Politics as usual

Why arguing over it doesn't have much of a point anymore. [Link]

Insolvency is no longer a sporadic problem, it’s become pervasive at all levels of government everywhere. This is why the recent brouhaha in Wisconsin was so surreal. The public-employee unions weren’t just rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic, they were fighting to preserve their right to bore more holes in the hull.

When these are the objective conditions, what point is there in arguing that the whole system is corrupt and that middle-class entitlements have to go on the scrap-heap along with every other big-government program? It’s going to happen anyway soon enough. A year ago the U.S. government was only taking in a third of what it needed to cover annual outlays; today it’s so much worse that individual monthly deficits are larger than the entire Bush administration’s. The money’s all gone. Our options are closing down to default or hyperinflation.

It’s going to get ugly out there. A lot of old people are either not going to get their pensions and Social Security at all or get them in hyperinflated dollars that won’t be worth anything. Anyone else dependent on government transfer payments will be similarly screwed. Urban poor, farmers, veterans, the list goes on. Imagine the backlash when that really hits – when it sinks in that the promises were lies, the bubble has popped, the Ponzi scheme is over.

And if you’re prone to schadenfreude, you’ll at least have this consolation: at least here in the U.S. we have favorable demographics with a productive age cohort that will keep rising until 2050. Elsewhere, notably in Europe and Japan, the crash will be far, far worse.

There’s a not a lot of point in arguing about the aftermath, either. Whatever survives the worldwide crash in government finances is going to look like austere, minimalist night-watchman states simply because they will no longer be able to borrow the money to spend at anywhere near today’s levels.

Reality is about to smash the dreams of the world’s collectivists like the hammer of an angry god. They won’t even have the right categories to think about a world in which government is not defined and legitimized by its ability to hand out goodies and entitlements like so much addictive candy.

So…Argue about politics? Not me, not much. What would the point be, anymore?

And from a comment there: [Link]

“When I screw my eyes shut real tight, I can almost see a US future more aligned with the anti-federalist “articles of confederation” view.”

I said as much almost a year ago. We are headed toward a decentralized model.

The things Eric are talking about are not only going to happen, they will be codified – enshrined into our Constitution with serious override ratios.

“I subscribe to the narrative that Wisconsin’s union-stripping measures are primarily a Republican-party power grab, secondarily an attack on democracy, and perhaps in some tertiary sense a boat repair.”

The union-Democrat nexus is fundamentally corrupt, undermines democracy and creates vassals insane with entitlement. You can call this a Republican power grab and an attack on democracy, but considering that Democrats have squeezed as much power as they could have out of this corrupt bargain, it is hardly a stinging blow.

In fact, “this is what democracy looks like.”