So what is the true rate of inflation?

There is no one true rate of inflation, since to estimate inflation, one has to compare apples and oranges, and there is no one valid way of doing this.

But if inflation is substantially less than ten percent a year, we are consuming substantially more goods this year than last year.  Do you think we are consuming substantially more goods this year than last year?

But whatever the true rate of inflation might be, it is increasing.  It is not increasing fast as I expected, not increasing very fast at all.  It is increasing at about two percent a year, so if this year inflation was not ten percent, but eight percent, next year it will be ten percent a year, and the year after that, twelve percent a year.  The rate at which prices increase, is itself increasing.

This does not sound all that terrifying, but recall that hyperinflation begins as the collapse of a paper bubble.  Everyone wakes up one morning realizing that inflation is a lot higher than they thought and will only get worse, so they all try to unload their paper at the same time for tangibles:  Land in productive use, gold, ammo, guns, non perishable food items, alcohol,  and suchlike, also overseas non tangible assets, paper assets regulated by solvent governments.

Only to discover that they cannot all unload their paper money at the same time.

If the rate of inflation is high and increasing, sooner or later, it suddenly starts to increase a lot faster.  Suppose inflation this year was seven percent, then next year it will nine percent, which is not imminent doom.  If people are not panicking today, they are unlikely to panic tomorrow. The end is not nigh.  But the end, nonetheless, is in sight.

Consensus leads to the madness of crowds, not the wisdom of crowds.  As we move to a government ruled by consensus, and intrusively pervading every aspect of society with its power, madness and evil prevails.

The wisdom of crowds happens when you collect people’s guesses or estimates for some fact, without them consulting each other, without them forming consensus first.

The opening anecdote of the book “The wisdom of crowds” relates Francis Galton’s surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox’s true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts)

But the book also has many examples of the madness of crowds. The book tells us, when members of the crowd consult each other first, when they influence each other’s opinions, when they update their Bayesian priors from the priors of those around them, the crowd becomes markedly less wise, often becomes insane.

The crowd, he tells us, goes mad when the members of the crowd are too conscious of the opinions of others and began to emulate each other and conform rather than think differently.

In other words, consensus is apt to be madness.

And now I depart from the book, and tell you my own observations on my own authority, not that of James Surowiecki.

Our communications skills were evolved for the hunt and for war, where groups were small and feedback from the environment was strong, immediate, and impossible to ignore.  Ignore it, you would soon get hurt.

Humans are not well adapted to the mental life of large groups, to “the life of the mind”, meaning life without forceful feedback from the senses, feedback that is frequently accompanied by physical pain to force us to pay attention.

With larger groups, more feedback from people and less feedback from the environment, consensus building is apt to go into positive feedback loops, even without deliberate manipulation by the insane and the evil.

A bubble is a manifestation of a spontaneous positive feedback loop by the sane.

Add the evil and insane to the mix, and consensus will reliably go wrong.  The sane update their views from the consensus, the insane do not update so the consensus moves towards the insane, the evil lie and manipulate the Overton window, so the consensus moves towards what the evil purport to believe.

Linguistics theory, Chomsky’s universal grammar, is best understood as grantsmanship (the evil), an effort by academics who did not know or care much about foreign languages to take control of a juicy chunk of academia from  polylingual language geeks.  The lies about language continually and radically changed, reflecting not the pressure from the sane, nor updates on the basis of information, but, like the abruptly changing Soviet line, moves in a struggle over grants and power.  Global Warming is similarly a combination of grantsmanship (the evil) with the death-to-humankind greenies (evil and insane).

Anti dietary fat science is primarily the insane dominating the consensus (greenies and animal rights activists who are entirely unmoved by either evidence or the opinions of the sane).

The financial crisis is a combination of bubble (the sane are apt to spontaneously go off the rails by paying too much attention to each other and not enough to external reality) with evil (political loan allocation) and with the evil and insane (affirmative action going ever lefter than thou.)

The destruction of fatherhood, the financial crisis, and lots of others, including global warming, are all manifestations of the left singularity.  Lefter than thou is the way to power, so whatever direction the consensus tends to move, whether spontaneously as in a bubble or through madness, becomes a path for the evil to gain power,  (“Hey, we are all agreed on X, so we need to enforce X”) so whatever the direction that the consensus happens to be moving defines leftism, whereupon the evil push it ever further in that direction.  (“We need to enforce X even more than it is already being enforced.  Grant all power to us, and we will take care of X”)

Thus in the left singularity evil and madness invariably ally, to pursue ever escalating heights of madness.

The scientific method, (short form: “take no ones word for it”) was a conscious effort to be mindful of this flaw in our natures, and socially enforce behavior that protects the group from it. The scientific method is replication. He who invokes “consensus” preaches not science, but authority and faith.

The twinkle up, twinkle down consensus building behavior of OWS, on the contrary, is an effort to socially and coercively enforce this flaw in our nature, from which the evil and the insane benefit.

The corporate form is also an effort to protect us from this flaw in our nature.  The board appoints the CEO, and monitors him, but is not supposed to second guess him and direct him.  Consensus is socially prohibited.  The board chooses one guy, and goes with what he thinks. If they don’t like it, they choose another, but they are not supposed to switch too often, and not supposed to meddle.  When the board meddles, people in the investor class tend to view this as improper and corrupt.  They are supposed to look over his shoulder and keep an eye on what he is doing, but are not supposed to second guess him, short of firing him.

The reason that rentacops were so effective in dealing with OWS is the corporate form:

The shareholders theoretically appoint the board (though more commonly it appoints itself, and subsequently perpetuates itself).  The board appoints the CEO, and delegates to him full power over the assets of the firm.  He is not supposed to suffer any interference from the board, short of being suddenly fired, and mostly he does not.

He in turn delegates the full power of the property owner down the line (or at least he is supposed to), and in the case of security, delegates to the guys in each building.  Thus, when OWS attempted to occupy, the security guards did not need to consult with a bunch of suits, who would in turn consult with a bunch of lawyers, who would consult with … instead the security guards had all necessary authority to act ex tempore without consulting anyone, to exercise the sort of power over trespassers that a private owner would.   When dealing with outside intrusion, some poorly paid guy was able to speak with the full authority of the owners, the shareholders, since the shareholders had granted full authority to the board, the board to the CEO, and the CEO … all the way down to some poorly paid guy who has a stungun and pepper spray in his desk.  When the security guys decide to throw out some unwanted visitors, that is usually morally and legally the same as if they personally owned the building, for those who actually do own the building fully delegated that moral and legal authority to them.

Of course, just as it all too frequently happens that board does meddle, it also all too frequently happens that corporate decisions are made by committees, but it is not supposed to happen.  Committee management and matrix management is a manifestation of the mid level management hugging power to themselves.  One is likely to  see a meeting of twenty high status people, and one lower status person who does not speak much, the lower status person being the one who actually knows the matter being discussed, the one who is actually responsible for giving effect to the supposed consensus of the meeting.  But corporations are not supposed to make decisions by meetings and consensus, and mostly they do not.  To the extent that they do, they deservedly suffer ridicule.

The OWS model would have the shareholders gather in  a crowd, and twinkle up and twinkle down at each other.  In the corporate model, the poorly paid guy with a stungun in his desk is the avatar for the shareholders.  He is the property owner, in their place, exercising their full authority to deal with unwanted visitors.  He does not file a report to the shareholders proposing courses of action and wait for them to twinkle the various courses of action up or down.

Regulation, however, interferes with the corporate model.  To do something that is regulated, the corporation finds it has to get buy in from dozens, perhaps hundreds,  sometimes thousands, of meddlesome people.

In regulation, the evil and insane, which is to say the consensus, prohibit the sane (the corporate form) from acting, and even from sanity.  In the banking crisis, they demanded conformity not only in action, but in thought.

Markets are also a way of avoiding consensus, since each participant in the market is expected to outsmart all the others, thus as in science, replicate the research of each of the others.  The laws against “insider trading” attempt to prohibit this, but do not have the effect of enforcing consensus.  Price control and rationing does have the effect, but we are not getting that problem.

The corporate form is mostly sane because consensus is socially discouraged, replaced by delegating concentrated power freely, and concentrating power as much as practical.  The scientific method is sane, if actually followed, though markedly slower and less efficient than the corporate form, because consensus is discouraged for replication (“take no one’s word for it”).  The market is mostly sane, because market participants are supposed to strive to each be smarter than the rest, rather than to conform. Corporations exist because markets require more decision making by more smart people, because markets replicate decision making. Corporations economize on decision making, by telling people what to do.

Since committee decision making is expensive, as well as tending to madness, a corporation that finds itself holding meetings to make decisions should consider outsourcing the activities that are causing this problem to the market.

Peer review enforces consensus in science, as regulation enforces it against corporations.  And so the the insane take over the asylum.

Why has science stopped progressing?

Peer review came into broad application around 1942 or so, and that is pretty much when science stopped progressing.  Technology continued to progress until 1972, and some areas of technology continue to progress today, but large areas stopped progressing in 1972, and many additional areas of have very recently stopped progressing, at least in the West.

Because of peer review, Einstein’s special relativity paper would not be publishable today.  Any paper that is publishable today has lots and lots of citations to prove it is in line with the consensus.  Einstein’s paper conspicuously lacked citations, because it was not in line with the consensus.  Einstein was not an academic, and not a PhD, his paper had few or no citations, and radically up ended existing physics.

When I was taught special relativity, they did not tell us Einstein was right because the holy consensus tells us so, they had us replicate the calculations and review the evidence that Einstein presented in “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” just as if Einstein was some patent clerk with neither PhD nor academic position.

Einstein attempted to present special relativity as his dissertation, and it was rejected.  If rejected as his dissertation, would surely have been rejected had it ever been submitted to peer review.  So instead he submitted for his dissertation a don’t-rock-the-boat paper that contained nothing very new or interesting.

Each person replicating the research of each of the others can be costly.  A corporation reduces the cost of this, enabling the employment of people who are not bright, by telling them what to do. Externally a corporation is market oriented, each corporation replicating the research of all the other corporations in the market, but though externally a corporation is market oriented, internally, a corporation is socialism, but what people fail to notice is that internally it is socialism on the pattern of the Nazis, the socialism of the Führerprinzip, not the socialism of the modern left whose massive dysfunction we see on display at Occupy Wall Street.

This sounds like corporations are oppressive, and they are, but in practice it means that a low pay low IQ security guy does not need to hold a meeting, nor wire the board for instructions, when a bunch of bad guys attempt to occupy the office. Full concentration of power to the CEO is supposed to be accompanied by full delegation of power from the CEO, and usually it is.

The Führerprinzip is that you don’t have committees and you don’t have votes and you don’t have consensus.  Each leader (Führer in German) is delegated full authority in his own area by his leader.

According to allied propaganda, the Führerprinzip is that the Führer is above the law and incarnates the German people, but rather, the Führerprinzip is more the common sense observation that committees are dreadfully bad at making decisions, and you should appoint a smart guy with full authority to deal with X, and hold him fully responsible for any foul ups in X.

This maximizes the capability of hierarchical organizations to get lots of stupid people to perform functions that would require smart people, were they a multitude of independent operators in the market, and lowers the high cost of figuring out what to do.

In contrast, organizations that have lots of committees tend to be horribly Dilbertesque.  In practice, the socialism intended by the modern left is markedly worse than the socialism practiced by Hitler, in roughly the same proportion as the socialism practiced by the communists murdered more people than the socialism practiced by Hitler.  Rather than people being empowered by participation, they are oppressed  by meetings that they do not want to go to, and strangled by red tape.

Leftists want to slice power into lots and lots of tiny little slices, and share that power out between lots and lots of people, but this in practice is horribly disfunctional.  What it does is not empower people but instead ensure that decisions are evil and insane, in other words, ensure that decisions are left wing.  It also increases the cost of decision making.  If a decision is sufficiently important that it is worth spending the time of a lot of important people on it, then it should be made by the market, or by the scientific method, not by consensus.

Because the socialism of the Nazis was inherently saner than the socialism of the modern left, it was inherently less left wing, hence its markedly lower murder rate.  And thus the modern left, which is to say the modern state, reaches into science, markets, and corporations to remake them all into its own image, which is to say, make them all inherently evil and insane.

… we are undergoing cultural decay — ranging from the collapse  of art and literature after 1945 to the soft totalitarianism of  political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds  of reality television and popular entertainment

… how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change,  evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields?

When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s  and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration:   We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads  in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde  in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. …

… One cannot in good conscience encourage an undergraduate in 2011 to study nuclear engineering as a career.…

… In the next three years, the large pharmaceutical companies will lose approximately one third of their current revenue stream as patents expire, so, in a perverse yet understandable response, they have begun the wholesale liquidation of the research departments that have borne so little fruit in the last decade and  a half.
…

The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, …

Incomes, stalled since 1973, are now falling, across the board, afflicting all income quintiles, with no end in sight. Japan has been in decline for over a decade. There is no reason to think that this decline will end until its causes are remedied – and if never remedied, we may well wind up like so many vanished civilizations before us.

Since the decline effects all of society, every aspect of society, we have the luxury of looking of looking for causes where the light is best.

Let us look at three well studied instances of decline:   the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, Wikipedia, and Washington Mutual.  I did not select these cases because they all support my thesis, but because they are conspicuous and good information is available for what went wrong.

1. The space Shuttle Explosion

   Low ranking engineers explained to their superiors in detail that the Challenger would explode if launched in cold weather and explained in detail how and why it would explode, but the high ranking “engineers” neither understood nor believed.

   Chairman Rogers: Well, let’s read it. “Loss of mission” – this is actual loss.

   “Failure effects summary: Actual loss. Loss of mission, vehicle and crew due to metal erosion, burn-through, and probable case burst, resulting in fire and deflagration.”

   …
   Mr. Mulloy: But about halfway through, after we had looked at all of the data, the conclusion and recommendation charts that Mr. Lundhad prepared came in and the logic for his recommendation, which did not specifically address don’t launch 51-L, what itsaid was that, within our experience base we should not operate any solid rocket motor at any temperature colder than we have previously operated one, which was 51-C.

   Chairman Rogers: Didn’t you take that to be a negative recommendation?

   Mr. Mulloy: Yes, sir. That was an engineering conclusion, which I found this conclusion without basis and I challenged its logic.

   Mulloy then repeats over and over again that he was not able to understand the explanation of why the shuttle was going to blow up, from which he concluded not that he was an idiot, but the engineers telling him it was going to blow up were idiots.

   “And this was a rather surprising conclusion, based upon data that didn’t seem to hang together, and so I challenged that.”

   Further, in describing how it did blow, he reveals he still does not understand the explanation of how it did blow up. In other words, he is an idiot, and, being too stupid to understand why the space shuttle was going to explode, and not wanting to believe it was going to explode, insisted on it being launched. Mulloy not only did not understand why the space shuttle was going to explode, but after it exploded, and the cause of the explosion had been found, studied, and explained again step by step, still did not understand how it exploded.

   So how is it that Mr Mulloy, and people like him, who do not know $#!% shit from beans, are in charge of people who knew and understood stuff?

2. Wikipedia

   Wikipedia has less information, and less useful information, than it used to.  This reflects its policy of presenting the official view on everything.  Where there is no official view, facts tend to get deleted as unsupported, or not encyclopedic, or some such.  Truth and knowledge is supposedly what comes from universities and the mainstream media.  If not in the universities or the mainstream media, is supposedly not truth. This leads to particularly bitter contention in political fields like climate science, evolutionary psychology, race, and Darwinism, but causes widespread damage in many non political fields, for example on computer science, since the vast majority of computer science knowledge is not academic.

   Contributors are instructed:  “Wikipedia is an encyclopedic reference, not an instruction manual, guidebook, or textbook. Wikipedia articles should not read like … instruction manuals. ”

   When I look something up related to computer science, it is normally because I am working on a project, and need to know how to do something, so I need something that reads like an instruction manual, guidebook, or textbook.  Further, anyone who knows computer science stuff is usually an engineer, so is apt to write like a textbook or instruction manual.  The effect and application of the not-a-manual rule is to prohibit contributions from people who actually do stuff, which contributions they intend to share with other people who actually do stuff, in favor of contributions by people who do not do stuff, and are incapable of doing stuff – which is to say, in favor of academic knowledge.

3. Washington Mutual

   Washington Mutual was able to take over many other better run banks, not because shareholders had confidence in Washington Mutual, but because regulators had confidence in Washington Mutual willingness to enthusiastically hurl vast amounts of money in the general direction of desired voting blocks. Kerry Killinger, CEO of Washington Mutual, became rich and powerful in substantial part through his cozy relationship with left wing activist organizations such as Acorn, which enabled him to control regulators as much as it reflected the fact that regulators controlled him.

   Washington Mutual took out ads condemning themselves for racism, and was given a bunch of other, more soberly run banks, to loot and destroy.

   Banks were told by regulators: “Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor … In reviewing past credit problems,  lenders should be willing to consider extenuating circumstance”

   If a bank prevented people with no credit history from borrowing, this was a practice with “disparate impact” – which is “Raaaacism”. “Disparate impact” means you cannot apply standards at which non Asian minorities fail disproportionately – such as having documented income, a past history of paying their bills, and so on and so forth.

   When your regulator tells you that you “should” make easy money loans, you will make easy money loans, or suffer dire punishment.  And indeed, banks that did not make easy money loans did suffer dire punishment – they got taken over by Washington Mutual and its merry band of idiots.

   It is clear that Kerry Killinger and Angelo Mozilo sincerely believed that lending unemployed no-hablo-english wetbacks money to buy million dollar houses no money down was a good idea. They conned everyone of gigantic amounts of money, but their biggest victims were themselves and their banks.

   They did not pretend to believe in order to become rich and powerful, rather the regulatory apparatus efficiently selected stupid people who sincerely believed stupid things to become rich and powerful. If their beliefs had been feigned and cynical, a lot more of the disappeared money would have stuck to them.

   That Kerry Killinger was quite genuinely stupid was also demonstrated by the inability of Countrywide and Washington Mutual to manage their paperwork. Many of the titles that passed through their hands now have no paper trail showing who is the rightful owner, which suggests that bank was for the most part staffed by people whose IQ was below 105.

   Because political correctness requires stupid beliefs, selection for people who are sincerely politically correct, such as Kerry Killinger, selects stupid people, who in turn hire and promote other stupid people, so that no one in his bank could do a banker’s paperwork.

This is consistent with Codevilla’s analysis:  That that we are ruled by a ruling elite, credentialed but not educated by the very best universities, that is increasing narrow, ignorant, out of touch, and stupid!

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters – speaking the “in” language – serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. …

…regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative “nonprofit” and “philanthropic” sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government.…

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity – being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs.…

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. … But didn’t our [ruling elite] go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn’t most of them get good grades?  … getting into America’s “top schools” is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that “the best” colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

We have statistical evidence that our ruling elite selects people who fit in at the expense of ability – that people who are excessively able in unappreciated ways do not fit in.

Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”

all other things being equal, being an officer in the ROTC is likely to get you excluded from a prestigious university – any fool can see that political correctness counts more than ability or experience – whether in college admissions, or Obama’s picks for the federal reserve, or the post of CEO of HP, people are chosen primarily for their theology not their ability.

Codevilla continues:

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what amounts to indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting unequivocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don’t have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

This means that there really is no private enterprise any more. Everything is to a greater or lesser extent run by the ruling elite – and the ruling elite is not very bright, and is steadily getting dumber.

If someone is important and under pressure to perform (perhaps the board, being composed of major shareholders, wants the CEO to make a profit and will fire him if he does not) he will surround himself with the smartest people he can get – the Google policy. But if he is under no pressure to perform, he will prefer that those lower in status than him are not quite as bright as he is, other wise he is apt to find himself in the uncomfortable position of Mr Mulloy, wherein a low status person explains why he is wrong about something, and he fails to understand the explanation. Since our ruling elite exclusively works in fields where there is no pressure to perform it naturally finds itself more comfortable inducting new members of the ruling elite that are dumber than the existing members, so that with each generation, our ruling elite gets stupider and stupider. Once upon a time, the ruling elite was kept smart by the continual infusion of smart people from business, and was prevented from declining by an hereditary elite, but now, completely self enclosed, and under no pressure to perform, a purported meritocracy by slow degrees becomes an idiocracy.

I predict that wherever membership of the government bureaucracy is controlled by some meritocratic test, the test will be subverted to that it no longer has much to do with intelligence, because bureaucrats do not much like smart people.

Observe that even at Google, though they get the smartest engineers that they can, they have a very different policy for other parts of the company. Those that might have to deal with the state, are selected to fit in, and if you are dangerously smart, you are unlikely to fit in.

We are in decay because the our ruling elite, including our top scientists (who are not really scientists, but rather a priesthood who preach pseudo scientific rationales for whatever our rulers desire to do), are steadily getting dumber and dumber.

It is, however, apparent that Bear Stearns kept a lot of bad loans, and took losses on them, even though it unloaded most of the bad loans onto various suckers by means of fraudulent warranties and representations.  I argue therefore that Bear Stearns was under pressure to please regulators by lending to the supposedly poor and oppressed, which poor and oppressed are notoriously unable and unwilling to repay loans, and finding itself with a pile of bad loans, proceeded to unload as many of them as it could, by fair means and foul, many of them onto Ambac.

If, in the end, the government winds up compensating Ambac, and the Bear Stearns boys who made these fraudulent warranties and representations to Ambac go unpunished as individuals, we should conclude that Bear Stearns was carrying out government policy, that this fraud, like so many others, was committed out of political correctness.  If, on the other hand, those who committed these massive frauds are themselves individually punished, for committing lucrative frauds that sank the world economy, then this will be evidence for the fraud was committed for profit.

Against the theory that the fraud was conducted for profit, is the fact that this is a civil lawsuit, even though fraud, and fraud that cost the taxpayer trillions, is a criminal offense.  That there is not the slightest suggestion that any of these many acts of fraud will be punished criminally, suggests that these frauds were committed not for gain, but for political correctness.

… the government’s policy of diverting capital into housing creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have been had government policy not actively encouraged over-investment in housing.

…

The connection between the GSEs and the government helps isolate the GSEs’ managements from market discipline. This isolation from market discipline is the root cause of the mismanagement occurring at Fannie and Freddie …

I hope my colleagues join me in protecting taxpayers from having to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when the housing bubble bursts.

… The flip side of regulatory capture is that mangers and owners of highly subsidized and regulated industries are more concerned with pleasing the regulators than with pleasing consumers or investors, since the industries know that investors will believe all is well if the regulator is happy. Thus, the regulator and the regulated industry may form a symbiosis where each looks out for the other’s interests while ignoring the concerns of investors. …

… the government increases the likelihood of a painful crash in the housing market. …

Needless to say, there was only one vote for addressing the looming financial crisis.  Looking at the tea party candidates, I think if the Tea party did a clean sweep, if every single congressman had belonged to the tea party, I think there would have been two or three votes for addressing the looming financial crisis.

All the conservative criticism of her seems to be disappearing off the web, but what the hell, she stank, critics pointed out she stank, so someone killed her.   It might have been a leftist who did not think she was left enough, but chances are, was a conservative. Yes, chances are that unkind remarks by conservatives got her killed.  Pity it was not someone who mattered more.  Her platform was to create lots of high paying jobs in government and quasi governmental activities – in other words, to transfer wealth from productive people who mostly voted against her, to unproductive people who mostly voted for her, thus moving the nation generally leftwards.

As the nation plunges into bankruptcy, as the Cloward–Piven crisis approaches, we might kill enough similar wrongdoers to eventually get out of the crisis.  I don’t really see any other path to resolving the crisis other than watering the tree of liberty in the usual fashion.

Anti semitism is the faulty, paranoid, and obsessive belief that Jewish elites are significantly different from gentile elites.

Jews, as Jews, simply were not an are not influential in the development of the theocracy that ruled us. Jews really do not matter so much, so any belief system that causes one to focus on Jews sends one crazy, detaches one from reality.  If we look at the elite and bad conduct by the elite, and start asking:
“Who is a JOO? Look I see a JOO!  See the JOO!” then we are apt to attribute to the elite an ethnic solidarity that it conspicuously lacks. The elite is disproportionately Jewish, and hates Jews, entirely white, and hates whites, mostly anglophone, and hates anglophones, mostly American, and hates Americans and America.

Before any Jew was allowed to get anywhere near the reins of power, he had to convert to progressivism, or plausibly pretend to. Lots of them did so, as the progressive theocrats intended, which was highly beneficial for those Jews that converted and ascended, but a disaster for Judaism, and none too good for the Jewish people as a people.

Progressivism is an American branch of left protestantism, which sought theocratic power, in particular wanted all educational institutions to inculcate all children, especially Jewish and Catholic children, in their religion. Since the American constitution forbade this, they over time, ditched Christ, ditched redemption, and in large part ditched God. This started in 1900 or so and was largely completed by the time they were running reeducation, denazification and anti-colonialism.. They retained, however, a great pile of Christian and specifically protestant beliefs that are incompatible with Judaism as a religion, a culture, and a society. If Jews were influential as Jews, progressivism would be post Jewish, rather than post Christian.  But progressivism is, in practice, a post Christian heresy from Christianity.

For an example of the post christian character of progressivism, consider the ludicrous progressive belief that all people are equal in ability and virtue and so forth, which is what remains of the Christian belief that all people are equal in the sight of God, after God and Christ have been removed from the belief system.

The proposition that men and women are literally equal, that races are equal, leading to the conclusion that they are interchangeable, that women can be soldiers and firemen, men can marry other men, can only be understood as proposition about souls, rather than bodies, and when this doctrine is doubted, the reaction is religious rather than empirical. Understood as a species of Christian belief, it makes sense, because the Christians believe that the most important part of the self is immaterial. If it’s immaterial, then material differences have nothing to do with it. So Christians are free to believe pretty much anything they want about this most important part of the self, unconstrained by material evidence of any sort. They are free to believe that deep inside everyone, there is a core, an essence, that is not the slightest diminished by bodily infirmity etc. etc. I.e., the soul. The progressives jettison God, replacing God with, presumably, Nature. So “equality before God” becomes “equality before Nature”. That is, natural equality (of some unspecified sort). And this could be how the progressives manage to believe in some unspecified “natural” (biological or whatever) equality even though no evidence backs them up. Their belief is derived, not from evidence, but from the Christian heritage of progressivism. Their belief looks superficially like a scientific hypothesis because all the terms in it could be interpreted as referring to natural things, but it doesn’t really have any empirical content, because “equality”, while it could refer to something measurable, does not actually refer to anything measurable. Any attempt to measure something to test the claim of “equality” is attacked by progressives.

Progressives are using naturalistic-sounding words to talk about equality, but they are behaving as though it didn’t make any sense to try to measure it, which is how Christians would behave with respect to attempts to rigorously test equality before God. The Christian reaction would range from skepticism that it could be done, to the sense that it doesn’t even make sense to try, and finally to the certainty that it is heresy to even suggest such a thing and the person suggesting it is evil and possibly a sorcerer and should be burnt at the stake – and if you express doubt about natural equality, the progressive reaction you will get is not an appeal to empirical evidence, but condemnation and threats.

Progressivism is today influential world wide, and everywhere it is primarily American. For example “Gay pride” was applied throughout Europe often before it was applied in America, but with made in America propaganda, directly translated and retain American idioms, and often American neologisms, such as “Gay” as the new euphemism for homosexual; the hand of the master was visible; the muppet’s lips were moving, but the voice was not that of a local. Similarly American schoolchildren are taught about America, and are primarily taught that America is the most evil nation in the world, and German schoolchildren are also taught about America, and are primarily taught that America is the most evil nation in the world.

But, I hear you ask, if the Cathedral, the progressive ruling elite, is primarily American, rather than Jewish, why is it so maniacally anti American? Why you, ask, do they hate people like you and me. Surely that they hate Americans shows they are not Americans, do not think of themselves as Americans, therefore must be Jews?

Alas, self hatred is depressingly common, and progressives hate themselves, and therefore hate everyone like themselves, and therefore they hate you, and hate me, for reasons I will now explain:

Central to Christianity is sin and redemption. Christians are held to a standard so high that they cannot possibly attain it, and even if they attained it, they are condemned by original sin; we are all sinners and should be ashamed and guilty. But the preacher offers us a way out. Accept Christ as Lord, Christ will forgive you, Christ loves you, Christ will shoulder the load. Yes, you are a sinner, but Jesus loves you. And thus, central to progressivism is sin. Progressives are held to a standard so high that we cannot possibly attain it, and even if we attained it, we are condemned by original sin in that we are beneficiaries of colonialism slavery racism and blah blah blah. But the sensitivity trainer cannot offer us a way out, since God is dead and Jesus never existed. And so progressives are required to hate themselves. And they do.

The Progressives, the Left, the Cathedral, does not hate non Jewish whites because it is disproportionately Jewish; it hates all whites because it is white and hates Jews disproportionately because it is disproportionately Jewish.  It hates America and Americans because it is primarily American.

The most honest political ad of all time illustrates the perils of the politically correct only listening to each other. When they speak, their purpose is not truth, but power – and since they understand power as meaning the capacity to harm, everything they say is a lie intended to harm the hearer – and since they listen respectfully, indeed worshipfully, to each other …

The ruling elite is theocratic, hence the nickname “the Cathedral”. Their religion is simultaneously altruistically self hating, as illustrated by environmentalism and the fact that the disproportionately Jewish elite hates Israel and Jews, yet contradictorily, at the same time nihilistic and cynical, with the Alinksyite approach that anything goes in the pursuit of power, a contradiction resolved in their own minds since they are pursuing total, limitless, and absolute power, not on their own behalf, but on behalf of the oppressed and downtrodden – they are doing it for the proletariat, for the colonized. And if the proletariat and
the colonized are so rude as to talk back to their betters, well then, they are doing it for the trees.

The Cathedral will destroy everything, starting with itself, just as the most honest political ad of all time ended with the murder of the narrator. Its self hatred renders it powerless against more self confident theocracies, such as Islam, and its self destructiveness renders it incapable of holding power for very long even absent external enemies.

If the Jews were running things, we would have decent airport security like they have in Israel, instead of naked body scan and genital gropedown.   If the Jews were running things, the CIA would operate more like Mossad and less like the Keystone Cops.

The antiprofiling fetish is a left superstition and ritual, derived from progressivism’s Christian roots,  not a Jewish superstition and ritual – so it is obvious who is in charge.

Similarly, Israel had no banking crisis, despite the fact that their banks are full of Jews, who are doubtless as crooked as bankers elsewhere:  The reason there is no banking crisis in Israel is because banks in Israel did not make political loans to voter blocks and special interest groups notorious for not paying their debts; such loans being a progressive, rather than Jewish, superstition. And when the US government put the heat on banks around the world to buy mortgage backed securities, Israel “refused to support the world banking system”.  Since when did we have a world banking system? One worldism is a progressive superstition centered on the UN, and the UN hates Jews.

The left is lily white (as we saw at the “rally to restore sanity”) and hates whites.  The left is dominated and largely controlled by America and anglophones (as we saw with the export of the “gay pride” program to the non English speaking world) and hates anglophones and hates Americans most among anglophones.  The left is disproportionately Jewish, and hates Jews.

We are not ruled by Jews.  We are ruled by people who hate themselves and hate us and hate Jews most of all.

Here is the Bank of Israel’s take on the Global financial crisis:  You will notice that while everyone else is lying about it, they are telling the truth:

What are the factors that led to the global crisis?

The main factor that initiated the crisis was the accumulation of mortgages in default in the US as a result of the reversal of the trend of US housing prices. This occurred against the background of easy mortgages over a period of several years during which mortgages were provided to homebuyers who did not have sufficient ability to repay them. The losses spread to large financial institutions in a number of countries through the globalized financial markets, which facilitated the creation and marketing of complex financial instruments world wide. These instruments had a variety of terms to deal with default that had not been in use in the past and some of the instruments were sold and guaranteed by large financial institutions. Large investment houses worldwide held the view that advances in the study of finance had enabled a better understanding of these products and the correct valuation of the products and their guarantees. In retrospect, the risk assessment of these products was extremely deficient. Thus, significant losses were incurred by these large financial institutions and their customers. As a result, uncertainty regarding the financial stability of these institutions spread at a surprisingly quick rate and activity in the markets for more basic financial products-in which these same investment houses are active-was also affected.

How has the crisis so far affected the Israeli financial system relative to its effect on the financial markets and institutions in other advanced economies?

One of the main causes of the global financial crisis was the provision of mortgages, primarily though not exclusively in the US, to borrowers with insufficient ability to repay them. As a result, housing prices rose sharply in these countries, as did the prices of financial assets. When the financial institutions began to realize that they had provided mortgages to homebuyers with insufficient ability to repay them and these individuals were forced to sell their homes, a downward trend began in the prices of houses that served as the collateral for not only sub-prime mortgages, but higher quality mortgages as well. The drop in the value of other assets also eroded the collateral for loans that were made by the financial institutions in these countries. These developments, together with the collapse of the markets for mortgage-backed securities, had a multiplier effect that among other things led to the collapse of several financial institutions in the US, the UK and Europe. The large-scale provision of such mortgages in these countries to individuals with insufficient means to repay them was not,  however, characteristic of the Israeli financial system

You will observe that members of the Israeli elite can and do speak close to the the truth about the crisis, (the problem was mortgages to deadbeats) while members of the American elite, including their European muppets, cannot and do not. (Supposedly the problem was “excessive leverage”.)  Thus the financial crisis was brought to you by progressivism, not by the Jews, despite the  disproportionate presence of Jews in finance and financial regulation.

Observe:  We have arrived. America is now a totalitarian terror state.

In 1992 I visited Cuba.  Thereafter, I argued it was a totalitarian state, because when I asked certain questions some people fled, fearing that merely hearing the question would result in them being punished for the thoughts it might elicit, and others answered furtively.

Yesterday, I asked someone very close to me a question apt to have a politically incorrect answer (I cannot identify him further, for he swore me to secrecy)

He looked around furtively.  We were on top of a hill overlooking the Coral Sea in a semi rural area, the other side of the world from his workplace.  He lowered his voice.  He then proceeded to utter a series of politically correct platitudes, with gestures and grimaces reversing their meaning, his grimaces implying the opposite of the ostensible meaning, the same sort of communication coded against possible eavesdroppers and hidden microphones that I encountered in Cuba, where they would swear loyalty to communism, while making a gesture of their throats being cut.

Like Havel’s green grocer, the truth would destroy his career.

This is the behavior that in 1992 I saw in Cuba and thereafter used as evidence that Cuba was a totalitarian state, a state of omnipresent fear.

So if Cuba was totalitarian in 1992, America is totalitarian in 2010.   We have arrived at the end of Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom”.

In America, unlike Soviet Russia, we don’t send dissidents to Alaska, and although lots of American psychiatrists are eager to diagnose political deviation as mental illness and treat it with electroshock and lobotomy as they do in Cuba, government has as yet declined to employ them in this capacity.  But what government does do is ensure that political deviation blights your career.  If a company knowingly employs political deviants, it is apt to be sued by quasi governmental organization for a “hostile work environment”, in which lawsuit, no evidence will be presented of anyone saying unkind things to those for which the work environment was supposedly hostile, but evidence will be presented that employees had subversive thoughts – often evidence that they expressed subversive thoughts far from their workplace, as perhaps on a hill overlooking the Coral sea the other side of the world from his workplace – so the company will be punished, for failure to punish subversive thoughts.

Hayek, in “The Road to Serfdom”, argued that regulatory welfare state must inevitably become totalitarian.  Lo and behold, totalitarianism has arrived.  Most people, everyone with some position in society, everyone with something that could be taken away from them, are very, very frightened.

And what is totalitarianism?  Hayek’s totalitarianism seems to be pretty much Havel’s totalitarianism, and here is Havel on totalitarianism:

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!”

Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think I can safely assume that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and the carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be.

If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say.

Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone.

The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”

This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer’s superior, and at the same time is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan’s real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer’s existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?

Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan ‘I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient,’ he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth.

The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?”

Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the façade of something high. And that something is ideology.

As Bruce Charlton points out:

If you go into an institutional environment – a government office, a school or college, a hospital or doctor’s surgery, a museum, public transportation – and you observe posters adorning the walls on politically-correct topics such as diversity, fair trade, global warming, approved victim groups, third world aid – remember Havel’s essay, and that the correct translation of such posters is as follows:

“I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient”

Such posters are a coded admission of submission to ideology – except in the rare instance where they advertise genuine corruption by ideology.

The frequency of such posters nowadays, compared with a generation ago, is a quantitative measure of the progress of totalitarian government.

Catholic Christmas church service, approximately one hundred attend, most of them young.  Sermon is about Christmas being a time for children.

Some months ago I checked the graveyards.  To judge by the absence of angels, graveyards one hundred  percent protestant.

The tallest building in the united states was finished in 1974.

Cars are becoming humbler.

US electricity production was growing exponentially until 1972.  After 1972 it grew more slowly.  Per capita electricity consumption  seems likely to have peaked around 2007 or so.

Supposedly GDP is still growing rapidly, just as supposedly inflation is zero, but it seems improbable that GDP is growing when per capita electricity consumption is not.

One could present all sorts of rationalizations for the decline in manned space exploration – for example that manned space exploration was a polite way of demonstrating superior capability to nuke the other side, and supposedly we are so much more civilized and mature now that the need for such chest beating has diminished.

However, by 2000, we have more compelling evidence of decline.  The buildings damaged or destroyed in 9/11 have not been repaired or replaced.

The west is the past. America sinks into Eurosocialism, while Europe becomes the western satrapies of the new Persian empire. Every rising civilization was a lender, innovator, and investor, every declining civilization a borrower.  California used to be the place where the future was invented, but no longer.

The west’s lead was California’s lead.  And California is no more.

Where, for example, was the netbook commercialized?  Who invented and built the “Amazon” Kindle?  Who is today creating the blue light lasers that are the core of every DVD reader and writer?

The Kindle was developed in Taiwan, by Eink.   It is some standard computing parts wrapped around a new display technology invented, developed and manufactured by Eink.

Indians looking to study abroad rate Melior in Singapore higher than Stanford in the USA.

Today, our universities turn out people trained in political correctness and “diversity”.  Every male CS graduate can parse a boolean expression, but most female CS graduates cannot, indicating that a male needs to be able to parse a boolean expression to get a CS degree, and a female does not. The end stage of this process is that no one needs to be able to parse a boolean expression, but everyone needs to be able to hate dead white males.

China leads the world in coal to liquids technology.

China leads the world in internet based transactions.

The simplest explanation for the fact that western research seems to have fallen off a cliff is that we are now reaching the point where hating dead white males is a more important academic qualification than anything else.  Doubtless it is in reality more complicated than that, but the simplest explanation works quite well:  Consider, for example, the recent demonization of Chagnon.  The most striking factor was the ignorance and stupidity of the academic associations condemning him.  They just did not know stuff.  It was as if they don’t read books by dead white males, as if they feared that reading such stuff might contaminate their minds with dangerous thoughts.

What we have had for some time in academia is theocracy, not meritocracy, and theocracy tends to promote those whose faith is most zealous and reliable.  It is easier to have zealous and reliable faith if you are dumb as two planks glued together.

Who is at the top of Academia:  I suppose the tip top crust are the people who condemned Chagnon, and people like the leading scientists of global warming, Mann and Phil Jones, who are demonstrably not nearly as smart as I am.  Mann, for example, keeps making ludicrous and amateurish mistakes in his statistics, and any time Phil Jones wants something scientific done, he summons a post grad, and tells the postgrad to produce a chart that proves such and such, suggesting that Phil Jones cannot produce such charts, nor tell if the chart actually does prove such and such.

Mann’s work demonstrates he is simply stupid.  Mann’s power over other scientists demonstrates that simply stupid people are on top.  Stupid people on top provide a simple explanation of why science does not get done.

How did Mann get to the top?  By telling the state what it wants to hear, by political correctness.

Demonstrably, the people in charge of science and research are not the tip top crust.  They got where they are by hating dead white males more than anyone.

The fact that undergraduates are marked on the basis of race, gender, and political correctness is fairly harmless.  That academics get power over other academics on the basis of political correctness has not been so harmless, and we are today paying the price, in that western research is failing.

Singapore has sustained its rate of growth.  Taiwan has sustained its rate of growth.  Therefore China is likely to sustain its rate of growth.

Assuming China grows like Singapore from now on, and the US grows like Europe (counting European growth as real, even though such growth as occurs is government employees, whose product is valued at cost, which cost grows at astonishing rate) then China should surpass the US in total GDP by 2019 or so.

China should surpass the US in GDP per head, as Singapore already has, by around 2045 or so.  Taiwan should surpass the US in GDP per head in 2018 or so.

The financial system of the west is collapsing because the fed and its bureaucrats have the mission to replace financial panics with wise regulatory authority – which might work if wise regulatory authority had the will to punish elite wrongdoing the way financial panics did, and resist the desire of politicians to use the financial system as a piggy bank for vote buying the way bankers threatened by financial panics did.  Since brave regulators are not to be found, the replacement is not working.

The last time the west stalled, it stalled for four hundred years under intellectual stagnation induced by theocracy, from 1277 to 1648.

We are seeing multiple simultaneous crises.  Academia is a thousand loudspeakers controlled by one microphone, and that microphone in the hands of an idiot.

All the massive financial crime that the financial crisis exposed <http://blog.jim.com/economics/mortgage-fraud-predatory-borrowing.html> continues unpunished and unabated, foreshadowing another, even bigger financial crisis coming up fast.

The graffiti on the buildings that are now owned by the Federal Reserve foretells our future.

We are also seeing an explosive gold rush in government as rent seeking monopolies multiply.  Thus it used to be, for example, that the local council gave itself a monopoly of water and sewage, though there is in practice no rationale for the sewage monopoly – septic tanks and highly localized sewage farms are more economical.  Large centralized sewage facilities beloved of councils and council unions suffer severe diseconomies of scale due to the high cost of  piping sludge any reasonable distance. Seeing the lucrative flow of money, every other level of government gets into the act.  Just as to get anything done, a private individual needs multiple permits from the council, each requiring him to hire numerous “consultants” at $400 per hour, the council needs multiple permits from state and federal governments, requiring the council to hire numerous “consultants” at $100 000 per hour.  The tip is emitting methane!  Oh the horror.  Someone official comes to officially look at the methane, charges  $100,000 for looking, and issues an enforceable “recommendation” for an open ended and indefinite series of remediation measures, each of which will require another look.

Oh what did we do before there were people to officially and highly scientifically investigate the fact that tips are apt to pong?  What would we do without government to supervise government?  And surely any problems that might occur can be easily remedied by providing yet another layer of regulatory authority to regulate the regulators that are regulating the regulators that are regulating the local council.

This, like the housing boom is unsustainable.  A single monopoly will charge inefficiently high prices and produce inefficiently low product, which is indefinitely sustainable. Multiple layered monopolies suffer a coordination problem that results in them charging infinite prices and producing zero product, as each attempts to get the majority of the squeeze.

This problem is remediable only through collapse or foreign conquest.  As I have remarked several times, the reason that Dubai can build high towers and we no longer can, is that in Dubai, you only need the approval of one theocrat and one holy religion.

I hope for collapse, since foreign conquest is likely to be unpleasant.  Last time around, however we had stagnation for four hundred years.   Collapse would be preferable.

Democracy is self destructing, as it inexorably moves further and further to the left – the fate of the past democracies of Athens and Rome.