Its Time to Abandon the United States

Karl,

RE: “What we should and must begin to do is prepare to abandon the United States of America. No sentimental feelings of loyalty. No wishing we lived in a world that we do not. No hoping against hope that the land of our birth will somehow redeem itself.”

You caught on. Thank you. YOu have become a ‘conservative’.

But, we don’t have to ‘begin thinking’ about it. We have been.

Some of us, myself included, have been working on this problem since we ‘gave up’ on the current model decades ago. We have been called every name in the book. We were called doomsayers when we predicted this set of consequences, and called radicals for proposing alternatives. We’re criticized for being ‘unscientific’ even when point out the obvious fact that it’s prediction that creates science, not measurement alone. We were called dinosaurs for arguing that human behavior is immutable when it is mandatory for group persistence.

Frankly, for some of us, it’s painful to be ahead of the curve: we watch our society sitting like a bus on a railroad track, singing campfire songs as the train barrels at speed toward the bus despite your shouts and gesticulations to get off the tracks.

We have been arguing:

a) GOVERNMENT IS IRRATIONAL BECAUSE IT IS INCALCULABLE: That it is impossible to govern the domestic empire using existing forms of democratic government on grounds that our current quantitative technologies are insufficient to make calculable judgements. This is more simply stated as “democratic debate is impossible when quantitative measures that permit inter-temporal judgments are impossible to obtain”. Politicians are not incompetent because they choose to be. They are incompetent because they (and economists) do not have sufficient information to make the decisions they are called upon to make at the level of abstraction that they must make them in a government of this size. The problem of “Socialist Calculation” is real outside of a static economy. Scale simply recreates the impossibility of calculation. The fall of the Chinese bureaucracy came for two reasons: first, they put their talent into the bureaucracy rather than into trade – creating a static economy. Second, they transformed from practical quantitative administration of the state to moralistic and utopian rhetorical debate. This caused their downfall. This causes ours. We do not lack moral courage or character. We lack institutions that make calculation and cooperation in a state of this size and scope. In the broader sense, Jarred Diamond is wrong and the austrians are right: societies fail because their formal means of ‘calculating’ the use of property, and the informal institutions needed to manage property, and their formal institutions of naming and recording property, are insufficient for the division of labor in the population under consideration – and as such, the society over-consumes and destroys its economy. Diamond unlike deSoto does not correctly diagnose the cure. The cure is CALCULABLE PROPERTY. And the process of causal laundering caused by the current methods of taxation and accounting, as well as the various forms of monetary expansion, as well as defined benefit programs, all ensure that the economy is incalculable. It is in fact, irrational. Largely because it is TOO LARGE.

b) STATUS IS THE FIRST INCENTIVE: That human beings are, first and foremost, driven by status, and to secure their status by way of political power. Man does not live by bread alone. He does not live by money. HE LIVES BY STATUS. Money is a vehicle for obtaining status. Status controls access to groups, to mates, to opportunities, and to experience and stimulation. Status is obtained by money. Status is a necessary component of human existence given that humans must know who to immitate at all stages of their intellectual development, and status is the only means of determining that choice for all but a few. Status is an ARBITRARILY discounted property of ‘incentives’. ‘Incentives’.

c) PREVAILING POLITICAL THEORY IS COUNTER TO HUMAN BEHAVIOR: Because of status signals, the utopian democratic secular socialist humanist program is counter to universal demonstrated preferences of human beings in all times and in all societies. By counter, we mean:

i) Multi-culturalism is economically impossible under democracy because the status signals across groups are discounted relative to the status signals within groups. It is not impossible under private government (republicanism or monarchic republiciansism) because minorities have no access to political power and therefore compete via the market for status.

ii) People will not tolerate the use of taxes for purposes with which they disagree, and in particular, when those purposes undermine their social status. And social status becomes more difficult to ‘sense’ the larger the population becomes.

iii) People are charitable within their demographic (race, culture and class) and they are NOT charitable external to their demographic. This is because they pay vast opportunity costs to create their social order, and it’s status signals. So it is not the money, but their time, and investment in the society that they ‘feel’ is taken from them. Property is defined as what people ACT like is their property. And theft of forgone opportunities runs against their sense of loss aversion.

iv) maners, ethics, morals, myths and literature comprise a set of economic principles that require individuals forgo opportunities for self benefit, in order to capitalize the system of property rights (even ‘bad’ systems like south american semi-feudalism) that is as important as the formal systems of law and it’s codification of those rights. These SOFT institutions must be taught as rigorously as are the hard institutions. But they cannot be. Because narratives require value judgments across cultures. this ensures that any society that fails to make value judgments will be undermined by those societies that DO make value judgements. People are tribal. Demonstrably. Empirically. Universally. And the people who argue the opposite are simply Shumpeterians intellectuals who seek to obtain social status by giving away what is not theirs. Just as Schumpater warned us they would.

d) The USA is ungovernable. Of course, this is ancient history. The minute we completed the Louisiana purchase the civil war and our current state of affairs became deterministic. We could no longer mimic the egalitarian small states of europe. We became an empire – if only to defend ourselves from conquest or being surrounded by the europeans. We immigrated millions, caused the first european great depression by doing to europe what china has just done to us, and probably caused the world wars, which in turn put us in a position to take over the UK Navy and it’s port system, and the seas. American government is a system by which locals managed to plunder a continent, and the party is over, because there is nothing left to plunder, and our advantage in institutions has been adopted by the rest of the world.

e) The Republicans are not “wrong”. The tea party is a manifestation of the descendants of classical liberal western culture acting as a minority, and as a minority, they are demonstrating that they are willing to displace, replace, or even destroy the existing ‘democratic secular socialist humanist” order in order to implement their social program. Those of us who operate in conservative theory have been saying for YEARS that this state of affairs would occur as soon as the dominant classical culture became a minority.

Classical Ideology: All ideologies are progressive, in that they seek to displace the existing political and social order. Otherwise they would not be ‘progressive’. Conservatives are no longer truly ‘conservative’ They are in fact, simply CLASSICAL LIBERALS in the anglo tradition, and are now becoming progressives in the sense that they seek to displace the existing democratic secular socialist humanist order with classical liberalism. Even at the expense of the state itself. STATUS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN MONEY.

The fact that they cannot articulate this strategy rationally, and instead rely upon historial analogy, or moral statements, or allusion to founding principles of the country, is a correctable defect – one which people like me are attempting to correct. But that group of classical liberals that have been called ‘conservatives’ are no longer CONSERVATIVE. They are progressive and perhaps RADICAL. The fact that the progressives do not understand that the progressive MYTHOLOGY is counter to demonstrated human preferences, and it’s inter-temporal policy preferences that depend upon the assumption of STATIC SOCIETIES renders economies and political judgements INCALCULABLE – ie: impossible in the long run, and risk-inducing in the long run.

Welcome to the new world order – there is no USA any longer. There cannot be. A community of interest cannot develop under sufficiently divergent status signals or sufficiently different economic opportunity.

BLEEDING HEART LIBERTARIANISM
There is an emerging movement called “Bleeding Heart Libertarianism” which is a code phrase for Austrian Individualism, Classical Liberal Politics, and Conservative macro with rational, calculable redistribution. This movement is called “NeoClassical Liberalism”.

Join up. Because if we’re going to have a future, that is the only future that’s possible aside from totalitarianism.

SOLUTIONS
We either devolve the central government to the states, or create regional governments of allied states, and let them compete. But it is irrational to expect a division of labor in this complexity, with this diverse a set of cultures and subcultures, to agree upon anything substantive, because anything substantive will affect status signals, and alter the state of political power. Furthermore, a government this large cannot resolve group conflicts because the conflicts are innately over status and power. Furthermore, a government this large cannot make quantitative or rational judgments because they lack the institutional information systems by which to make it, and the absurd use of Keynesian aggregates (although somewhat improved over the past decade) creates as much distortion in an economy as it does control interest rates and assist in growth.

I have collected propositions that would allow us to improve calculability. But the fundamental conflict of interest over access to power and status is simply insurmountable in a country this size, unless it is culturally and ethnically homogenous.

Somebody very smart once said, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where most and rust corrupt, and thieves break in and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not corrupt and thieves do not break in and steal”