This Is Your Last Chance
The indictment is long and strong.
A cabal of politicians, governments, courts, medical authorities, pharmaceutical companies, multinational agencies, the mainstream media, academics, and foundations, particularly the World Economic Forum, have concocted responses to a virus and its variants that have robbed the people of rightful liberties, are a mechanism for the imposition of global totalitarianism, and have amplified rather than reduced the virus’s dangers, inflicting severe injury and death that will last years, perhaps decades, and afflict millions, if not billions, of victims (See “The Means Are The End,” Robert Gore, SLL, November 13, 2021).
This is their last chance.
They can reverse course and pray to whatever demonic deity they pray to that it’s enough to prevent the retribution they deserve, or they can perish in the destruction they’ve created. They will reap what they have sown, their time is up.
This is it, the last gasp of the psychopaths who express their contempt and hatred for humanity by trying to rule it. Compulsion, not voluntary and natural cooperation. Power, pull, and politics, not incentives, competition, honest production, and value-for-value trade. From each according to his virtue to each according to his depravity.
“The Last Gasp,” Robert Gore, SLL, March 24, 2020
Their time is up.
This assertion may appear as recklessly foolish as Luke Skywalker’s ultimatum – “Jabba, this is your last chance, free us or die!” – did to Jabba the Hut at the Sarlacc Pit.
It’s not, but to understand why requires an understanding of slow moving (on human time scale) but enormously powerful forces. Most history studies the wrong things and most predictions are straight line projections of the present and recent past.
The linchpin of history is innovation, not governments and rulers. We don’t know who ruled whom when humanity lived in caves, but we do know that someone tamed fire, someone planted seeds and cultivated them for food, and someone invented the wheel. With such steps humanity emerged from the caves and began building civilization. Even at this early stage one thing was clear: innovation creates new capabilities and opportunities and serves as the basis for further innovation.
Government is the acquisition of resources that enables those who govern to exercise control over those whom they govern. This presupposes resources, which presupposes production. Government is always subsidiary to production, yet most history focuses on the former and treats the latter as a secondary matter. This is looking down the telescope from the wrong end. Before a government can take someone must make.
History as studied is a dreary succession of violent takers: their kingdoms and empires, their exactions from the populace, their wars, their depredations, their monuments, and so on. Most of this is trivial compared to the innovation that gets short shrift.
Who ruled which nations in 1440 and what effect does whatever they did have on us today? There’s not one person in ten million who can knowledgeably answer those questions. Ask instead if the moveable-type printing press that Johannes Gutenberg invented that year has had an effect on their lives and most will acknowledge its inescapable importance.
The few rulers who have ruled wisely are largely forgotten. Wise rule is maintaining the conditions that allow the people themselves to create, innovate, and produce, what’s been called the night watchman state. Protecting them and their property from invasion, violence, theft, and fraud are the important but minimalist assignments for such governments. Crucially, such protection of the people extends to protection from the government itself. This type of government offers would-be rulers no opportunity for the larceny, self-aggrandizement, and power they crave, which is why they’ve been so rare.
The perfect night watchman state has never been achieved. There have only been a few that have come close. Conditions of relatively greater freedom, however, have coincided with the explosions of innovation and productivity that have bequeathed to humanity most of its progress.
The United States’ explosion was the Industrial Revolution, which launched virtually every important industry we have today and took the nation from its agrarian roots to industrial preeminence. With the exception of Theodore Roosevelt, an outlier in many unfortunate ways, the presidents who presided during the Industrial Revolution (1865-1913) have passed into obscurity, always a desirable fate for presidents. (See “The Magnificent Eleven,” Robert Gore, SLL, May 3, 2017. For a fictional treatment of the period, see The Golden Pinnacle, Robert Gore, 2013.)
Nineteenth-century fecundity set the table for twentieth-century insanity, giving psychopathic rulers the resources for two world wars and innumerable smaller ones, history’s most totalitarian governments, genocides, and the perpetration of myriad other miseries and horrors. The twentieth century is easily history’s most tyrannical and bloody . . . so far. Emblematic of the century is its “greatest” invention, nuclear weaponry, which can destroy all life on earth.
In the United States, establishment of the central bank and imposition of income taxes in 1913 allowed the government to expropriate a far higher share of the nation’s incomes and wealth than it had. Shortly thereafter, ignoring George Washington’s sage advice to avoid foreign entanglements, the U.S. entered World War I. The Industrial Revolution and its comparative freedom were over, the accretion of state power that continues to this day was underway.
Government resurfaced as the dominant institution, as it has been for most of history, not just in the U.S. but around the globe. Intellectual fashion followed the political trend. Money and power—heady prospects for many intellectuals—were to be had promoting the growth of the state and toadying to its functionaries. A few brave souls spoke out against the trend and championed freedom, but they were ignored and shunned. Today, champions of freedom are consigned to obscure corners of the Internet.
You would think that living off the Industrial Revolution’s productive legacy, with first call on incomes and accumulated wealth, rulers would command more than ample resources to do whatever they desired. Such is not the case. Their schemes and rapacity are unlimited while even in the most productive and wealthy societies, resources are not. Governments and their central banks have created a debt explosion that leaves the world in the deepest financial hole it’s ever been.
The explosion has accelerated the past few years, leaving rulers at the outer limits of what they can expropriate or borrow. Whatever growth in GDPs they now hail, the unmentioned growth in debt is greater—the hole gets deeper. This state of affairs illustrates history’s central truism: governments can’t produce. Their stock in trade, coercion and violence, only destroys. Making producers tax and debt slaves to those who produce nothing destroys both production and integrity.
The death knell sounded in 1971 when the United States government repudiated the last vestige of its promise to redeem its dollars for gold. Debt would be the coin of the realm. The bland term “financialization” hides the moral obscenity. Each year the nation’s debt has grown. Production, when netted against that debt, has shrunk, and an increasingly large portion of what remains is diverted to those who don’t produce. Washington decides who gets what, but it can’t command the what. That shrinks as productive virtue is penalized and theft, fraud, and violence are rewarded.
This increasingly precarious state of affairs has lasted for fifty years. It won’t last much longer. Only moral and intellectual bankruptcy greater than current financial bankruptcy could call this abject failure a failure of capitalism.
Capitalism is the economics of political freedom. The strangulation of both in the U.S. officially commenced in 1913. They are the antithesis of what we now have, state-directed collectivism. Capitalism and freedom didn’t fail the people, the people failed capitalism and freedom. If people can’t handle individual freedom—as collectivists like to argue—they certainly can’t handle collectivist power, as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have amply demonstrated. It’s like the one brat in a room full of self-directed, happily interacting children seizing control of the room.
Supposedly collectivists will reap the rewards of the only things they produce—destruction and death. After the collapse, a global collectivist government will replace the current multiplicity of collectivist governments. Most of the collapse’s survivors will become slaves living on subsistence doled out by the small aristocracy that will rule the planet. The real work will be done by artificially intelligent machines. The slaves will be pacified chemically and electronically through ubiquitous virtual reality technologies and monitored ceaselessly while the aristocrats live in unimaginable splendor. Those who resist pacification and enslavement will be “corrected,” or if that fails, murdered.
This is simply a straight line projection of the present and recent past that ignores a fully evident counter-trend still gathering steam. After a centuries-long, bull-market run, government as an institution has topped out. The plans and predictions of the global totalitarians are the overconfident rationalizations of newly minted millionaires at the top of bull markets—the “permanently high plateau” in 1929, the “new economy” in 2000, “house prices only go up” in 2007, and “the Fed’s got our backs” now.
We already have shining examples of totalitarian collectivist failure in really big countries with lots of people—the Soviet Union and Communist China. The former collapsed after tens of millions died, the latter made a mid-course correction towards more freedom after tens of millions died.
Blithering idiots attribute those failures to incomplete control by the totalitarians or claim collectivism can only work when the whole world is completely enslaved. They ignore the core quandary of collectivist control—it produces nothing. Collectivist governments steal, they don’t produce. A global collectivist government will produce exactly what the current multiplicity of collectivist governments produce: nothing. Yet, this government will supposedly build the world back better from the ashes of financial, economic, and political collapse.
Collectivists have perfected a demand management technique that obscures but does not solve the productive inability of the economic systems over which they presided: murder a lot of people. People are producers so production shrinks faster than populations, exacerbated by the collectivists’ unerring ability to kill the most productive people. Today’s collectivist killers plan to use the same demand management technique, but this time AI machines will make up the shortfall.
Current AI technology isn’t there yet but somehow a slave society will produce the innovations necessary to get it up to snuff. The absurdity of this presumption is captured in the contradiction in terms that will supposedly fill the gap: state science. State science is the approved propaganda of the moment propagated by state functionaries and cohorts mislabelled as scientists—for instance the rampant convolutions, contortions, corrections, and prevarications that characterize the Covid travesty, climate change, and green energy.
As for slavery, Alexis de Tocqueville had the last word on its economics in 1835.
It is true that in Kentucky the planters are not obliged to pay the slaves whom they employ, but the derive small profits from their labor, while the wages paid to free workmen would be returned with interest in the value of their services. The free workman is paid but he does his work quicker than the the slave; and rapidity of execution is one of the great elements of economy. The white sells his services, but they are purchased only when they may be useful; the black can claim no remuneration for his toil, but the expense of his maintenance is perpetual; he must be supported in his old age as well as in manhood, in his profitless infancy as well as in the productive years of youth, in sickness as well as in health. Payment must equally be made in order to obtain the services of either class of men: the free workman receives his wages in money; the slave in education, in food, in care, and in clothing. The money which a master spends in the maintenance of his slaves goes gradually and in detail, so that it is scarcely perceived; the salary of the free workman is paid in a round sum and appears to enrich only him who receives it; but in the end the slave has cost more than the free servant, and his labor is less productive.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume One, 1835
The slaves will own nothing because they’ll produce next to nothing. It’s doubtful they’ll be any happier with that state of affairs than slaves have been in the past.
Turning again to the historical record, the accomplishments of state science and industry are an almost undetectable molehill compared to the Everest of innovations and wealth flowing from free scientific inquiry and production. Picking through this meager molehill, one finds that many state “accomplishments” are merely new and improved ways to kill people.
Setting aside straight line projections, what’s actually coming is a history’s greatest trend change: total financial, economic, intellectual, and moral collapse. The staggering sum of global debt, unfunded liabilities, and derivatives is in the quadrillions, a double-digit multiple of global production. The numbers are so large and opaque that a more precise estimate for that multiple cannot be derived. Every asset and stream of income is already pledged as collateral—often several times—or will be de facto collateral as governments’ bankruptcies and rapacity mount; they’ll steal whatever they can get their hands on. What most of the world reckons as wealth is somebody’s debt or equity, so insolvency will quickly work its way through the daisy chain. So much for financialization.
Like financial and economic collapse, intellectual and moral collapse will center on governments. Billions of people indoctrinated in some version of statist dogma will look to governments as the solution for the government-created apocalypse. Courtier intellectuals, media lights, corporate shills, and other minions and toadies will be scurrying like cockroaches in a filthy kitchen when the lights are turned on. Their voluminous output of putrid, state worshipping dreck will have the same value as fiat debt and currencies.
Today’s “thought leaders” are circling the drain. They’re on the wrong side of history and they’ll take billions of devout believers in government omniscience and omnipotence with them. Fat cat crony collectivist corporations all the way down to those subsisting on some form of state-granted transfer payments will find the government teat withered and barren. The delusory notion that bankrupt governments can provide universal basic incomes will be treated with the universal derision it deserves.
Government has been collapsing under its own weight for decades. If one were to graph its overall strength, the U.S. government at the end of World War II was peak government—the U.S. empire was at its unchallenged economic, political, and military apex. Vietnam, Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard, the fall of the USSR, the war on terror, the Patriot Act, and the Covid insanity would mark some of the downward inflection points since.
History will probably look back on the Biden camarilla’s fraudulent ascension to power as the final sharp break, the demarcation of the vertiginous crash. It’s hard to imagine that the institution that plays such a huge part in all our lives will simply be rubble amidst the chaos and ruins, but few people foresaw the end of the Soviet state either. Straight line projections don’t yield such predictions.
To those who rule and are trying to implement their global consolidation: This is your last chance to save your own skins. Nothing will stop the collapse, but you can at least abandon your nefarious project and its totalitarian blueprint. It’s your only chance to avoid the Sarlacc pit, and that’s a slim chance indeed. Collapse will focus your victims’ attention on their ruination and your responsibility for it. You’ll be lucky to escape their retribution. Your odious class has always hid your failures and tried to shift the blame, but that game is up.
As always happens after cataclysms, the survivors will rebuild. The human race is a hardy bunch. With previous equity, debt and its corresponding credit assets wiped out, and many real assets destroyed in the mayhem and chaos, there will be little capital to fund their efforts. Capital will be earned and rebuilt the old fashioned way—consumption less than production generating savings invested in enterprises whose returns compound the savings.
With governments either broke or wiped out, emergent groups in smaller geographic areas will have to look to their own resources for protection. On the other hand, they’ll be unencumbered by the confiscatory taxes, stifling laws and regulations, rampant corruption, Big Brother surveillance, perpetual violence, and general idiocy we now take for granted among governments.
There will be a decentralized multiplicity of new political arrangements and subdivisions, from chaotic black holes to well-ordered enclaves. The success of the latter will be due to the freedom they embrace, the individual rights they protect, and their ability to defend their enclaves. New industries, technologies, modes of commerce, and ways of life will emerge. This will be the true great reset, not the Klaus Schwab version, which only recycles failed concepts of centralized power and collective subjugation on a larger scale.
Brace for impact, the collapse is well underway and will soon hit its inflection point, if it hasn’t already. It will be a test of character unlike anything we’ve faced before. It was Jabba the Hut and his creepy cohorts—Planet Tatooine’s establishment—who were blown to smithereens and cast into the Sarlacc Pit. Our enemies’ greatest weakness: the arrogant stupidity of evil and the crumbling bulwark of lies behind which it hides. These are the allies of Samuel Adams’, “irate, tireless minority keen to set brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” Our greatest weapon: the magnificently defiant human spirit that stands on the plank above the abyss and shouts: “Jabba, this is your last chance, free us or die!”