Amerika

The West finds itself at a terminal impasse on several linked issues. If we do not raise retirement ages, we cannot afford entitlements; if entitlements go, so does the plan to replace us with enough foreign labor to keep the tax system going, although without entitlements it would be solvent.

Even more, it has become clear that globalism has failed. Countries are broke, their citizens are not reproducing enough starting with the smartest, faith in government has plummeted, and we are all caught in a cycle of having persistent problems that our solutions do not fix but refusing to change course.

This means that the process of deglobalization has accelerated, partly originating from the verbiage of populists such as Donald Trump who wanted separation from China and dependency on global trade:

Current geopolitical changes — the war in Ukraine, effects of the pandemic, and greenhouse gas emission targets — revived discussions about the value of globalization. However, international trade of goods and services has been slowing down significantly since 2011, with increasing nationalism being a factor. Additionally, lower salary differentials between developed and emerging economies have reduced overseas product shipments—which are increasingly criticized regarding environmental impact

“Digitization and the volatile dynamics of doing business globally have led technology-based industries to review their overall strategies,” says Schmitz. “In the face of deglobalization, an option is to establish additional headquarters in key economic regions, allowing companies to gain more independence from geopolitical upheavals, faster decision-making processes in respective regions, and greater market proximity and customer orientation.”

First world nations have been in an entitlements loop for almost a century. In order to keep growth alive, they must tax their citizens highly and hand out lots of money, which requires ongoing “wars on…” persistent problems that never get solved, like drugs, terrorism, and pollution.

If they lower taxes, the government structure collapses and the entitlements are in danger; on the other hand, if they raise taxes, they squeeze more money out of a small group, namely the fifth of each society who comprise the upper middle class and pay most of its taxes.

Like a forever war, this situation offers no good exit option. To reject entitlements is to reject equality itself, overthrowing the French Revolution, American Civil War, and Second World War. To keep entitlements is to keep stumbling drunkenly toward bankruptcy and collapse.

Globalism was their last shot. They wanted to create a world market in order to sell more stuff to the third world while taking third world resources, but in the process, simply created enemies in the form of the BRICs and every third world nation that noticed it got pennies on the dollar.

History will record globalism as simply the continuation of colonialism. Europeans left Europe in order to conquer the world so that no more surprises like Huns, Mongols, Turks, and Barbary Pirates would hit Europe without warning, but ended up needing the cash to pay for internal wars.

Now that we have put the internal wars behind us “in theory,” countries suppress the risk of revolutions by buying loyalty from their citizens in the third world style, but this takes up three-quarters of the budgets or more. Entitlements are socialism mixed in with capitalism.

In order to keep revolution risk low, modern nation-states dedicated themselves to equality in order to justify these expenditures. However, equality like a virus quickly takes over everything because government can rationalize its spending using equality as an aegis.

(Side note: ignore the conservatives who distinguish between “equity” and “equality.” They are the same beast because equality can only be shown to have been achieved by equity.)

Starting with the French Revolution, accelerating with the American Civil War, and exploding into full form in WW2, the equality virus creates a narrative that we alone are good because we stand for freedom and civil rights, therefore we are entitled to take whatever we want.

The idea goes that since we bring freedom, and conduct trade in freedom, globalism has clean hands because the impoverished third world is willingly selling us its labor and raw materials for pennies on the dollar. We are the good guys, but we can still take whatever we want.

Reversing this situation requires the kind of leadership that democracy can never have, since our standard of life is kept afloat by this worldwide theft. Instead we double down on the policy of civil rights that divides us against ourselves:

Parties appeared to be highly aligned (meaning they were internally consistent and distinct from one another) in the 1950s and ’60s, and again after 2000. The new model found elections were highly predictable across both periods, though political surprises occurred more frequently than the standard model would suggest.

However, the 1950s and ’60s differ from today in one key respect. “In the early period, the parties were aligned, but they weren’t very polarized,” King explained. “Both parties would shoot to capture voters in the middle. Today the parties are still highly aligned. They just happen to be polarized and so highly partisan. They’re not shooting for the median voter; they’re appealing to their extreme supporters.”

What happened in the period in between? The earlier alignment lost much of its value in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, the paper explained, perhaps due to factors including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and younger voters’ opposition to the policies of both parties in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, elections grew more uncertain during this era.

If you query any Leftist today, you will find that their rhetoric centers around civil rights, including diversity, as well as the entitlements that this justifies. They want equality, and the path to Utopia in their minds leads through equality to multiculturalism to a quasi-socialist state.

Lucky for them, they got everything they wanted, which is why they have an obsessive search for new victim groups to “raise up,” whether those be transsexuals or pedosexuals at this point, with the obese and insane up next for their turn in the golden light of the shining city upon a hill.

Most likely, the shift to egalitarian ideals follows the rise of planet-consuming cities, at which point people rely on government and commerce instead of nature, both of which reward socially-pleasant notions rather than realistic ones:

We might only be in the early stages of the 21st century, but the urban-rural balance of the world has already tipped towards cities. By 2050, the UN’s Population Division predicts that over two-thirds (68%) of the world’s population will be concentrated in urban centers. This represents a complete reversal of the rural-urban population distribution of just a century ago. And by 2100, this ratio could top 85%.

Since the publication in 1972 of The Limits to Growth, the landmark report led by American environmental scientist Donella Meadows, our understanding of the factors limiting urban demographic, economic and physical expansion has sharpened. Scientists term these planetary boundaries.

From a global justice perspective, it is not enough to acknowledge that we live at a time of unprecedented planetary urbanization. We must find ways to curb the predatorial tendencies that urbanization has of devouring the wider world.

In order to support the city population, people desire free stuff from government to keep the risk of revolution low plus relentless markets in order to provide opportunity, giving us the worst of both capitalism and socialism in one handy consumerist package.

If you query a Rightist, you will find an ideal like that of Old Europe or the Founding Fathers: everyone has an equal shot at the start, the best rise, and those who cannot get it together end up impoverished living next to the train tracks.

Civil rights, however, because of its inherent tie-in to entitlements, supports not only diversity but immigration. It needs a constant flow of new people to pay its taxes, and wants to expand the citizenry to include foreigners in order to be able to distribute more money and have supportive voters.

All of our problems today stem from our support of civil rights. If the manic urge for equality went away, natural selection would return and with it, greater competence. At that point we could actually solve problems, and this is the one thing that The Opposition fears.

Our division ends when we ask what our goal is. Not even our plan; a stated goal alone will suffice. There is no goal except a facilitative society that gives urban residents what they ask for, and this creates our terminal cycle of growth dependency.

The instant we state a goal however we will start to assess all that we do in terms of whether it addresses that goal or not. Modern civilization depends on chaos like globalism and civil rights to keep us from formulating any kind of goal.

Tags: deglobalization, entitlements, equality, equity, Globalism, socialism