Amerika

As civilizations age, they raise marginal costs by addressing specific problems and special interest groups, removing focus from what they do well as a core activity. We see this same pattern in corporations, volunteer groups, rock bands, social cliques, and families.

The West did one thing well: spurred on by a type of transcendental realism, it aspired to quality through order. Instead of focusing on details, it looked at the big picture and assessed quality instead of merely quantity, allowing it to produce highly effective institutions.

This began with a focus on quality in breeding through the system of manorial feudalism. A gentle social hierarchy of this type raises up those of exceptional ability, removes those who are defective, and nurtures everyone in the middle with good examples but does not subsidize their failings.

Was this a hard world? Maybe, but people today tell me that we have a hard world now, too, so it seems most likely that life is always hard for humanity and there is no Utopia, only a choice between dystopia and a system that works out reasonably well for its good people and drives away the bad.

Since the middle class revolt that began a millennium ago, the West has been steadily abandoning the practices that made it great, and in the process has lost any sense of goal. Prosperity doomed us, we grew too fast, and people stopped fighting the decay so that they could focus on individual desires.

Under the middle class rule, in the name of making everyone happy, we have removed focus from our core compentency and goal and transferred it to the marginal costs. In this way, equality, unions, taxation, and corruption work in a parallel model: they flatten the curve and achieve equality mediocrity.

Witness a country moving into third world status in the case of South Africa and the crippling effects of corruption on not just an economy but the social structure of a country:

A significant driving force, which resulted in this blurring of the line, is the ANC’s determined pursuit of cadre deployment.

Cadre deployment is the process of inserting party loyalists into every component and corner of the government and public service apparatus. Apart from being a way of handing out tickets for the government’s gravy train to loyal supporters, family and friends, cadre deployment primarily serves the purpose of rendering the government leviathan under the ruling party’s increasingly all-encompassing control.

James Myburgh, editor of Politicsweb, observed: “The point about corruption in South Africa is not that it is and was condoned, but that it is compulsory. You can’t legally do business with the state or state-owned enterprises without essentially cutting in some or other ANC faction.” This state of kleptocracy, where corruption has become the norm and therefore something many businesses budget for, is a characteristic of South Africanisation that flows naturally from the first aspect, cadre deployment.

Corruption works like an VAT: at every level of the process, the mordida or bakshish subtracts a third of the value of whatever is being made or done. The guys cutting the trees, the firm milling the lumber, the construction team, local government, and the painters all take their cut.

This raises costs and lowers quality. The cost is calculated at the top, sort of like it is in command economies like in the Soviet Union, and cannot take into account all the layers of corruption deductions beneath it. Therefore, corners are cut.

Even more, people are demoralized. Why work actually hard — efficient, aggressive, quality-oriented — when anything you do will simply be consumed by the corruption anyway? No one has faith in a society ruled by corruption, so everyone does the minimum and hopes to get paid to come back and fix it.

These societies eat themselves by destroying all wealth except truly massive amounts. This means that the people who need to be investing in instrastructure and having a dozen kids cannot afford to do so, meaning that corners are cut there and the cost passed on to future generations.

Even more, the relatively small slice of the population who know how to spend money so that it generates more money have less money. Instead, it goes into the pockets of criminals and everyday people who fritter it away on luxuries.

The eternal symbol of the third world, after all, is the favela tenement with a brand new sixty-five inch television, sort of like how in America we frequently see hovels and trailers with brand-new fancy cars or pickup trucks behind them.

The first world has wasted its money on paying for waste humans. Leaving race aside for a minute, we have accumulated low-IQ laborers who tend toward corruption and are absorbing massive amounts of government aid, causing taxes to rise and driving the middle classes into relative poverty.

The more one taxes, the more the costs act just like those corruption payments of a third. The tree-cutters pay tax on the trees they sell, the lumber mill is taxed on its lumber, the construction crew pay tax, and the painters are hit with taxes and fees, on top of everyone paying sales tax, property tax, income tax, and whatever registrations and regulatory compliance costs they must pay.

Of all the statements made here, the most controversial is this: those costs are passed on to the consumers, every time. Just as corruption increases the costs and lowers the quality of the final product, the taxes do the same thing.

This creates consumerism, or a need for professional corner-cutters. Make it out of plastic and stamped metal, and if it lasts for a few years, that counts as a good product. You can still get an actually decent product but it will cost a great deal more.

For example, consider the Kitchen Aid mixer that Costco is now selling for $300. Fifty years ago, all mixers were like this: metal construction, heavy and solid, with a strong motor. Now the motor is the minimum size and burns out quickly and the construction is plastic on the average.

Add in other costs as well like unions and burdensome regulations, and soon you will see why products now are either stamped MADE IN CHINA or are “assembled” in the US from parts from abroad. Our marginal costs destroyed our products and made them inferior.

Was planned obsolescence a factor? Probably less than people think. Planned obsolescence, or designing of products to fail after a certain time so that they must be replaced, only rewards those in monopolies. Everyone else suffers because the customers buy a product from a different company.

Consequently our only business model in the West seems to involve taking raw materials from the third world, making them into cheap products, and then selling those for high markup in order to push back against the high marginal costs of taxes and corruption.

We are even selling to the third world much as we sell to low-IQ poor people here because only they are numerous enough to make a profit fat enough to escape the tax trap:

Many companies that are increasing their commitments to China are consumer-facing. They still view China’s enormous market as a promising long-term bet, even if sales took a hit during the zero-Covid era.

“I remain more confident than ever that we are still only in the early chapters of our growth story in China,” said Howard Schultz, Starbucks’s interim chief executive and longtime leader, earlier this month. The company plans to open 3,000 new stores by 2025, even though same-store sales in the country fell 42% in December and 15% in January from a year earlier. Mr. Schultz said he is planning his first visit to the country in years in the spring.

Economists forecast a pickup in growth in China, while fears linger about an economic downturn in Western countries. Last month, Goldman Sachs upgraded its growth forecast for the country this year to 5.5% from an earlier target of 5.2%. Key gauges of consumer activity in January showed significant improvement.

When the taxes and corruption eat away at your profits and your shareholders have the power to destroy you with a mass sell-off of stock, you keep profits high by cutting corners and selling cheap, disposable products on the basis of novelty achieved through advertising and entertainment.

This is the new economy that America adopted after the income taxes really kicked in during the early 1930s. No one could make an honest living anymore because, in parallel to the third world, governments in the first world were taking their one-third cut at every level, adding up to more than half the cost.

In that environment, the only products that succeed are cheap to make and sold at huge markups. The old American vision was to make the best gadget; the new is to make another Coca-Cola, so you can add flavors to water and sell it for a 400% markup, driven by a media blitz and celebrity endorsements.

As taxes in the first world rise, the need for profit expands, so first world companies make money by selling inferior products to the third world:

Speaking at the Organisation of African, Caribbean, and Pacific (OACP) parliamentary conference in Brussels, Belgium, yesterday, Mr Tayebwa condemned the EU member states’ practice of exporting EU-banned pesticides and other products to developing countries, and asked OACP member states to strongly stand as a team against this double-standard arrangement, which he said makes African countries vulnerable.

He added: “We are telling the EU to be transparent, we are all human beings. We all have red blood. The milk that kills a European, can kill an African. The pesticides that can cause cancer to Europeans, can cause cancer to the Caribbeans. Why are you allowing dangerous products to be manufactured in your union and be exported to other countries? Stop it.”

Mr Tayebwa said: “It’s unfair for anyone to allow a cancer-causing product to be manufactured as long as it’s for export to other countries.”

We see here two different out-of-control systems that use the same ideal, namely the Third World System perfected by the Asiatics in Mongolia: warlords rule, give out favors in exchange for loyalty, and therefore the system “works” in perpetuity rather than taking on actual risk of instability.

The Third World System took over after the French Revolution because that event announced to all leaders that from that point forward they had to manage the risk of revolution as well as other threats to the survival of each society.

To manage revolution, you buy off your citizens just enough that they cannot gain enough popular support to rebel against the state, and you demonize all opposing ideas just enough that no one ever really figures out what they are.

This forces the state into a liberal mode of thought, since if you are redistributing wealth to buy off your citizens, you have left behind the Realism of the Right and have moved into the humanistic central command structures of Leftism, since Leftism is powered by egalitarianism which requires strong power.

In the immediate moment, this system addresses the problem of revolution, but as often happens when decisions are made from negative impetus — in order to avoid problems, as opposed to positive impetus which designs competing systems to the cause of those problems — new problems arise.

That is, the Third World System (democracy, pluralism, individualism, collective reward, egalitarianism) tends to make its people go insane at the same time they become wholly dependent on external authority. You start with a few dependents, and end up with mostly dependents.

All systems which rely on satisfying people instead of objectives are this way: jobs, unions, votes, committees, socialism, and communism. They all go out the same way, although some die more slowly than others, which is that at some point they raise costs of doing anything to a paralytic level.

Once that point is reached, the system itself becomes a cash cow: everyone wants to extract as much wealth as they can in order to get out because they believe (with cause) that it is moribund and, because it has limited what it is willing to do, will never escape its death spiral.

In the West, by adopting the Third World System of means-over-ends thinking, in which the warlords deny certain methods entirely because they will lead to mental states incompatible with warlord rule, we have limited ourselves from using any of the methods that will save us.

We cannot cut entitlements, therefore the taxation must continue. We have human rights, therefore the diversity must continue. Our voters are insane, therefore we need experts. There is risk of revolution, therefore we must distract and buy off the proles constantly.

There is no future in this but its overlords who have graduated with MA and JD degrees are clever, clever people who have found a way to keep the boat afloat until their retirement. Enter “globalism,” the system in which the first world takes from the third world and then sells marked-up products.

Consider the blood teak dilemma:

One of the most expensive woods on the market, teak is predominantly found in the dense jungles of Myanmar. Growing slowly over decades, it is durable and has a uniform golden brown color that makes it highly desirable, particularly for high-end furniture and luxury yachts. Just one square meter (ca. 10.7 square feet) of teak decking can cost up to €1,000 ($1,066).

But the pricetag has done little to slow its popularity. Demand from the €8.5 billion yacht industryis fuelling teak logging in the forests of Myanmar. According to the United Nations, the southeast Asian country’s forests are already facing devastation, with almost 15 million hectares lost between 1990 and 2015 — more than the entire forests of Germany.

Much of the timber — often dubbed “blood teak,” as it funds the brutal military junta that has killed nearly 3,000 people since a February 2021 coup — is exported illegally. Such are the findings of Deforestation Inc., an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and various media outlets, including DW.

As usual, the journalist cherry-picks and lies. Teak can cost up to a certain price per square meter, but most of it does not cost that, and goes to the boats and condominium furniture not of billionaires but the middle classes. You can still buy teak benches on Amazon and at your local furniture shack.

The best teak will go for a high price and end up on luxury yachts, sure, but that is a tiny portion of the teak that is farmed. How many billionaire yachts are there, versus the many millions of $250 teak shower benches sold to the regular middle classes?

Globalism means worldwide democracy, which means that the proles get to vote for free stuff from the warlords but the warlords are able to continue plundering the jungles, oil fields, prairies, and oceans for material that makes them money so as careerists, they can get rich at their jobs and get out.

They have no motivation other than advancing themselves, and no reason to consider anything else, since this system was forced on them as much as it is on you. They are reacting defensively and criminally to an unstable and unworkable system.

To them, the corruption tax required to fund wealth redistribution entitlements is a given because this is how they avoid revolutions. When proles revolt, they ensure that future generations will pay for their corruption with further corruption. You enslaved yourselves, fools.

Now the proles are slowly awakening to the fact that the entitlements state means that the one-third of everything taken at every level means that we are all equally poor, and very few people actually escape the worker’s paradise since they are forever paying off those taxes and for items with prices raised by those taxes:

Maryann O’Connor is juggling two jobs, sometimes working up to 11 hours per day, not what she expected to be doing at age 66.

Millions of Americans nearing their golden years are still financially unprepared for retirement. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 50% of women and 47% of men between the ages of 55 and 66 have no retirement savings.

O’Connor, who adopted and raised three children as a single mother, said she knew she would be in that group.

Add to this the problem of inflation, which is caused because wealth redistribution devalues currency and makes the speed of transactions more important than enduring wealth, and you get a situation where prices constantly go up and the warlord favors never quite pay for it all.

People exist in a state of permanent control under this system, which like in the third world, evolves organically from a loss of actual leadership and enough intelligent people to counterbalance the raving, short term memory, self-pitying, and esurient attack of the proles.

If you want to know how things got so bad, realize that the frog boiled slowly because We The People did this to ourselves. By overthrowing kings, we let the criminals in, and those criminals have since been stealing for themselves while keeping our proles bought off so the farce can continue.

In this way, corruption and taxation are essentially the same animal with two different names, and the first world slowly becomes the third world, which now that we are globalized means a uniform humanity of low average IQ with no future except stealing from and selling garbage to each other.

Tags: bakshish, china, corruption, graft, marginal costs, mordida, taxation, third world system