Tag Archives: Decentralization

The Great Decentralization, by Joel Bowman

Decentralization is the growing counter-force to centralization and tyranny. From Joel Bowman at bonnerprivateresearch.com:

May the forces of history be with you

Joel Bowman, appraising the situation from Buenos Aires, Argentina…

Welcome, dear reader, to a new year and another Sunday Session… that time of the week where we pull back from the granular and ponder the grander, all with the abiding help of a glass or two of Bonarda. Today, we widen the lens even further…

Inflation and deflation… tyranny and liberty… bulls and bears… Betty and Veronica.

History is full of epic matchups. Apparently equal, yet wholly opposing forces wrench at the heart… the brain… the wallet… and other vital organs… tearing us in impossible-to-reconcile directions.

The story is the same in markets, in politics, in love and in life…

Take, for example, the economy, our primary area of concern in these here pages.

On the one side, innovation and competition tend to exert downward pressure on prices over time. It is the natural outcome of competition, of creative destruction, where weaker hands and lesser ideas are weeded out over time. Lessons are learned… skills acquired… processes bettered. The resulting price deflation should deliver, as Jim Grant once phrased it, a kind of “dividend for the working man.”

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Deglobalization And The End Of Trust-Based Money Set The Stage For National Bitcoin Adoption, by Ansel Lindner

Trust-based money means money that has nothing going for it other than social custom and legal tender laws lead to its acceptance. The only thing behind it is promises from people who repeatedly lie to us—central bankers and politician. Bitcoin is a whole new ball game. From Ansel Lindner at bitcoinmagazine.com:

This is an opinion editorial by Ansel Lindner, a bitcoin and financial markets researcher and the host of the “Bitcoin & Markets” and “Fed Watch” podcasts.

Two forces have dominated the globe economically and politically for the last 75 years: globalization and trust-based money. However, the time for both of these forces has passed, and their waning will bring about a great reset of the global order.

But this is not the global, Marxist kind of Great Reset promoted by Klaus Schwab and those who attend Davos. This is an emergent, market-driven reset characterized by a multipolar world and a new monetary system.

Globalization Is Ending

The first reaction I usually get to my claim that the age of hyper-globalization is ending is flippant disbelief. People have so completely integrated the environment of the dying global order into their economic understanding that they cannot fathom a world where the cost-to-benefit analysis of globalization is different. Even after COVID-19 exposed the fragility of complex supply chains, like when the U.S. very nearly ran out of surgical masks and basic medications or when the world struggled to source semiconductors, people have yet to realize the shift that is happening.

Is it that hard to imagine that the businessmen who designed such fragile, overcomplicated production processes didn’t properly weigh the risks?

All that is needed to break globalization is for risk-adjusted costs to change a few percentage points and outweigh the benefits. The pennies saved by outsourcing numerous tasks to numerous jurisdictions will no longer outweigh the possibility of complete collapse of supply chains.

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

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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The end of the age of globalisation, by Phil Mullan

The war will push the global economy in the opposite direction—towards more decentralization and autarky—than the globalists want. From Phil Mullan at spiked-online.com:

How Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could hasten the demise of the US-led economic order.

The economic consequences of Russia’s bloody and despicable assault on Ukraine are very much a secondary consideration to the immediate human and geopolitical implications. And since the various national responses to the conflict are still so fluid, it is far too early to be able to identify the war’s precise longer-term economic effects. Nevertheless, it is possible to tentatively suggest what could unfold on the international economic front.

At least in the short term, the direct and indirect disruptions to economic relations arising from the invasion will almost certainly damage prospects for economic growth and boost inflation far beyond the combatant countries. In particular, the relative toughening of sanctions will generate economic difficulties in many areas beyond Russia itself.

While the war is of huge importance geopolitically, it would, however, be misleading to overstate its economic effects, given all the other enormous economic challenges already in place. For example, the Financial Times claims that the war has ‘shattered hopes of a strong global economic recovery from coronavirus’. But this implies that a strong recovery was already on the cards. There has long been a prevalent complacency that ignores the fundamental atrophy afflicting most advanced industrialised countries. War or no war, the high debt and weak investment common to many Western economies are likely to mean a continuation of the sluggish growth of the past decade.

More broadly, the repercussions of the war are likely to reinforce existing economic trends towards autarky and regionalisation, rather than taking us in entirely new directions. Analysts at Goldman Sachs, for instance, suggest that the war is going to damage globalisation and reinforce de-globalisation forces. But this conventional counterposition of ‘de-globalisation’ to ‘globalisation’ does not help clarify what is happening. In practice, market capitalism has always operated both nationally and internationally at the same time. As a result, economic internationalisation (‘globalisation’) can easily co-exist with a heightened focus on national economic considerations (‘de-globalisation’).

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Hedge Fund CIO: We Have Begun A Great Transition, by Eric Peters

Hedge fund CIO Eric Peters with some spot on observations about the world’s evolution away from centralized power. From Peters at zerohedge.com:

Red Buttons: Russia has 6,255 nuclear weapons, followed by the US with 5,500. China has 350, France 290, the UK 225. Pakistan has 165 warheads to defend itself from India, with 156. Israel is estimated to have 90 nukes. North Korea is believed to have enough fuel to build 40-50 nukes. Iran is headed there too. We detonated Little Boy over Hiroshima in 1945 and killed 150,000. It had the force of 15,000 tons of TNT. The average nuke today contains the force of 100,000 tons. Many are far larger. One such weapon dropped on New York City would kill an untold number.

Fat Fingers: Vladimir Putin controls Russia’s arsenal. Biden is America’s commander-in-chief. Xi Jinping rules over China, potentially for life. There’s Macron of course. Boris Johnson too. Imran Khan is Pakistan’s Prime Minister, although Arif Alvi is its President and commander-in-chief. Modi is India’s Prime Minister and regularly engages in petty skirmishes with two nuclear-armed neighbors. Naftali Bennett is Israel’s PM. Kim Jong-un leads North Korea with ten stubby fingers. And who could forget Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran for life.

Lonely: One thing uniting humanity is the belief that the majority of earth’s 14,000 nuclear weapons are controlled by men who are mentally unstable and unfit to wield such awesome power. Some of us believe 100% of these weapons are controlled by such people. Barely a person on the planet would choose a nuclear war, yet we created a system that empowers others to do just that, on a moment’s notice. An alien would likely observe that such a concentration of power is a gross failure of any species. Perhaps it’s a stage of development that few, if any, advance beyond. Maybe that’s why we have not been visited.

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A Nation Divided: The Majority of Americans Believe Its Time to Make it Official, by Mike Nichols

A reasonably amicable divorce will be far better than continuing division, antipathy, and strife. From Mike Nichols at genzconservative.com:

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

“That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it., and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

The opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence are universally familiar. Those great words began the separation of an oppressed people from a totalitarian regime. It was the beginning of the United States of America; our republic threw off its colonial shackles and declared itself independent of England.

Such words, however, have not been used since. Perhaps it is time they were.

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The Prospects for Soft Secession in America, by Jeff Deist

SLL is all for secession, soft or otherwise. From Jeff Deist at mises.org:

In 1930, Columbia professor Karl Llewellyn published The Bramble Bush, his famous tract on how to think about and study law. Llewellyn urged readers to consider both law and custom when seeking to understand a society, to recognize the difference between black letter legal codes and the day to day practices of state officials and citizens. Where there was no sanction, the author instructed, there was no law. In other words, we should focus on the substance of things at least as much as we focus on the form. This is an important lesson for how we view the United States today, with an eye toward what is actually happening on the ground among people and institutions, rather than legal formalisms.

A few years ago, on a panel discussion at an event in Vienna, Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe made an offhand remark I found very interesting. Paraphrasing him, he said that nationalist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were largely centralizing while the nationalist movements of the twenty-first century were largely decentralist in character—breakaway movements represented by Brexit, Taiwan, Scotland, Catalonia, and others. Donald Trump also represented a breakaway movement of sorts, away from DC, but of course this possibility went totally unfulfilled.

This strikes me as an important insight. What we know as today’s map of Europe is really countries cobbled together from principalities, city-states, kingdoms, dukedoms. And the EU seeks, but has not achieved, total dominion over them as a supranational government. What we think of as the US is really an incredibly disparate set of regions which became fifty states over which the US federal government asserts almost total control. And in both cases, cities became politically, economically, and culturally dominant.

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Why Nation-States Will Die-Off in the Information Age, by Joe Jarvis

The Age of Decentralization is upon us, and it may last longer than the Age of Centralization that preceded it. From Joe Jarvis at thedailybell.com:

When was the fall of the Roman Empire? Was it in 410 when the Visigoths sacked Rome, or 455 when the Vandals plundered Rome? Or was it 476, when the last western Roman Emperor was deposed?

Whatever the answer, the people alive on the ground at the time surely did not wake up to a headline saying: “Rome has fallen, commence medieval barbarianism.”

Only later did historians pinpoint certain dates.

It’s possible, therefore, that we are already past the date that will be considered the fall of the American Empire.

Perhaps historians will look back and say that September 11, 2001 marks the sacking of the American Empire. Not because the Twin Towers fell, but because that’s the day rule of law and due process came crashing down as well.

History may shed more light on the silent coup that occurred behind the scenes, which shifted the US governing structure to a relative dictatorship.

Yes, just like in Rome, the appearances carried on. The Senate still passed bills, and the courts still nominally gave fair trials. But the great erosion hit a turning point. From there on out, due process was not required to assassinate enemies of the US, to spy on “potential terrorists”, and even to confiscate property using civil asset forfeiture.

Or perhaps the CIA already took over as dictators in 1963 with the assassination of the last truly elected US President, John F. Kennedy.

Maybe the fall of the American Empire will be seen in terms of the destruction of the US dollar. The 1913 creation of the Federal Reserve, the 1933 debasement of the gold backed currency, and the 1971 total removal of the gold standard from the US dollar are all part of slow downfall.

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Saving Civilization, by Robert Gore

sydney_opera_house_-_dec_2008

Savagery or civilization?

Imagine you had been picked as a juror for the Derek Chauvin trial. Before you hear a shred of evidence, you very well might make a decision most people would not only admit was the better part of valor, but that harmonized perfectly with prevailing morality.

Your pretrial verdict? Guilty. There had been threats since Chauvin was charged with second and third degree murder and second-degree manslaughter that acquittals would provoke rampaging riots. After the riots last summer, no one could doubt the threats’ credibility. A guilty verdict on all counts could avoid injuries, deaths, and billions of dollars in property damage. Against those consequences, what do the rights or the life of a policeman matter? You’re predetermined verdict is for the greater good.

Even if such considerations never entered your head, you’d need extraordinary courage and independence to impartially hear the evidence and if you thought it warranted, vote for acquittal. You’d have to withstand pressure from your fellow jurors. You’d run the risk that your personal information was leaked by some mainstream or social media scumbag and mostly peaceful thugs showed up at your door. You might be canceled out of a job, your business network, and your social circle. Your privacy would be obliterated and reputation ruined in the wilting glare of nonstop publicity and odium. Politicians and other public figures would denounce you.

The chance that one such person would land on the jury was remote, the chance of twelve nonexistent. Under the inverted standard of justice that prevailed, the outcome was always going to be dictated not by the facts of the case, reasoned consideration of the evidence, deliberation, and the applicable law, but by “social considerations,” which is a polite way of saying the mob.

The mob hailed the verdict as justice. It’s the same justice as John Gotti’s three acquittals after his goons intimidated jurors. Chauvin was guilty unless proven innocent beyond a “reasonable” doubt as defined by the mob. In the same vein, the policeman who shot and killed Ashley Babbitt at the Capitol is not guilty—without a trial—because that’s what the mob demanded. Such blatant contradiction is mob justice.

A morality that confers “rights” on mobs and strips those of an individual is the morality of savages. Maxine Waters is a savage, but so too are the members of the Minneapolis City Council who agreed to pay George Floyd’s estate $27 million before Chauvin’s trial had begun, the judge who recognized the prejudicial unfairness of Waters’ inflammatory statements but passed the buck for doing anything about it to the appellate courts, and the political, media, and celebrity jackals from Joe Biden on down who’ve been howling for Chauvin’s conviction since Floyd’s death.

Whatever the justifications they cite for their pre-verdict demands, they are implicitly insisting that Chauvin’s rights are of no consequence. When the “rights” of some outweigh the rights of one, anything goes. There are people who call for reducing the world’s population to 500 million, which implies a genocide of over 7 billion. That such people are on university faculties rather than denounced and shunned as advocates of mass murder shows just how far the barbarism of collectivist justification has advanced, even when the collective embraced is a fraction of the number of individuals whose lives are to be canceled!

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Service and sacrifice are the watchwords of government, the ultimate mob. Who’s served and who’s sacrificed? There has never been a government that has not arrogated to itself the privilege of using force and fraud to strip individuals of their production, their property, their rights, their liberty, and ultimately, their lives. That privilege is governments’ defining essence and is the privilege that has always threatened humanity. The rationales and rhetoric are invariably collective: the demands of the mob supersede individual rights and individual justice.

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Never mind The Great Reset. Here comes The Great Reject. by Mark E. Jeftovic

SLL is a sucker for any article that uses Atlas Shrugged as a hook, and this is a pretty good one. From Mark E. Jeftovic at bombthrower.com:

The Jackpot Chronicles Scenario #4: Atlas Shrugged

It occurred to me that I never did finish the final instalment of last summer’s Jackpot Chronicles, wherein I posited four possible post-Covid scenarios.

For a quick refresher, The Jackpot is concept I cribbed from William Gibson. It’s a term he uses across a few of his near-future cyberpunk novels that describes a series of rolling global catastrophes that set in sometime around 2016 (his stories span multiverses, and timelines, but the common theme is that somewhere around 2016, some kind of irrevocable glitch in the matrix occurred that put a permanent end to normalcy as it has been understood up until that point).

If there was a Jackpot, whatever it was, it could arguably have happened at many points throughout the 20th century, or if we wanted to confine our speculation to the 21st century then, 9/11 or the GFC would do. Everything after that being symptomatic as opposed to causal.

And then… 2020 and COVID hit. That’s when the fabric of time cleaves us into the before times and The Jackpot.


The other post-pandemic scenarios from the rest of my Jackpot series were:

  1. Force Majeure: The wheels come off completely and the system comes unglued. Mad Max.
  2. Tin Foil Hat: It really is one Big Conspiracy and we’re into a New World Order.
  3. The Great Bifurcation: The middle class gets wiped out and we get a two-tier society

I had thought the fourth scenario would be the one themed Deglobalization, and to a certain extent it still is. In the original outline I described that Deglobalization:

“Is where multi-national corporations, so shaken from this Near Death Experience, realizing their error of betting the farm on just-in-time supply chains, labour cost arbitrage and having zero buffers, begin pulling manufacturing back home.

The smart ones start building cushions and shock absorbers into their business logic, and they begin to eschew leverage after being on the wrong side of a series of cascading liquidity implosions. In other words, businesses begin to transition themselves into what I called “Transition Companies” as posited in the inaugural posting for [this blog]”.

I also went on to say that I considered this one most desirable yet least likely. My view on this scenario has changed somewhat, and I also think that the staggering government ineptitude and duplicity at all levels in all jurisdictions (with few notable exceptions) has made our regeared “4th scenario” more likely given that it’s in progress. Mass demonstrations, mass exoduses, crypto-currencies are symptoms of a Great Reject, or as I’ve renamed this scenario “Atlas Shrugged“.

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