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You can’t create a twenty-first century society based upon an educational system promoting the myth that you can be all you can be — by just showing up; enforced by an mediocre bureaucracy – which essentially just shows up; built on a twentieth century industrial model to create workers for factories — that no longer exist; and enforced by a geopolitical financial establishment — totally hedged against any risk.
— Jerry Bannon, The Wonder Springs Chronicle, 25 January 2012, Publisher and angry American citizen

By attempting to pick up where we left off last week and close out this brief series, this article runs significantly longer than I normally like, but I think the context helps provide a cogent framework to build toward a positive future economic path. Borrowing the outline, and placing it in a totally different context from what was presented in a Monday evening presentation I attended, the conclusion is: Make wine, not argument, and definitely not war.

When your first job after graduating from college is in military intelligence, the one universal law is to: Never believe anything you are told without verifying it from at least two other independent sources. Through experience, even in the more communications side of the spy craft, like the National Security Agency, contrasted with the real spooky dudes, you quickly learn that the real world does not operate as it is generally hyped and anything approaching the real truth is hard to come by.

This of course can quickly make you cynical, if not tempered with the most powerful force in the world — which is truth. Truth always comes with a cost and most of the time untruth grows not so much from its power, but from the naïve perception we do not possess the resources to dismantle the presuppositions of these lies.

One such untruth fostered through the media, especially at this time, is that we live in a global capitalist system of markets. This whole myth supports inductive extreme views that in order to move toward the shining city on the hill, we need either to restrain capitalism or unleash capitalism and markets will work their magic.

Neither view is able to grasp the reality that the industrial consumer age we experienced during much of the twentieth century is unsustainable, because all the productivity gains we have been able to achieve, especially in the last thirty years, have been offset with decreasing efficiencies and centralization.

Tags: capitalism, high marginal tax rates, Laffer Curve, Reagan Revolution, Glass-Steagall, debt, Alan Greenspan, GDP, globalism

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If you want it done precisely your way, you better do it yourself!
— Ancient Chinese Proverb

Late last week I bought a new over the air TV antenna from Costco, no more cable or satellite television for me. Now just the twenty minutes of advertising per hour rather than paying around an additional hundred bucks a month for the privilege of watching hundreds of channels I care nothing about, and I suspect few supply much positive influence to change our nation or the world.

To celebrate I decided to watch the Saturday evening Republican Debates. This was debate number 15, or so I was told. They all seemed like decent, somewhat committed guys, but I didn’t see a national messiah amongst the crew. But just like the current incarnation of our president, it seems that they all still believe that the federal government is the source of the solutions to our current woes.

Over the past three years we have learned that Barack Obama was not the national messiah either. But in the first real job he ever had, it seems that he was amazed, just as much as most of his supporters, that achieving nirvana in this world was not an easy task. Falling back to a more realistic desire shown in Machiavelli’s The Prince, he also seems not to have either the talent, the ambition, or the constitutional ability to achieve that desire either.

When you look around the world, even though there seems currently a little temporary stability coming to the United States, we still seem incapable of even dealing with our universe of ever expanding debt; solutions are just as far away as they were a year ago; yet the current plight remains a juggernaut to a stable future.

What all this means is things are going to get worse, possibly much worse before they get significantly and sustainabiy better. In the context of last week’s article on The Normalcy of Deviance, this climax may probably come about not through a slow demise of prosperity but rather a global stupendous collapse. Could it be the Mayan’s got it right, long ago, for reasons they could not understand?

Tags: normalcy of deviance, Barack Obama, GDP, MADP, risk, debt, capitalism, entrepreneur, Entrepreneurial Pioneer Area

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Highly indebted governments, banks, or corporations can seem to be merrily rolling along for an extended period, when bang! — confidence collapses, lenders disappear, and a crisis hits.
— Reinhart and Rogoff quoted in This Time is Different

I know the above quotation has to do with money and dollars, but money is really just a functional necessity of a somewhat artificial world of enterprise and finance. I suppose in reality we could eat dollars, but all they would really do is increase our daily fiber content, not much nutritional value there. We could also eat dirt, with much the same result. Furthermore both money and dirt are in some circles considered filthy, which is undoubtedly true in a biological context.

The point is both money and dirt are in theory used to grow something. Sadly in our economic world the over use of debt, through highly leveraged fractional reserve banking is in the process of bankrupting the world. In the case of real dirt, that same monetary leverage is leading to perhaps the final chapter in the Debt Supercycle and we may go truly hungry as that deleveraging occurs.

In the United States there are currently over three hundred million people, of that total less than one percent, perhaps two million are directly involved in providing the food we eat. (Since as of this writing we still do not have an permanent Internet connection, that estimate will have to do.) Yet if something goes wrong with what that small minority does; either through natural climate changes, or world economic changes — well over three hundred million people in this country are going to go hungry — and much of the rest of the world will face a severe famine.

We don’t like to think about dirt, after all it is dirty and we like to be clean. Yet the Bible says that were created out of the dust of the ground, and formed into a likeness of the living God. Even evolutionists believe that somehow, through great mega-faith, those dirty elements rearranged into some form of life.

Essentially we like to be dirt-free because we don’t want to accept our humble roots, hence we can seem to be merrily rolling along for an extended period, when bang! — confidence collapses . . . and a crisis hits.

Tags: dirt, agriculture, debt, cheap energy, water, Farm Bill, PREFER Ltd, SAFER Process