Someone has mentioned the current financial crisis in the as a possible death knell for the central government. Even radio talk show host Glen Beck has mentioned this possibility. My question is this: Given that countries such as and have gone through much worse economic problems and survived (despite a suffering general population) why should anyone hope that a new “Great Depression” would create an end to the state here? Even if it did, what would stop it from somehow reconstituting itself?
My admittedly fatalistic view is that we are more likely to see a Strong Leader arise out of the ashes rather than a disintegration of the State into nothingness.
The Road to Serfdom and all that.
Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, etc, etc…
Depression is typically bad for liberty. People will normally trade the lie of financial security provided by government and central banking over having to work for their money when it is being stolen by the government and central banking. Also depressions like the one in the US more often than not end in war.
Look at the most common falsehood in history: That is that WW2 lifted the out of the Great Depression. The letting soldiers come home and become productive did. As far as war being a help to the economy; WW2 certainly did not lift the Soviets or Chinese or Indians or Pakistanis out of poverty. The raw materials of , excess labor of , and human resources of have done more to end poverty than any war.
That’s a good question. I feel like a mute, as I have absolutely no idea.
I don’t think this is the end of the central government, but there is an opportunity here for reform and revolt. What separates us from other countries as that we’re weathier and more individualistic. We’ll accept tyranny but only for so long (at least that’s what I believe and hope). Either way, it doesn’t look good for liberty.
When the emperor Septimius Severus was on his deathbed he called his two sons, Caracalla and Geta, to pass on to them his last wills. When asked how to keep the ailing empire from crumbling he simply said “pay the soldiers well and do not bother about the rest”. How right he was!
Both North Korea (PRK for short) and Zimbabwe have very large armed forces (in relation to their population), be them in form of militias or regular troops, it matters not, which are kept much better fed, housed and treated than the rest of the population. It’s no mystery that Mobutu confiscated the white farms to hand them over to his armed followers anf their families since he had no money (real money) to pay them and it’s no wonder that the PRK military has access to “luxuries” ordinary citizens can only dream of (reliable electricity, basic medical cares etc).
The PRK case is very particular since a large chunck of their budget comes from their own enemies: South Korea has been sending “humanitarian aids” for many years now, mostly in form of large sums of cash, Japan has been buying raw materials for longer than anyone can remember from Kim-Il-Sung’s regime and even the US, despite all the saber rattling and the tanks stationed behind the DMZ, has been steadily providing PRK with much of its oil needs for a few years now. In short you can say that these three countries have effectively taken the place of Soviet Russia as the PRK main benefactors: without their help the military would probably have rioted already (it’s well known that unpaid troops tend to become unruly quite quickly).
So what lesson have we learnt from this? These countries have disaster-area economies, yes, but they have shifted most of their resources to their repressive apparatus. “Pay the soldiers well and do not bother about the rest”. The “dear leaders” of these countries know very well that their own soldiers, if ever faced with a popular uprising, will fight harder, not out of sheer loyalty, but to preserve their own privileges which may not seem much to us but are quite a lot in those unlucky countries.
What of the US? The US has been steadily building up an enormous repressive apparatus: of course part of this growth may be explained away as a “fad”, very common in Western countries at the moment, toward a much larger and militarized “civilian” police, but the US have been steadily outdoing their own allies, and even “communist” China for many years now with their “security” build up. But then it’s ALL about the terrorists (be them “Muslims” or “white supremacists”) and those pesky drug dealers…
North and South may have reconciled by now, but there are third party parasites that need to keep the illusion of conflict and the state of fracture going for their own purposes.
Americans (IMO) have a long way to go to get to North Korea level subsistence, and in order for that to happen, the military industrial complex needs to find a new host to transfer wealth from. The only candidate I can think of would be China, and I don’t see the Chinese doing things the American way, or selling out to American corporations. They march to the beat of their own drummer.
The growth of the state is inevitable anyway though, I’m not saying that the current economic crisis is a good thing, but, isn’t this the sort of thing Rothbard talked about as the “objective factors” that are required for a movement?
Granted, big armies help in maintaining power. However, ultimately power comes from the consent (or submission) of the governed.
Not exactly parallel. The North Koreans are being propped up by the Americans and South Koreans. The American presence ensures that the two states will never reunite while the South Koreans feed their neighbors.
Who is going to feed the American people? Who is going to “save the union”?
Certainly not the people who have been “bombed back into the stone age”, and I hope not Canadians. Our system is already about being barely able to scrape out more than a middle class existence.
That strategy only works until you run out of gold.