Thanks

Capitalist Hero

Posted by Lew Rockwell on August 25, 2011 02:03 AM

"I said if there came a day I couldn't meet my duties I would let you know...that day has come." The great Steve Jobs resigns as CEO of Apple.

Here he is in 2005 on 3 lessons from his life.

Ending the fiat money scheme

The Price of Abandoning The Gold Standard

By Charles Kadlec

Forty years ago President Richard Nixon severed the final link between the dollar and gold. We have been living with the consequences of that colossal error ever since.

We were promised that breaking the link between the dollar and gold would free the Federal Reserve to smooth out costly recessions, provide high employment and strong economic growth. Internationally, the devaluation of the dollar was supposed to reduce our trade deficit and improve the international competitiveness of American workers and businesses. And, because trade was only one-tenth of the U.S. economy, all of this could be done while maintaining price stability. Each and every one of these promises has been broken.

Since Nixon killed the gold standard the unemployment rate has averaged over 6% and we have suffered the three worst recessions since the end of World War II. The unemployment rate averaged 8.5% in 1975, almost 10% in 1982 and has been above 8.8% for more than two years, with little evidence of any improvement ahead.

This performance is horrendous compared with the post-World War II gold-standard era, which lasted from 1947 to 1970. During those 21 years of economic ups and downs the unemployment rate averaged less than 5% and never rose above 7%. Growth, too, has slowed. Since 1971 real economic expansion has averaged 2.9% a year--more than a full percentage point slower than the 4% growth rate during the post-World War II gold-standard period.

When compounded over 40 years, 1% slower growth under the paper dollar system has had a mind-boggling impact on our incomes and the size of the economy. At 3% growth the U.S. economy is about $8 trillion smaller than it would have been had we continued to experience the average growth rate prior to Nixon severing the link between the dollar and gold. That implies that median family income today would be about $70,000, or nearly 50% higher than it is today.

It would also mean that the tax base--for federal, state and local governments-- would be approximately 50% bigger, generating a bounty of tax revenues that would make the current and projected fiscal challenges manageable without severe spending cuts or growth-killing tax increases on working Americans.

What about our competitive position? During the past 40 years the dollar has fallen in value by more than 70% against the euro/German mark and the Japanese yen. Yet U.S. net exports have fallen from a modest surplus in 1971 to a $400 billion-plus deficit.

The dollar we use today is worth less than two dimes in buying power compared with the pre-Nixon dollar. And with little reason to believe that the dollar will maintain even this paltry value, the average American family is left with no meaningful way to save for its children's education or its own retirement. We experience all of this as financial insecurity and well-grounded anxiety about the future.

By contrast, a gold standard is extraordinarily good at maintaining the buying power of the dollar. From 1948 to 1967 inflation averaged less than 2% per year. Interest rates were low and stable, with the yield on AAA corporate bonds averaging less than 4%. Moreover, if Nixon and his successors had maintained the promise that a dollar was worth 1/35 of an ounce of gold, a barrel of oil today would sell for less than $2.50.

That's right, the whole notion of an energy crisis is a grand illusion created by the fall in the paper dollar against gold, oil and all other goods and services over the past 40 years.

Finally, since Nixon killed the gold standard the world has suffered from 12 financial crises, beginning with the oil shock of 1973 and culminating in the financial crisis of 2008–09 and now the debt crisis in Europe and the growing deficit crisis in the U.S. Conversely, between 1947 and 1967 there was only one currency crisis, involving the British pound, and no major bank failures or Wall Street bailouts in the U.S.

We have paid dearly for Nixon's colossal error. But this abhorrent deviation from a sound dollar can be corrected. The country--and the world--awaits the political leader who truly understands that making the dollar as good as gold is vital to the prosperity, security and liberty of the American people, and who can therefore lead the country and the world forward to a 21st-century gold standard.

A mob made by the welfare state

London’s burning 

Yes, there’s a ‘political context’ to the riots: it is that British youth have been so suckled by the state they have zero sense of community spirit.

By Brendan O’Neill 
Many commentators are on a mission to contextualise the riots that have swept parts of urban London and other British cities. ‘It’s very naive to look at these riots without the context’, says one journalist, who says the reason the violence kicked off in the London suburb of Tottenham is because ‘that area is getting 75% cuts [in public services]’. Others have said that the political context for the rioting is youth unemployment or working-class anger at David Cameron’s cuts agenda. ‘There is a context to London’s riots that can’t be ignored’, said a writer for the Guardian, and it is the ‘backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures’. The ‘mass unrest’ is a protest against unhinged capitalism, apparently.
These observers are right that there is a political context to the riots. They are right to argue that while the police shooting of young black man Mark Duggan may ostensibly have been the trigger for the street violence, there is a broader context to the disturbances. But they are wrong about what the political context is. Painting these riots as some kind of action replay of historic political streetfights against capitalist bosses or racist cops might allow armchair radicals to get their intellectual rocks off, as they lift their noses from dusty tomes about the Levellers or the Suffragettes and fantasise that a political upheaval of equal worth is now occurring outside their windows. But such shameless projection misses what is new and peculiar and deeply worrying about these riots. The political context is not the cuts agenda or racist policing – it is the welfare state, which, it is now clear, has nurtured a new generation that has absolutely no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.
What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are ‘rising up’ – actually they are simply shattering their own communities – represent a generation that has been more suckled by the state than any generation before it. They live in those urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state over the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of less well-off urban people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their childrearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain ‘mentally fit’, has helped to undermine such things as individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The anti-social youthful rioters look to me like the end product of such an anti-social system of state intervention.
The most striking thing about the rioters is how little they seem to care for their own communities. You don’t have to be a right-winger with helmet hair and a niggling discomfort with black or chavvy yoof (I am the opposite of that) to recognise that this violence is not political, just criminal. It is entertaining to watch the political contortionism of those commentators who claim that the riots are an uprising against the evils of capitalism, as they struggle to explain why the targets thus far have been Foot Locker sports shops, electrical goods shops, takeaway joints and bus-stops, and why the only ‘gains’ made by the rioters have been to get a new pair of trainers or an Apple laptop. In past episodes of rioting, for example during the Brixton race riots of 1981, looting and the destruction of local infrastructure were largely incidental to the broader expression of political anger, byproducts of the main show, which was a clash between a community and the forces of the state. But in these new riots, smashing stuff up is all there is. It is childish nihilism.
Many older members of the urban communities rocked by violence have been shocked by the level of self-destruction exhibited by the rioters. Some shop-owners have got together to defend their property, even beating up rioters who have turned up with iron bars. In one video doing the rounds on social-networking sites, a West Indian woman in her fifties braves the rubble-strewn streets to lecture the rioters: ‘These people worked hard to make their businesses work and you lot wanna go and burn it up. For what?’ On Twitter, the hashtag #riotcleanup is being used by community members to coordinate some post-riot street-cleaning, to make amends for what one elderly Tottenham resident described as ‘the stupid behaviour of the young’.
But it’s more than childish destructiveness motivating the rioters. At a more fundamental level, these are youngsters who are uniquely alienated from the communities they grew up in. Nurtured in large part by the welfare state, financially, physically and educationally, socialised more by the agents of welfarism than by their own neighbours or community representatives, these youth have little moral or emotional attachment to the areas they grew up in. Their rioting reveals, not that Britain is in a time warp back to 1981 or 1985 when there were politically motivated, anti-racist riots against the police, but rather that the tentacle-like spread of the welfare state into every area of people’s lives has utterly zapped old social bonds, the relationship of sharing and solidarity that once existed in working-class communities. In communities that are made dependent upon the state, people are less inclined to depend on each other or on their own social wherewithal. We have a saying in Britain for people who undermine their own living quarters – we call it ‘shitting on your own doorstep’. And this rioting suggests that the welfare state has given rise to a generation perfectly happy to do that.
This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one’s own community. And as a left-winger, I refuse to celebrate nihilistic behaviour that has a profoundly negative impact on working people’s lives. Far from being an instance of working-class action, the welfare-state mob has more in common with what Marx described as the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, it is worth recalling Marx’s colourful description in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon of how that French ruler cynically built his power base amongst parts of the bourgeoisie and sections of the lumpenproletariat, so that ‘ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, swindlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, brothel-keepers, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars… and from this kindred element Boneparte formed the core of his [constituency], where all its members felt the need to benefit themselves at the expense of the labouring nation.’ In very different circumstances, we have something similar today – when the decadent commentariat’s siding with lumpen rioters represents a weird coming together of sections of the bourgeoisie with sections of the underworked and the over-flattered, as the rest of us, ‘the labouring nation’, look on with disdain.
There is one more important part to this story: the reaction of the cops. Their inability to handle the riots effectively reveals the extent to which the British police are far better adapted to consensual policing than conflictual policing. It also demonstrates how far they have been paralysed in our era of the politics of victimhood, where virtually no police activity fails to get followed up by a complaint or a legal case. Their kid-glove approach to the rioters of course only fuels the riots, because as one observer put it, when the rioters ‘see that the police cannot control the situation, [that] leads to a sort of adrenalin-fuelled euphoria’. So this street violence was largely ignited by the excesses of the welfare state and was then intensified by the discombobulation of the police state. In this sense, it reveals something very telling, and quite depressing, about modern Britain.

The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people

The New Britannia 

Big Government corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically.

by Mark Steyn

The trick in this business is not to be right too early. A week ago I released my new book — the usual doom’n’gloom stuff — and, just as the sensible prudent moderate chaps were about to dismiss it as hysterical and alarmist, Standard & Poor’s went and downgraded the United States from its AAA rating for the first time in history. Obligingly enough they downgraded it to AA+, which happens to be the initials of my book: After America. Okay, there’s not a lot of “+” in that, but you can’t have everything.

But the news cycle moves on, and a day or two later, the news shows were filled with scenes of London ablaze, as gangs of feral youths trashed and looted their own neighborhoods. Several readers wrote to taunt me for not having anything to say on the London riots. As it happens, Chapter Five of my book is called “The New Britannia: The Depraved City.” You have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat me to Western civilization’s descent into barbarism. Anyone who’s read it will fully understand what’s happening on the streets of London. The downgrade and the riots are part of the same story: Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances but its human capital, too.

As part of my promotional efforts, I chanced to find myself on a TV show the other day with an affable liberal who argued that what Obama needed to do was pass another trillion-dollar — or, better yet, multi-trillion — stimulus. I think not. The London rioters are the children of dependency, the progeny of Big Government: They have been marinated in “stimulus” their entire lives. There is literally nothing you can’t get Her Majesty’s Government to pay for. From page 205 of my book:
“A man of 21 with learning disabilities has been granted taxpayers’ money to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute.”
Hey, why not? “He’s planning to do more than just have his end away,” explained his social worker. “Refusing to offer him this service would be a violation of his human rights.”
Why do they need a Dutch hooker? Just another hardworking foreigner doing the jobs Britons won’t do? Given the reputation of English womanhood, you’d have thought this would be the one gig that wouldn’t have to be outsourced overseas.
While the British Treasury is busy writing checks to Amsterdam prostitutes, one-fifth of children are raised in homes in which no adult works — in which the weekday ritual of rising, dressing, and leaving for gainful employment is entirely unknown. One tenth of the adult population has done not a day’s work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997.
If you were born into such a household, you’ve been comprehensively “stimulated” into the dead-eyed zombies staggering about the streets this last week: pathetic inarticulate sub-humans unable even to grunt the minimal monosyllables to BBC interviewers desperate to appease their pathologies. C’mon, we’re not asking much: just a word or two about how it’s all the fault of government “cuts” like the leftie columnists argue. And yet even that is beyond these baying beasts. The great-grandparents of these brutes stood alone against a Fascist Europe in that dark year after the fall of France in 1940. Their grandparents were raised in one of the most peaceful and crime-free nations on the planet. Were those Englishmen of the mid-20th century to be magically transplanted to London today, they’d assume they were in some fantastical remote galaxy. If Charlton Heston was horrified to discover the Planet of the Apes was his own, Britons are beginning to realize that the remote desert island of Lord of the Flies is, in fact, located just off the coast of Europe in the north-east Atlantic. Within two generations of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, a significant proportion of the once-free British people entrusted themselves to social rewiring by liberal compassionate Big Government and thereby rendered themselves paralytic and unemployable save for non-speaking parts in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. And even that would likely be too much like hard work. Here’s another line from my book:
“In Britain, everything is policed except crime.”
Her Majesty’s cowed and craven politically correct constabulary stand around with their riot shields and Robocop gear as young rioters lob concrete through store windows to steal the electronic toys that provide their only non-narcotic or alcoholic amusement. I chanced to be in Piccadilly for the springtime riots when the police failed to stop the mob from smashing the windows of the Ritz and other upscale emporia, so it goes without saying that they wouldn’t lift a finger to protect less prestigious private property from thugs. Some of whom are as young as nine years old. And girls.
Yet a police force all but entirely useless when it comes to preventing crime or maintaining public order has time to police everything else. When Sam Brown observed en passant to a mounted policeman on Cornmarket Street in Oxford, “Do you know your horse is gay?”, he was surrounded within minutes by six officers and a fleet of patrol cars, handcuffed, tossed in the slammer overnight, and fined 80 pounds. Mr. Brown’s “homophobic comments,” explained a spokesmoron for Thames Valley Police, were “not only offensive to the policeman and his horse, but any members of the general public in the area.” The zealous crackdown on Sam Brown’s hippohomophobia has not been replicated in the present disturbances. Anyone who has so much as glanced at British policing policy over the last two decades would be hard pressed to argue which party on the streets of London, the thugs or the cops, is more irredeemably stupid.
This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want” to be accomplished by “co-operation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life’s vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As I write in my book: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.” The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. From page 204:
“For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population”.  
I believe it is regarded as a sign of insanity to start quoting oneself, but at the risk of trying your patience I’ll try one more, because it’s the link between America’s downgraded debt and Britain’s downgraded citizenry:
“The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people.”
Big Government means small citizens: It corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population. When you’re imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.
There are lessons for all of us there.

A matter of degree

The Barbarians Inside Britain's Gates

By THEODORE DALRYMPLE

The youth of Britain have long placed a de facto curfew on the old, who in most places would no more think of venturing forth after dark than would peasants in Bram Stoker's Transylvania. Indeed, well before the riots last week, respectable persons would not venture into the centers of most British cities or towns on Friday and Saturday nights, for fear—and in the certainty—of encountering drunken and aggressive youngsters. In Britain nowadays, the difference between ordinary social life and riot is only a matter of degree, not of type.

A short time ago, I gave a talk in a school in an exquisite market town, deep in the countryside. Came Friday night, however, and the inhabitants locked themselves into their houses against the invasion of the barbarians. In my own little market town of Bridgnorth, in Shropshire, where not long ago a man was nearly beaten to death 20 yards from my house, drunken young people often rampage down one of its lovely little streets, causing much damage and preventing sleep. No one, of course, dares ask them to stop. The Shropshire council has dealt with the problem by granting a license for a pub in the town to open until 4 a.m., as if what the town needed was the opportunity for yet more and later drunkenness.

If the authorities show neither the will nor the capacity to deal with such an easily solved problem—and willfully do all they can to worsen it—is it any wonder that they exhibit, in the face of more difficult problems, all the courage and determination of frightened rabbits?

The rioters in the news last week had a thwarted sense of entitlement that has been assiduously cultivated by an alliance of intellectuals, governments and bureaucrats. "We're fed up with being broke," one rioter was reported as having said, as if having enough money to satisfy one's desires were a human right rather than something to be earned.

"There are people here with nothing," this rioter continued: nothing, that is, except an education that has cost $80,000, a roof over their head, clothes on their back and shoes on their feet, food in their stomachs, a cellphone, a flat-screen TV, a refrigerator, an electric stove, heating and lighting, hot and cold running water, a guaranteed income, free medical care, and all of the same for any of the children that they might care to propagate.

Looters take electrical goods after breaking into a store during the second night of civil disturbances in central Birmingham, England.

But while the rioters have been maintained in a condition of near-permanent unemployment by government subvention augmented by criminal activity, Britain was importing labor to man its service industries. 

You can travel up and down the country and you can be sure that all the decent hotels and restaurants will be manned overwhelmingly by young foreigners; not a young Briton in sight (thank God).

The reason for this is clear: The young unemployed Britons not only have the wrong attitude to work, for example regarding fixed hours as a form of oppression, but they are also dramatically badly educated. Within six months of arrival in the country, the average young Pole speaks better, more cultivated English than they do.

The icing on the cake, as it were, is that social charges on labor and the minimum wage are so high that no employer can possibly extract from the young unemployed Briton anything like the value of what it costs to employ him. And thus we have the paradox of high youth unemployment at the very same time that we suck in young workers from abroad.

The culture in which the young unemployed have immersed themselves is not one that is likely to promote virtues such as self-discipline, honesty and diligence. Four lines from the most famous lyric of the late and unlamentable Amy Winehouse should establish the point:

I

 didn't get a lot in class

But I know it don't come in a shot glass

They tried to make me go to rehab

But I said 'no, no, no'

This message is not quite the same as, for example, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise."

Furthermore, all the young rioters will have had long experience of the prodigious efforts of the British criminal justice system to confer impunity upon law breakers. First the police are far too busy with their paperwork to catch the criminals; but if by some chance—hardly more than one in 20—they do catch them, the courts oblige by inflicting ludicrously lenient sentences.

A single example will suffice, but one among many. A woman got into an argument with someone in a supermarket. She called her boyfriend, a violent habitual criminal, "to come and sort him out." The boyfriend was already on bail on another charge and wore an electronic tag because of another conviction. (Incidentally, research shows that a third of all crimes in Scotland are committed by people on bail, and there is no reason England should be any different.)

The boyfriend arrived in the supermarket and struck a man a heavy blow to the head. He fell to the ground and died of his head injury. When told that he had got the "wrong" man, the assailant said he would have attacked the "right" one had he not been restrained. He was sentenced to serve not more than 30 months in prison. Since punishments must be in proportion to the seriousness of the crime, a sentence like this exerts tremendous downward pressure on sentences for lesser, but still serious, crimes.

So several things need to be done, among them the reform and even dismantlement of the educational and social-security systems, the liberalization of the labor laws, and the much firmer repression of crime.

David Cameron is not the man for the job.

Imperial States always do, finally

Why Is America Committing Suicide?

               The US of A on the road to ruin

by Justin Raimondo, August 05, 2011 

America is committing suicide. That’s the only explanation I have for the course followed by US policymakers in the past decade, a period in which the US budget deficit has skyrocketed beyond all reason. While we have run up deficits before, some of them considerable by the standards of the day, in 2001 – the year we launched ourendless “war on terrorism” – the deficit began to enter new territory. Whereas before it had fluctuated, going up, down, and effectively maintaining a steady state of neutral, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks this country went into debt bigtime, with the deficit climbing steadily, doubling in 2007, and nearly doubling again the next fiscal year.

In the name of fiscal “austerity,” Congress recently authorized yet another raising of the debt ceiling, and everyone sits around waiting for the “draconian” cuts to fall – a “cut,” that is, in the rate at which government spending is projected to grow. Only in Washington, D.C., is a “cut” actually an increase – just not as much of an increase as was anticipated. As Ron Paul pointed out, if Congress had simply frozen spending at 2004 levels, we’d have more of a “cut” than we do now. 

No one is surprised by this Washington doubletalk: that’s the language they speak in the Imperial City, where murdering civilians is “collateral damage” and taxation is “revenue enhancement” instead of good old-fashioned theft. It’s silly season on Capitol Hill: so what else is new? Yet I sense a more sinister pattern in this Kabuki theater known as the debt ceiling drama, the implications of which are darker than I care to contemplate — but then again, that’s my job … 

While governments can only finance their completely non-productive (in reality: counter-productive) activities by incurring debt, it’s rare in human history to find profligacy comparable to our own. One has to go all the way back to ancient Rome, under the heel of its more depraved emperors, to find a precedent. The numbers are not merely astonishing: they are inconceivable. The figure — $14.3 trillion – must forever remain in the world of abstractions, because any attempt by the human brain to concretize it fails. How do our lawmakers imagine we can continue to spend at these levels, living light years beyond our means? 

Their recklessness is epitomized by how the military budget came out in all the deficit dickering. As it stands, real defense cuts only kick in if the “super-Congress” fails to come to an agreement on what cuts to make. Then and only then will the misnamed“defense” department come in for something approximating its fair share of cuts. Put another way: only in the most extreme and politically next-to-impossible case will Congress even consider cutting back on its overseas empire. They’ll yank your grandmother off her dialysis machine before they’ll contemplate getting rid of “foreign aid.”  

We ordinary folk live in a completely different world than the movers and shakers of the Imperial City: no one outside the Beltway bubble can really understand the mental processes that allow for such a massive evasion of reality, a kind of collective madness that infects the ruling elite in this country, regardless of party. They talk down to the hoi polloi, and use a different language when they converse among themselves, but occasionally the truth comes out. In 2004, Ron Suskind wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine which included this quote from an unnamed top White House aide: 

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’” 

While the context was a discussion of the Iraq war, this mindset – which is dominant in the Washington of Barack Obama just as it was during the Bush era – pervades our ruling elite in all matters. Why shouldn’t they run up a $14.3 trillion debt  — after all, don’t they create their own reality? Armed  with such supernatural powers, we aren’t going to let a little thing like impending bankruptcy stand in our way – not when we can wish it out of existence. 

Except we can’t. World markets trembled this week, and all indications are that the Big One is just now visible over the horizon. Americans are waking from their decade-long dream – or is that nightmare? – to discover that the world as they used to know it is falling apart, and a new world – a poorer, more restrictive, grayer world — is dawning. Yet our “leaders” in Washington are oblivious to the crisis, as much as they posture and pose: they are, personally, practically invulnerable to the effects of the economic collapse – at least, so far – and so don’t take it seriously. Encased in their self-created bubble, and imbued with the radical subjectivism that has taken hold everywhere but in the sorely beleaguered reality-based community, our rulers pursue policies that are suicidal in their effect, if not their intent.  And I am beginning to wonder if that isn’t their intent, at least on some level…. 

I put this out there as a proposition, a speculation, based solely on evidence of the circumstantial sort. When someone habitually engages in suicidal behavior, repeating the same pattern in spite of recognizing, on some level, that their actions are self-destructive, one has to wonder if they harbor a death wish. Which raises the question: So why is the American ruling class intent on committing suicide? 

There is a theory of history, which I don’t agree with, that treats civilizations as organic entities which go through a process of maturation, progressing from youth to senility in stages roughly comparable to the life process of a human being. Could theSpenglerians be right? Is American civilization entering a new phase — one of terminal decadence? This isn’t the first time I’ve thought of these lines from Robinson Jeffers’ poem, “Shine, Perishing Republic”:

“While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
          to empire

And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
          mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
          to make earth.

Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;
          and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly
          long or suddenly

A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
          shine, perishing republic.”