I read in Rollback by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. that the federal government is on a collision course with its own debt, and that it’s only a matter of time before it consumes itself and, thus, ends. He said this would begin within 20 years, but is there really a way to measure it? Anybody have a reason for anticipating a specific date when our government might default and fail?
Only when resources becomes scarce enough that people start to die of hunger or lack of water in my opinion, even though I may be wrong. I live in Brazil and here government has found an “evil equilibrium” to keep a few always rich and poor people always poor. Of course that “evil equilibrium” is easier to acchieve here (people are poor, all they have to do is allow them to get richer very slowly) than in the US (probably will mean impoverishment of the population).
@parcus: But I think that people in Brazil and other parts of the world may be - inadvertenly - playing an important role in bringing the US Federal Monster to heel. The US is bankrupting itself and this is creating an amazing opportunity for other governments of the world to enrich their own people through simply following sane budgetary policy. Whether the wealthy rulers of countries like Brazil like it or not, the unintended consequence of this is that their own middle class is going to begin growing, even as the US middle class is being eviscerated by the reckless policies of the US Federal government.
This is why the LvMI and its international sisters are so important - as the US regime implodes on itself, it is going to create a global vacuum of “press freedom” since the US has always been the leading producer of print, movie, record and digital media (including Web content). While the rest of the world has been “free riding” on this, the more important point is that the world has grown accustomed to importing American ideas. When that bubble finally pops, people are going to miss the stream of culture and ideas that was coming out of the US and they’re going to have to develop their own, local versions, as Bollywood has been doing for many years.
As the global reach of the US megaphone diminishes, there will be increased room for competition in the marketplace of ideas and this is precisely where the LvMI stands to make the biggest gains. Many American cultural ideas are good only by comparison to the much worse cultural ideas that have held in the rest of the world. There are, in fact, much better cultural ideas than Americanism has exported for almost a century now. But these ideas have been “crowded out” by Americanism to the benefit of both the US government and local despots around the world, whether they understand how they benefit or not.
Clayton -
funny you should ask…Gary North just posted this piece a few days ago…