Have you been reading HomeFree America?
You should be. It is “John Robb’s open notebook on the future of the American Dream.” It is also the first draft of the book he is working on.
Mr. Robb’s analysis of the collapse of the Blue Model, 20th Century legacy government and economy is very similar to the arguments made by James C. Bennett and myself in our book America 3.0. He sees, as we do, that they are doomed. He sees, as we do, that a much better world is coming. Ah, but the transition period. That will be a challenge.
This is the quote of the day:
All layers of government — city, state, and federal — want the old, bureaucratic economy to continue, unchanged. They can’t imagine a world without plentiful flows of taxes levied on corporate profits and withholding from personal incomes.
Without this flow of tax income, the entire edifice of the current economy falls. It is the source of the financial life-support to the increasingly obsolete bureaucracies from the civil bureaucracy to education to national security to banking to health care — that still offer traditional jobs. The rest is spent providing services, from health care to retirement income, in an attempt to keep the existing economic system alive.
People who tell me the the current corrupt model cannot be defeated have it backward. It cannot survive. The only question is how hard the transition to a better political and economic order will be. Not if, not even when, but how.
Oh, I agree it can’t survive even if the Left is trying to sell bugs as features.
”If Obamacare really does cause millions of people to voluntarily leave full-time employment,” Matt Yglesias writes in a representative piece, “that shows us how much avoidable suffering the earlier system was causing,” and you can find roughly similar arguments from Jonathan Cohn, Jonathan Chait, and others too numerous to name.
No mention of who is to pay the taxes. Amazing. The “earlier system” was the economy.
There was a thread a few days ago in which a commenter asked for someone to say something hopeful, because everything around him seemed so dispiriting.
The great state apparatus we find so fearful and imposing is, in fact, a house of cards built on a three legged table.
It is it’s very complexity and overbearing nature that are the major weaknesses of the construct, not its strengths.
The crucial task over the next generation is to prevent the typical evasions and scapegoating of the prog cadres as they try to manipulate the situation to facilitate the acquisition of more power for themselves and their captured state institutions.
This will not be an easy piece of work, obviously, but must be carefully done, from the ground up, by working to take control of school boards and city councils and county commissions, as well as higher aims at other levels.
It is the dirty, crucial, and indispensable work that many, many ordinary people who want to live in freedom, and pass that legacy on to their children, must do to secure the future.
“It cannot survive”. Agree.
Nor should it.
I’d be interested in seeing how you can kill a bureaucracy. We still have agencies founded at the turn of the 20th century that survived the demise of their founding mission.
Someone once noted that a bureaucracy is the closest thing to an immortal lifeform humanity ever created.
Michael. by ‘avoidable suffering’ Yglesias means working and contributing to society. Leftist have an expectation that others exist to support them.
“Michael. by ‘avoidable suffering’ Yglesias means working and contributing to society.”
Work is the curse of the drinking classes. That about it ? Of course, now it’s marijuana.
I read some of it. Great stuff. I also am interested to see how you kill a bureaucracy.
“how you kill a bureaucracy”
Well…heh..Koba the Master was pretty good at it. You did ask.
The Bankruptcy settlement it turns out isn’t Hyper-Inflationary Chaos, it’s Neo-Liberal Shock Doctrine. Aka Oligarchal Privatization of National Property. Of which USG has an awful lot. And the rest if it needs it.
That’s what Stan Fischer at the Fed means. He’s the Rape of RU Guru.
So we may end up with Yeltsin’s then Putin’s America.
This will change things, I expect the Bureaucrats will quite survive. The 1% will move into actual Nobility Territory.
It turns out the Underpants Gnomes had a plan all along.