Signs of a Dying Empire

[pbrower2a]

(10-14-2017, 07:44 PM)Galen Wrote:

(10-09-2017, 06:10 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-07-2017, 09:02 PM)Galen Wrote: At this point even the normal financial press is starting to realize what the dollar losing reserve currency status means for the US.  The unipolar world that started with the collapse of the Soviet Union is coming to a close as the US empire fades.

Basic needs get meet first, let there be a revolution. I have been re-reading Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century in which (among much else) Piketty discusses much -- including the economic conditions in France on the eve of the 1789 Revolution. Land rents were a gigantic share of the economy, and when the social order broke down the land rents that had been easy money for an aristocratic elite were no longer sustainable.

Piketty is an idiot socialist without a clue.  If the crony capitalism caused by the feds usurping power the Constitution does not end then things will get very ugly.  The Dims won't do it but the R's might if it allows them to survive.  The (Democrats -- insult redacted) seem to be pretty self-destructive these days.

Nothing says that an intellectual can't be terribly wrong. There is no question that Lev Trotsky, Josef Goebbels, and Ted "Unabom" Kaczynski were brilliant people. Intellectual power behind the person making the argument is not proof of the validity of what someone says. Furthermore, someone discussing topics outside of his area of expertise (I would never dispute Noam Chomsky on linguistics, but he is fair game on politics) is not an authority.

Economics is full of value judgments. If slavery were still in existence there would be economists developing sophisticated arguments to establish how essential it is to the prosperity of the rest of humanity. As it is, economists fit every position in the political spectrum except Nazism and Ku Kluxism.

Piketty is a socialist. He is not an "idiot" socialist as you might believe as a redundancy. If anything it seems to be Republicans who have made unambiguous steps toward tyranny, this time of a neo-feudal character in which 95% of the people are obliged to suffer for the untrammeled indulgence of 2% of the people. If the elites are more diverse than the rural landlords who formed the economic elite of pre-industrial, ancien regime France (we have big corporate farms squeezing out the old yeoman farmer that once defined rural America, capitalists and financiers, big urban landlords like Donald Trump, sell-out intellectuals such as lobbyists and corporate attorneys, administrative elites, and organized crime) we are getting severe inequality that can bring great suffering -- especially if the elites choose to damn everyone else to poverty. 

Maybe I am reading things into Piketty that he would not endorse. I am not convi9nced that economic elites are better than the rest of us. They can simply get away with much more.

But let us not forget -- Donald Trump has intensified the crony capitalism that has entered on little cat feet and now charges like a tiger with Donald Trump as President. Donald Trump is no reformer; he is the most corrupt pol that we have ever endured.  We may be headed for revolutionary changes, whether as the result of a proletarian revolution or the sorts of reforms that foreigners like Clay in Germany or MacArthur in Japan impose upon a nation in defeat after going very bad and trying to impose their evil on others. We could also have a depression of the sort that we had in the 1930s, and that makes the economic elites irrelevant and unsustainable and make America much more humane and humanistic.