Amerika

Businesses, like civilizations, go through cycles.

When they are new, the goal is clear and so are the actors, so the company consists of only those who are actually productive.

Over time, the goal shifts from the task that makes them money to the task of keeping the company unified and harmonious. It still makes money because having survived its early years, it finds itself as part of a stable business need which it addresses for profit.

After this goes on for awhile, the company bloats as it divides jobs into many tiny super-specialized roles so that it can replace people. The founders are gone, or at least less involved, having been replaced by MBAs, lawyers, HR reps, and other bureaucrats.

Now you have the corporation. It leverages its debt, has lots of shareholders, possesses several layers of management, and has made employees into interchangeable cogs who spend most of their time “doing the company” by going to meetings, answering emails, attending training, and other activities with low return on investment.

Corporations love regulations because corporations are unstable. The guys at the top are riding herd over a huge mass of people who are not really self-starters, but obedient procedure-followers. This means that there no gelling, no real unity, only a sense of following orders and acting toward incentive. Employees use the company to advance their own careers, ignoring its health and the impact on the consumers. Regulations cost money and keep competition at bay by making it too expensive to enter the market.

Eventually, however, someone gets past the gates, or as we see happening regularly, the technology matures. People will pay a thousand bucks for a smartphone when these are new gadgets, but fifteen years on, they want to spend fifty bucks on it and have it do basically everything. The technology has matured and the margins have narrowed; the gold rush is over, and simultaneously, the company has increased in size and, owing to its specialized roles, cannot downsize.

Thus, it starts milking its customers by raising prices while simultaneously cutting margins. We all know the tricks; the old widgets do not work with the “new” version of the gadget, the box size is smaller so you need to buy two, or you have to get a service plan to keep the thing running. The company has entered its final phase and, since anyone creatively-minded has been driven away years ago, now has no plan or ability to introduce new products which might keep it afloat.

Now consider the state of government. It is a Leftist creation arising from the equality-bureaucracy nexus, namely that once you get rid of social hierarchy, where aristocrats manage you on a first name basis, you end up with impersonal bureaucracies and their endless rules. It has steadily been raising taxes and delivering less performance. Where do you think it is on the business cycle?

People are ready to leave the mental ghetto of modernity where we see the only solutions as more taxes, red tape, and bureaucrats. We want an end to civil rights, which gives government an incentive to manage every part of our lives. We want natural selection where the good rise and the bad, well, good luck to you, as Trump would say. We want to focus on life again instead of ideology and money.

We are not going to get there through government. It has become weak and dependent, and now it cannot deliver any of what it promised a century ago, despite taking in more money that ever. In its quest for civil rights, it has demographically transformed once prosperous lands from having high-IQ populations to low-IQ ones. Clearly it is destroying civilization in order to keep itself afloat.

The fascinating thing about populism is that it has no real definition other than an organic movement against the elites. My thought is that the medium is the message here, and the message is that we want an organic society again because government has failed us and is in its own death throes draining us.

Tags: business cycle, civilization cycle, government, taxes