Spain's Unbearable Pain
- This topic has 38 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 12 years ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Spanish drank the ‘American Dream’ Kool-Aid and bankrupted itself buying Good German luxury cars and building biodegradable tract housing along with highways on which to drive in circles.
More bankruptcy: Spain went deep into debt to buy millions of barrels of crude oil which was burned for zero return. Trillions of euros were borrowed and spent and what is there to show for them? Smog and used cars, some abandoned ‘developments’ and a sense of futility.
Progress has always had an Alice in Wonderland quality of a trip down the rathole but there are real consequences. Greece was pushed down the chute and now it is Spain’s turn. Every barrel of oil Spain does not burn in the future is a barrel that can be burned by Good Germans, instead.
Worst thing is there is absolutely nothing the Spanish can do to escape their fate of ‘conservation by other means’. Best thing is there is nothing the rest of the world can do to escape Spain’s fate.
steve from virginia post=1789 wrote:
Worst thing is there is absolutely nothing the Spanish can do to escape their fate of ‘conservation by other means’. Best thing is there is nothing the rest of the world can do to escape Spain’s fate.
Ain’t that the Truth.
The Rain falling on Spain will Mainly be the Pain that Remains after the Insane waste for no Gains.
Forget any country trying to pay off it’s debts, it will never happen.
I would venture to guess that you can count on one hand the number of countries that do not borrow to meet day to day expenses.
In the US about 45% pay no income taxes. I would guess that 20% of the workers are paid by a government in some form or the other. They pay taxes but with monies that came from the government so they are still a big net loss to government income. Add to that the retired who do pay taxes but less than they take in from SS and you see the picture. Then you have the illegals who use the system, pay no taxes and send money out of the country. So as a real rough guess I would say that only 25% of the workers in the US are paying all the bills. No wonder we have to borrow Trillions each year.
MR166 post=1794 wrote: Forget any country trying to pay off it’s debts, it will never happen.
I would venture to guess that you can count on one hand the number of countries that do not borrow to meet day to day expenses.
In the US about 45% pay no income taxes. I would guess that 20% of the workers are paid by a government in some form or the other. They pay taxes but with monies that came from the government so they are still a big net loss to government income. Add to that the retired who do pay taxes but less than they take in from SS and you see the picture. Then you have the illegals who use the system, pay no taxes and send money out of the country. So as a real rough guess I would say that only 25% of the workers in the US are paying all the bills. No wonder we have to borrow Trillions each year.
The way the system is set up, everybody from individuals to corporations to Nation States HAS to borrow, because without borrowing there is no Money. The issue of course is WTF is it you are borrowing FROM? Where does the Lender GET money to loan out?
In essence, the Lenders get the “right” to loan out money based on their Ownership of the Assets of the Earth. Land in the old days, Oil most recently. John D. Rockefeller loans you money so you can buy “his” Oil with it. What happens though when Rockefeller runs Short on Oil to sell with the money he loans out? If the resource isn’t there to redeem the Notes issued, they aren’t any good anymore.
All Industrial Nation States have had to borrow from the Owners of the Oil in order to have access to the resource necessary to run an Industrial society, complete with Electric Lights for the people and roads and bridges for them to drive their Carz about on. Everybody, including Mercantilist countries like China and Germany are in debt on Da Goobermint level, because most of the profit from Mercantile Biz flows to Private hands, not into the State treasury. The States only get what they can tax out of this, which usually is not much since Multi National Corporations easily evade the taxation.
Anyhow, countries like Greece and Spain which got in too late on the Industrial Bandwagon have had to borrow the most per capita, with the least return on the wastage. As the resource runs thin, their ability to borrow is triaged out first. However, all remaining industrial societies STILL have to keep borrowing to keep buying what is left of the Oil and the whole game shrinks at an ever increasing pace as each country falls off the cliff.
You cannot stop borrowing under this system. The moment you do, your society runs outta money to buy any Oil. You can create your own money, but it won’t be any good to buy any Oil from the “Owners” of the Oil. Unless you can REVERSE ENGINEER a society that functions in the absence of Oil, you are basically SOL here.
It seems more than ever we have peaked our resource use. One can predict where it will start by following countries that have depleted so much of their own resources that they are completely dependent on outside and thus lose sovereignty.
Spain, like the rest, will be free once it becomes self sufficient and imports luxuries not necessities. Sucks but I believe it could take a while.
And yes that means we are all in a lot of trouble.
william post=1796 wrote:
Spain, like the rest, will be free once it becomes self sufficient and imports luxuries not necessities. Sucks but I believe it could take a while.
And yes that means we are all in a lot of trouble.
A lot of TROUBLE, no doubt.
“Spain” and “Self-sufficiency” in the same sentence is an Oxymoron. Same could be said for about every country in Europe, MENA and probably the entire world at this point.
Some places still have good arable land available, but generally speaking they are not the same places that have large energy reserves. The places that have large energy reserves don’t have good arable land and water resource. So they are all interdependent on the basic trade of Food for Oil. When that trade collapses due to lack of Credit availability, both sides are screwed.
I have no idea what the carrying capacity of Spain is without Oil, but I am pretty sure it is nowhere near its current population numbers. Spain won’t be self sufficient in necessities and just importing luxuries for quite some time to come. To get from here to there, they will need a lot of dead people.
I see Dead People.
Steve from Virginia,
Great comment – as usual. Unless there is an imposter out there, your comment to the NY Times (Krugman post/article?) was equally impressive.
“Finance creates credit out of thin air”
Yup.
Back to your post here, do you think Spain will “go down the chute” before Portugal?
Hummmm, for the past few years Spain has been the leader in Solar and PV power and yet they are bankrupt and raising their electric rates by 7%. Yet another stunning victory for the Green Movement.
MR166:
Investing in solar is, of course, not a ‘bankable’ proposition. For the greens, it’s worthwhile, because their focus is long-term and takes into account externalities (at least that’s what they would claim). If saving the planet were profitable–well, I’m sure the capitalists would have found a way to monopolize that as well, milked it until it was no longer profitable, and then moved on to fucking everything up. Nobody said the end of the world would be pleasant.
Of course, there are much bigger reasons Spain is in trouble. But, sure, providing subsidies to expensive technologies isn’t going to help your balance sheet much.
Now its the turn of Spain.
Whenever I hear someone use “Growth” as a solution to the financial problems, I know that it cannot happen.Let’s look back at the last 30 years. Those were the years that the US financed its growth with borrowing. The lenders of those loans were printing money that they did not have. In other words, leveraging.
Gov. had guidelines that lenders were suppose to follow when doing leveraging. (Aprox. 10 times.) which was suppose to be financially prudent and sustainable.
However, all the lenders found ways of pretending that they were following the guidelines while leveraging up to highs of even 50 times.
That is the way that the prosperity/growth was financed over the last 30 years. You can call it a bubble, inflation or whatever you want. The end result is that it was not financed by GDP growth, ( real wealth).
“Growth” was pulled forward faster than the growth of the economy.As a result all of the money “printing” that is happening, now, is only to cover the lack of cash flow that is suppose to come in to the lenders/banks from wealth creation. The borrowers do not have the means of making their payments. The loans were not invested into wealth creating assets that would generate cash flow.
A reset is happening and it will not end until GDP is equalized with wealth creation. Some areas will have to do a lot of adjusting and suffer a lot. Some areas will take longer to adjust because they are still producing surplus wealth for trade.
Some areas will be under pressure to give away their surplus wealth under the threat of having it taken away by force.
All regions of the world have been affected.
For example,
Do a search for “house for sale” in Spain then in Vancouver. You will quickly find out that a comparable house would be priced 100 times in bubbly Vancouver.
Be prepared. Be nimble. Be quick.
Its coming to your neighborhood.Oh!
I Forgot, according to the generational dirt poor, “Spain’s Unbearable Pain” is still bearable.jal post=1812 wrote:
A reset is happening and it will not end until GDP is equalized with wealth creation.
People do not “create wealth”. People only do Work to reform the Wealth that is out there into different forms, at the expense of some energy transformation and entropy depletion.
The wealth that one person “creates” out of such transformations results in the depletion of “wealth” for somebody else, or many somebody elses elsewhere. Its a closed system overall.
When you run short on the energy necessary to do the transformations and keep entropy at bay, you can’t rob Peter to pay Paul anymore, and everybody gets “Poorer” in aggregate, though a few people can aggregate wealth out of a diminishing pie for a while.
It really gets interesting when the Big Dogs start fighting each other for what remains to sieve up, once the general population has been thoroughly impoverished. Then you get your Wars.
RE
“People do not “create wealth”. People only do Work to reform the Wealth that is out there into different forms, at the expense of some energy transformation and entropy depletion.”
What a bunch of BS.
Are you trying to tell me that a farmer is not creating wealth by harvesting his crops or that someone who creates shelter from the forest is not creating wealth? Even mining a non renewable source of minerals is creating permanent wealth if they can be recycled.
MR166 post=1826 wrote: “People do not “create wealth”. People only do Work to reform the Wealth that is out there into different forms, at the expense of some energy transformation and entropy depletion.”
What a bunch of BS.
Are you trying to tell me that a farmer is not creating wealth by harvesting his crops or that someone who creates shelter from the forest is not creating wealth? Even mining a non renewable source of minerals is creating permanent wealth if they can be recycled.
Absolutely, that is exactly what I am telling you. When a farmer harvests crops out of the earth, he is depleting the soil to do it. You can recycle waste through the soil to maintain fertility, but over millenia as long as you run itnensive agriculture you eventualy deplete the soil and or water table. The Middle East is the result of that.
Taking Minerals and changing their form isn’t creating wealth. An Iphone is just a collection of rare earths and semiconductors which in the absence of electical energy is just a neatly constructed paperweight. without the energy, there is no Wealth in an Iphone.
All wealth stems from taking Energy stores and moving them downhill, in essence burning them up. When you run out of the store of potential energy to run the gradient, you run out of Wealth. POOF.
The amount of Wealth you can access without Machines which run on the thermodynamic energy of fossil fuels is exceedingly small by comparison, but in any event nobody ever “creates” wealth. They merely harvest it in some manner, or steal it from some other part of nature. Besides what the Sun rains down each day on the earth and some geophysical energy, all the “Wealth” that is here has always been here, it just gets redistributed. Take away from Biological diversity, expand the Human population, etc. Zero Sum Game baby.
MR166 post=1794 wrote: Forget any country trying to pay off it’s debts, it will never happen.
Society doesn’t have the money to pay back the debt due to the fraudulent Debt Dollar tyranny that has been used to financially chain us down.
Check out this graphic for the short version…
The point of Debt Dollar Tyranny was expressed concisely by the world’s biggest industrialist of his day, Henry Ford.
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debt.”
~Henry FordThe Debt Dollar Tyrants have always been the #1 risk to societies around the globe… and now they can smell the financial napalm as they attack all western nations – and the populace has NO IDEA that a concerted attack is under way.
As Sun Tzu said, and the Debt Dollar Tyrants have incorporated, “war is all about deception.”
Look who the banksters put on their $20 debt receipt, aka FRN…
“The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me, but I will kill it.”
~Andrew jacksonGentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out!
~Andrew JacksonLook who “the bank” put on their $5 debt receipt…
“I have the Confederacy before me, and the bankers behind me, and for my country I fear the bankers most.”
~Abraham LincolnBoth men were victims of assassination attempts, but only one succeeded. However, the failed attempt didn’t fail for lack of planning, the assassin brought two guns and BOTH misfired.
Three excellent resources that everyone should view at least once are:
The Secret of Oz…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swkq2E8mswIRenaissance 2.0
https://www.csper.org/renaissance-20.htmlDebunking Money Series
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_yh4-Zi92QThe psychopathic financial oligarchs have moved into their next operational tactic – to take the Western nation’s into financial receiverships based on their fraudulent monetary system and their iron grip on all major western governments.
The people have to wake up and figure out where we are in short order or it look bleak. It looks bleak already, but it can get a lot worse.
Debt Dollar tyranny works similar to this simplified example…
Corporation A creates $20 and lends it to Society B at 5% interest, payable as a lump sum in 1 year’s time.
It works out like this…
Year | Debt Owed to A | B’s Debt Money | A’s Debt Paper Value | Total Money + Debt Paper Value in System.
0 | $20 | $20 | $0 | $20
1 | $21 | $20 | $1 | $21 (technically, the instant before debt is payable)Note that $21 is owed by B to A, but B only has $20 unless one of two things occurs.
1. B sells their labor to A and earns $1 in a timely manner to pay the debts.
2. B sells their assets to A and earns $1 in a timely manner to pay the debt in full.
Note that A controls the destiny of B… No matter what B does or how they do it, they are constrained by the mathemtics of the Debt Dollary Tyranny system and completely under the thumb of A. If A wants to bankrupt B and put them into receivership, that’s exactly what A can do any time they want – just hold back $0.01 from B’s possession and B is bankrupted.
The beneficiaries of this tyranny are the OWNERS AND CONTROLLERS of corporation A.
Pure Machiavellian. Sun Tzu Art of War Evil…
Your entire country is at the mercy of the OWNERS AND CONTROLLERS of the Federal Reserve System (Corporation A), and there is nothing you can do about it inside their Debt Dollar Tyranny model.
S&I are out trying to help the subjects (that’s us, we are subject to this Debt Dollar Tyranny) keep their wealth local because the system was ENGINEERED to asset strip the subjects.
If you have Netflix, watch “American Experience: The Crash of 1929” and note how John Kenneth Galbraith refers to the people wiped out in the Great Depression. I believe it was at about 44 minutes into the show when he referred to them with the highly technical term “suckers.”
Note that Japan and Germany weren’t under Debt Dollar Tyranny until after they were conquered.
Note that Muslims aren’t under Debt Dollar Tyranny until they are conquered. Yes, there are other tyrannical systems that jack those populations, but none that enrich the Debt Dollar Tyrants like good old fashioned Debt Dollar Tyranny.
And no – gold is not the solution. The Tyrants who currently covertly rule over us own and control most of the gold. Britain wasn’t stupid selling off its gold at the low, they did it on purpose to enrich the inner party class that controls government. The inner party who bought it low will probably sell it back high to the governments… and then buy it low again – fleecing the naive proles the while time.
The proletariat has to get more sophisticated.
Reverse Engineer post=1829 wrote: [quote=MR166 post=1826]”People do not “create wealth”. People only do Work to reform the Wealth that is out there into different forms, at the expense of some energy transformation and entropy depletion.”
What a bunch of BS.
Are you trying to tell me that a farmer is not creating wealth by harvesting his crops or that someone who creates shelter from the forest is not creating wealth? Even mining a non renewable source of minerals is creating permanent wealth if they can be recycled.
Absolutely, that is exactly what I am telling you. When a farmer harvests crops out of the earth, he is depleting the soil to do it. You can recycle waste through the soil to maintain fertility, but over millenia as long as you run itnensive agriculture you eventualy deplete the soil and or water table. The Middle East is the result of that.
Taking Minerals and changing their form isn’t creating wealth. An Iphone is just a collection of rare earths and semiconductors which in the absence of electical energy is just a neatly constructed paperweight. without the energy, there is no Wealth in an Iphone.
All wealth stems from taking Energy stores and moving them downhill, in essence burning them up. When you run out of the store of potential energy to run the gradient, you run out of Wealth. POOF.
The amount of Wealth you can access without Machines which run on the thermodynamic energy of fossil fuels is exceedingly small by comparison, but in any event nobody ever “creates” wealth. They merely harvest it in some manner, or steal it from some other part of nature. Besides what the Sun rains down each day on the earth and some geophysical energy, all the “Wealth” that is here has always been here, it just gets redistributed. Take away from Biological diversity, expand the Human population, etc. Zero Sum Game baby.
RE
https://www.doomsteaddiner.org
Hi RE and MR166, you two are defining “wealth” in to different ways.IMHO, you are both right in your own way, but talking past each other because you haven’t “gone Socrates” and thought about the different way in which you use the term “wealth” and how that might change the dynamics of the discussion.
When a person is on an island and 3 minutes away from a dehydration death, you better believe that person would value the rain storage system set up he came across as “additional wealth” even though, in the way you define the term “wealth,” it is merely reordered “wealth.”
Which is true, in a way, but completely meaningless to the person who just died of dehydration.
The “wealth” added, from the perspective of the person who found the rain storage system is the fact she’s still alive instead of dead.
That, I guarantee you, will be considered “additional wealth” by the person who did not die of dehydration.
Both of you are correct, but you talk past each other not fully understanding how the other defines “wealth.”
TheTrivium4TW post=1835 wrote:
Both of you are correct, but you talk past each other not fully understanding how the other defines “wealth.”
You are correct that we are defining “Wealth” in a different way, and also correct that we are generally talking “passed” (note spelling!) each other.
My goal here however is to get people to understand that the definition of “Wealth” which looks at it anthropomorphically from just the perspective of the person who sets up a rain collection system and cistern is not looking at the Big Picture.
You are aware perhaps that some communities and Goobermints now regulate and in some cases outlaw rain collection systems. Reason is two-fold, first off if you become water independent in some way, you no longer have to pay for the water provided by the local water supplier. Second reason is that if enough people are sequestering water, its not making its way into the general supply of water. In a very arid environment, this can cause a lot of problems.
So, the person who has his own water collection and storage system is “wealthy” but he is wealthy at the expense of other people and other organisms that need the water he sequesters for himself. Zero Sum Game.
Drop enough people into a given area, if the pool of natural resource generally considered the “commons”, any one person’s “wealth” comes at the expense of somebody else’s poverty. You cannot lever up and make EVERYBODY Wealthy in a resource poor environment. You cannot “create” wealth that is not there in Nature to extract to begin with.
Steve Jobs got plenty Wealthy before he croaked designing Ipads, Iphones and generally making it difficult to copy digital information. Did he “create” Wealth though? No he did not, the whole system is extracting wealth from the Rare Earth mines in China and from the labor of poor folks at Foxconn, and levering that on the back of a power infrastructure that runs all the routers and cell towers and so forth. Those costs are externalities to Apple’s Biz, so they don’t pay for that, its subsidized out of the general pool of wealth the society is accessing through the thermodynamic energy of fossil fuels.
Until people grasp that no Wealth is ever really created but just moved around from one spot to another and generally consolidated up under the Ownership paradigm, they’ll continue to believe inthe canard of Perpetual Growth in a Finite World. It just can’t happen. You run up against a wall when the population is so great it stresses out the seemingly ‘bottomless’ well of natural resource. We have hit that wall.
This discussion has taken a very unexpected turn.
From “Unbearable Pain”, due to cash flow restriction to a discussion of “wealth”.
I will add a comment to “wealth” for you to think about.
1. Replacing broken windows is not wealth creation. It is forever having to re-do what had been accomplished before going forward to do new things.
2. The man who uses the flow of water, (uses no energy), for his needs will always be better off than the man who must bring water uphill, (uses energy) for his needs.
Hi R.E., I understand your view and, given your definition of wealth, it makes sense.
Thanks for the “passed” vs “past” note – I subconsciously used “past” without a thought, but I’m not sure why. I’ll chalk it up to one of those things that felt so right right at the time, but is ultimately just plain wrong.
“Passed” is the winner, though, so hopefully my subconscious isn’t beyond an update. 😉
“You are aware perhaps that some communities and Goobermints now regulate and in some cases outlaw rain collection systems. “
Am I the only one who sees the tyranny in the above statement. THAT is the reason we have the 2nd amendment in the US!
First of all the law makes no sense. Household water winds up back in the ground with less evaporation that rain water. Ah, the socialist brain at “work”.
MR166 post=1844 wrote: Ah, the socialist brain at “work”.
Actually no, this is the Capitalist brain at work. It comes as all things once in the Public Domain become Privatized for Profit. A Corporation buys all the rights to the Watershed and then sells the Water back to the people for a profit. The water falling on your roof is not “your” water, it belongs to somebody else. If you use it without paying them for it, you are stealing it.
Not only do they own the Water you need, they also own your Goobermint. Through regulatory capture, they get the laws written so that they can in fact legally prevent you from collecting rainwater. nothing you can do about it either, because you don’t have as much money as they do to buy the Politicians votes.
This my friend is end-stage Capitalism, otherwise known as Fascism. It comes when a wealthy and powerful plutocracy runs da Goobermint for Private profit. Its not socialism, which is quite different. In socialism, the water would be held by the state and distributed to the people for free, with the costs for the infrastructure distributed out over the population through taxation. It is very important to understand the difference between Fascism and Socialism. Its a very common error made these days by people who think Da Goobermint is “Socialist”. Its not, its Fascism, or end-stage Capitalism, whichever you prefer.
Absolutely, that is exactly what I am telling you. When a farmer harvests crops out of the earth, he is depleting the soil to do it. You can recycle waste through the soil to maintain fertility, but over millenia as long as you run itnensive agriculture you eventualy deplete the soil and or water table. The Middle East is the result of that.
That is not true as a blanket statement. It is possible to farm indefinitely, even a fairly inhospitable climate like the Peruvian Andes. Indonesia and much of China have been farming roughly as long as the middle east. Egypt of course had the annual Nile flood, but thems the breaks.
Iceland turns out to be a perfect example. The first settlers tried to farm the same way they did in Norway (Another 2500 year success story) and turned much of island into desert in a couple of generations. At that point the Icelanders said the Old Norse equivalent of “Oh Sh*t”, and the Althing passed some fairly draconian laws, which have prevented further problems for 1000 years now.
They did the same thing with their fisheries in the 20th Century. Remember the Cod War with Britain? There’s currently a political fight in Iceland about the fishing boat captains privatizing too much public wealth. I think even Ash and Ilargi would agree that that is a much better problem to have than not having the wealth at all.
So RE you actually think that a person owns the rain that falls on his roof?
You could be a closet conservative.
RE as I thought about your last post more and more something really interesting crossed my mind.
It seems that we both think that a person has the right to collect rain water from his roof. I, as a conservative, think that my rights to collect rain water is guaranteed by the US constitution and that the liberals want to take that right away from me for the common good. You, on the other hand, as a liberal ( I assume) think that you also have the rights to collect the rainwater from your roof and that I, as a conservative want to take those rights away from you for the benefit of some corporation.
Really, we are both on the same side and being screwed by a third party without even knowing it.
MR166 post=1848 wrote: So RE you actually think that a person owns the rain that falls on his roof?
No I do not think so, for a couple of reasons.
First off, rain is part of the Commons, the resources of the Earth that God bequests to all his children. I don’t think any person or corporation can claim ownership over that which all need for survival.
Second, I don’t believe in the ownership of private property beyond that which you can carry with you. Since a roof is generally speaking too big for you to carry, you can’t claim all that rainwater as yours. You could however claim all the rainwater that fell on your Tent as yours, since you can carry your tent with you. I will add that you can have the help of your Dogs insofar as what you can carry with you (or horses or oxen if you are in a different climate)
Insofar as giving me a label, it’s best described as Neo-primitive Darwinist. I don’t fit very neatly into Conservative-Liberal pidgeon holes.
david icke is really inspirational in this interview. alex jones is great, too, other than his accusing the TSA of pedophilia:
MR166 post=1851 wrote: Thanks RE, That explains a lot.
No doubt 🙂
In the spin down I project, Liberal and Conservative aren’t very useful distinctions. Nor do I think Private Property will last very long.
Reverse Engineer post=1856 wrote:
In the spin down I project, Liberal and Conservative aren’t very useful distinctions. Nor do I think Private Property will last very long.
I’d like to clarify my position on this one some.
While I do not think the Liberal/Conservative divide or the Dem/Rep ones are very meaningful distinctions in the long term, clearly they make a difference in the near term insofar as how the vast majority of the population is “lining up” here. The problem of course is that neither group really understands the problem and both groups tend to revert to ideological concepts that aren’t real valid.
The Conservative wants to perpetuate Private Property ownership, but of course by doing so he legitimizes the concept that a Corporation can Own all the Water in a given area. Or the Oil, or the Food extracted from the land, whatever. This is what Standard Oil does, or Monsanto, or in fact an individual does if he ties up all the resources available on “his” land.
The Liberal wants to put all the reources into the Public trust, but lacks the means to make an equitable distribution of scarce resources. He also has a real legal problem which comes from centuries of the Commons being tied up under Property law codified in English Common Law.
Neither side can really “win” here in a situation of massive Population Overshoot. What you will get are slightly different types of scenarios which both end up in failure. Followed to its logical conclusion, the Conservative ideology ends in Fascism and the Liberal ideology ends in Communism. Both of course are forms of Totalitarianism just with a slightly different result in who tends to be sent to the Great Beyond. In Communist redistributions of wealth, many private property owners get sent to the Great Beyond (see Mao). In Fascist redistributions of wealth, many impoverished people are sent to the Great Beyond (see Adolf).
So generally speaking, anybody who has some property tends to line up with the Fascists, in the hope that by doing so he gets to keep his property, at the expense of course of all the non-property holders sent to the Great Beyond.
Similarly, anyone with little or no property lines up with the Communists, in the hope that by doing so he will get a piece of the pie redistributed when the Property holders are sent to the Great Beyond.
Conservatives all tend to be people who have in some sense been “succesful” in the paradigm of Ownership and Wealth collection; Liberals all tend to be people who have been in some way shut out or disenfranchised in this process. There are of course lots of exceptions to these general rules of thumb, but on a statistical basis that is how it plays out.
In both cases though, as long as the large structure of the Nation State holds together, you will end up with Totalitarianism and a whole lot of Dead People of course. Which of course is inevitable in a world of Population Overshoot also. You are likely to see both of these solutions undertaken in different places epending on a whole lot of differing variables for a given location. Here in the FSofA, the Fascist Solution seems most likely, in Venezuela a Communist soluton seems more likely.
Eventually of course, both solutions will fail, because they cannot sustain themselves, they self-destruct over time. You have to work your way down to smaller tribal sizes of Goobermint ebfore you can get enough equity and enough repsonsiveness in Da Goobermint for it to be sustainable.
So, that is why I am a Neo-primitive Darwinist. I’m just working ahead of the overall game here, leapfrogging the whole Conservative-Liberal, Fascist-Communist dichotomies. The problem of course is that while I can leapfrog this on an intellectual basis, I cannot avoid the fact that in the near term my local Goobermint will take on either Fascist or Communist ideology. Because of that, I just try to stay as far away from the whole mess as I reasonably can, in one of the lowest population zones on the face of the Earth. I don’t know whether it will end up Fascist here or Communist (though I expect the former more) but in neither case is it a very good solution and won’t be pleasant to live under.
In both cases though, as long as the large structure of the Nation State holds together, you will end up with Totalitarianism and a whole lot of Dead People of course. Which of course is inevitable in a world of Population Overshoot also. You are likely to see both of these solutions undertaken in different places depending on a whole lot of differing variables for a given location.
Interesting observation.
In historical context, both system have come about from other systems which lasted longer, (1,000 years) than our present economic/financial/social system.
Those previous systems were also riddled with greedy people and the system had to harness those people so that those systems could have lasted as long as they did.
I don’t know whether it will end up Fascist here or Communist (though I expect the former more) but in neither case is it a very good solution and won’t be pleasant to live under.
I would like to think that the “bad” people are not always one step ahead of the “law” and that some kind of a modern system will come out of the ashes that will make it possible for those surviving the bottleneck restructurization, to have a wholesome lifestyle.
As an after though.
There are social systems that have lasted millions of years.
Look to nature.
Bees, ants, birds, sharks etc.
What kind of blend will the human specie develop that will be sustainable ?
jal post=1863 wrote: Interesting observation.
In historical context, both system have come about from other systems which lasted longer, (1,000 years) than our present economic/financial/social system.
The evolution of Goobermint isn’t all that complex. It basically evolved up from Tribal level into Monarchies and Oligarchies and then pasted Parliamentarianism on top of that.
However, what we are talking about here isn’t so much Goobermint as it is Economics. The reason Tribal and then Monachies lasted so long was mainly because we weren’t stressing the environment so much. We were essentially inside a world of great surplus, so that economics which externalizes the waste costs sorta worked.
Far as models go in the animal kingdom, they tend to be pretty hierarchical overall, at least for the ones that work in larger groups. Again though, its not so much the political organization as the distribution of scarce resources you have to deal with. Animals don’t really deal with that problem, they just die off. People seem to get all bent out of shape over this problem though. Everybody figures it is the OTHER guy that should go to the Great Beyond. Rich people fiigure its all the Poor people; and Poor people figure its all the Rich people.
Far as models go in the animal kingdom, they tend to be pretty hierarchical overall, at least for the ones that work in larger groups. Again though, its not so much the political organization as the distribution of scarce resources you have to deal with. Animals don’t really deal with that problem, they just die off. People seem to get all bent out of shape over this problem though. Everybody figures it is the OTHER guy that should go to the Great Beyond. Rich people fiigure its all the Poor people; and Poor people figure its all the Rich people.
Are humans smarter than other species?
(Bees, ants, birds, sharks etc.)
There are social systems that have lasted millions of years.
Surely, we should be able to build a sustainable society.
jal post=1867 wrote:
Are humans smarter than other species?(Bees, ants, birds, sharks etc.)
There are social systems that have lasted millions of years.
Surely, we should be able to build a sustainable society.
By most definitions of the word, sure Homo Sapiens is smarter. However, being smart might be counterproductive to running a sustainable social system. Perhaps only stupid creatures can run sustainable social systems for millions of years.
According to the CIA fact page for Spain, the economy breaks down as 4% agriculture, 24% industry, and 71% services as a function of labor force participation. Again, referencing the CIA web site, the USA is less than 1% of the labor force in Agriculture.
It seems to me that this is a big inefficiency for them. Agriculture is important there, but not near as big as in the USA, yet they have 4% of the work force employed?
This is probably one of those banana republics that should never have joined the Euro zone in the first place. The best way to see the mindset of the Spanish people is to read about the legal fights every time an old Spanish ship from the colonial period is found by a salvage operator. The salvage guys claims the loot, based on international law. The Spanish claim the loot (often gold and silver coins) based on national heritage. But they never mention that the gold and silver was stolen from native Americans, during the process of committing genocide.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that every last wrong must be atoned for, but you gotta at least make a token effort. Especially since you [Spain] are about to be on the receiving end.
For the last 30 years, growth was being generated by borrowing.
The borrowed money did not exist. It was created, (heheh, God Work)Can borrowing, (creation of money), continue without paying back the lender with interest?
Who or what organization is capable to continue lending without getting their loans paid back?
How long can loans be given out with only a token cash flow coming back to the lenders?
At some point in time, there has to be loan forgiveness and a rebalancing of the books. (There has to be a recognition that bankers are false gods)
The participants of all this fraudulent accounting are well aware of what is happening and must continue the pretend game.
There is no other game in town.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.