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“Radical solutions require radical solutions,” I wrote in my 2010 book, “The Anti-American Manifesto,” a polemic that calls upon us to save ourselves from imminent social, economic and political collapse by overthrowing the system and rebuilding society from the ground up. We currently face several radical problems. But we’re not likely to rise to the challenge, because the adherence of President Joe Biden’s administration to the Democratic Party’s cult of militant moderation ensures that its proposed solutions will mitigate these grave issues — at best — with zero chance of avoiding disaster.
There is a time and a place for tweaks and minor adjustments. You don’t amputate a leg to cure a sprained ankle. Extreme situations require going big; if your oncologist suggests removing half your tumor and then waiting to see how it goes, fire her.
Our planet has cancer. Exponentially growing and increasing temperatures have killed most of the world’s reefs and threaten widespread food shortages and thus political stability. Garbage, toxins and other pollution are clogging the oceans and poisoning the air. We can debate the specifics, but when studies predict the possible collapse of human civilization within 30 years and “a ghastly future of mass extinction,” environmental degradation has obviously become a radical problem.
Despite calling climate change “the number one issue facing humanity,” Joe Biden clearly doesn’t grasp the seriousness of the situation. His plan aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, the same year his plan calls for the elimination of fossil fuels. Grant him this: His plan is achievable. If human civilization vanishes, who in the hellscape will be left to burn fossil fuels?
Biden’s approach to the climate change crisis recalls my metaphorical oncologist, the one who counsels half-measures. Ban fracking on federal lands, though most oil and gas comes from elsewhere. Improve fuel economy standards, though Detroit is moving quickly to an all-electric car future anyway. Seal off leaking oil and gas wells. It’s good stuff. It moves in the right direction. But it’s like taking out half the tumor. Half of it is still inside you, multiplying.
You’re still going to die.
You could even argue that Biden is making things worse. Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief that former President Donald Trump, a science denialist who wants to mine coal even though energy companies do not, has been replaced by a president who acknowledges the issue. But Biden’s half-measures are no likelier to fix the problem of rising temperatures fueled by greenhouse gas emissions than Trump’s overt sabotage. Catastrophe is inevitable either way.
From geoengineering to synthetic trees that absorb carbon dioxide more efficiently to whitening the surface area of the earth to reflect the sun’s rays to actively promoting algae blooms, science offers a number of Hail Mary passes that might stave off environmental apocalypse. Many sound wacky. They might be counterproductive. But at least they’re radical. Which means that, unlike tweaking mpgs, they might work.
The COVID-19 pandemic reiterated what anyone who ever gets sick has long known: America’s health care system is hobbled by rapacious for-profit insurance companies. I have a silver plan (Anthem BlueCross BlueShield) purchased via the New York Affordable Care Act marketplace. When I arrived at the hospital two weeks ago for a hernia repair operation that I definitely needed — I was losing feeling in my upper legs — I was informed hours before surgery that I would have to cough up $6,500 between the deductible and the co-pay. I am due for a colonoscopy, but now I can’t afford one. And I’m relatively lucky; I’m not one of the 1 out of 4 Americans who routinely skip seeing a doctor because they are too poor.
As with climate change, health care in the United States is a radical problem in need of a radical solution. Studies consistently show that Americans rank last or close to last among industrialized nations in terms of access to medical care, quality of care and cost. Average life expectancy in the United States has been falling over the last three years — a radical reversal of 20th-century trends that recall Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nothing Biden has in mind would put us where we belong: number one.
Biden’s moderate sales pitch famously defeated Sen. Bernie Sanders, for whom a major platform plank was “Medicare for All.” During the campaign, Biden repeated Obama’s 2008 pledge to add “a public option” to Obamacare (Obama reneged). But the scheme recently unveiled by the White House downplays the public option and would allow Americans to spend up to 8.5% of their annual income on health care.
The new president is inheriting big, long-neglected problems that require big, dramatic solutions.
The average young person graduates from college with over $32,000 in student loan debt. Default rates hover around 10%; even bankruptcy doesn’t allow people to discharge these debts. Hobbling our best and brightest minds shrinks the consumer economy and discourages entrepreneurship. Yet Biden only wants to forgive up to $10,000 — and it doesn’t seem to be a top legislative priority. Even if he gets what he wants, the problem will remain extreme.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. labor market is 9.9 million jobs smaller than pre-pandemic levels. New York City alone lost 1 million jobs to the COVID-19 lockdown. Millions of families face destitution, eviction or foreclosure. By any measure, this is a huge problem that could slow recovery for a long time. Biden’s solution is a one-time payment of $1,400 — better than nothing but a rounding error compared to what would be required to keep people in their homes while they’re waiting for employment opportunities to return.
As Democrats bask in the glow of impeaching Donald Trump for a second time with some bipartisan support, they may want to consider how he got elected. Desperate workers in flyover country suffered from deindustrialization for years. It was a radical disruption. But Democrats ignored them, exacerbated the problem with poorly written free trade agreements or satisfied themselves with half-measures.
Here we go again.
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Dear Ted, this “just” in:
There are NO government solutions to ANY problem you, or anyone else sees. Never have been, never will be, never can be.
99+% of the time, any problem that you, or anyone else sees, was directly caused by prior government interference .
More government interference only makes any particular problem even worse than it already is, not better.
“Everything government touches turns to crap” Ringo Starr
“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure” Robert LeFevere
Which means that: “The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic” H.L.Mencken [ is that you, Ted?]
To find out what to do about this unsettling fact of life [government solutions never work], please read/study:
“Why Government Doesn’t Work” [which perhaps should have been titled “Why Government “Solutions” Never Work”:
https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Why_Government_Doesn%27t_Work
Regards, onebornfree
Don’t blame me, I voted for Cornpop!
A rant on the bogus warming nonsense sets the tone for this ridiculous article.
The geologic record shows that we are due for the next ice age; overdue, in fact. The warming eventually brings on the cooling by transferring moisture from the tropics to the poles where it freezes solid. We are also at the start of a Grand Solar Minimum which signals a severe cooling period is ahead.
To fix health care costs, get rid of insurance except for catastrophic coverage. Once hospitals and doctors can only charge what the public at large can afford, costs come down because there’s no other option. It is the availability of a 3rd party payer that ratchets up the cost.
To fix the costs associated with higher education, stop issuing student loans and close most of the schools that turn out Humanities and Social Science bullshit artists at high cost to produce people that can say – Do you want fries with that. Once the bulk of the funds dry up, the remaining schools will have to settle for charging what the public can afford.
This isn’t rocket surgery.
As H. L. Mencken observed a century ago, for every complex problem, there is a simple solution – and it is always wrong.`
“The state always poses a greater threat to society than whatever problem it purports to solve.” Llewellyn Rockwell
Regards, onebornfree
The actual quote:
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
But for simple problems, it takes gov’t regulations designed to pick winners and losers to convert them to complex problems that most people can’t break down to their simple constituent components.
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
Thomas Pynchon
The major problems of crime, the cost of health care and higher education are complex problems because the gov’t and their corporate hangers on have made them so. The real solutions are never mentioned because they would require the corporations and gov’t to lose the control they crave and demand.
Yeah, libertarianism will make crime, health care, and higher education go away. Right.
“Biden Offers Moderate Solutions to Radical Problems”
And you still offer Democrat-sounding milquetoast bleatings where vehement opposition and efficient organization is required. We’re talking war of aggression across the world and galloping fascism everywhere and here. Not a matter of Fahrenheits.
The only thing we have to deliver sometime soon is the killing and deep-sixing of the Democrat party, the main administrator of imperial wars and conquest machine. The other clowns, the Publicans, are just clowns right now.
And what damfool illusionist trick is that of distracting our eyes from the general fascism and mass murder to consider climate change and future hardships? Ever heard about priorities? You say you’re “criticizing” Biden? Looks a lot like you’re deviating the discourse instead.
Pity. Years ago, you seemed to show some potential.
I think that there is a 99% or so probability that humanity will be reduced in numbers, by 99% or so, by 2050. Perhaps much earlier. It’s the boiling frog analogy, but the level of intelligence exhibited by Western populations makes the comparison insulting, to our rapidly disappearing amphibian friends.
Your depiction of climate simply ignores the anthropogenic influences of a vast planetary human industrial system and the production and consumption of eight billion human beings, and their billions of domesticated enemies, their massive deforestation, emptying of the oceans of their fishes and other edible creatures and the gargantuan pollution of every type poisoning every biosphere. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance-you have a way to go on your journey into the night.
‘Biden Offers Moderate Solutions to Radical Problems’
I wish people would quit referring to Biden as if he were a sentient entity.
It’s exasperating. I don’t say my plum tree’s thinking about leafing out, for example. It doesn’t think any more than Biden does.
When you make broad brush assumptions about a person, you’re usually wrong unless you know them for a considerable amount of time.
I’m all for lessening the footprint humanity has on the planet. Reducing the human population back to about 1 billion seems very reasonable to stop the deforestation, over fishing, etc. I know I’m supposed to be against eugenics, but I’m not, at least not its primary contention. The only thing I find wrong with eugenics is that those who actively champion it want to use force to achieve their goal. I prefer to use neglect such as stopping welfare, foreign food aid, etc. Just stop all the free stuff programs that haven’t ameliorated the original problems but have made them worse by allowing societies of halfwits to have the highest birth rates in the world to keep compounding THEIR problem.
When it comes to climate, however, the AGW crew of climate frauds are way off in the weeds. One part of CO2 in 2500 parts of the other air components is not heating up anything. If CO2 were to form a layer at the top of the atmosphere, then it might have a blanket effect, but as a mixed gas, it will give up its heat to neighboring molecules so as to be a non issue at current concentration and even multiples of that concentration. CO2 was picked as the bad guy because pointing at water vapor would be scoffed at instantly and water vapor is far more powerful and does form blankets (clouds) to have an effect that might even be measurable.
Henrik Svensmark showed that cosmic rays are the nucleation sited for cloud formation and cosmic rays are channeled by the ridiculously named “solar wind”. The cosmologists are largely responsible for most of the nonsense the climate frauds preach.
The sun and electromagnetism that connects all the planets to the sun and the rest of the cosmos are the overwhelming drivers of climate on earth. Plasma has been ignored by cosmologists while they pin everything on gravity, a force 39 orders of magnitude less powerful. Birkeland currents (aka solar wind) are responsible for the Auroras and feed a constant stream of energy into the planet. The hexagonal patterns on the poles of the gas giants are unexplained by standard cosmology, but are explained by plasma physicists whose views are marginalized because they don’t buy into the gravity centric model.
The only thing I find wrong with eugenics is that those who actively champion it want to use force to achieve their goal. I prefer to use neglect such as stopping welfare, foreign food aid, etc.
Will you abandon the use of force by the state to continue the structure of society without welfare, foreign food aid, etc?
You certainly DO want to use force, albeit implicit rather than explicit. You’re just not honest about it like the Left.
I like the probabilities and percentages. How would you collect on a bet made on the basis of these?
You have to admit that Mulga Mumblebrain’s choice for a nom de plume is apropos.
My political philosophy is anarchism – rules but no rulers, so I’m ready to abandon the state’s use of force and the state itself. The producers will survive. The parasites won’t.
When, not if, but when the US Dollar reaches its intrinsic value of toilet paper, the game stops, like it or not. Welfare, public pensions, salaries for gov’t employees, social security, etc all disappear. It’s happened in the past in other places and is set to happen in the US and via an interconnected domino effect world wide.
How you perceive shutting down the theft of resources to distribute them to persons that haven’t earned them as force is something I’d like you to explain.
It would be great if the death of the dollar deals death to the USG. But I’m not entirely convinced this will happen. You can believe the clever Jew bankers know this is coming and have planned accordingly. They are not just going to abandon their monopoly and the government that enforces it.
When inflation begins in earnest, they will simply roll out their own digital currency, blame the demise of the dollar on Covid, and claim the new currency is “backed by gold” so it will be seamlessly adopted. Of course the USG will use this as an excuse to cancel plenty of old debt and obligations like SS.
Even if they can’t scrape up enough gold to truly back the digital currency, they will claim they have it! But you can believe the “gold backing” will be temporary and they will be back to their same old playbook soon enough.
Yes, the bankers will replace the paper dollar with a digital version, any day now. The rest of the world will still keep abandoning the dollar, paper or otherwise. Therefore the digital dollar is no real solution to a currency that no one trusts to keep its value.
The Fed can actually back the existing dollars with gold 100% if they want. Gold would be revalued at about $40,000 per ounce, last I heard. If FDR could revalue gold at whim, so can the cadaver in the oval office with a fatwa (executive order).
My guess is some country will revalue gold in their currency and then we’re off to the races. The rest of the world will follow with their own valuation per currency and over time there will be a balanced new price for gold that the bankers can agree on. As soon as the ink is dried on that agreement, the debasement will start anew.
This time however, the US no longer has a manufacturing engine for growth. The dollar will keep losing against gold no matter what the international price is and the foreigners aren’t going to cut the US any slack as it continues to deteriorate. Germany, China, Switzerland, and other countries that do have a robust manufacturing sector will see their currencies increase in worth versus gold and they will protect their currencies against the fraud that the US will try to perpetrate.
Nixon closed the gold window for redemption when de Gaulle demanded gold instead of green paper. The same will happen again when the US runs a trade deficit with other nations. That deficit is guaranteed because the US imports the bulk of the manufactured goods sold in the country. There’s insufficient time to rebuild manufacturing before the gold withdrawals are requested.
There is no out for the US from the international perspective. The US could keep the bullshit dollar for internal currency purposes and come up with a more stable currency for international only use. I believe the Amero or some similar name was suggested years ago. All sorts of things will be tried, but without an engine for growth, those attempts won’t last.
Maybe the City of London Jew bankers don’t care about USD anymore because they have already stolen the hard assets in the USA and they plan for USD to be replaced by the yuan for international trade.
If this is the case, why would they bother backing the Fed’s new digital currency with gold if it will only be used domestically on the slave plantation?
There’s no point in backing a US only currency with anything but gov’t coercion.
Gold, silver, oil, uranium, etc can be used to back the international US currency. Backing can be anything another party will accept. It’s really barter on a national scale to balance the books on trade.
My political philosophy is anarchism – rules but no rulers, so I’m ready to abandon the state’s use of force and the state itself.
Fair enough. If you abandon the state you abandon the use of force to enforce the state’s rules.
How you perceive shutting down the theft of resources to distribute them to persons that haven’t earned them as force is something I’d like you to explain.
Given a state, you have rules that are enforced by armed men with guns. Ownership is a rule that is enforced by those armed men with guns. (It happens to be useful and probably leads to the longest-term best use of resources, but it’s still a rule.) So preventing people who don’t buy into the rule of ownership (thievers of resources, in other words) from accessing the owned items necessarily involves using armed men with guns against them. That’s force.
This time however, the US no longer has a manufacturing engine for growth.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/global-manufacturing-scorecard-how-the-us-compares-to-18-other-nations/
China manufactures more than we do. Germany and Switzerland, less, at least in 2018.
I look forward to the end of the fiat dollar and the ability to foist them on the world to enrich bankers. But be sure of your figures.
If you abandon the state you abandon the use of force to enforce the state’s rules.
With no state, there are no state rules and hence, no logical way to tie state force to something that doesn’t exist. There are only the general rules the population of the area assert and in addition, the rules the individual asserts over himself and his property. Those that break those rules get whatever the victim deems appropriate at the moment. There doesn’t have to be a one size fits all answer to crime. Even the bogus justice system hands out wildly different sentences for similar crimes.
I have guns. I can enforce whatever I want that concerns my person and property. Why is that so hard to understand? The force I might use is in response to a threat by some miscreant. The state uses force, for example, to extract currency from me in the form of taxes I don’t agree with. Their force is an offensive act whereas mine is defensive. There’s a huge difference in the use of force, the state’s is illegitimate whereas mine is a natural right.
Germany and Switzerland are also smaller countries with smaller populations, so it would make sense they manufacture less.
Face it, the US traded away its manufacturing base over the last 30 years. What replaced it is finance and financial boondoggles aimed at fleecing the citizenry. Consumer goods are majority foreign. Even the auto industry the US owned is now fragmented with other player having significant market share.
The US owned the aircraft manufacturing industry. Now, several foreign manufacturers make and sell planes world wide. The US owned the software industry. Now, there are software firms all over the planet. I recently purchased a 3D CAD system from an outfit in Brussels that is an AutoCAD clone at a much lower cost and it runs on Linux, not that crap Windows O/S.
Linux is a world wide collaboration that owns the Internet, with Windows owning the desktop only.
Solar and wind are majority foreign components. The best inverters are German.
Catch my drift?
That would be great for me…but it will probably not happen in my lifetime.
It is not so easy to replace the dollar with digital one. Visa and mastercard (obvious choices – they act as an extension of the US government), have correspondingly 4 and 2 data centers that process and spy on international dollar transactions because they are based in the US. They have such a tiny infractructure because they account only for a tiny fraction of the global transactions.
The vast majority of payments are not international and many, many countries have their own systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_gross_settlement) for processing local cards, because fees are lower, and because data is safer within their own borders. I would bet that most of these systems, already connected to banks, have the infrastructure/specialists/datacenters for expansion into the digital currency realm, but don’t do it. Despite the obvious benefits to state bureaucrats.
The other digital currency option – digital payments to be processed not by the US credit card data centers, but by the automated clearing houses, ultimately leads to swift network for dollar transactions. swift has data centers that simltaneously process transactions in belguim and the US, and sanctions are harder to make there as the us needs the consent of a third party. and this is a problem – europeans do not automatically obey the us, see for example the platform gab is using e-checks, after being banned by visa and mastercard, because e-checks use the automated clearing houses network, which is not US controlled.
The main reasons for the digital currency hesitance are 1) there are many alternatives and unless you turn the us into a huge concentration camp you cannot force people to use it – assuming the government will immediately screw up with negative rates and monertary punishments so people will naturally try to run away from the proposed currency and 2) the alternatives are easy to create and run in a smartphone connected world as apps. There are several good papers on the bank of england website and bank of international settlements websites, exploring those options.
Let me give you an example how hard is to impose financial restrictions in practice – few years ago the us threatened to ban anyone who does business wih iran with sanctions, meaning banks will be cut from the swift system that allows them to tranact with other banks. Immediately a chinese bank- kunlun bank, offered and opened accounts of iranian companies and started transacting, because kunlun bank had no business with foreign entities and was not using dollars. the us put the bank in some sanctons list but the effect was zero. Or another one – I was working in a bank outside of the us, where local expat americans were opening bank accounts not with their us passports, but with the temporary local/resident permits. The bank was not reporting them as us citizens and uncle sam was not taxing them. What I’m trying to say is financial punishment does not work as intended – it is a brainchild of bureaucrats and academics with no practical experience in banking and finance. I can give you 10 more examples just from my experience how money can flow cross borders and not be taxed without even using offshores- the options are dousens.
There’s a real scare (in the us) that there will be proliferation of transacting apps that will use processing centers in third countries. This january the us banned wechat pay because it allows anyone to transact easily without the us gov as a middlemen (the app was using data centers in china). Even now it is hard for the us to control the process – banning apps on google and apple store does not make them disappear from the internet. Imagine what will happen if they try to impose negative rates with digital dollar – there will be immediate proloferation of transacting apps linked to datacentres and banks outside of the us, hosted in Tanzania for example. The US is simply not that effective in policing the world, apart from the 5-eyes.
I have guns. I can enforce whatever I want that concerns my person and property. Why is that so hard to understand? The force I might use is in response to a threat by some miscreant.
Gun ownership is the beginning of a polite society. Good for you.
You do sleep, right? Who protects your property while you spend 1/3rd of your life unconscious? You must recognize that some people do not recognize your right to own the property you defend. They’re willing to use guile or force to take it from you (guile being worse, as they try to convince you of things like “we owe the debt to ourselves”). If they just wait until you sleep, or infiltrate your place with sedative gases, they can take pretty much all your stuff, and your life, without your being able to do a thing about it.
You’re going to need at least one, and probably two, other people to assure round-the-clock security. Now keep going, and tell me where you wind up.
The figures remain: the USA has the second-largest manufacturing sector by value in the world. It’s nowhere near what it was years ago, about 20% of the economy, but it remains.
That we sent most manufacturing overseas to become shufflers of digits and printers of FIAT dollars does not remove that fact. That we aren’t cutting edge in a lot of fields we pioneered is also true, and that we don’t seem to value engineering over things like lawyering (as every D for President has been since Carter, their last honest candidate) is also true, and shows we probably don’t have much of a future if things continue.
The good news is that the world is wising up to the dollar. If we lost the ability to print tomorrow, we would have a manufacturing sector we could build upon. If we lose it later, probably only expensive defense crap will get made here.
I assume you’ve read Eamonn Fingleton on this website. If not, worth a read, as his In Praise of Hard Industries aligns with what you and I believe.
I’m of the opinion that Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto currencies will be banned when the various gov’ts startup their own digital currencies. Maybe not immediately, but they’ll whittle away at them with a regulation here and a law there till they cease to function. The only worthwhile part of the whole crypto craze is the back end blockchain technology. The currencies are little more than the modern tulip craze.
I spend my working life on PC networks and mainframe systems. The easiest thing in the world is to clone something that’s been tested and debugged over decades. The FedGov and the banks create money from nothing. There’s no limit to what they can purchase. If they need another thousand data centers, they’ll build them using the existing ones as templates. They’ll turn them out like hotdogs.
The existing credit card processors are the natural allies for the gov’t since they benefit from the banishment of green pieces of paper. They’ll jump at the chance to expand their empire.
Controlling access to things outside the US is child’s play. The NSA has a hook at every NAP in the country and they can turn traffic off for anything they don’t like.
Initially, they only need to control every transaction inside the US. The US Dollar may disappear internationally once the SHTF. SDR’s, gold, oil, uranium, etc can all be used as barter between gov’ts because barter is what they actually use to settle accounts. The normal barter item was gold. There’s nothing preventing gov’ts from bartering anything the other end of the transaction will accept.
Notice how I used paragraphs to separate out the various segments of my reply. You may want to consider making your prose easier to read.
Are you suggesting that the police protect my property while I’m sleeping? Are you hinting at the police protecting my person when I’m awake?
Stop pissing on my shoes and trying to convince me it’s raining. I’m not an idiot and I don’t like someone treating me as such.
The police are worth spit when it comes to protecting persons or property. When seconds count, they are minutes away handing out traffic tickets. When they show up, if they show up, they either draw a chalk outline around the body or take a statement for what was stolen. They are as useless as teats on a bull when it comes to protecting persons or property because they aren’t there when the crime occurs.
I’ve got alarm systems and computer systems that scan my property 24/7. I’m an EE and a professional software developer, so I’ve got security covered.
Instead of sedative gas, why not hint at the use of a neutron bomb so they can kill all the life in an area and then take the property at their leisure. You’re prose has entered the realm of the ridiculous.
So we could end up with multiple discreet national digital currencies, all being traded and valued on FX markets and all being exchanged internationally —– and no “world reserve currency” ?
They may try to use the fiat SDR as the world’s reserve currency. Just another attempt at not facing the real issue which is currency instead of money.
It looks to me like the simple answer is to all of this is Visa (“Leading Global Payment Solutions”) because it already seamlessly handles multiple currency transactions. What am I missing?
But of course the parasites probably want to make it more complicated for their own purposes.
https://usa.visa.com/
A week or so ago, I laid out how the credit card companies (banks) are the simplest way to get to a digital currency INSIDE THE US ONLY. Just withdraw the paper and people have no option but to use plastic. They need more processing centers, but that’s easy to fix.
Once the green paper inside the US is gone, the Fed & Fed Gov can work on their FedCoin or whatever they want to call it. That will give everyone an account at the Fed, but they’ll still need the processing power of the CC companies. How the Fed, Fed Gov and CC companies work this out is in their hands. There are numerous possibilities.
The Dollar outside the US could follow a completely different set of rules. The Fed Gov wants to spy on the US population. They’re not that interested in what the foreigners do. Tyranny starts at home.
Climate change is not an existential crisis. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is what plants need to grow. When plants grow, animals are better fed and humans also have more food. Global warming cannot be controlled by reducing the use of coal, oil, and natural gas to warm the people, light their homes, and improve the economy. For an expert answer to Al Gore’s crazy imaginings, read “Inconvenient Facts” by veteran geologist Gregory Wrightstone, available on Amazon for less than $2o. Clearly written, illustrated with 93 figures and graphs and tables, less than 200 pages.
There’s a 650 trillion to 1 quadrilion dollars derivative market that depends on the current dollar infrastructure. This means bonds, futures, options, that are in essence market price bets tied to the Dollar price of something (commodity or another financial product or real estate).
If you disrupt that, it will create such a havoc that the Great Depression era hunger and misery will look like a Golden age.
The international market (all countries, even US allies) will start dumping dollars like crazy. This will happen because foreign banks and CEOs will panic and no amount of assurances will stop the desintegration of the dollar system – they don’t have the FED.
But you are right – it may happen and something is probably in the works. The only way it can work in my opinion is the US to create a mirror internal currency (the digi dollar) and retain the existing one for trade with the world – something like the onshore and offshore yuan in communist China. This way, the US will finally lift the sickle and hammer of communist revolution dropped by the Soviets…
Anything that has wealth tied to a piece of paper is going to be history when the SHTF. Only real tangible things will retain value.
The stock market will plunge back to where the earnings are commensurate with the stock price after it overshoots to way below that value during the panic. Derivatives will be shown to be completely worthless as the dominoes of counter party risk fall. The banks are going to fail this time as the Fed becomes the nations bank. Nationalizing the existing financial / banking infrastructure will likely happen.
It is going to get truly ugly, and soon.
How will Fedcoin be placed into circulation?
Are they going to wait until the dollar goes to zero so that all liabilities are eliminated, and then give it to everybody in amounts they deem appropriate?
FedCoin is step two. Step one will be to get rid of paper money and have the Credit card companies build out their network so that for a while everything will be on plastic. No more fears of bank runs, no putting money under the mattress, buying drugs might be difficult, etc. Your bank account will be converted to a debit card account. This may take a year.
Then FedCoin comes along to use the banking infrastructure and everyone has an account at the Fed. Debts really don’t have much to do with this scenario. Lots of debt will get wiped out when the debtor can’t pay up. No different than any other time except maybe in the tremendous volume.
There are several possible scenarios. I suspect the dollar will remain the currency inside the US but something else will function outside. Tourists going on vacation will just continue to use plastic, either Visa, etc or ultimately FedCoin or whatever they call it.
Mostly peaceful leftists, rejoice! Biden regime resumes war by bombing in Syria.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/us-carries-airstrike-iranian-backed-militia-syria/story?id=76122461
Moar war! It’s the true way of leftist mostly peaceful peace!
I’m suggesting that there is a need for some sort of security that goes beyond you and your defensive weapons. I was thinking more of Männerbund than police, but both exist to serve the purpose of defense when you cannot do so. Police are more effective in a society where people care about the long term future effects of their actions, and that society has long ceased to be the USA.
Your alarm systems aren’t you. When you sleep, you require assistance from others. Keep following that logic and see if it doesn’t lead to you creating a state.
The police are absolutely useless in fighting crime. At best, they MAY find the criminal after the fact.
If the concept of police were in any way effective, crime would be on a down trend heading toward elimination in an asymptotic curve, but never quite getting to zero. If we graph crime, there’s a baseline that never gets eliminated because the system wants it that way. Crime and criminals are the raison d’être for the state to exist and therefore criminality must continue for the state to continue. The state makes it impossible for the average person to protect himself from the criminal element because if they did, the state would come after them under the color of the nonsense laws they’ve concocted.
No one can defend against an unprovoked attack. Even cops get shot execution style periodically by some miscreant that just decides to take him out. The reaction to such an attack should be for the armed population to kill the shooter to eliminate him from any future violence. The cops simply can’t do that job because they aren’t there in numbers when an incident occurs. It is far more likely that neighbors, passers by, the local population in general are within the vicinity of any crime committed and they should be in a position to seek and destroy the perpetrator.
When you sleep, you require assistance from others. Blatantly false! I sleep inside a structure and it protects me from a predator. Since the cops are almost never around when a crime is about to be committed, they can’t possibly protect anyone.
You’re lack of basic logic is appalling.
Zounds! That’s a lot to put in one post. I’m going to assume the bad grammar is actually autocorrect, since your written English is otherwise accurate. I’ll just repeat my grandfather’s admonition that “all general statements are false,” and leave your absolutely useless otherwise alone.
It does let me know where we differ. You might do with reading systems of survival, by Jane Jacobs. Like lawyers, and thus every Democratic candidate since Carter, you think in absolutes and project that on the world. (I do, too, it’s not a failing, it’s a syndrome we live by.) a scientist will live by probability, with probability being either higher or lower. Will more police reduce crime? At what level do they cease to add any marginal value? Will reducing police confrontation on the streets increase carrying of guns and murder rates (NYC ran that experiment last year. The answer: yes, by 44%.)
Probabilistic thinking has made flying safe, while medical errors using the absolutist approach you favor, kill thousands in the USA every year (the probably too high estimate of 200k would be two loaded jet crashes every day.). The more you can look at things from a probability standpoint (and your phrase “cops are almost never around” shows you already can and do) the more you can focus on continuous improvement.
Ever watch a video on how long it takes a thief to break into a house? Generally, under a minute. I suppose that that is something. Better not go to sleep too heavily sedated or with too much alcohol in your system, or you won’t wake in time to wave the ring over the gun safe, get the Glock, load the mag, and be prepared to fire away.
You ever read about justice in Ancient Athens? There was no concept of a DA or police. If you were murdered, your relatives would take the murderer to court for justice. No relatives, no case. The criminal wasn’t punished at the expense of the victims, but made to pay off. That still involves others in your defense, and also depends upon a population that can reflect on future results of present actions, so you might not care for that sort of society.
May your sleep be undisturbed by the sorts of troubles that probability would tell us could happen with some degree of certainty to you.