A
Turn for the Worse
James
Howard Kunstler
2
July, 2018
The
Democratic Party has steered itself into an exquisitely neurotic
predicament at a peculiar moment of history. Senator Bernie Sanders
set the tone for the shift to full-throated socialism, and the
primary election win of 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a New
York congressional district seems to have ratified it. She promised
voters free college tuition, single-payer health care, and free
housing. Ah, to live in such a utopia!
One
can actually understand why New Yorkers especially would fall for
that agenda of promises. When I was a child there in the 1950s and
60s, New York was a mostly middle-class city. City College of New
York, with a really distinguished faculty, was free. That’s right,
stone free. Much of that middle-class was educated there, including
most of my high school teachers. In the 1950s and 60s, it cost a few
hundred dollars to have a baby in the hospital, and less than that to
receive three stitches in the ER. Back then, New York real estate was
mostly rental housing and not subject to the deformations of
wandering global capital.
You
can’t overstate how fortunate this country was after the Second
World War. The mid-twentieth century was the apex of American
industrial wealth. We produced real goods and lived in extraordinary
comfort. Now, of course that has all turned around, the industry is
mostly bygone, the magnificent energy supply is getting sketchy, and
all that’s left is a false-front financialized economy based on
swindling and accounting fraud. Medicine and health care have become
unabashed rackets, and good luck finding a place to live for less
than half of your monthly income.
Things
have changed, as Bob Dylan once noted in song, and the times they are
a ‘changing once again. This is probably the worst time in recent
history to go full-bore socialist. Look, it’s as simple as this:
the 20th century saw the greatest rise of global GDP ever. The
prospect of that is what drove the various socialisms of the period —
the belief that there would be evermore material wealth and that a
lot of it had to be fairly redistributed to the workers who brought
it into being. You can debate the finer socio-ethical points of that
— and indeed that’s what much of politics consisted of throughout
the industrialized world — but the stunning bonanza of wealth
compelled it.
That
is the world we are moving out of right now, despite the fantasies of
Elon Musk and the many techno pied pipers like him. GDP growth has
stalled, the implacable trend is toward contraction, and the wizards
of financial hocus-pocus are running out of tricks for pretending
that they create anything of value. In short: there’s no there
there. All that’s left are IOUs for loans that will never be paid
back — and that kind of loan (especially in the form of a bond)
doesn’t have any value.
So,
the Democratic Party has embarked on a crusade to redistribute the
wealth of the nation at the exact moment when the “wealth” is
turning out to be gone. Good luck with that.
A
perhaps more high-toned and fine-tuned version of this program is the
new scheme called “universal basic income” (UBI). A Silicon
Valley zillionaire named Andrew Yang has launched a 2020 presidential
bid based on this UBI. You can listen to his pitch in this excellent
discussion with Sam Harris here. Yang is obviously sincere. He
proposes to give every citizen around $1,000 a month whether they
have a job or not. You can mount any number of arguments about how
this might incentivize behavior for better or worse, but if something
like that were ramped up, I assure you it could only be done with a
debased currency on track toward oblivion. The wealth is no longer
there and the representation of it in “money” will be obviously
false.
Don’t
get too worked-up, either, over the Big Story that robots will soon
be doing all the jobs lately done by humans in America. That fantasy
of the next economy is actually already dead-on-arrival due to the
energy predicament that virtually no one in the public arena is
paying any attention to. The century-long oil bonanza is winding down
again. The oil companies know it. They’re not spending any money on
exploration, meaning they won’t replace the energy we’re
currently burning up with new supply. To make matters more
interesting, the alt-energy industries will not survive the demise of
oil. You have no idea how this dilemma will shove the life our nation
into something like a new medieval age. And don’t be surprised if
it comes complete with a new feudalism — which is just a way of
describing a deeply local economy, if you can make one at all.
The
Democratic Party’s return to socialist nostrums could not happen at
a less propitious moment. It’s one thing to spend other people’s
money during an age of steadily rising GDP, and another thing when
GDP is collapsing. It might even prove to be a winning strategy in a
few elections. But that depends on how delusional the voters remain.
Is
The Civil War Here NOW?
Ware
Change
NO ONE will win from this. This is COLLAPSE.
America
Is Now Officially In A Civil War: How We Will Win Convincingly,
Triumphantly and Decisively
Lionel
Media
Esteemed author Tom Ricks asked whether we’re heading toward a civil war. "I don’t believe we’re to Kansas of the 1850s yet. But we seem to be lurching ... in that direction,” he wrote and USA Today reports. Ricks was commenting on “What Democratic rage would look like,” a Bloomberg opinion column that quotes political scientist Thomas Schaller as saying, "I think we're at the beginning of a soft civil war. ... I don't know if the country gets out of it whole." This is an incoherent uncivil civil war with no strategy or targeting of the demented and deranged left.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinio...
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