Tag Archives: centralization

Doug Casey on the Struggle Between the Powerful Forces of Centralization and Decentralization

Posted on December 7, 2022 | Leave a comment

This is indeed the struggle of our times, and decentralization is going to win. From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

Centralization and Decentralization

International Man: We’re seeing several disturbing trends converge: currency debasement, increased surveillance, and more travel restrictions.

It seems governments everywhere—and the WEF elite behind them—are waging an all-out war on ordinary people worldwide.

What do you make of this trend, and where is it headed?

Doug Casey: Well, as I said earlier, the World Economic Forum is actually an informal United Nations, which is bad enough.

It’s populated by people who like the idea of powerful government in general, and a powerful world government in particular. When you look at history, you find that there are people who arise from seemingly nowhere and are able to put themselves in positions of huge influence and power. In today’s world, that usually happens through elections. But Bismarck, Napoleon, Mao, Kissinger, Schwab, Gates, and most others didn’t come up through elections for what they’re worth. They came up through force of personality, cleverness, and connections. Elections are essentially an Americanism.

Incidentally, I don’t believe in elections or “democracy” as means for determining who your boss is and who controls you. Elections have rarely been more than popularity contests at best, and more often, mob rule dressed in a coat and tie. As HL Mencken quipped, an election is just an advance auction on stolen goods. Now, more than ever, they’re just rubber stamps for political operators who are adept at using the media and other forms of influence to get the hoi polloi to robotically legitimize their rulers.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Debt, Economy, Governments, Morality, Politics, Propaganda, Secession, Tyranny

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Europe’s Machiavellian Moment, by Alastair Crooke

Posted on December 22, 2020 | Leave a comment

European and American elites are motivated by a common impulse: centralization and control and the plebs be damned. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

It is still too early to say, but perhaps the U.S. election is the beginning of a new ‘Turning’ (in the sense of the ‘Fourth Turning’). Of course, what happens in the U.S. is most people’s primary focus now; but even as that plays out over the coming year – perhaps chaotically – the seeds sown on 3 November, and in its aftermath, take us to a pivot: Does the centralising project of progressive ‘wokedom’ in Blue America, and in Merkel’s Europe, have the ‘grit’ to persevere – or will its leaders fold in the face of the approaching crises – and concomitant public anger?

The Project has three main pivots: the centralisation of Big Tech and MSM; the concentration of banking and financial tech, within centralised Central Banking; and Merkel’s centralisation of politics in Europe, at the head of an empire claiming to occupy the ‘moral high-ground’.

What is so significant about the U.S. election; what is so significant about the last four topsy-turvy years in Washington, has been the casting aside of all illusion of democracy, and the blunt demonstration that real power is exercised by a clique of billionaires. Europeans with little by way of independent news may be the last to notice. But for sure, China, Russia, Latin America – and the Middle East, which has suffered the most from America’s and Europe’s ‘moral’ sieges and wars – have taken due note. They will not further put up with European or American moral hectoring.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Cronyism, Economy, Governments, Technology

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The EU’s Drive toward Political Centralization Will Doom Its Economy, by Antonis Giannakopoulos

Posted on September 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

Political centralization in the grubby mitts of politicians and governments always dooms economies. From Antonis Giannakopoulos at mises.org:

In the wake of the economically disastrous covid-19 shutdowns, the political class has desperately tried to save the failing euro system. On July 21 European leaders agreed on what they called a “historic” deal. It was nothing more than a multitrillion euro stimulus package. However, it is more probable that the “recovery fund” will delay any chance of a much-needed economic restructuring taking place. What it will do is waste scarce resources and capital while setting Europe up for another financial and debt crisis. Another even more important issue is the dangerous path toward political centralization the EU is heading down as a result of the crisis. The European Parliament is very much dominated by procentralization forces and contains few individuals who defend the principles of decentralization and economic freedom while seeing with great concern the ever growing power of Brussels.

Has the social democratic project for the EU prevailed?

The Classical Liberal View: Economic Union, Political Decentralization

Even before the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, which created the core institution that later became the EU, there have been tensions between the two paths that a European union should take. The tension is between the classical liberal vision and the social democratic vision. The liberal vision puts its primary focus on defending individual freedom and respecting property rights while promoting a European free trade zone with a robust free market. The treaty of Rome was a major victory for the liberals, as it was built on two basic principles: freedom of movement and the free circulation of goods, services, and financial capital. In short, the treaty aimed at the restoration of rights and values that had been lost during the early twentieth century as nationalism and socialism prevailed in the European Continent.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Civil Liberties, Debt, Economics, Economy, Governments, Law

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Nationalism and Secession, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Posted on August 24, 2020 | Leave a comment

This article is from 1993 and makes a strong case that secession and smaller political units are freer and more compatible with trade, production, and capitalism. From Hans-Hermann Hoppe at lewrockwell.com:

[Published in Chronicles, Nov. 1993, p. 23–25]

With the collapse of communism all across Eastern Europe, secessionist movements are mushrooming. There are now more than a dozen independent states on the territory of the former Soviet Union, and many of its more than 100 different ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups are striving to gain independence. Yugoslavia has dissolved into various national components. Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia now exist as independent states. The Czechs and the Slovaks have split and formed independent countries. There are Germans in Poland, Hungarians in Slovakia, Hungarians, Macedonians, and Albanians in Serbia, Germans and Hungarians in Romania, and Turks and Macedonians in Bulgaria who all desire independence. The events of Eastern Europe have also given new strength to secessionist movements in Western Europe: to the Scots and Irish in Great Britain, the Basques and Catalonians in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium, and the South Tyrolians and the Lega Nord in Italy.

From a global perspective, however, mankind has moved closer than ever before to the establishment of a world government. Even before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States had attained hegemonical status over Western Europe (most notably over West Germany) and the Pacific rim countries (most notably over Japan)—as indicated by the presence of American troops and military bases, by the NATO and SEATO pacts, by the role of the American dollar as the ultimate international reserve currency and of the U.S. Federal Reserve System as the “lender” or “liquidity provider” of last resort for the entire Western banking system, and by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Moreover, under American hegemony the political integration of Western Europe has steadily advanced. With the establishment of a European Central Bank and a European Currency Unit (ECU), the European Community will be complete before the turn of the century. In the absence of the Soviet Empire and its military threat, the United States has emerged as the world’s sole and undisputed military superpower.

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Posted in Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Governments, History, Politics, Secession, Trade

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Global Centralization Is The Cause Of Crisis – Not The Cure, by Brandon Smith

Posted on February 20, 2020 | 1 comment

Smith hits the nail square on the head with this one. From Smith at alt-market.com:

Once you understand the globalist mindset, almost everything they do becomes rather robotic and predictable.  It should not be surprising that the World Health Organization (WHO), a branch of the United Nations, has been so aggressive in cheerleading for the Chinese government and its response to the coronavirus outbreak. After all, China’s communist surveillance state model is a beta test for the type of centralization that the UN wants for the entire planet. They certainly aren’t going to point out that it was China’s totalitarian system that allowed the outbreak to spread from the very beginning.

Even now Xi Jinping is trying to rewrite history, claiming that he had been swift in responding to the crisis more than a month before he actually did.  The lie that the coronavirus mutated naturally in a food and animal market in Wuhan continues to be peddled by the mainstream media even though no evidence supporting this claim exists.  And China is still releasing rigged death and infection numbers while they have over 600 million people under martial law lockdown and their crematoriums continue pumping out the fumes of the dead 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

Brave health workers like Li Wenliang, who was punished by the government for warning about the virus in December, have died in the process of trying to fight against the centralized behemoth just to get vital information to the world, but that never happened, right? It was actually president Xi and the CPC that saved the day. The WHO and the CPC say so. You’ll never hear the UN praise the efforts of Li Wenliang; they want his name to disappear down the memory hole as much as the Chinese government does.

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Posted in Governments, Medicine, Propaganda, Science

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Ungovernability, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on October 23, 2016 | Leave a comment

A grim prognosis on the health of governments in Europe and the US. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

Over the summer I introduced a two-fold assertion: 1) global economic growth is over (and has been for years and won’t come back for many more years) and 2) the end of growth marks the end of all centralization, including globalization. You can read all about these themes in “Globalization Is Dead, But The Idea Is Not” and “Why There is Trump” There are also extensive quotes of the second essay in wicked former UK MI6 spymaster Alastair Crooke’s “‘End of Growth’ Sparks Wide Discontent”.

When I say ‘the end of growth’, I don’t mean that in a Limits to Growth kind of way, or peak oil or things like that. Not because I seek to invalidate such things, but because I mean economics, finance only. Our economies simply ceased growing, and quite a few years ago. The only reason that is not, and very widely, recognized is the $21 trillion and change that central banks have conjured up ostensibly to kickstart a recovery that always remains just around the corner.

That those $21 trillion will have massive negative effects on all of us is not my point either right now. Just that growth is gone. And that’s hard enough to swallow for a system that’s based uniquely on that growth. That is what this ‘essay’ is about: what consequences that will have.

All that said, I don’t have the idea that too many people are willing to accept the notion of the end of eternal economic growth (let alone right this minute), nor of globalization’s demise. Which may be partially understandable, but not more than that. Instead, quite a few people may honestly feel that the end of growth will make ‘leaders’ try for more, not less, centralization/globalization, but that, if it happens, is temporary. Unless, as I wrote earlier, we see dictators in the west.

Because, as I said in those articles, the overbearing principle is, and must be, that when centralized power ceases to deliver benefits to people, they will no longer accept that decisions about their – ever poorer- lives are taken by people hundreds or thousands of miles away from where they live. People allow that only when they reap sufficient benefits from it. With growth gone, there are no such benefits left. Look at Greece and Italy and Brexit, and look at why Trump is where he is.

Since it will apparently take a while for the above to sink in – which is not because I’m wrong-, I’m a little hesitant to introduce the next assertion, which is very closely related to the other two and takes it a step further. That assertion is that there are multiple countries in the western world -and perhaps beyond- today that run a serious risk of becoming de facto ungovernable. I’ll refrain from using the term anarchy.

I’ve been playing around in my head for a while with the thought that it is striking that the last two major global powers, which together have dominated world politics and economics for over 200 years, look well on their way towards becoming ungovernable. It is perhaps even more striking that nobody appears to understand or even contemplate this.

Both Britain and America are caught in an apparent trap in which various groups of their citizens blame each other for everything that’s going wrong with their lives -which admittedly is plenty-. But that’s where the end of growth and globalization comes in: societies are in urgent need of new ways of organizing themselves, of formulating new goals, priorities and policies.

To continue reading: Ungovernability

 

 

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Posted in Economy, Governments

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