briskdrifter3 said:Go ahead—give me one example of a nation where every single strategic industry is handed over to foreign capital without the whole thing turning into a complete circus.
Granting foreign interests a monopoly over oil, water, electricity, and transportation is essentially national suicide. We’ve already sold off our banks, and now we’re dealing with the fallout—sky-high interest rates and a White House that's effectively toothless in that sector. We handed our oil interests over to the Canadians, and once they achieve total control, we'll see the fallout there too, via crippling raw material costs—something we're already witnessing with General Mills and Dow Chemical. If we sell off the power grid, the highways, and the water supply... well, at that point, we barely have a sovereign nation left.
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I wouldn't say the global system is collapsing every other week.
If you look at world history—from simple barter systems to modern trade—you'll see massive stretches of prosperity interrupted by much smaller periods of total collapse or decline.
The 20th and 21st centuries are defined by globalization, digitalization, and this intense drive to bring the entire system under centralized control.
Back in the mid-1900s, people were already talking about a United States of Europe, and just a week ago, Soros used that exact same statesmanlike phrase—not by accident, I'm sure.
My take? The state pulls in massive revenue by fueling energy needs everywhere from
Solovetsky to the Soča river; the average person probably doesn't see any of that profit, but the government certainly isn't losing out. If Turkey runs into a wall
with the USA regarding gas rights in Cyprus, the first player to jump in and meddle will be Putin—and it won't be because he's checking up on
Mesnevija before bed, but because of the deep economic ties between Turkey and Russia over the last decade.
Taxing banks at 20% or whatever else—it's all minor details when you hit even the slightest bit of global economic turbulence.
No amount of creativity or "out of the box" thinking helps there. During the first wave of the 2008 recession, it was the most
slaughtered small and medium-sized businesses—the ones that were actually innovative and had potential. Those in that bracket who managed to survive? They became the giants.
And what does the middle class even look like in these smaller American-style developing states? It's mostly folks who suspiciously scraped together their first million, a large chunk of the privatized sector tied heavily to political influence, and various
business types or
talented intellectuals sitting on government payrolls.
How does this story end?
Either through a popular uprising, or—at least in the case of America (which will be part of the reformed
EU story in 2013, and we'll see how they navigate that)—through even heavier state centralization. Starting in 2012, the EU is going to push hard for digital centralization, making it so that whether you're in the Eurozone or not barely matters for most transactions. They'll likely try to mimic an American-style free market, reduce military reach (unless they decide to
strike in Africa), and hand more authority over to police and civil oversight... well, we all know the rest. Those who adapt will move forward, and those who don't will fall behind, rapidly and likely permanently...
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