Lessons From Election 2012

Lessons from last night:

Demographically, Republicans can no longer win national elections. It doesn't matter who lied, it doesn't matter how unfair the media coverage, it doesn't matter the amount of cheating. Those are all included in the final result.

The Democrats saw that lying was successful. They will continue to do it.

The media are not going to become less biased. They are a focused filter favoring the Democrats - except for Fox, and Fox is preaching to the choir. The minority. The demonized minority.

The Democrats have a firm hand on the mechanisms for cheating, especially in urban centers. They are not going to suddenly stop.

Nor will there be fewer people dependent upon government handouts at the next election.

None of this matters because we are facing a financial crisis that could happen literally any day now. Nobody seriously thinks that the government has - or can get - the money to pay what it already owes. Our creditors - existing and potential - have already cut us off. Right now, the only thing standing between the US Government and a failed treasury auction is the fact that the Federal Reserve is buying up 70% of each new issue. They are paying for them with dollars created out of thin air, on the spot, and that is the only thing enabling the government to pay its bills right now.

If the Federal Reserve can do this, people who accept dollars are asking, then what real value does a dollar contain? What if the answer is "no real value at all"? There really isn't a good counter-argument to that.

So what happens when the people with goods and services to sell stop accepting dollars? Or at least, stop accepting them voluntarily?

The government, like any organism, will do whatever it takes to survive for as long as possible. It will confiscate what it needs from the citizenry and sell it to the highest bidder in order to get the most cash possible so that they can continue to pay law enforcement and all of the other bills.

(Military culture and ethos is wrong for this kind of work - so the military will be cut, mercilessly. But just like nobody can fight the military, we can't fight law enforcement either. What did you think the push behind giving law enforcement military toys was? I am telling you flat out NOT to fight, ever. The day for civil disobedience - not fighting - may come when the government is at the end of its rope. That day is not today, and if there is one thing I can guarantee looking at the long sad history of this kind of collapse it is that the government will not lack for brownshirt recruits. Those who believe in the mission will volunteer, and they will be thugs right out of the mold of all the worst internal police down through the centuries.)

That the government will then re-confiscate that sold item when they need the money again is something that may not be immediately apparent, but the smart folks with money will have it figured out right away. If it cannot be moved away from the government's ability to confiscate and re-confiscate, it won't really be worth anything. This means economic dislocation, as people either follow their jobs elsewhere or lose them.

The government will not tolerate anything competing with it. Not successfully. The people with their hands on the tiller cannot allow successful private schools for the middle class, or anything else the government oversees. For the upper class - those schools can afford to pay the government bribes (or whatever you want to call them) out of what their customers pay. But not the middle class - the necessary costs to pay those bribes put them out of reach for the middle class, as well as being large numbers of customers that the affluent are not. The people whose economic well being is rooted in control of the government function will not allow it, and even if they would, the entire mechanism of the President and his party are rooted in Envy - they cannot abide someone being better off than the average voter, unless that someone is somehow a member of an acceptable group (like actors) that publicly say they hate wealth while privately sitting on a fortune that makes most businesses look like paupers and laughing their backside off at the suckers who believe it. They must destroy those who seek to better themselves, or they lose people dependent upon them, and when they lose people dependent upon them, they lose power.

But the wealth to pay off the government's existing debts does not exist. Not in the entire world, let alone in the United States. Meanwhile, the demands of those siphoning from the public trough will continue and add to the bill. There will therefore come a day when the government falls short, as their constituents clamor ever more loudly for what they were promised and finally even law enforcement isn't getting what is due to them. It will take some time - years, maybe decades, but when law enforcement stops getting paid the end will be almost here.

What it's about now is mutual support networks that enable individuals to survive government economic persecution. Once upon a time we had such networks in place. They atrophied when the government outcompeted them for resources by holding a metaphorical gun to the donor's heads and saying "Give us your money instead." We need to rebuild them so that when one person is victimized by the government's ever more voracious appetite, we can somehow get them what they need to survive.

It's not about fighting. It's about banding together to help one another survive while the now-inevitable government collapse plays out. Because every last one of us is going to be a target - a victim - at least once before it's all over.

PS: All of this does assume we will not be successfully invaded as the government comes apart. But that's not something we can reasonably hope to forestall as the government becomes unable to modernize, then to maintain, then even to pay the military. Frankly, at some point the government will probably hold a fire sale on military equipment and our only real protection at that point will be a perception that we don't have enough left to make it worth the invader's while.