to be achieved: the Tokugawa Shogunate tried to do it; China with its Great Wall tried to do it; the Romans tried to do it with their limes; the British tried to do it with their fleet. A key point is that without innovation conquest or collapse is inevitable. However the politicians do believe their own doctored figures on the size of the US economy, inflation, unemployment rate and so on so there will be an attempt at relatively peaceful Brezhnev style stagnation. Keep in mind the old guard in the Kremlin wandered into Afghanistan in part because of Russia’s own drug war, in part to keep out radical Islam and literally dozens of other reasons but no clear and attainable objectives were set. Despite Reagan the communists would still be completely in charge of Russia without Afghanistan just as they are in China , Vietnam and Cuba. The attempt to ignore the outside world and reality in general is an affliction of the political classes.
Take the McCain position of drill, drill, drill. Can it get the US to energy independence? I don’t know, maybe it can but will it get Europe off its dependence on Russian oil and gas? No. Is Russian colonization of Europe politically survivable for US politicians? Not if it includes the British Isles and the trigger point for US interventionism is probably lower than that. Given the level of stagnation that is occurring but concealed by bogus economic stats non-nuclear intervention will fail.
The Obama plan of taxing everything in sight seem to be costing him any chance of winning the White House. But let’s say he loses, McCain serves one term due to economic failure and a Democrat is elected in 2012, what happens?
Nothing good. No domestic savings to fund public works. More outsourcing, more capital flight and more ex-patriation to avoid taxation. Reductions of foreign investment domestically and more imports as internal sources of capital dry up. A similar scenario but of different sequence if Obama wins a single term and is replaced by President Palin or Romney. Cooking the books and then believing the accounting statements a la Enron does not work on a national level either.
Major constitutional reform to avoid more bull being put out as fact is needed. And the way to do it is well known to politicians because it has been done before many times throughout history:
Try to have your opponents in power when disaster strikes. Hard to do but it does explain why McCain and Obama both act like they are trying to lose this election. Most political disasters are broadly predictable: not in the sense that it is knowable that the market is going to crash Nov. 5, 2008 but more along the lines of between now and Oct 31, 2013 the Dow will go down to at least 900 because it is grossly overvalued and by law major withdrawals must commence in 2013 for the leading edge of the baby boom when they start turning 70 years old.
Don’t get into power until you are reasonably certain a bottom has been reached. You don’t send rescue teams out until the hurricane is past, the volcano has stopped erupting or the Earth stops shaking. This time that estimation will be very tricky indeed. Why shouldn’t the Dow go from 900 to 90? Why shouldn’t houses decline faster than tax assessors can track? Annual tax and insurance bills that exceed home value are becoming common in many metropolitan areas so even homes owned outright are in danger of walkways.
Have a plan ready that can be implemented immediately. The New Deal really sucked, it caused the secondary collapse of 1937-8 and FDR barely got the economy moving in time for the 1940 election even with the Munich crisis causing French and British purchases of American machinery.
Given the gross overestimation of the size of the economy all of the above steps can easily be screwed up. To take one previously unused example inflation is a tax on capital. Over the past 40 years inflation has averaged more than 3% and that means depreciation has been underestimated and income has been overestimated to the point where real GDP may be less than half the published figures. Add in adjustments for “core” inflation and real GDP shrinks to 5T. Plans based on 13.5 T can run into real trouble if the actual figure is 10T or worse yet 5T. And that can happen. It did happen in Russia during the Brezhnev era. Trying to command a recovery when the industrial base is considerably smaller than the bureaucracy says it is will not work. It didn’t work in Japan either for the same reason. The result was stagnation, which is what is most likely for the US in coming years.
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...