Where liberty is, there is my country.
Benjamin Franklin
The builders will be in the driver’s seat.
Debt is any enemy of government’s perfect ally. The more a government borrows the more it’s weakened. The consequences of debt, required repayment of principal, and compounding interest are inexorable, forestalled by central bank and government machinations but never prevented. The longer they forestall the more severe the consequences. Central banks and governments have fostered the world’s greatest debt bubble and promoted negative interest rates to facilitate it. An unprecedented tsunami of debt has creditors paying borrowers to lend them money. This weird and anomalous combination, impossible in a world without central banking, portends global disaster.
The enemies of government have only to wait. When the reckoning arrives, governments will find they no longer have the means to wage war or control their populations (see “The Illusion of Control,” Part 1 and Part 2, Robert Gore, SLL ). Their demands on their nations’ productive taxpayers and their depreciation of currencies have stripped their countries of their wealth and ability to produce. Be it by creditors, revolutionaries, or invaders, or some combination of the three, these governments will be toppled and replaced by something new. It’s a story as old as human history.
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A graph of global economic growth versus the much steeper graph (in both percentage and absolute terms) of global debt growth above it conveys an obvious message: something has to give. When that something gives it will lead to the greatest deflationary depression in history. The trillions in fiat debt that governments and central banks will conjure in response will be no match for the quadrillions (one quadrillion equals one thousand trillions) in debt, unfunded liabilities, contingent liabilities, securitized collateralized-debt, derivatives, and other promises—all counted as a liability or quasi-liability on one set of books and an asset or quasi-asset on another—that will unravel and implode.
Governments are meeting the ongoing economic and financial crisis—whose “official” start will probably be placed at the 2008-2009 implosion, but whose roots stretch back to at least 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window—the same way they always have: stealing incomes and wealth, keeping for themselves or giving to favored recipients, issuing debt, “encouraging” or outright forcing their central banks to buy that debt, and debasing their currencies. This bag of larcenous and fraudulent tricks produces nothing, leads to no voluntary, mutually beneficial trade, and retards savings and investment, the foundations of economic growth and progress. It is how Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt turned what should have been a garden variety recession and financial reset into the Great Depression.
It is why a Greater Depression is at least ten years on and the worst is yet to come. Anyone who doubts that we’re in this Greater Depression should reflect on one fact: across the developed world national governments’ debts are growing faster in both percentage and absolute terms than government-calculated gross domestic products. In other words, the “growth” we now have is more than completely offset by the greater growth of those national governments’ debt. The disparity yawns even wider when growing individual, corporate, and political subdivisions’ debts—which mostly fund consumption and so generate no offsetting return—are added to national governments’ debt.
One positive thing about the Greater Depression going forward is that it will hit an inflection point and its pace will dramatically quicken. That inflection point will be crashing equity and debt markets, heralding the depression’s severe economic contraction. Default, bankruptcy, and deflation will be the order of the day and much of what the world now considers wealth—debt and equity claims, title to land and tangible assets pledged as collateral for multiple loans—will simply evaporate.
Broken promises, vanishing wealth, and contracting economies will inevitably lead to social disorder and chaos, which severely resource-constrained governments will be unable to control or contain. Current political arrangements and geographic boundaries will not survive the stress, with larger entities shattering into smaller ones. The parasitic monstrosities that are today’s governments will be unsupportable. Future generations will look back in wonder that they were able to expropriate so much of the world’s production and wealth while being responsible for so much of its misery.
Necessity is the mother of invention and inventive thinking. Collapse will lead not just to a wrenching political, economic, and financial reordering, but an epochal reset in human thought. Most of what most people now believe will be seen as tragically wrong. Today’s impervious-to-facts-or-reason worship of governments, rulers, and their minions will certainly stand revealed as the folly it’s always been.
Sand is sand until somebody figures out how to make glass, semiconductors, and solar panels. For centuries petroleum was considered a nuisance. It didn’t become valuable until somebody discovered its constituent elements could be used for, among other things, light, heat, and powering internal combustion engines. Gold was just another rock until humanity discovered its many virtues, which make it ideal for, among other things, jewelry, microcircuitry, and money (see “Real Money,” Robert Gore, SLL).
A resource, natural or otherwise, is a resource because it has at least one use. Resources are not the ultimate source of wealth, the minds that discover uses for them are. Very few wealth-creating ideas are tabula rasa, without antecedent. They build on prior discoveries and ideas. Innovation, when allowed to proceed, is a compounding, exponential process, creating new possibilities that lead to more innovation. It epitomizes organic adaptation, the bottom-up, decentralized progress that humanity makes when it’s not smothered by its diametric opposite—top-down, centralized command-and-control.
Reality-based intelligence, competence, and innovation will be prized as the world is forced to organically adapt to economic collapse, entropic decentralization, and much smaller political subdivisions. Those who would build new societies will need builders. Engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, farmers, plumbers, electricians, mechanics, carpenters, computer programmers, machine-tool operators, doctors, technicians, etc.—people who know how to do useful things—will find their skills, ingenuity, and industriousness in demand. Politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, lawyers, crony-socialist executives, administrators, college professors, think tank propagandists, criminals, celebrities, safe-space students, perpetually aggrieved whiners, a menagerie of misanthropic misfits, the indolent, the entitled, etc.—people with little or no useful skills—will be so much disposable baggage. Ironically, within this latter group there are numerous proponents of population reduction. Without an exercisable claim on the talents and production of the former group, they may well find themselves at the head of their own line.
The first question those who would found new societies may ask is: What must we do to attract the builders? The proper question will be: what must we not do to attract the builders? For once builders will be in the driver’s seat, and it’s not difficult to imagine their answers. They’d like to hold on to what they earn, so forget theft under the euphemism of taxation. Why should they fund senseless wars or the lifestyles of people they neither know or care about, and probably despise? Bye-bye warfare and welfare states. Forget the frauds of fiat debt, legal tender laws, and central banking; individuals and markets will decide the accepted medium or mediums of exchange.
Builders don’t cotton to people who know less than they do about their occupations telling them what to do, so you can toss hundreds of thousands of laws, regulations, and codes out the window. As a matter of fact, they don’t particularly like other people telling them what to do, period. Isn’t there an ancient parchment somewhere that says: that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? What must be done to attract the builders? Leave them alone to pursue their happiness!
As the world splinters into a thousand or more enclaves, they will be experiments into what works and what doesn’t, confronting two basic issues: supporting their populations and defending themselves. The most successful at the former will undoubtedly be the most successful at the latter because both stem from a common source—productive human minds that are free to innovate, produce, and voluntarily cooperate and exchange, and thus have a stake in defending what they build from armed invasion, parasitic immigration, and internal corruption and subversion. The multiplicity of enclaves will give builders the option to leave failing ones and find or start ones more to their liking.
When humanity proceeds from one epoch to the next, there are usually precursors within the prior epoch of what’s to come in the next one. Hong Kong after World War II offers a glimpse of what’s possible in the coming age of decentralization. It is smaller than Rhode Island, has a population roughly equal to Washington State’s, and no natural resources other than the natural shelter and deep waters of Victoria Harbor, which enabled the construction of one of the world’s leading ports. Yet, in a span of fifty years it went from scattered farming and fishing villages emerging from Japanese occupation to a commercial and financial powerhouse with one of the world’s highest concentrations of both skyscrapers and ultra high-net-worth individuals.
It capitalized on capitalism, which unleashed the skills, ingenuity and industriousness of Chinese immigrants fleeing Communist China, attracted to its low taxation and minimal government interference in the economy. Hong Kong is, of course, a nightmare to all those bleating about wealth inequality. The lower bound on wealth is zero, the upper bound in a Moore’s-law world where science, knowledge, and technology are exploding exponentially virtually infinite. Such will be the gap in the new era’s most successful enclaves, with their dramatically reduced or nonexistent taxes and minimalist or nonexistent governments. The bleaters will be apoplectic, well-advised to find an enclave of their own kind to shelter themselves from the horror—someplace where everyone is poor, but equally so.
Hong Kong is also a nightmare to all those statist collectivists who insist that freedom is impractical and can’t work in the present day and age. What they really mean is that individual rights, self-interest, market competition, voluntary interaction, and free exchange among builders can’t work, but force and fraud can, as long as they’re on the business end of the guns and the checks are made out to them. A bankrupt world plunging toward ruinous chaos is the end result of barrel-of-a-gun political power. It is only the power to stymie, stop, cripple, enslave, corrupt, plunder, destroy, and murder. If people cannot handle freedom for themselves, they sure as hell can’t handle power over other people. If the last century has demonstrated nothing else, it has demonstrated that. Just consider the bloodbath perpetrated by the author of the barrel-of-a-gun quote.
Imagine a group of several million people from around the world signing a petition to the United Nations or whatever global governance organization the globalists foist on us. They ask for a small area, say no bigger than Rhode Island, or maybe Rhode Island itself, in which they are allowed to set up their own country and live in freedom, with a minimalist government or no government at all. They volunteer to pay the expenses for anyone who doesn’t want to live in Freedomland to move to the location of their choice.
If you’re shaking your head at the impossibility of such a proposal, are you doing so because people could never live together in freedom or because the world’s powerful would never allow it? The former answer involves such a dim view of human nature it’s a wonder those who believe it even get out of bed in the morning. The latter answer is based on a clear understanding of the world’s powerful.
Mel Gibson shouted it in Braveheart: Freedom! It’s an ideal that’s animated the best of humanity for centuries, the discussion of which is the first thing repressive regimes censor. If discussion is impermissible, then a real-life test of that which they hate and fear is out of the question; its success would be an irrefutable reproach to their professed politics and their psychopathic psyches. Freedom and tyranny can’t live under the same roof. The chaos and violence engulfing Hong Kong was foreordained in 1997. Gibson was drawn and quartered.
However, the dinosaur—predatory government—faces its extinction. Those who worship and those who hate state power both sense that titanic forces are at work, that earthshaking changes are coming. Real power, the power to create, invent, build, and produce—the power of the mind—awaits its full liberation. The war for freedom will be bloody and chaotic, but it’s a war that must be fought…and won.
On the other side of that valley, havens will emerge in which humanity is finally free to reach its vast, glorious potential. That’s worth fighting for.
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all governments eventually become corrupt….all corrupt governments eventually fall. those are two facts history teaches, most oftn , the hard way.
the very definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
so when this present form of big government comes crashing down, why on earth would sane people institute more of the same, under a different name??
I say, there is no government like no government.
if you say it won’t work, I would beg to ask, how do you know, since it’s never been tried.
all I ask is that you honestly think about it
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Reblogged this on Starvin Larry and commented:
“The enemies of government have only to wait. When the reckoning arrives, governments will find they no longer have the means to wage war or control their populations (see “The Illusion of Control,” Part 1 and Part 2, Robert Gore, SLL ). Their demands on their nations’ productive taxpayers and their depreciation of currencies have stripped their countries of their wealth and ability to produce. Be it by creditors, revolutionaries, or invaders, or some combination of the three, these governments will be toppled and replaced by something new. It’s a story as old as human history.”
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Like a laser, Robert, you’ve focused your thoughts to give us one word: HOPE
I and my family can stand on our own two productive and resourceful feet, bowing to no man nor government. And that’s good enough for me. We will survive and prosper.
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One day, no one will bow to either man or government.
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AMEN!
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A wide vision clearly seen.
Through your words today I can feel the winds of history, and I find them refreshing.
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Thank you.
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A lot here to think about and to consider.
i could here the Trump worshipers shouting but the dow is 28,000, best economy in the history of the us. and the world!!! Lets not discuss or consider the Debt!
Again recently ran across the Bible verses on “The Builders.” There may be a connection?
The Parable of the Wicked Tenants
…41“He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” they replied, “and will rent out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him his share of the fruit at harvest time.” 42Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: ‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is from the Lord, and it is marvelous in our eyes’? 43Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.…
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I’ve always heard that God helps those who help themselves.
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Yes, and look how that can and will be interpreted.
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Can,has,and will be.
Yeah that is it.
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Robert: Excellent piece. I hope you are correct in your assessment. Sadly, for this reincarnation to take place, many must and will perish. It will be Bosnia times Rwanda, as Mr. Bracken has alluded to in his posts. And, the Blue Hives will be all but uninhabitable. They are almost there, now.
My only problem with all of this is the timeline. If we have been in the economic meltdown as your describe for some time, it would seem to me that it is possible for it to go on ad infinitum. As long as all the players agree to the rules of this mutant Monopoly Game, what is to stop it from continuing indefinitely?
The folks at the top are criminal psychopaths. But, they are not stupid. And, they know that such an upheaval would bring the gun-toting masses of pissed-off Americans down on their heads no matter where in the world they tried to hide. Therefore, do you see them pulling a whopping big rabbit out of their hat? Debt forgiveness? A Jubilee Year? Dollar devaluation? What say you?
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Dweezil,
Back in the days when I was trading bonds, I said that any entity, if it spends money it doesn’t have long enough, will go broke. At the time I was saying that about GM and it was absolutely inconceivable to most that GM could go broke, but it did. It wouldn’t be here now but for a government bailout.
The thing is, broke is broke, whether you’re GM or the federal government, and there are no rabbits to pull out of the hat. Sure TPTB will try to shift the losses and so on, so there very well may be things like debt forgiveness and Jubilees. That rearranges the losses to an extent, but we’ve already spent our future, the ultimate loss is baked into the cake. We’re just about out of future to spend, which is why this game cannot go on forever.
One other point. Hemingway asked in The Sun Also Rises: “How did you go bankrupt?” His answer: “Gradually, then suddenly.” It seems like the lead up to what’s coming has been interminable. That’s the gradual part. I think almost everybody will be surprised at how quickly the sudden part occurs. Recall that in the autumn of 2007 stock markets were setting record highs and within a year, Lehman Brothers was bankrupt and we were in the midst of one of the economy’s and stock market’s biggest plunges ever. Let that serve as a reminder of the value of prepping beforehand–you never know when the shit will hit the fan.
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I sincerely wish for anarchists to have what they seek.
Will they respect my right to be as far away from them as possible while they try it.
“if you say it won’t work, I would beg to ask, how do you know, since it’s never been tried.”
How do you know that it hasn’t?
“all I ask is that you honestly think about it”
I’d ask the same of you (pl.), but I won’t hold my breath for it to happen.
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Gore, that’s all wild-eyed optimism. Think rather of
small, somewhat radioactive feudal domains
ruled by alpha males.
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That’s me, wild-eyed optimist. At least I’ve got something to fight for.
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Robert,
Your words have given me a sober optimism. The Revelation to St. John depicts the sudden catastrophic collapse of Babylon. Historical biblical scholars have sought to interpret Babylon as a specific city, or nation, usually within their lifetimes. However, Babel/Babylon, and the essence thereof, has existed throughout our history. The incredible hubris of building a tower to heaven, the imposition of control over individuals to remain in the city, rather than to move out into a recreated world, along with the overarching desire to make a name for themselves apart from their divine design remind me of the world in which we now live.
I believe there is a rapidly approaching tipping point, and the collapse of the current system will seem very sudden, when in fact it has already begun. “Let him who has ears to hear, listen.”
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Mr. Woodyard
Robert says: “Freedom and tyranny can’t live under the same roof.” I agree with that.
What I find to be the problem is that of the “roof”. To believe that any group of individuals can live on this finite planet in freedom while another group of the opposite mind exists is like trying to mix oil and water. Not going to happen. How is a World divided any different that a house divided? Neither is able to stand.
You say some interesting things in your comment. I’m thinking that you and I might be on the same page. I believe that “the MYSTERY BABYLON HARLOT” That St. John wrote about is neither city nor nation, but an empire just as was Rome and the other five that preceded it. The reason for it being called MYSTERY BABYLON is because in Isaiah 47 we read: “Come down, sit in the dust o Virgin daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground:…and thou hast confidence in thy malice, and hast said: There is none that seeth me.” verses 1 and 10. Ah, but a few do see.
You say; “Let him who has ears to hear, listen.” Yes, and “let him who has eyes to see, look.”
I agree with you 100% on that “rapidly approaching tipping point,”. As I look back on 79 years I find myself wondering how much further down can morality fall.
I could probably write for hours about this subject and never make a dent, but this is enough for now.
Mr. Gore says some very interesting and thought provoking things, but I cannot share his optimism regarding the future of this world. The “Conflict of the Ages” continues and there can be only one winner.
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I don’t know if all gov’t is evil. But this i know. Our US gov’t is evil. They exist only for themselves and to capture as much wealth and conquer with as much power as they possibly can.
And we’ve moved to a point where they don’t even try to hide it anymore. They parade it right in front of our faces. Witness the fake impeachment hearings. We’re told that the gov’t bureaucrats decide foreign policy and it’s the job of the president to carry it out. They tell us this point blank.
The federal reserve is stealing hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the form of setting below mkt int rates, all to make their buddies on trading desks infinitely more rich. Those are the buddies who hire them after they retire from the federal reserve board. And even that doesn’t content them. At the same time, they whine that they can’t get inflation to go up. Inflation to suck the very wind out of the 90% of society that aren’t their close friends.
The repo madness. We were filled with bullshit stories about how it was corps needing to pay taxes. Except after taxes were paid, the repo madness didn’t stop. The tax story was all bullshit. What really happened is this. The federal reserve signaled they were going to buy bonds. QE. Their buddies on the trading desks at hedge funds LOADED THEMSELVES TO THE GILLS WITH BONDS THEY COULD MAKE A GUARANTEED PROFIT ON BY SELLING THEM TO THE FED IN A FEW MONTHS. How do these trading desks finance this? REPOS, of course. And when the repo rate went up, the fed concocted the phony tax story, and then went in and did the repos for their buddies so they could get a low borrowing rate.
IOW, the fed is guaranteeing a profit to their friends through qe, then they’re even financing their friends borrowing to do it.
It’s like they’re trying to loot everything they can get before the collapse.
The whole thing is the most stinking rotten mess this country has ever seen.
I CANNOT WAIT TILL THIS COUNTRY GOES ALL HONG KONG.
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I’ve got one more thing to say. It’s about our vaunted Constitution and how the fraud has been going on since day one of this country.
We had an Articles of Confederation prior to the Constitution. It’s thirteenth clause said there had to be a UNANIMOUS vote of the states to change it.
But the Elite wanted more power for the federal gov’t than they could get from the Articles of Confederation. But they couldn’t get a unanimous vote of the state legislatures to do it. SO THEY RATIFIED THE CONSTITUTION WITH ONLY NINE STATES. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
I used to be a Constitutionalist. Then i found out that while it may be a fine reading document, it is absolutely worthless in practice, If the elite want something, they get it, constitution or no constitution.
Like i said. It’s been going on since day one of this country.
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Beautiful!
I have lived my whole life in anticipation of such events and still believe something like this description will eventually happen. The only problem for me is that I am now over 60 and wonder if I will live long enough to actually see it come to pass. I sincerely hope so, but I still wonder.
A long time ago, I read something which Gary North had written along the lines of this. “Never underestimate the power that the State has to prolong and extend the system in place.” Inexact wording from memory, same meaning. This always caused frustration on my part, because I wanted the ‘collapse’ to happen immediately.
Now that we are much closer to the breaking point, I have had many years to prepare myself. I think that I am prepared mentally, physically my health is beginning to deteriorate, spiritually I am secure. Bring it on!
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We have a lot in common, including our perspective. Bring it on indeed! Thanks for the comment.
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Wow! Stirring words indeed, and I agree wholeheartedly! It’s hard to predict when the collapse will take place, since the dying edifice employs many tricks to prop itself up ever-longer. But collapse it must.
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Good article, Robert
under daily news
Linked @ https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
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Thanks and thanks for pointing out the new link.
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No problem I have linked your articles before. You may have forgotten but you have thanked me before. Keep up the good work and I will keep linking it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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What amazes me is the courage and desire of builders to try to find a method for doing what they love, building. When others try and succeed in stealing from them and call their extortion ‘legal’ because the majority agreed it was okay to ‘tax’ someone else the builders keep trying to find a way.
The method of fiat currency and using violence to back up their extortion can’t go on forever, or so I believe. Yet it has managed to survive its own destructive forces that cause mass starvation while it sends millions to work camps or kills them for having the incorrect philosophy. Yet these monstrosities somehow survive sometimes for centuries to be replaced by another that has a different form but the same structure. The support that keeps it in place is the desire and willingness of so many to be slaves and ensure that their neighbors are also enslaved.
Humans seem to bent on destruction and unable to recognize it when something superior arises among them and value its worth. Instead when it is recognized the mob would rather destroy what improves them so that they might feel secure in their unchanging world that requires an authority. They claim the moral high ground of holding life in sacred awe and when authority demands they destroy it, torture it and die because of their own immorality they follow the commands and continue unabated in wholesale destruction.
If history is a predicter of the future the collapse will be a reorganization of the immoral practices and philosophies. I do hope that a paralyzing collapse will give the moral, the builders an opportunity to succeed and that the mob might once recognize their value.
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There is always a self-contained joy to building something. I think if every human building could know that joy, just once, a lot of the world’s misery would vanish.
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I explain the problem in simple terms:
Governments have power.
Psychopaths are drawn to power as s#!t draws flies.
Theft and corruption follow them in.
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Are the builders in charge in China? How many did Mao kill? Are the builders having their organs harvested instead of building?
Kampuchea? Pol Pot?
Stalin, the purges, the camps, the Holodomor?
Tell me again what is the source of your optimism? Who exactly will survive to build anything if we descend into the darkness we can all see on the horizon? Truth and facts don’t matter. No building will occur until there is respect for it again, and there is much looting, death and misery between here and there. Besides, slaves can be made to build. Plenty of instances last century.
Sorry, tbe irrational people have to starve to death in the cold and dark first.
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Sorry, tbe irrational people have to starve to death in the cold and dark first.
I don’t believe I implied otherwise. That’s a source of my optimism.
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“The enemies of government have only to wait.”
“How we burned in the camps later…”
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A strong call Robert. You can see how this can motivates only the top ten or fifteen percent of our population. And some of them will be to fearful to move forward. Imagine the terror of the bottom half.
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Trumpeter, I have looked at your comment numerous times and I still can’t figure out what you mean. It is as clear as mud. Please elaborate.
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