I posted this to a friends response about the political parties which also had a mention about technocrats. Figured maybe it should go on the blog:
The honest truth is that the United States only became the worlds superpower because we were the only industrialized country not to have it’s infrastructure destroyed with two world wars, we were already on the downside of our economic lifecycle when the internet created another artifical upswing which the United States got much of the benefit from. It created a small amount of tangible wealth and a huge amount of intangible wealth, and it was inevitable that the latter of those would finally collapse. What is worse, that very technology made it easier for the whole world to get wrapped up in the same bubble. Which leads us to all the parties trying to convince the largest sector of the public that they can solve an unsolvable problem. The more people realize the problem isn’t being solved, the more they try to blame it on politicians just not knowing what they are doing, and thus the more the world is leading towards Technocracy, thinking the solution is that we need more experts in their field to make the decisions. Technocracy is not Democracy in most cases, as those experts are not typically elected, they are appointed. Not only are the socialists realizing that socialism doesn’t work, and quickly turning to technocracy, but now many people think capitalism doesn’t work and are doing the same. It’s really much bigger than that, but also much simpler. A nation who has the best access to the factors of production [land (which includes natural resources), labor, capital (including entrepreneurship) ] will grow until they run out of those resources, they will then need to either conquer a new land, absorb new factors of production (with things like NAFTA and Economic Unions like the EU) or they will perish at the hands of another nation that wants their resources. Has happened over and over for thousands of years. Alexander, Cyrus, the Huns, Vikings, Francs, Romans…the list goes on and on. There is nothing the government can really do to fix the current problem that will be acceptable to the American people, while still leaving the American people with both their egocentrism And their sense of ethics in tact.
We have grown short on natural resources and neglected the ones we have a comparative advantage at (like food production), we have labor that needs to be reallocated so dramatically that nearly half of our current workforce needs to be in other fields to be creating real growth for the nation and we’ve wasted American capital by pseudo conquering lands we have gained No natural resources from, only to keep the american people in a state of fear about “terrorist” retaliation to such actions, and by using our National Guard specifically, so they don’t question why they are there and it removes them from the general workforce to give the appearance that unemployment is less than it really is, if they had not deployed into active duty.
Another friend mentioned that “both parties are owned by corporations” And at this point, he is right. Both parties are indebted to corporate interests much deeper than they could probably ever pay off on. The kind of change our government needs, would be so dramatic in the eyes of the people and the government, the changes necessary to fix the government in and of themselves would probably destroy it. I love this country, or at least the idea of this country we were taught in school years ago intended by our founding fathers, but I’m afraid this isn’t going to end well no matter which approach we take. Historically, there seem to be 2 possible solutions to the Real problem: We 1) either conquer the Chinese (through military power or just coercing a paradigm shift in their political ideologies) or 2) We learn to speak Chinese. Neither is really acceptable, but if we don’t choose one, then eventually they will make the decision for us. History shows that it is so. At the end of the day, you do what you have to do so that (whoever you believe to be “your people”) will survive, the rest is just political posturing, so the masses can sleep better at night with a clear conscious. If the people can sleep at night, they don’t give a shit what you did to get them there. If the people can’t sleep, then they revolt.