AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS ADDICT

I saw these cartoons at Monty Pelerin’s World, at economicnoise.com. They make you laugh on the one hand, and soberly contemplate where we are on the other.

THE NEXT AMERICAN REVOLUTION

This article titled The Next American Revolution by Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com, is a view into the future from his crow’s nest. CHS always makes you think. Here are a few excerpts from the article.

“The next American Revolution will not be an event, it will be a process. We naturally turn to the past for templates of the future, but history has a way of remaining remarkably unpredictable.”

“The point is that extrapolating the present into the future fails to capture sea changes and developments that completely disrupt the supposedly unchanging, permanent Status Quo. The idea that the next revolution will take a new form does not occur to conventional forecasters”

“Everything centralized, from the Federal Reserve to the Too Big To Fail Banks to Medicare to the National Security State depends on the Federal government being a Savior State that must ceaselessly expand its share of the national income and its raw power lest it implode. All Savior States have one, and only one trajectory– they must ceaselessly expand and concentrate wealth and power or they will fail.”

“You see the dilemma: The Savior State cannot stop expanding, but the financial system that generates its revenues can no longer support its vast machinery of debt and phantom collateral.”

“The conventional view is that technology will magically enable the permanence of the present; this will be proven incorrect, as what technology enables is not the waste, entitlement and centralization that characterize the present but social innovations, some of which are already visible”

“Technology is not just disrupting old industries and companies, it is disrupting the entire Savior State/cartel-capitalism model.“

“The entire current model of governance, social order and the economy will be revolutionized not by overthrow but by the process of irrelevance.”

“The new system will be better, more humane, more flexible, more transparent, with more opportunity, for it will be everything the current corrupt, sclerotic, parasitic and exploitive system is not”

Reading this article reminds me of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Conventional wisdom didn’t see what was happening. Central planning by the Soviet Union couldn’t keep up with the constant and accelerating change that was happening in the world at that time. All I remember is I turned on the news and I was watching people tearing down the Berlin Wall, and they weren’t getting shot.

Every decision that every individual makes everyday totals up to being an immovable force that is more powerful than the decisions of central planners. The planners decisions are just hurdles that the immovable force of individuals have to deal with in their everyday decision-making. Planners want to protect what exists, individuals in the market produce what doesn’t exist. Individuals in the market drive the future, planners try to keep the present from becoming the past by stifling the future.

This entry was posted on July 5, 2013 at 12:25 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: American Revolution, Central Planning, Federal government of the United States, Federal Reserve, Independence Day, Savior State, Too big to fail