[gsc] US too delusional to fix

[info]

> 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/