is shedding some cars and banks really the decline?

These are symptoms. They are symptoms of the grab for power by vested economic and political interests, and to hell with everyone else.

Was it ever a incline to begin with?

Yes, very clearly. You are perhaps a little young to remember a time when every year, planes went higher and faster, more things were available to more people, the per capita income kept rising, new records were set in nearly every area of human activity, all the time. If you didn't live before 1969, you missed the peak. In Western Civilisation, people used to travel faster than the speed of sound. They don't any longer. People used to visit the Moon. They don't any longer. Private passenger rail service used to be available. It is not any longer. People used to have a reasonable expectation of a future with more inventions, brighter, faster, niftier vehicles. But, of course, the intention of the socialists has always been to prevent that future, to license all activities, to regulate all conduct, to prevent innovation, to destroy entrepreneurship, to have boots smashing human faces, forever. So, naturally, we don't have those things to anticipate. The inventors have invented, but they cannot make any money because they aren't allowed to sell their products. The Moller air car cannot be flown except as an experimental aircraft. The ducted fan personal aircraft can't be flown except as an experimental aircraft. Richard Branson couldn't enter the USA to look at the designs for his new spaceship because he's a foreign national. The civilisation that Raven refers to has peaked. It peaked about 40 years go. It cannot advance because too many people are trying to live with other people's money. The burden of government is too great. The idiocy of self-important central planners is in the way of any and every accomplishment. The way to solve this problem has traditionally been for the thin veneer of civil behavior to wear off, and people go out and slaughter the scum who have been causing them grief and aggravation. When every city has every lamp post and city building decorated with the eviscerated bodies of the filth who think they govern us without our consent, then a new culture can arise to replace the old. In some ways, the alternatives already exist. The old culture developed a robust inter-connected network or reticulum of networked computer systems. About the same time that the peak accomplishments of the old culture were impressing the masses, people began to develop open source cryptography. The old system almost certainly cannot last indefinitely. The problem with solving problems with other people's money is, as Maggie Thatcher noted, eventually you run out. At a guess, that was Maggie quoting Hayek. Sensible fuck. About 1969, DARPA funded the first mil-net which was adapted to commercial use in 1973 as Compuserve. In 1976, Hayek conceived of free market money, denationalisation of currency. About that time, open source crypto became the standard approach, and within a few years we had RSA and other standards. I suspect that the arrival of technologies like encryption and bitTorrent and peer to peer networks and digital bearer instruments and Loom are the harbingers of doom to the old civilisation. A new culture based on open source and consent is replacing the old culture of compulsion and limited competition. These transitions can be tricky. And, in general, those who have made their lives out of forcing other people to pay taxes and serve in the military against their will and obey endless mindless regulations don't deserve any respect, not even for their worthless lives. Isaac Asimov wrote about that same time that an empire which is allowed to last too many generations brings on a worse dark age when it collapses. Its collapse is inevitable. The only question is how long the authoritarian regime will survive before it collapses. And the consequence of that question is that the longer it lasts, the slower will be the recovery. The more knowledge will be lost in the transition. And the more despair people will have before they get on with setting up a new way of doing things. Regards, Jim http://bostontea.us/