News & Analysis
Ruin is the Result of Regulatory Democracy
Extreme Poverty Is Now At Record Levels ... According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty than they have ever measured before. In 2010, we were told that the economy was recovering, but the truth is that the number of the "very poor" soared to heights never seen previously. Back in 1993 and back in 2009, the rate of extreme poverty was just over 6 percent, and that represented the worst numbers on record. But in 2010, the rate of extreme poverty hit a whopping 6.7 percent. That means that one out of every 15 Americans is now considered to be "very poor." – The Economic Collapse Blog
Dominant Social Theme: How did it get so bad? We have to elect better politicians and make businesses more socially responsible.
Free-Market Analysis: This is a good article from Economic Collapse and is getting a lot of play. We ordinarily don't comment on articles that are widely disseminated in the alternative 'Net press, but we want to provide some commentary on this article because it helps illustrate the wrong direction in which both America and the Western world are headed.
The meme here is one of "regulatory democracy." One would think after a century of the most vicious kind of regulatory democracy that things would generally be better. But are they? No, of course not.
They are much, much worse. The reason for this is that the concept has root that people need "leaders" and that only government – the bigger the better – can provide prosperity and create the conditions necessary for civil society. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As we are seeing now, governments do not create wealth; they drain it. Governments do not provide peace; they ruin it. Governments do not guarantee the perpetuation of civil society; they abrogate it. These are the unfortunate facts.
Government cannot be fixed by better government. Government cannot be fixed by the right leadership. The only way to make government better is to make it smaller. The best government in our view governs the least.
Every law and regulation is a price fix. It is incredible that generations of smart people throughout the West can gaily endorse market functionality, the Invisible Hand and markets generally while going on about the need for this law or that regulation.
Every law and regulation is a price fix. Each one moves wealth from people who create it to people who didn't and don't have any idea about how to direct the wealth they've received toward productive endeavors. This is why so many lottery winners eventually go broke. They have no idea how to handle the money they get because they have not earned it to begin with. A little like governments.
One thing, however, that laws and regulations do effectively is to "level" society. The idea of an egalitarian society is the Holy Grail of progressives, politicians and the law enforcement officials who ensure that the leveling takes place.
What these people and many other people fail to understand is that the leveling is always leveled DOWN. You can, in fact, build a fairly level society in which only a tiny handful of fabulously wealthy people have approximately the same income, the same possibilities, the same outcomes.
It will be a "fair" society, to be sure, but it will also be a ruined one. We're on that track now. Here are facts that the Economic Collapse blog cites in the article excerpted above: "19 Statistics About The Poor That Will Absolutely Astound You" ...
#1 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of "very poor" rose in 300 out of the 360 largest metropolitan areas during 2010.
#2 Last year, 2.6 million more Americans descended into poverty. That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959.
#3 It isn't just the ranks of the "very poor" that are rising. The number of those just considered to be "poor" is rapidly increasing as well. Back in the year 2000, 11.3% of all Americans were living in poverty. Today, 15.1% of all Americans are living in poverty.
#4 The poverty rate for children living in the United States increased to 22% in 2010.
#5 There are 314 counties in the United States where at least 30% of the children are facing food insecurity.
#6 In Washington D.C., the "child food insecurity rate" is 32.3%.
#7 More than 20 million U.S. children rely on school meal programs to keep from going hungry.
#8 One out of every six elderly Americans now lives below the federal poverty line.
#9 Today, there are over 45 million Americans on food stamps.
#10 According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly 15 percent of all Americans are now on food stamps.
#11 In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps.
#12 The number of Americans on food stamps has increased 74% since 2007.
#13 We are told that the economy is recovering, but the number of Americans on food stamps has grown by another 8 percent over the past year.
#14 Right now, one out of every four American children is on food stamps.
#15 It is being projected that approximately 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point in their lives before they reach the age of 18.
#16 More than 50 million Americans are now on Medicaid. Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, approximately one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.
#17 One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one government anti-poverty program.
#18 The number of Americans that are going to food pantries and soup kitchens has increased by 46% since 2006.
#19 It is estimated that up to half a million children may currently be homeless in the United States.
These facts and figures are not a coincidence in our view. There is a predatory force at work here, Money Power, wielded by an Anglosphere power elite that is trying to create world government and has been busily at work for at least the past century making it happen. They have used regulatory democracy as their weapon.
Now this power elite is apparently getting ready to shift its memes somewhat. Because government is being held in disrepute by more and more individuals, there will be new ways of promoting authoritarianism. People are to be instructed in the virtues of direct democracy and are to be assured that the new meme of "transparency in government" will assure that past abuses won't take place as a result.
But if world government does come about, the results will be the same for the world as they are in America now. Everybody will be leveled – but down not up. Since much of the world lives without regular shelter on a dollar a day, one can reasonably assume that this is where the rest of the world's billions will eventually end up.
Only apparently, in the long-term there won't be "billions" as the other part of the elite agenda is to cull the planet. The lucky ones will end up working in a global gulag for the new Kings of the World.
Conclusion: What stands between us and this fate is the Internet Reformation. Education is key to helping people avoid onrushing one world government. We can see resistance building to plans for a new world order and believe that over time this resistance shall grow increasingly widespread and genuine. The Internet is a process not an episode.
Editor's Note: Tip of the hat to Saman Mohammadi of The Excavator who mentioned DB today in a thoughtful article on what we call directed history. His response comes after we commented on a previous article of his presenting evidence that the current government of Iran is a product of Western intel. On Friday, we wrote: "This is another good article by the Excavator! We've been writing about the issue since the publication of High Alert in 2007 (as have others as well) but Mohammadi does a good job in presenting what we consider to be a fairly scholarly exegesis on the subject [of the current Iranian false-flag government]." His articles can be seen on his blog and today's article is featured at Alex Jones's websites. Our previous article is entitled, "Excavator Digs up Truth About CIA's Support for Khomeini's Regime Change in Iran."
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Posted by kenn on 11/08/11 09:47 AM
[Tip of the hat to Saman Mohammadi of The Excavator who mentioned DB today in a thoughtful article on what we call directed history.]DB
So we all live in Dark City and Samon Mohammadi is Murdoch. Wouldn't surprise me but that would require close collaboration. Where do they meet to present their agenda and how do they keep such a meeting secret are questions for the elite of the 99 percent.
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Posted by taxesbyanyothername on 11/08/11 09:41 AM
Sorry should have checked better before posting. I meant that the only statistics here with validity are those concerning the numbers of people drawing food stamps.
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Posted by taxesbyanyothername on 11/08/11 09:37 AM
Good reply DB. No I would not argue that anything about the economy is better, just that other than the numbers regarding food stamps are the only statistics in this article with value. It is very difficult to even figure out how they arrived at any of the other numbers.
I worked for the census and can tell you from first hand experience that almost the entire exercise was a political push for more entitlements and more government control. Statistics don't lie but people do. The methodolgies used to arrive at these numbers confuse even the people useing them. I suppose that further confirms your point but printing the article just further confuses those reading it.
Reply from The Daily Bell
Thanks for the gracious follow-up and for bringing the numbers-issue to our attention and to others who may "happen by" here. We stand by the overall points we made, but no doubt you are correct that some of these numbers were in a sense massaged to present a certain conclusion. But the larger conclusion to be drawn is that America is on the way down, not up, and for reasons we discussed. There are plenty of statistics that would buttress this argument, not all of them from the government by any means!
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Posted by Libertarian Jerry on 11/08/11 08:14 AM
The bottom line,in this discussion,is that its all about power. The power seeking megalomaniacs of the world are always attracted to the centers of power,either the State or the powers behind the State. The more centralized the power centers the worse the situation becomes. This is why most of the founders of America wanted to diversify the levers of power between the local,state and national governments.
But with the Civil War and its aftermath,the 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution,the New Deal,the Great Society and the growth of the Imperial Presidency plus a general ignoring of the Original Intent of the Founder's Constitution,America has degenerated into a mobocracy that the power seekers have used to their advantage. More and more power concentrated in the central government.
More and more megalomaniacs attracted to the Central Government. These events have been repeated over and over again throughout history. And now its Americas turn.
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Posted by Dave Jr on 11/08/11 06:53 AM
OWS represents the unemployed. Unemployment is largely a product of federal government regulation and entitlement. OWS will be used as an excuse for more regulation. "Responsive" government creates more unemployed.
Those unable to support themselves are powerless. Government gains their power by feeding them.
It is becoming plain to see that those who deny the existence of government involvement in conspiracy, are the lunatics, the deniers of reality.
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Posted by taxesbyanyothername on 11/08/11 12:49 AM
All of these #s came from the same place originally, the 2010 census. If you dig into the census reports they say that their methodology is so flawed as to be almost worthless.
Even that great bastion of progressive government and socialist thought the N. Y. Times says that these very numbers are ridiculous. Government assistance is not taken into account when determining poverty. No provision is made for cost of living differences in different places.
And on, and on, and on. Pretty dissapointing. I started frequenting this site because I thought it would be a good place to learn. You have good articles and good people, but this one does not even make it to mediocre. If you can not do better than this I can not see how you can even think that you are learning about what you contend is the most powerful organization ever to exist, let alone thwart them.
Reply from The Daily Bell
We used the numbers to make a point about regulatory democracy. And a profound point about what regulation and enforced egalitarianism does to a country. The leveling of opportunity to make sure everyone has a "chance" only ends up leveling the opportunities themselves.
If you are arguing that the US economy is headed in the right direction - as workers demolish large parts of Detroit to create Greenways - we emphatically disagree. We won't defend the numbers except to say that may not be accurate individually, they certainly correlate to a trend of which people both inside and outside the US are aware: that the US economy is not what it was, that the entrepreneurial energies that made the US economy vibrant have been stifled; that opportunities in the US have diminished for the middle class due to a lethal combination of high taxes, high price inflation and high regulatory hurdles.
So ... what is your point? That poverty has actually lessened in the US over the past few years? That people have MORE opportunity? That wages are going up? That food stamp use is declining? That foreclosures are diminishing, etc., etc.? The overall trend is down, not up, has been since 2008, and we don't except that trend to change anytime soon.
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US wealth gap between young and old is widest ever
By HOPE YEN
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The wealth gap between younger and older Americans has stretched to the widest on record, worsened by a prolonged economic downturn that has wiped out job opportunities for young adults and saddled them with housing and college debt.
The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, according to an analysis of census data released Monday.
While people typically accumulate assets as they age, this gap is now more than double what it was in 2005 and nearly five times the 10-to-1 disparity a quarter-century ago, after adjusting for inflation.
The analysis by the Pew Research Center reflects the impact of the economic downturn, which has hit young adults particularly hard. More are pursuing college or advanced degrees, taking on debt as they wait for the job market to recover. Others are struggling to pay mortgage costs on homes now worth less than when they were bought in the housing boom.
snip -----
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Posted by gmallast on 11/07/11 10:29 PM
Question: Why doesn't the Daily Bell or anyone else challenge the claim of socialists that they are for "equality" in the sense of equal economic outcomes? Could that claim possibly be disingenuous?
Look at the history of state socialism going back to self-styled prophets Jan Mattys' and Jan Bockelson's prototype socialist terror state in the German city of Munster in 1534-35. Then follow every socialist state since. They can only be considered egalitarian by the standards of Animal Farm where "Some animals are more equal than others." The only socialist communities that actively strove for true economic egalitarianism of the sort asserted (but not practiced) by Louis Blanc, "From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs," were small communes--mainly communes of religious fanatics. But even most fanatical socialist communities degenerated into something the opposite of economic equality--most egregiously at Jonestown.
Of course the same goes double for the regulatory state going back to 17th century mercantilism and Louis XVI's Finance Minister Jean Baptiste Colbert.
Frederic Bastiat pointed out that it is laissez faire capitalism that tends towards the greater degree of economic equality in practice even while eschewing it in principle. That is, of course, because capitalism is about mass production for the masses. About providing both their needs and their employment in a practical way.
But could it be, that the doctrine of economic equality is a scam to deceive people away from the true doctrine of political equality: viz. that no one has a charism of wisdom and virtue giving him an absolute right to rule: neither an individual, a group, nor the people as a whole. No such political/economic charism is given to humans either by God, the people, or by political office. It is simply not available to human beings.
Dr. Thomas Sowell points out, socialism is the ultimate form of elitism because if there is to be an ideal distribution of wealth, there must be someone different from all other people with a charism of wisdom and virtue that enables him to discern the ideal distribution of wealth and have the right to seize all wealth to achieve it.
But real life human nature, instead of some cloud land ideal, is such that if someone claims the wisdom and virtue giving him the power and right to seize all wealth, won't he find some excuse to keep a disproportionate share for himself?
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Posted by cat writer on 11/07/11 09:20 PM
Ross, the people are the predators.
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Posted by rossbcan on 11/07/11 04:38 PM
Government
"by the people, for the people"
... has been rationalized to:
"by the predators, for the predators"
... but, this is an unstable state of affairs, at best. History and mankind's will to survive is clear. Soon, we will be observing the people, en masse displaying "won't (be enslaved) power"
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Posted by taxesbyanyothername on 11/07/11 03:14 PM
I hope you know you are paraphrasing Jefferson. "That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves."
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Posted by RR on 11/07/11 12:43 PM
"Only apparently, in the long-term there won't be "billions" as the other part of the elite agenda is to cull the planet. The lucky ones will end up working in a global gulag for the new Kings of the World."
Click to view link
Click to view link
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Posted by Abu Aardvark on 11/07/11 11:49 AM
DB: "As we are seeing now, governments do not create wealth; they drain it. Governments do not provide peace; they ruin it. Governments do not guarantee the perpetuation of civil society; they abrogate it. These are the unfortunate facts.
Government cannot be fixed by better government. Government cannot be fixed by the right leadership. The only way to make government better is to make it smaller. The best government in our view governs the least."
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This from Bob Wenzel over at "Economic Policy Journal":
"The Idiots Guide to Corrupting Congressmen: Former lobbyist Jack Abramoff explains on 60 Minutes how he corrupted Congress.
Bottom line:When you create power centers, there are people like Abramoff who know how to get at those power centers. The only solution is to eliminate the powers centers, whether the power centers are government agencies or legislation going through Congress"
Click to view link
Reply from The Daily Bell
Thanks.
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Posted by GWBramhall on 11/07/11 11:09 AM
Sometimes the DB disappoints me with the crazy conspiracies you seem to see everywhere. Then there are posts like this that are spot on and make me glad I take the time to read them. Do you think that perhaps the government is overselling the "Food Stamps" program and that is why its numbers are so high?
My wife has observed on several occasions the people on line at the grocery store paying with food stamps and have all matters of junk food and other non essentials in an enormously filled shopping cart. You are clearly right, if the one worlders had their way (to say nothing about the OWS lunatics) we would all see our standard of living plummet to near or below the poverty line.
You touched on all the bases but none better than that the government cannot create wealth and only interferes with the prosperity of the nation as it attempts to regulate something about which it has no understanding.
Reply from The Daily Bell
Gee, Bramhall, you upset the elves. We track the memes of the elite as best we can, especially the financial ones. That's what we do! So OF COURSE we see and report on what seem like "crazy conspiracies." It's our brief. We're a speculative website analyzing the promotions of the greatest conspiracy on earth. Somebody had to do it. And by the way, sometimes some of the craziest conspiracies we can imagine turn out to be surprisingly credible. See here:
Click to view link
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Posted by fine2opine on 11/07/11 10:59 AM
"Another fine mess we've gotten into, Ollie". G.E. have won either way. If we (the populace) accept thier draconian measures, we are doomed. See #1-#19. If we resist, we fall right into thier hands anyway. Obviously, OSW is an elite sponsored event. Prmary goals are to draw out the malcontents from behind their keyboards and into the camera's eye, and to also create a brewing pot for violence, at which point marshal law can be declared to 'restore the order' from disorder- disorder they themselves created.
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Posted by Jones on 11/07/11 10:39 AM
When one sees what is going on in the world they are faced with two choices. Either the people that they continually appoint and trust to "lead" them are complete morons or their seeming incompetence is deliberate. Perhaps a mix of both?
Regardless, you can see that the whole thing is irrational and is not working but these people have no intentions of relenquishing their power as is evidenced by the growing police state and military war machine... paid for by you, of course.
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Posted by laceja on 11/07/11 09:41 AM
Well, now you know how the elite plan to eliminate the internet... They just make us all so poor, we cannot afford it. Problem solved!
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Posted by rossbcan on 11/07/11 08:30 AM
When a "regulation" is decreed (rule of man), these are the effects:
a - regulation is an "obey or else" proposition. Behavior cannot be "controlled" (we live in action PRECEDES consequence reality, can only respond to action after the fact). If the "regulated" behavior is peaceful, the "regulators" must initiate aggression to impose "their decreed will".
b - A war between the "regulators" and "regulated" is decreed. Regulators produce nothing that people will voluntarily trade for (wealth). The regulated, assuming they are productive, should they have issues with "regulations" will spend resources on avoidance and/or defense from regulators. Both regulators (100%) and regulated, to the extent they divert resources from productivity are, simply by decreeing and enforcing "regulation" are evicted from ability to participate in a productive, division of labor economy.
The cumulative effects of ever increasing regulation and the REAL effects in decreasing possibility of people being productive has already taken their toll, an attrition cost destroying civilization. On this path, it can only get worse, achieving the elite population reduction agenda, the inevitable REAL effect of the choices elites are forcefully coercing:
Click to view link
Of course, regulation (obey or else) is also interference in the free choice of the regulated, which, by definition is also a "decree by man" of the regulators that they have an inherent, forcefully imposed survival advantage over the "regulated", BECAUSE:
Darwin PROVED: Survival EQUALS ability to adapt to environment EQUALS ability to choose correctly EQUALS freedom:
Click to view link
So long as we collectively accept the legitimacy of "rule of decreeing man", initiating aggression in response to our peaceful choices or rejection of coercion, we refuse to THINK and make the proper pro-survival CHOICES:
Click to view link
Exec Summary: Choosing subservience EQUALS to CHOOSE NOT TO SURVIVE, individually and collectively.
