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In these climax years of industrial technocratic society, two opposing
forces shape the destiny of government: the desperate effort to control
everything versus the decline of the ability to carry out that effort. The
result will be the loss of legitimacy and the collapse of government from the
highest levels, moving downward until the real power to make anything work
re-sets at a feasible and appropriate level — probably very local. This
dynamic is seen very clearly in three spectacles du jour: the “national
security” (spying) mess, government-sponsored accounting fraud in
finance, and the ObamaCare rollout.
As history develops, people do things for the
simple reason that it seems like a good idea at the time. Computer tech made
it possible for bureaucrats and military apparatchiks to invade the privacy
of everybody, but in the end it only had the effect of embarrassing the
perpetrators and eroding a big chunk of the US government’s legitimacy.
The attempt at maximum control will eventually lead to maximum resistance
and, quite possibly, some sort of political revolution, perhaps starting with
the death of the two dominant political parties. When political disruption
finally occurs, it will manifest quickly, as criticality thresholds are
breached. It has the potential of taking this society in very undesirable
directions including civil war, theocracy, and war against other peoples.
The diminishing returns of computer
technology applied to intelligence gathering are that it produces more
mountains of data than any team of professionals can make sense of, and it
prompts said professionals to make mischief with the information that is
easiest to sort out: the financial records of ordinary citizens. Nothing will
create political resistance more surely than messing with people’s
money. The NSA apparatus is now a self-reinforcing monster that will strive for ever more control ineffectively, creating a
debris path of ever more embarrassment and resentment. A lone true patriot
like Snowden does more to oppose this monster than all the
“freedom” and “liberty” spouting,
flag-lapel-pin-wearing cowards in either political party.
The pervasive accounting fraud in the attempt
to prop up an unsound banking system is even closer to criticality. A society
that produces tradable goods needs sound money which functions as 1) a medium
of exchange, 2) a store of value 3) a unit of account for establishing
prices. The combined accounting frauds in Federal Reserve
policy, private banking and securities markets, and government fiscal
management is destroying all these functions. The more abstracted
finance gets from real productive activity, the more fragile the system
becomes. We are doing nothing now except adding more complexity and
abstraction to it, causing the system to become more detached from reality.
In effect, we’re opting to forego an economy based on goods in favor of
one based on empty promises and paper swindles. The potential and probable
consequent destruction of nominal wealth would be an event that advanced
technocratic society likely will not recover from — in the sense that
today’s standard of living could be preserved for billions of people
worldwide. That destruction would herald a new dark age, this time without
any prospect of recovery via the exploitation of natural resources, which
will have been depleted.
The ObamaCare piece
of the picture is a mere pathetic soap opera compared to the first two
quandaries. The 2000-page law did nothing to address the core tragedy of
medicine in America — namely, that it has evolved into a hideous
hostage racket. You go to a hospital with a terrifying illness and you are
susceptible to fleecing by the so-called “care-givers” for the
promise that you may get to live. No prices for treatment are never discussed. They are presumed to be astronomical
— but who cares if you end up dead, and if you do get to live,
you’ll figure that out later. If you hold an insurance policy, these
charges will be subject to a fake negotiation between grifting insurance companies
and grifting hospitals, physicians, and drug companies. The price
“settlements” are only slightly less a joke than the actual
charges, and are obfuscated in documents designed to bewilder even
well-educated policy-holders.
Even if you are insured, the charges may
bankrupt you. A typical one-day charge for “room and board” in a
non-specialized hospital in-patient bed runs $23,000 at my local hospital.
For what? Half a dozen blood-pressure checks and three bad meals? You can be
sure that ever-fewer families will be able to fork over $12,000-a-year for
basic coverage. The ObamaCare legislation and its
laughable rollout of a useless website is just a punctuation mark at the end
of the soap opera script. The result eventually will be the complete
implosion of the medical racket and a return to a very primitive clinic
system, with payment in chickens or cords of stove-wood. The smaller number
of surviving humans will surely enjoy better health, and greater piece of
mind, when this monster racket expires of inertia, bad faith, and deceit.
These efforts to manage runaway hyper-complexity
with more complexity are guaranteed to fail. Our prime task at this moment in
history is managing contraction, and the means for doing that would be
simplifying, not adding layers of complication larded with fraud, pretense,
and mendacity.
Published as an E-book for the
first time!
The 20th Anniversary edition
With an entertaining new introduction by the author
Bargain Price $3.99
Amazon Kindle …or
… Barnes & Noble Nook …or… Kobo
ALSO… it’s that time
of year
Paperback or
E-book
Amazon or Kindle or Kobo
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