The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Twentieth Century Reflections

29 April 2009

Volume 11, Issue 17

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Today Americans celebrate the ascendancy to the Presidency of Barack Obama, the anointed one. For now the plurality believes strongly in his messianic vision. Growing minorities however are beginning to look at him as the other end of that religious spectrum. My mission here today is not to change anyone’s opinion, but to point out that our forty-fourth president is just the latest and last (re)incarnation of what has set the American agenda for perhaps a century, at least from the end of the Viet Nam war.

This operating paradigm focuses upon the role of bigness to solve all the hiccups of human problems. Where do we begin, big urban centers, big business, big labor, big special interests, big politics, big wealth evolving into big debt, big consumption, big bureaucracies, and big government. All of these and perhaps many more are now giving us a world in which the individual has to go it alone, because these big solutions, treat human beings, created in the image of God, as no more than other components of the material world.

When you put the Obama presidency in that light what you see, is not the light of a messiah, but rather the end of an era in which largeness for the sake of itself has run out of gas. The emperors of the paradigm have no clothes, but they still believe they can create them if we figure out some way to provide a method to finance the whole shebang.

George W. Bush played his role very well. Under his watch enterprise imperialism became the dominant force in the world, and we are not talking about the shooting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, or the War on Terror. Thru the unregulated financial schemes began in the Clinton Administration; the enterprise imperialists brought the world’s wealth to American shores, and exported incomprehensible debt financial schemes to pull it off. The roots of this growth emphasis however, can be traced back through presidents for most of the century, for big things take time.

As the final player, this time as a true big government leader, the gifted Obama has completed his first one hundred days. By being very busy, he and his teleprompter make their rounds. So far there seems to be little substance, which was not really preexisting underlying economic strength. Really the economy was not that bad until late last year the unsustainable nature of enterprise imperialism became apparent as a drag on real wealth and wealth creation.

As our good friend Brute’ pointed out in his cartoon last Friday, what is missing from all the stimulus, bailouts, and other debt financing programs is even the mention of the role of the entrepreneur in creating new wealth. This new wealth will be the stimulus that will change the twenty-first century, but so far in the first decade of the century we are still looking backward to what was, rather than forward to what may be.

Obama’s “Change you can believe in,” focuses upon government more closely modeled on twentieth century fascism than any other economic model. In this model big government selects the “businesses” which succeed via the application of capital and the plan is that it will all work well, until it doesn’t, and then we will print some more money and try something else.

Going back to the end of the Viet Nam war for our basis point, way back in that ancient history, Americans were the entrepreneurs to the world, the Germans were the engineers, and the Japanese were the manufacturers. Now the Japanese still sort of manufacture some good things, the Germans still do a decent job of engineering some sophisticated stuff, and Americans have become the world’s gluttons.

Now in this diminishing world of globalism, that quality, or excellence of production of the late seventies, has been replaced with essentially cheap consumer kitsch. We learned recently that Volkswagen has replaced Toyota as the world’s largest automobile producer, but these Volkswagens are not produced in Germany, but as transportation in the developing world, mostly South America.

Entrepreneurship is dead, because wealth cannot be created in a world driven solely by debt, because growing businesses cannot be created in which the prime source of funding is debt in which loan payments or dividends must be paid from the inception.

A little over a year ago as I was talking to people about buying a restaurant in Colville, the conversation came up about the local “economic development commission.” They had grants to start a small business of about seven thousand dollars. Of course to get that grant you had to put together a business plan and go through their bureaucratic screening process, which if you were to calculate the time value of the capital involved, you would probably be about two hundred percent in the hole. This, so that you might be able to get enough money to buy a decent used car, not to start a viable wealth producing enterprise.

Now the greatest hurtle to entrepreneurship is the belief that big anything is going to save the world. This is the one true fallacy of bigness. If this mammoth paradigm were true we would still be living in caves and we would be afraid to go outside because of the dinosaurs roaming around, devouring we small pitiful little creatures. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the behemoths of the past century, which we mentioned at the beginning of this article, are still consuming the resources that true entrepreneurship requires.

Contrary to the illusion of climate change associated with global warming, what this world really needs is an ice age. Not so much a literal ice age but an economic ice age, in which the culture of bigness at the expense of all else will perish.

Well you say, “This can or will never happen, you are such a pessimist.” Well look just outside your window, while it takes a discerning eye to see, there is a snowfall of debt liquidity now falling around the world, most of it falling on the developed countries. The hope of a true economic spring still lies in some unknown future. This is just how the real ice age began.

The scientific case can be made that the ice age was caused by ocean effect snow, following a time of great warmth where Siberia was the home of huge herds of Wooly Mammoths and similar huge creatures. As we have stated at times over the months, the economic reality is that the world is awash in oceans of vast amounts of non-energetic debt. My complaint was that the natural economic liquidity cycle, which should be driven like the natural hydrologic cycle, had broken down in the economic sense. However it may be true that I missed the increasing overcast of debt clouds, and all we needed was just some small event like a real estate meltdown to trigger the whole elephantine killing economic Pleistocene.

Especially in the United States, the continuing twentieth century concept of it is always Christmas and never winter, is being replaced with the Narnia reality of it being always winter and never Christmas. Part of that, if not the whole cause, is that, it is more than allegorical, that we no longer believe in Christmas at all, it is just the Holiday Season, in which we are to celebrate the winter by gluttonous consumption, both in goods and in spirit.

This stems from a Babylonian fallacy that we humans are masters of our own destiny and if we think small we will always be subject to the whims of nature. Since we are discussing climate change, both economic and natural, even Al Gore, the messiah of global warming, has admitted that water vapor and solar activity have significantly more effects on our natural world than all the human caused greenhouse gas emissions. His counter is that if we do nothing, essentially we cannot save the world, from us.

That has no basis in the true science he admits, but more to do with our religion that requires salvation and without a true messiah we are forced to created a god from nature that needs to be appeased, in this case the world climate. In past human history we called this religion pantheism, today we call it natural human enlightenment.

I would assume today President Obama will make some scripted remarks on how much he has accomplished, and what needs to be done. He will state that the world economy has been saved from catastrophe, and the too big to fail have been saved from their own ineptitude. Among the things that need to be addressed will be some spin on energy and his complex cap and trade taxing scheme, which is yet to be worked out.

Among those proposals will be some New Smart Grid for electrical distribution. What we have learned recently is our old dumb grid has been compromised so that energy human factors can shut down the whole country’s energy system causing severe hardships. However we are told that this new system will be immune to such problems, after all we designed it and by definition it will be too complex to be hacked by some dumb under-defined terrorist group or nation. But never questioned, especially since these new energy generation opportunities are not subject to conventional economies of scale, is the wisdom of an electrical national energy grid based upon huge electrical generation facilities of any type.

Finally, we have to worry this week about a potential outbreak of swine flu. Will it become a pandemic that will destroy the bigness of the economic machine? Sure it might morph into a strain that will kill many, but evolutionary Malthusianism states that this might be a good thing, overcoming our desire to reproduce beyond our carrying capacity.

Spinning Malthus in a more natural way, perhaps our lack of “moral restraint” in developing alternatives to our Babylonian fallacies will be directly related to the effect of the disease. We create artificial environments in which mutant strains of disease can become dominant, raising havoc upon the populations. However, what is not widely reported is that these organisms do not have the genetic diversity needed to compete in the wider natural world.

So reflecting upon the current state of things, our desire to create utopia on earth by following a twentieth century model of bigness at the expense of other ways is about to go the way of the dinosaurs and the Wooly Mammoths. What will replace them will be a world in which sound sustainable diverse natural human enterprise will again offer freedom and liberty based upon natural law and God’s divine plan. This latest twentieth century attempt at creating the infallible Babylon will fail like all the rest that have gone before.

In this failure many more people will learn, some to their dismay others to there unfounded joy, “Yes Virginia there is a God, and you are not Him, and hence we humans can and will not save ourselves from our own sinfulness.”