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Is Anyone Else Worried?
Is anyone else worried that the damage America suffered this year might be fatal? It’s been known for at least ten years that the early 2020s will, shall we say, be marked by political instability. Multiple crises are projected to explode simultaneously (or near enough): a demographic crisis, an “elite overproduction” crisis (our elite class is simply too big), and a fiscal crisis. In addition, many of us expect these crises will spark an additional ethnic crisis.
The populist conservative strategy to deal with all of this was to engineer a really good economy and try to split off part of the black working class from the progressive left (even a small number of black defectors would totally destroy the Democratic Party’s “demographic advantage”). Such a coalition would be powerful enough to finally stop the games that elites have been playing with immigration and trade policy, greatly lessening the risk of a civil war breaking out.
The idea that this strategy might fail is frankly frightening. If you think the BLM protests are bad, think again; things can get so much worse. We could easily see an ethnic death spiral, where poor whites come to believe elites want to ethnically cleanse them with trade and immigration policies, Hispanics think white people want to turn them into serfs to pay for Social Security and Medicare, white progressives finally realize that black people are culturally Southern, anti-Semitism returns in a really big way, and in general all hell breaks loose. And while all of this is happening the aforementioned crisis of elite overproduction sparks a massive wave of domestic terrorism as downwardly mobile elites lash out in the way elites have done throughout history: by organizing violence.
I just don’t know what to make of all of this. It’s a frightening situation.
Published in General
Given about every immigrant I ever met hates this country and its people with a hot intensity. Why is everybody so hot on flooding the country with them? Why do conservatives love to ship local jobs over seas to help foreigners and destroy our citizens? What is the goal?
I think people feel I am nuts when I discuss how these protests fueled by so many young clueless protesters remind me of what happened in Cambodia. My reading through the Federalist article came to a gut churning conclusion when I got to the paragraph where the young woman protester complained about how the rally to pull down the statues stopped in order to show respect to the elders. She adds that she finds showing that respect to be disgusting!
Nothing over there in Cambodia started with fields of skulls. It started with more gentile gatherings where the offenders, that is people who were nurses, doctors, teachers, auto mechanics and others, apologized to the farmers for their privilege.
All you need to do at first is take a knee to show contrition for your privilege. But once that activity concludes, you might have to allow the mob to break your neck.
Let’s get back to free enterprise, free trade, free association and freedom of speech. Those are the ideals I support.
Getting a new voting population they can control
Neoclassical economics doesn’t work if you have free trade and open borders. There’s a theory that it can work if you have either free trade or open borders, but it certainly doesn’t work if you have both.
The reason for this is simple. Consumer demand depends on wage increases, which depends on productivity increases. Continually swapping high-wage labor with low-wage labor hurts both productivity and wages, and puts downward pressure on consumer demand. The result is a kind of economic spiral of doom, interrupted by debt-fueled asset price bubbles.
The WWII generation successfully broke out of this kind of cycle, so it’s been done before. Our present situation is not inevitable, a message both Marxists and neoliberals are pushing these days; they were wrong the first time the world found itself trapped in a deflationary downward wage spiral, and they’ll be wrong this time too, but first the Boomers need to wake up to the fact that the world didn’t begin the moment they were born. Their parents weren’t wrong about absolutely freaking everything.
People talk about the post-WWII period of deglobalization as if it were some sort of disaster. The globalization of the late 19th and early 20 century saw war after war and an economic disaster. Meanwhile, the post-1940 period of deglobalization saw sustained increases in living standards even for the most persecuted ethnic minorities, right up until globalization started back up again in the 70s.
?huh? – Substituting high wages for low wages hurts wages? Paying people more suppresses demand?
Higher wages are a result of productivity increases. If you can produce more, you can get paid more.
I think he meant “Substituting high wages with low wages hurts wages”
It’s not like wages and productivity are unrelated to each other. That’s the whole point of supply-side economics.