05-21-2016, 06:23 AM
(05-16-2016, 12:40 PM)Galen Wrote:(05-16-2016, 08:45 AM)Anthony Wrote: And the demand for order is rising? It's plummeting - at least in the 1980s the right wasn't clamoring for abolishing the IRS altogether - which would mean at least a national sales tax, and maybe even a per-person head tax. They were content with a 28% top tax rate; even the "populist" Donald Trump would make it 25%.
Actually, it is the ability and confidence in the state to deliver order that is in question. In the twenties the US was a creditor nation but now it is the largest debtor. The ability of the Federal Government to tax and borrow are at or close to their maximum levels. That leaves printing, despite the protests of economic illiterates, which can only take you so far. When the dollar is no longer reserve currency of the world the US will have no choice but to scale back its spending.
Your money, unless it is super-dollars printed in North Korea or other questionable sources, is government debt. So long as the printing of debt does not exceed productivity, there is no inflation. Of course the printing of money can only go so far; just look at Venezuela. Venezuela should be the third-richest country by GDP per capita in the Americas, but the country is a mess with a breakdown of social order. The oil wealth is going to kleptocrats.
Quote:This is probably part of a much longer term trend. See the works of James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg for a better explanation. They were about twenty years ahead of events when they wrote The Great Reckoning.[/quote]
Yeah, sure. For the last fifty years or more the American economy has been on the brink of collapse unless it returned to the Gold Standard and the economic norms of the 1920s or earlier. How has that prophecy worked?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.