When the problems can no longer be patched over, it becomes necessary to step back and consider what is causing them to begin with.
When you are talking hundreds of millions and billions of people, it's not a computer, it's not a machine, it's biology.
People have been going forth and multiplying for a hundred thousand years and America represents, literally, humanity washing up against the edge of the global petri dish. Our essential culture is based on growth, geographic, population, economic, technological, industrial. Topped off with a half century of increasingly parabolic debt to keep the party going. Debt doesn't matter, until it does. That, more than the political charade, is what has to be understand and addressed.
Government, as the executive and regulatory function of society, is analogous to the central nervous system. While money and finance serve as blood and the circulation system.
Given our systems of perception and communication tend to revolve around personalities and only secondarily round the concepts and forces they express, there doesn't seem to be much acknowledgement of these basic forces, both driving society and directing it.
Much as our circulation system delivers the energy the digestive and respiratory systems generate around the body, while the government, as well as the culture, tries to give it some sense of overall cohesion. So there will always be that tension between desire and judgement.
The function of government is to make the tough choices. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Nor can we go both directions at the fork in the road. So government will step on people's feet on occasion and not just be there to hold people's hands. Not all desires are healthy, nor all decisions wise.
Meanwhile it has not occurred to the supposed intellects that money is a social contract which enables mass societies to function, not a commodity to mine from society. Markets need it to circulate, while people see it as signal to extract and store. Consequently ever more has to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted have to be devised. Since it is a contract, in which the asset is backed by a debt, similar amounts of debt have to be generated, to store the asset.
One way is simply squeezing the money flowing through the regular economy, forcing it to run on debt, drawing that saved money back into circulation. This tends to set up a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Consequently the effect is analogous to the heart telling the hands and feet they don't need so much money and should work harder for what they do get. The Ancients devised debt jubilees to reset the process, but we lack the long term perspective.
The other primary method is to have the government as debtor of last resort. The elephant in the room is that the capital markets could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus investment money. The bloated military and endless wars developed as a way to make it go away, so more can be borrowed. Which explains why they are such strategically inept boondoggles, but the same clowns and parasites are left in charge.
The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt, backing private wealth.
Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, though a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. The average five year old can figure this out, but economists are just creatures of the system.
The functionality of money is its fungibility. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing though our bodies. It is a public utility, like roads. It's not our picture on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not personally responsible fr maintaining its value.
the reality is that there is not the productive investment potential to save the amounts necessary for a stable society and reasonably secure lives, but we do save to many of the same reasons, so eventually the concept of the public commons we have to be resurrected and updated.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is the resulting atomized culture is more easily controlled by institutional authority and mediated by a parasitic financial system.
There was a time when government was private, but as monarchs lost sight of the fact the relationship is a two way street, they were usurped. Now banking is having its own, "Let them eat cake." moment.
Which is not to say banking can be a direct function of government, any more than the head and heart are one. Politicians live and die on the hope they inspire, so printing extra money is a handy sugar rush, but there will never be the willpower to back off, which that starts.
It is just one of those stages of human evolution.
"The function of government is to make the tough choices. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Nor can we go both directions at the fork in the road. So government will step on people's feet on occasion and not just be there to hold people's hands. Not all desires are healthy, nor all decisions wise."
However - as familiar and credible as these "mantras" sound - they are false. The function of government IS to look after its people. As many acorns as are properly planted, watered, tended - WILL become mighty oak trees. We CAN have our cake AND eat it - if everyone is treated equitably and the oligarchs are prevented from their theft of/from the common wealth! Absolutely at forks in the road - we MAY take both or more roads leading in various directions - seeking the best views and things from all roads. And government should NOT step on anyone's toes unless they are corruptly rorting the people (paying little to no taxes, bribing - oops - "lobbying") those public "officials" with political power and should definitely be there TO hold the hands of those citizens/residents/refugees/First Nations peoples/asylum-seekers who require it UNTIL the point they no longer do so! I do not argue against the final sentence... Jim
With much of the rest of your thesis/response John Merryman - agreement...
Certainly government enhances those within its domain, even those on the edges. The problem is this domain is always finite, so there has to be fluctuation and feedback between the social organism and the larger ecosystem. Nodes and network. Otherwise negative feedback starts to set in, as the number of those benefiting shrink, so does the size of its domain. After awhile the power of those on the outside exceeds those on the inside and that particular system falls into the dustbin of history.
A healthy system recognizes this yin and yang, between synchronization and harmonization, rather than the God Almighty of the monolith.
I would summarize Biden's foreign policy as follows: splashy headlines, but when you read the fine print, it becomes clear that not much has changed. Yemen, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Palestine all come prominently to mind.
Whatever passes for US "foreign policy" is just a sum of major lobbying interests projected outwards: Israeli, Military/Industrial, Oil/Gas. In the Covid era the pharmaceutical can be added to that list too. Only mechanism is some variation of "stick" - from expulsion of diplomats, through sanctions and acts of theft and piracy up and including military intervention. And of course promoting and financing "color revolutions" and "regime changes" via various deep-state cutouts such as NED and USAID etc. Nobody can get anything of value from US diplomacy (except Israel of course, it seems sometimes that the only reason State Dept even exists is to give never ending cover to whatever crime and landgrab Zionists commit), not even consistency of keeping own signature - in the last decade or two US reneged on own commitments walking out from ABM treaty, Paris climate agreement (rejoined, but it is moribund so useful just for cosmetic purposes), JCPOA (pretending to rejoin), INF, Open Skies...
From my position here in Australia there is little to nothing I can find to disagree with Patrick in your assessment excepting to add that the US sycophant and Pentecultist PM Morrison (and several of his governing Cabinet Ministers of the same cult or of similar end-of-days fundamentalist cult beliefs) is/are more-or-less in lock-step with whatever inanity drips from the lips of Pompeo/Blinken and Trump/Biden. Tragedy is on the nearing horizon of our world future!
Your situation in Australia is quite saddening, I must say. We have a government and a "thinking" class (quotation marks required) that finds wisdom in following along after the Washington cliques you name even when this is diametrically counter to Australia's palpable, right-there-in-front-of-you interests. I recently had a go-around with one Charles Edel after an essay I contributed to Australian Foreign Affairs. This fellow purported to speak for Australia, and when I looked him up he turned out to be an American--with a military background no less and a place at the Wilson Center. Edel's argument to me was that, no, Australians think and speak for themselves.
One can make no sense of this. But of how very much one can say this?
Thanks for your comment, and I thank John Merryman, too--whose thoughts are unfailingly stimulating of other, new thoughts.
I was going to write back that I have never heard of Charles Edel - but then you answered my "ignorance" by pointing out that he was from the US. Here in Australia various "think tanks" (what a term) mostly disguised by the addition of the word Institute - as if a university graduate faculty - though little more that lobbying groups of the right (IPA/ASPI/Lowy - along with the US Studies Centre at my old university Sydney U - infect the news and with largely secretive funding from the usual suspects and Big Mining - Gina Rinehart one ["Twiggy" Forrest another] whose billions come from inheriting the mining ventures of her "cowboy" father (who wanted the true owners of the lands which he "legally" mined to die out) the First Nations peoples of north-western Australia. It is disgusting on a human/ethical basis - and then there is Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp - controlling over 60% of ALL media in Australia - and he's a citizen of the US (playing on his family dynasty and young newspaper life here in Australia before his forays to the UK, the US - China, too! As you will know and no doubt see far more clearly than me...
When the problems can no longer be patched over, it becomes necessary to step back and consider what is causing them to begin with.
When you are talking hundreds of millions and billions of people, it's not a computer, it's not a machine, it's biology.
People have been going forth and multiplying for a hundred thousand years and America represents, literally, humanity washing up against the edge of the global petri dish. Our essential culture is based on growth, geographic, population, economic, technological, industrial. Topped off with a half century of increasingly parabolic debt to keep the party going. Debt doesn't matter, until it does. That, more than the political charade, is what has to be understand and addressed.
Government, as the executive and regulatory function of society, is analogous to the central nervous system. While money and finance serve as blood and the circulation system.
Given our systems of perception and communication tend to revolve around personalities and only secondarily round the concepts and forces they express, there doesn't seem to be much acknowledgement of these basic forces, both driving society and directing it.
Much as our circulation system delivers the energy the digestive and respiratory systems generate around the body, while the government, as well as the culture, tries to give it some sense of overall cohesion. So there will always be that tension between desire and judgement.
The function of government is to make the tough choices. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Nor can we go both directions at the fork in the road. So government will step on people's feet on occasion and not just be there to hold people's hands. Not all desires are healthy, nor all decisions wise.
Meanwhile it has not occurred to the supposed intellects that money is a social contract which enables mass societies to function, not a commodity to mine from society. Markets need it to circulate, while people see it as signal to extract and store. Consequently ever more has to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted have to be devised. Since it is a contract, in which the asset is backed by a debt, similar amounts of debt have to be generated, to store the asset.
One way is simply squeezing the money flowing through the regular economy, forcing it to run on debt, drawing that saved money back into circulation. This tends to set up a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Consequently the effect is analogous to the heart telling the hands and feet they don't need so much money and should work harder for what they do get. The Ancients devised debt jubilees to reset the process, but we lack the long term perspective.
The other primary method is to have the government as debtor of last resort. The elephant in the room is that the capital markets could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus investment money. The bloated military and endless wars developed as a way to make it go away, so more can be borrowed. Which explains why they are such strategically inept boondoggles, but the same clowns and parasites are left in charge.
The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt, backing private wealth.
Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, though a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. The average five year old can figure this out, but economists are just creatures of the system.
The functionality of money is its fungibility. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing though our bodies. It is a public utility, like roads. It's not our picture on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not personally responsible fr maintaining its value.
the reality is that there is not the productive investment potential to save the amounts necessary for a stable society and reasonably secure lives, but we do save to many of the same reasons, so eventually the concept of the public commons we have to be resurrected and updated.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is the resulting atomized culture is more easily controlled by institutional authority and mediated by a parasitic financial system.
There was a time when government was private, but as monarchs lost sight of the fact the relationship is a two way street, they were usurped. Now banking is having its own, "Let them eat cake." moment.
Which is not to say banking can be a direct function of government, any more than the head and heart are one. Politicians live and die on the hope they inspire, so printing extra money is a handy sugar rush, but there will never be the willpower to back off, which that starts.
It is just one of those stages of human evolution.
"The function of government is to make the tough choices. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Nor can we go both directions at the fork in the road. So government will step on people's feet on occasion and not just be there to hold people's hands. Not all desires are healthy, nor all decisions wise."
However - as familiar and credible as these "mantras" sound - they are false. The function of government IS to look after its people. As many acorns as are properly planted, watered, tended - WILL become mighty oak trees. We CAN have our cake AND eat it - if everyone is treated equitably and the oligarchs are prevented from their theft of/from the common wealth! Absolutely at forks in the road - we MAY take both or more roads leading in various directions - seeking the best views and things from all roads. And government should NOT step on anyone's toes unless they are corruptly rorting the people (paying little to no taxes, bribing - oops - "lobbying") those public "officials" with political power and should definitely be there TO hold the hands of those citizens/residents/refugees/First Nations peoples/asylum-seekers who require it UNTIL the point they no longer do so! I do not argue against the final sentence... Jim
With much of the rest of your thesis/response John Merryman - agreement...
Certainly government enhances those within its domain, even those on the edges. The problem is this domain is always finite, so there has to be fluctuation and feedback between the social organism and the larger ecosystem. Nodes and network. Otherwise negative feedback starts to set in, as the number of those benefiting shrink, so does the size of its domain. After awhile the power of those on the outside exceeds those on the inside and that particular system falls into the dustbin of history.
A healthy system recognizes this yin and yang, between synchronization and harmonization, rather than the God Almighty of the monolith.
I would summarize Biden's foreign policy as follows: splashy headlines, but when you read the fine print, it becomes clear that not much has changed. Yemen, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Palestine all come prominently to mind.
Whatever passes for US "foreign policy" is just a sum of major lobbying interests projected outwards: Israeli, Military/Industrial, Oil/Gas. In the Covid era the pharmaceutical can be added to that list too. Only mechanism is some variation of "stick" - from expulsion of diplomats, through sanctions and acts of theft and piracy up and including military intervention. And of course promoting and financing "color revolutions" and "regime changes" via various deep-state cutouts such as NED and USAID etc. Nobody can get anything of value from US diplomacy (except Israel of course, it seems sometimes that the only reason State Dept even exists is to give never ending cover to whatever crime and landgrab Zionists commit), not even consistency of keeping own signature - in the last decade or two US reneged on own commitments walking out from ABM treaty, Paris climate agreement (rejoined, but it is moribund so useful just for cosmetic purposes), JCPOA (pretending to rejoin), INF, Open Skies...
From my position here in Australia there is little to nothing I can find to disagree with Patrick in your assessment excepting to add that the US sycophant and Pentecultist PM Morrison (and several of his governing Cabinet Ministers of the same cult or of similar end-of-days fundamentalist cult beliefs) is/are more-or-less in lock-step with whatever inanity drips from the lips of Pompeo/Blinken and Trump/Biden. Tragedy is on the nearing horizon of our world future!
Jim.
Your situation in Australia is quite saddening, I must say. We have a government and a "thinking" class (quotation marks required) that finds wisdom in following along after the Washington cliques you name even when this is diametrically counter to Australia's palpable, right-there-in-front-of-you interests. I recently had a go-around with one Charles Edel after an essay I contributed to Australian Foreign Affairs. This fellow purported to speak for Australia, and when I looked him up he turned out to be an American--with a military background no less and a place at the Wilson Center. Edel's argument to me was that, no, Australians think and speak for themselves.
One can make no sense of this. But of how very much one can say this?
Thanks for your comment, and I thank John Merryman, too--whose thoughts are unfailingly stimulating of other, new thoughts.
I was going to write back that I have never heard of Charles Edel - but then you answered my "ignorance" by pointing out that he was from the US. Here in Australia various "think tanks" (what a term) mostly disguised by the addition of the word Institute - as if a university graduate faculty - though little more that lobbying groups of the right (IPA/ASPI/Lowy - along with the US Studies Centre at my old university Sydney U - infect the news and with largely secretive funding from the usual suspects and Big Mining - Gina Rinehart one ["Twiggy" Forrest another] whose billions come from inheriting the mining ventures of her "cowboy" father (who wanted the true owners of the lands which he "legally" mined to die out) the First Nations peoples of north-western Australia. It is disgusting on a human/ethical basis - and then there is Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp - controlling over 60% of ALL media in Australia - and he's a citizen of the US (playing on his family dynasty and young newspaper life here in Australia before his forays to the UK, the US - China, too! As you will know and no doubt see far more clearly than me...