Tag: decline and fall

This weekend I got a couple of calls from
the media asking me questions about Rick Perry, our governor here in
Texas and the statements he made about possible secession. Now, he
didn’t call for secession, but he was restating a principle that was
long held and at least in the original time of our country, and that is
that there was a right to secession.

Actually, after the Civil War, nobody believes there is a so-called
right to secession, but it is a very legitimate issue to debate because
all of the states that came into the Union before the Civil War
believed they have a right to secede and New England in the early part
of the 19th century actually considered it, and nobody questioned them
about whether they had the right to do it or not.  Since the Civil War, it’s been sort of a dead issue, but he brought
it up. It stirred the media and believe me, it really stirred some of
the liberal media where they started really screaming about what is
going on here. “This is un-American”, I heard one individual say, “This
is treasonous to even talk about it.”

Well, they don’t know their history very well because if they think
about it, it’s an American tradition. It’s very American to talk about
secession. That’s how we came into being. Thirteen colonies seceded from
the British and established a new country, so secession is very much
an American principle.

What about all the strong endorsements we have given over the past
decade or two of those republics that seceded from the Soviet system? We
were delighted with this. We never said, “Oh no. Secession is
treasonous”.

No. Secession is a good principle. Just think of the benefits that
would have come over these last 230-some years if the principle of
secession had existed. That means the federal government would always
have been restrained, not to overburden the states with too much
federalism, too many federal rules and regulations.

But since that was all wiped out with the Civil War, the federal
government has grown by leaps and bounds and we have suffered the
consequences, and we need to reconsider this. It’s not un-American to
think about the possibility of secession. This is something that’s
voluntary. We came together voluntarily. A free society means you can
dissolve it voluntarily. That was the whole issue was about.
Just remember one of the reasons that Wilson drove us in
unnecessarily into World War I. He talked about what we have to give,
have every country in the world the benefit of self-determination, a
good principle. Of course, I don’t think he really believed that. But
self-determination is a good principle. It’s a very American principle,
so to me it’s a shame that we can’t discuss this.

You know, it’s interesting that so many of us have been taught for so
many years, and as long as I can remember from the first grade on up
taking the pledge of allegiance that we have a republic that’s
“indivisible” and we have been preached that and preached it. So
therefore, there is no contest, no question since the Civil War that we
have even the thought that this could happen.

But you know what a lot of people don’t talk about and they really don’t even know about is who wrote the pledge to the flag.
The pledge to the flag came from, for instance, Bellamy, an avowed
Socialist who wanted to put into concrete in the pledge this principle
of being indivisible, and he did it, you know, for the celebration
ironically 400 years of the celebration of the landing of Christopher
Columbus, so it was in 1892.

I mean, the pledge of allegiance has not been here, you know, all our
history. So I think it’s worth of discussion. I think people should
discuss this because right now, the American people are sick and tired
of it all and I think the time will come when people will consider it
much more seriously is when the federal government can no longer
deliver. That time will come when the dollar collapses.

No matter what they do and how many promises they have and how many
bailouts they have, they can’t do it if the money doesn’t work. So then,
the independence of the states will come back and it doesn’t mean that
you’ll be un-American to even contemplate what might have to be done
once the dollar crashes.

It’s really not a question of a right of secession so much as a question of the American right to self-determination.  Are those who live in “the land of the free and the home of the brave” truly less free than Libyans, Iraqis, and Croatians?  Moreoever, if America is a conceptual nation, then obviously it cannot be a geographic location, nor can it be concepts that are intrinsically opposed to the original concepts.  It should be readily apparent that secular big government forced union “America” cannot properly be considered American, regardless of whether one considers the matter in terms of conventional nationalism or the conceptual nationalism so beloved of the melting pot mythmakers.

We already know the union of the forcibly United States will be divided.  The younger union of the Soviet Socialist Republics broke apart 23 years ago.  The European Union is visibly fracturing already.  The much older union of the kingdoms of Scotland and England will be voting on its dissolution soon.  The only thing we don’t know is when the division will take place.  As I have stated before, my expectation is that it will take place by 2033.

Pat Buchanan appeared inclined to bet on the latter in his pre-election column:

[W]hoever wins today, it is hard to be sanguine about the future.  The demographic and economic realities do not permit it.

Consider. Between 1946 and 1964, 79 million babies were born – the
largest, best-educated and most successful generation in our history.
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both born in 1946, were in that first
class of baby boomers.

The problem.  Assume that 75 million of these 79 million boomers survive to age 66.
This means that from this year through 2030, an average of nearly 4
million boomers will be retiring every year. This translates into some
11,000 boomers becoming eligible for Medicare and Social Security every
single day for the next 18 years.  Add in immigrants in that same age category and the fact that baby
boomers live longer than the Greatest Generation or Silent Generation
seniors, and you have an immense and unavoidable increase coming in
expenditures for our largest entitlement programs….

With government in the U.S. at all levels consuming 40 percent of
gross domestic product, and taxes 30 percent, taxes will have to rise
and government spending be controlled or cut. The alternative is to
destroy the debt by depreciating the dollars in which it is denominated –
i.e., by Fed-induced inflation.  But you can only rob your creditors once. After that, they never trust you again.

There is another social development rarely discussed.  The workers who are replacing retiring baby boomers in the labor force are increasingly minorities.  Black folks and Hispanics alone account now for 30 percent of the population – and rising rapidly.  Yet these two minorities have high-school dropout rates of up to 50
percent in many cities, and many who do graduate have math, reading and
science scores at seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade levels.

Can their contributions to an advanced economy be as great as were
those of baby boomers of the ’60s and ’70s, whose SAT scores were among
the highest we ever recorded? U.S. scores in global competition have
been plummeting toward Third World levels.

Let’s just say that I expect the de facto social policy of seeking to replace white male Anglo-Saxon Protestant products of intact families with a labor force that increasingly consists of uneducated, illegitimate, irreligious female people of color to work even less effectively than the Roman attempt to replace Roman citizens with German barbarians in the legions.

The bizarre thing is that it is the numerate and historically aware portion of the population that is decried as benighted, outdated, and anti-science by the bien pensantry.  They are betting on hope and belief in the inevitability of “progress” against mere population demographics and math.  In the immortal words of Pepper Brooks: “It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for ’em.”

In which we delve deeper into Ugo Bardi’s explanation of complexity, collapse, and the way in which the collapse of the Roman Empire offers a means of understanding the ongoing collapse of the American empire and the global financial system:

Tainter goes well beyond the simplistic interpretation of many earlier authors and identifies a key point in the question of collapse. Societies are complex entities; he understands that. And, hence, their collapse must be related to complexity. Here is an excerpt of Tainter’s way of thinking. It is a transcription of a interview that Tainter gave in the film “Blind Spot” (2008)

“In ancient societies that I studied, for example the Roman Empire, the great problem that they faced was when they would have to incur very high costs just to maintain the status quo. Invest very high amounts in solving problems that don’t yield a net positive return, but instead simply allowed them to maintain what they already got. This decreases the net benefit of being a complex society.”

So, you see that Tainter has one thing very clear: complexity gives a benefit, but it is also a cost. This cost is related to energy, as he makes clear in his book. And in emphasizing complexity, Tainter gives us a good definition of what we intend for collapse. Very often people have been discussing the collapse of ancient societies without specifying what they meant for “collapse”. For a while, there has been a school of thought that maintained that the Roman Empire had never really “collapsed”. It had simply transformed itself into something else. But if you take collapse defined as “a rapid reduction of complexity” then you have a good definition and that’s surely what happened to the Roman Empire.

The Romans kept increasing the size of their army even after the economic returns that they got from military activities went down, actually may have become negative. It is exactly the same behavior of whalers in 19th century who kept increasing the size of the whaling fleet even it was clear that there weren’t enough whales to catch to justify that….

So, I think we have enough data, here, to prove the validity of the model – at least in qualitative terms. Maybe somebody should collect good data, archaeological and historical, and made a complete dynamic model of the Roman Empire. That would be very interesting, but it is beyond my possibilities for now. Anyway, even from these qualitative data we should be able to understand why the Empire was in trouble. One of the main causes of the trouble was that it had this big military apparatus, the legions, that needed to be paid and didn’t bring in any profit. It was the start of an hemorrhage of gold that couldn’t be reversed. In addition, the Empire bled itself even more by building an extensive system of fortifications – the limes that had to be maintained and manned, besides being expensive in themselves.

The story of the fortifications is a good example of what we had said; the attempt of a complex system to maintain homeostasis. The Romans must have understood that legions were too expensive if you had to keep so many of them to keep the borders safe. So, they built these walls. I imagine that the walls were built by slaves; and a slave surely cost less than a legionnaire. Slaves, however, were not good as fighters – I suppose that if you gave a sword to a slave he might think to run away or to use it against you. You know the story of Spartacus, the leader of a slave revolt in Roman times. I am sure that the Romans didn’t want to risk that again. But with walls the Romans had found a way to replace legionnaires with slaves. You needed less legionnaires to defend a fortification than to defend an open field. That was a way to save money, to keep homeostasis. But it wasn’t enough – obviously. The Romans still needed to pay for the legions and – as a disadvantage – the walls were a rigid system of defense that couldn’t be changed. The Romans were forced to man the walls all along their extension and that must have been awfully expensive. The Empire had locked itself in a cage from which it would never be able to escape. Negative feedback kills.

Military expenses were not the only cause of the fall. With erosion gnawing at agricultural yields and mine productivity going down, we should not be surprised if the empire collapsed. It simply couldn’t do otherwise. So, you see that the collapse of the Roman Empire was a complex phenomenon where different negative factors reinforced each other. It was a cascade of negative feedbacks, not a single one, that brought down the empire.

The key phrase, and the one that is particularly relevant to the current situation, is this: “the great problem… was when they would have to incur very high costs just to maintain the status quo”. So, what are the primary aspects of the current status quo that require increasingly expensive maintenance?

I see two areas that fit the description of a response to a problem that creates a destructive series of feedback loops. The first is debt and the second is immigration. The debt issue is obvious, since new debt keeps being created to pay off the old debts; this strategy will work right up until new debt can’t be created, in which case default which destroys a significant percentage of the powerful financial institutions or increased inflation which further hammers the economy and the populace is inevitable.

Immigration was posited as the solution for the declining native birthrates that threatened the intergenerational Ponzi scheme of entitlements, but it is proving to be far more expensive in a broad variety of ways than its advocates expected. It was intriguing to see Ann Coulter finally, after all these years, turn openly against legal immigration, although she unsurprisingly, and erroneously, attempted to blame it on Democrats despite the Republican elite’s unstinting support of it. I note that one seldom hears the Bush-era claim that Hispanics are “natural conservatives” any longer, which I and others pointed out was totally ludicrous at the time.

There are, of course, other elements that have contributed heavily to American decline and fall, indeed, Bardi and Trainer both specifically deny the idea that there is any one causal factor in societal collapses. But for all that free trade, domestic spending, and foreign wars have added pressure to the structure, they have not created negative feedback cycles of the sort that debt and population demographics have.