The whole world is
so greedy for bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them,
or even turn off the tap. Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a
little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.
— Aldo
Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, March
1948
Since our consumer world has begun to outwardly head into
the ditch in 2007, there as been much said, pontificated, argued and discussed
about the reasons for our current muddling economy and direction for the
future. Little however, has been articulated regarding the need for economic
competition and decentralization, especially federal government
decentralization.
Presidential candidate Rick Perry in his book Fed
Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, indicates his focus on the national government, but seems to look at
one of the trees but misses the centralization forest. This of course has been
the Republican mantra for as long as I can remember as they, along with the
Democrats, ÒprogressivelyÓ centralize more and more power at the national
level.
Agriculture, Education, Environment, Healthcare, Housing,
Military, Social Security and Transportation are just a few of the centralized
bureaucracies that drive the national agenda. With largesse, contrary to all
the rhetoric to the contrary, and essentially by definition, begets a lack of
competition.
Centralization however is really the way we humans choose to
solve our community and cultural problems throughout recorded history. Since
the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament until the passage of ObamaCare in the
United States, to the Eurozone attempts to unify distinct nation states, into a
financial precursor to another attempt to create the human Babylonian utopia,
we believe we are significantly collectively smarter than we are individually.
Sadly this desire is totally contrary to the created natural
law order that exists in the universe; hence these experiments always end in
failure. But as fallen, sinful man, we redesign and refine these failures as
essentially the result of poor planning and execution; then we attempt to rebuild
that yellow brick road on the same footings of the previous failures.
ÒThis time is differentÓ is part of our fallen human nature,
and the only way we believe that we can save ourselves, from ourselves, is to
give it a better college, enlightened try. To believe otherwise only comes
through the grace of God, both the specific grace of the gospel centered in the
life, propitiatory sacrifice on the cross of Jesus Christ, and his bodily
resurrection three days hence; and also a common grace leading to the truly
enlightened worldview that this natural law focus is an individual not
collective salvation.
When you broaden this specific grace into the universally
common grace, available to all human beings throughout history; we quickly find
that bigger is not better, especially universally better, but just different.
Furthermore this understanding commonly redefines community as freedom for
achievement, rather than the community values of egalitarian outcomes.
In that enlightenment, when we look at the current gridlock
at the national level, as not only the contrast between collectivism, where Wonder
Springs defines those players as Òcollective elitistsÓ and their antithesis the
objectivist Òlaissez faire scoundrels;Ó we find the perfect storm, catch 22, or
simple chaotic inertia, which will slowly develop competition and eventually leading
to decentralization.
Oh, the horror of what we see as developing chaos of our
government! This is only a significant problem if our desire is to bring about
order within the limits of our limited understanding.
Thus far I have refrained from making any comments on the
ÒOccupyÓ movement that began on Wall Street and is slowly growing within cities
across the nation. Critics find it amusing that these people have nothing
better to do with their time, but in that, is the essential truth, that is
missed on both sides. These people have nothing better to do with their life,
just because they look to the state to provide that life meaning, which is, in
reality, only a natural understanding of their progressive elitist cultural
training.
ÒThey know no better, Ôcause theyÕve had no experience
outside that state regulated egalitarian community.Ó In reality that is just
chaos breeding chaos. In the proper context, Wall Street unregulated Òfree
market laissez faireÓ has created essentially pestilent chaos on the streets,
because we have attempted to create a financial world, where money and
consumerism are the sole measures of success.
Our only visible beneficiaries of this success, outside the
financial markets, and those with access to financial capital, are the
financial elites, who have no intention of Òsharing the wealthÓ unless enough
chaos requires some sort of minor readjustments of the financial equilibrium.
The dinosaurs of centralized government planning battling it
out to the end with the behemoths of global finance is just an misconception of
the much deeper structural faults of the natural lacks of competition and
centralization.
I recently purchased an audio version of F. A. HayekÕs, The Road to Serfdom. When he wrote the book during the Second World War,
few of us were around. To some extent this book served as the popular bible to
the rise of monetarism that fostered the Reagan Revolution.
It has been a number of years since I purchased the hard
copy, but listening to the book gives an insight that it is not so much an
endorsement of laissez faire capitalism, as defined through Alan GreenspanÕs
run at the Federal Reserve, but rather a treatise of nineteenth century
liberalism; almost the exact opposite of our liberal definition of today; also
quite different than what we would call conservatism.
What this means in a world of politics of conservative
versus liberal hybrids, we have so dumbed down the political gene pool, we no
longer have any genetic diversity from which to create a path, much less a
sustainable path forward.
When given the true freedom to choose politically, the
universal majority throughout the world would like to see moderately
conservative government. Put in terms of HayekÕs serfdom, they would be
generally defined as liberals, the antithesis of todayÕs what Hayek called
Òcollectivists,Ó which come in true socialist and conservative species; which
especially in recent years as dominated the worldÕs democracies.
So what are we going to do about this?
We have entered the endgame of basically the twentieth
century atheistic evolving political-financial experiment. On the natural law,
universal scale of reproducing sustainability, it has been weighed and found
wanting.
Compared to modern parliamentary governments, the American
model is designed to make significant changes, a slow process of compromise.
Since Republicans and Democrats are now at loggerheads, what is slowly going to
develop is what looks chaotic, but in reality is just a natural energetic
readjustment. Overtime this will cause decentralization and eventually the
emergence of true enterprise competition and a government, which fulfills its
natural common functions.
The good thing about the American political experiment, is
that these slow changes, allow the flexibility of the process to muddle
through, when more dramatic political processes may stress and potentially
collapse into anarchy; and some sort of authoritarian rule from either the
political left or right.
So your ability to adapt to these changes and understand
where we are headed, will allow to you look for opportunities being created, as
over time our world slowly increases competition, allowing for success of
smaller more competitive enterprises and eventually the decentralization of
governments at all levels.
© 2011: All rights reserved.
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