The Slings And Arrows of Progressivism

Greetings to the Steemit community! What follows is my first exclusive content for this outlet. For the past seven or eight years, I have been posting on Blogger (augenguy.blogger.com), which defunded me six years ago just as I was about to earn my first paycheck. Thus, I have labored to produce well over one million words with zero benefit, other than the praise of the faithful group of followers I built up there and on Twitter (@RadioFarSide). I'm hoping the move here will reverse that trend.

Today's rant is inspired by an article in Zero Hedge titled, "Millennials Have Ushered in the Baby Bust Cycle" (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-22/millennials-have-ushered-baby-bust-cycle#).

The author intimates that the US is heading for a massive crisis due to wildly decreasing birth rates, combined with severe debt loads and stagnate economy. He sees this demographic trend as a consequence of the Baby Boom immediately following World War 2, but he doesn't go far enough.

He is right that a bust cycle must follow a boom cycle. We see this in nearly every level of biology. Bacteria in a dish full of food with grow and expand until the food source is used up, and then the inevitable decline sets in until an equilibrium is reached. As close as the author gets to the actual underlying cause is to mention that birthrates fell in the 1930s, during the depths of the Great Depression, as well.

Here is the nugget that he overlooked: the US Federal government, under FDR, initiated the New Deal program that artificially inflated dozens of industries and economic sectors in order to combat a problem that would have solved itself. The New Deal further pressed the nation toward war in Europe and the Pacific, and whether by accident or design, created the Military-Industrial Complex. These seminal events have combined to create the conditions that the author has noted.

The New Deal pumped massive amounts of borrowed money into works projects like highways, tourist attractions, the film industry, and dozens of other sectors. This had the long-term effect of shifting the economy to service industries and propaganda - otherwise known as marketing - and away from manufacturing and agriculture.

The infusion of money created artificial prosperity, which led to rising birth rates that were later exacerbated by post-war rebuilding - yet another artificial boom. The economic boom combined with the sudden restart of family life following the war set up a birthrate increase such as had never been seen before. This resulted in the infamous Baby Boom Generation, whose aging members are now burdening the social services also created under the New Deal.

The New Deal created the Social Security System (SSS), sold as a guaranteed minimum income in retirement for all citizens. The problem is that the SSS created a slush fund, whereby younger generations paid in to support older generations. The Baby Boom meant mountains of money were flowing in that far exceeded the numbers of retirees making claims.

Congress, being a body that never passes up a pork barrel, started borrowing against the SSS and replacing the money mountains with IOU mountains. The money was used to further juice the Military-Industrial Complex in an enormous campaign called the Cold War, in which trillions of dollars were spent to create a standing military (forbidden still by the US Constitution) with an inventory of toys that were never intended to be used, just to intimidate.

This spending wave led to blindingly fast innovations in computerization and automation that we now see in the forms of the internet, AI and robotics, which in turn is devastating the job market and exponentially reducing the demand for human labor. Since the global financial system has as its base the monetization of human labor, this wave of innovation is gutting the economic and monetary systems that have developed over centuries. This, in turn, has led to things like Bitcoin and Steemit, where intellectual property is becoming the basis for monetary value.

Meanwhile, the US government's deficit spending and borrowing from slush funds like SSS to pay for a showcase military designed to intimidate, not fight, has created an inventory of useless assets that produce nothing and do not get destroyed so that they can be replaced. This financial black hole, in turn, has led to US military adventurism and meddling (i.e. nation building), in order to blow off non-productive assets and justify creating new ones.

All of this brings us to the point where we started: the Millennials are naturally the Baby Bust generation just based on simple natural cycles, but their plight is exacerbated by crushing debt created by New Deal spending bubbles and diminishing job outlook due to the innovation bubble. They are further saddled with a currency that is eating its own financial underpinnings to stay alive.

The point is that everything is related to everything else. When governments interfere in the natural biological cycles that we commonly call economics, it does nothing productive. It may appear to one or two generations that a miracle has occurred, but in the long run, the policies and actions have created much larger and more devastating consequences down the line.

The Millennials happen to be of an age where they are at the nexus of more than 100 years of social engineering. Furthermore, it is the Progressives who have caused it. FDR and his ilk were unabashed Progressives, and in their haste to create feel-good programs that were sold as miracle cures for natural cycles, they have created a bleak future that is only now coming to be appreciated.

Ironically, the Millennials have bought into the Progressive agenda of miracle economics, even as they are victims of it.

It would be amusing if it weren't so painful.

The chances of reversing this trend are slim to nil. Any further government intervention now would only create more problems down the line for future generations to deal with. There is only one way out, and that is to excise the gangrenous flesh before it consumes the entire organism. There are no painless remedies. Hiding the symptoms of popular, but harmful disease only allows it to progress until the organism can no longer support itself...and I use the word "progress" advisedly, for it is Progressive policies that are killing the mass organism by hiding the disease behind happy words and soothing platitudes.

It is no mistake that Millennials have been taught that history is a conspiracy of evil white men, so they will not look too closely and see the threads that tie their own suffering to the Progressive agenda of the past century.

History is a lesson from which we learn, not something we reinterpret to make us feel better about the present. Whether you like history or not, it holds the clues to our current situation and hints at the solutions needed to remedy our ills going forward. Blaming history is unproductive. We must examine it with a clear head and open eyes to understand why we are here and what choices we have for the future.