The Breaking Point: Profit from the Coming Money Cataclysm

THE BREAKING POINT

Profit from the Coming Money Cataclysm

JAMES DALE DAVIDSON

Humanix Books

The Breaking Point

Copyright © 2017 by Humanix Books

All rights reserved

Humanix Books, P.O. Box 20989, West Palm Beach, FL 33416, USA

www.humanixbooks.com | info@humanixbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any other information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

Interior Design: Scribe Inc.

Humanix Books is a division of Humanix Publishing, LLC. Its trademark, consisting of the words Humanix is registered in the Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

Disclaimer: The information presented in this book is meant to be used for general resource purposes only; it is not intended as specific financial advice for any individual and should not substitute financial advice from a finance professional.

ISBN: 978-1-63006-060-2 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-63006-061-9 (E-book)

To my indispensable Sabine, who proves again, as e.e. cummings wrote, that unless you love someone, nothing else makes sense

Contents

Foreword by Bill Bonner

One: Will the United States Go the Way of the Soviet Union?

Two: The Megapolitics of a Changing World

Three: The Political Economy of Plunder

Four: Would Marx Be a Socialist Today?

Five: Squandering the Spoils of a Good War

Six: Financial Cycles and the Dollar in the Twilight of Hegemony

Seven: The Great Degeneration

Eight: FATCA, Dumb, and Happy

Nine: Beyond Kondratiev

Ten: Ecofascism and the Natural Causes of Climate Disruptions

Eleven: Deconstructing the Greatest Lie Ever Told

Twelve: Can Food Crises Trigger Collapse?

Thirteen: The Deep State

Fourteen: The Domino Effect

Fifteen: The Big Fat Lie

Sixteen: The Hidden BTU Content of Fiat Money

Seventeen: The Great Slowdown

Eighteen: The Declining State

Nineteen: Black Swans on the Horizon

Twenty: The Idiot Principle of Deflation, and Why I Am One of the Idiots Who Sees It Happening

Twenty-One: The Next Stage of Capitalist Development

Twenty-Two: Pirenne’s Pendulum and the Return of the Organic Economy

Acknowledgments

Index

Foreword

By Bill Bonner

Something went wrong on the way to tomorrow. From the turn of the century in 1900 through the end of Cold War in 1989 to the next turn of the century in 2000, almost every view of the future looked as though it had been photoshopped. Imperfections were few.

In 1900, a survey was done. What do you see coming? asked the pollsters.

All those questions forecast better times ahead. Machines were just making their debut, but already people saw their potential. You can see some of that optimism on display in the Paris metro today. In the Montparnasse station is an illustration from the 1800s of what the artist imagined for the next century. It is a fantastic vision of flying vehicles, elevated sidewalks, and incredible mechanical devices.

But when asked what lay ahead, the most remarkable opinion, at least from our point of view, was that government would decline. Almost everyone thought so. Why would that happen? We wouldn’t need so much government, they said. People will all be rich. Wealthy people may engage in fraud and finagling, but they don’t wait in dark allies to bop people over the head and steal their wallets. And they don’t need government pensions or government health care either.

Nor do they attack their neighbors. Norman Angell wrote a best-selling book, The Great Illusion, in which he explained why. Wealth is no longer based on land, he argued. Instead, it depends on factories, finance, commerce, and delicate relationships between suppliers, manufacturers, and consumers. As capitalism makes people better off, he said, they won’t want to do anything to interfere with it. If you disrupt them, you only make yourself poorer, he pointed out.

One of his most important readers was Viscount Escher of England’s War Committee. He told listeners that new economic factors clearly prove the inanity of aggressive wars.

Capitalism flourishes in times of peace, sound money, respect for property rights, and free trade. One of the most important components of the wealth of the late nineteenth century was international commerce. It was clear that everyone benefitted from globalized trade. Who would want to upset that apple cart?

War must soon be a thing of the past, said Escher.

But in August 1914, the cart fell over anyway. The Great War began five years after Angell’s book hit the best-seller lists. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme alone—one hundred years ago—there were more than 70,000 casualties. And when Americans arrived in 1917, the average soldier arriving at the front lines had a life expectancy of only twenty-one days. By the time of the Armistice on the eleventh day of the eleventh month at 11 a.m. of 1918, the war had killed 17 million people, wounded another 20 million, and knocked off the major ruling families of Europe—the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs, and the Romanoffs (the Bourbons and Bonapartes were already gone from France).

Hic hoc. Stuff happens.

James Dale Davidson’s new book, The Breaking Point, is an attempt to explain why stuff happens the way it does. Using his theory of megapolitics, he also takes some guesses about what happens next.

After WWI came a thirty-year spell of trouble. In keeping with the metaphor of the Machine Age, the disintegration of prewar institutions broke the tie rods that connected civilized economies to their governments. Reparations imposed on Germany caused hyperinflation in Germany, while America enjoyed a Roaring ’20s as Europeans paid their debts—in gold—to US lenders. But that joyride came to an end in ’29 . . . and then the feds flooded the carburetor with disastrously maladroit efforts to get the motor started again, including the Smoot-Hawley Act, which restricted cross-border trade. The isms—fascism, communism, syndicalism, socialism, anarchism—offered solutions. Then finally, the brittle rubber of communism (aided by modern democratic capitalism) met the mean streets of fascism, in another huge bout of government-led violence—WWII.

By the end of this period, the West had had enough. Europe settled down with bourgeois governments of various social-democrat forms. America went back to business, with order books filled and its factories still intact. The isms held firm in the Soviet Union and moved to the Orient, with further wear and tear on the machinery of warfare in Korea—and later Vietnam.

Finally in 1979, Deng Tsaoping announced that while the ruling Communist Party would stay in control of China, the country would abandon its Marxist–Leninist–Maoist creed. China joined the world economy with its own version of state-guided capitalism. Then, ten years later, the Soviet Union gave up even more completely—rejecting both the Communist Party and communism itself.

This was the event hailed in a silly essay by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History? The battle was finally won, he suggested. It is the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government, he wrote. With the Cold War over, modern democratic capitalism would be perfected. And now US companies could hustle their products to 1.5 billion more consumers.

But the most obvious and immediate benefit America was to get a peace dividend, as billions of dollars could now be liberated from the defense budget and put to better use elsewhere.

Things were looking up. As China and the Soviet Union went, so went the rest of the world—with everyone trying to learn the latest buzz words from globalized business schools, setting up factories to make things for people who really couldn’t afford them, gambling on Third World debt, trading stocks of companies that used to belong to the government, and aiming to get their sons and daughters into Harvard so they would be first in line for a job at Goldman Sachs.

But wait. Things got even better when, in the late ’90s, it looked like the Information Age had freed us from the constraints of the Machine Age. Two things held back growth rates, or so it was said at the time: ignorance and resources. You needed educated scientists and trained engineers to design and build a railroad. You also needed material inputs—iron ore, copper tin, and most important, energy.

Education took time and money. And Harvard could only handle a few thousand people. Most people—especially those in Africa, Asia, and Oklahoma—had no easy access to the information they needed to get ahead.

The Internet changed that. You want to build a nuclear reactor? Google it! You want to know how Say’s Law works? Or Boyle’s Law? Or the Law of Unintended Consequences? It’s all there. With enough imagination, you can almost see an Okie in a trailer in Muskogee, studying metallurgy online. Then you can almost imagine him driving up to Koch Industries in Wichita with a plan for a new way to process tungsten. And if you drink enough and squint, you can almost bring into focus a whole world of people, studying, comparing, inventing, innovating—which leads, at the speed of an electron going home to a hard drive, to a whole, fabulous world of hyperprogress.

MIT has only 11,319 students. But with the Internet, millions of people all over the world now have access to more or less the same information. And there are even free universities that package learning, making it easy to study and follow along. Now there can be an almost unlimited number of scientists and engineers ready to put on their thinking caps to make a better world. Surely, we will see an explosion of new patents, new ideas, and new inventions.

As for resources, the lid had been taken off that pot too. In the new Information Age, you don’t need so much steel or so much energy. A few electrons are all it takes to become a billionaire. After all, how much rolled steel did Bill Gates make? How much dirt did Larry Ellison move?

The capital that really matters is intellectual capital, not physical resources. Or so they said. If you used your brain, you could actually reduce the need for energy and resources. Energy use declined in the developed economies as people used it more efficiently. So did the need for hard metals and heavy industries. The new economy was light, fast-moving, and infinitely enriching. There were no known limits on how fast this new economy could grow!

Those were the gassy ideas in the air in the late ’90s. They drove up the prices of dot-com companies to dizzy levels. And then, of course, the Nasdaq crashed.

And then, one by one, the illusions, scams and conceits of the late twentieth century—like pieces of bleak puzzle—came together:

No peace dividend—the military and its crony suppliers actually increased their budgets.

No end of history—that was all too obvious on September 11, 2001.

No hypergrowth, no great moderation, no great prosperity—all that came to an end September 15, 2008, when Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy.

And as far as producing real, measurable wealth—the Internet, too, was a dud.

And then, as the new century matured into a sullen teenager, the ground was littered with scales fallen from the eyes of millions of parents. The entire twenty-first century—from 2000 to 2016—was a failure. People hadn’t gotten richer at all. Instead, they had gotten poorer. Depending on how you measured it, the typical white man had lost as much as 40 percent of his real earnings since the century began.

People rubbed their eyes and looked harder; the picture came into sharper and more ghastly focus. The promise of material progress and political freedom had begun to break down many years before. In America, growth rates fell in every decade since the ’70s. Real wage growth slowed too—and even reversed. The government was more powerful, more intrusive, and more overbearing than ever and now able to borrow at the lowest rates in history. But so twisted had the financial system become that the least productive sector—the government—was the only one with easy access to capital.

There were signs of a deeper breakdown too. Soldiers returning from the Mideast were killing themselves in record numbers. The fellow in the trailer in Muskogee was likely to be a minimum-wage meth addict watching porn on the Internet rather than studying metallurgy. Debt had reached a record high—at 335 percent of GDP. Real peace seemed as remote as real prosperity.

And then, the Republican Party chose Donald Trump—the most unlikely standard bearer for a major political party in US history.

How these things came to be, and where they lead, is the subject of The Breaking Point.

The delight of the book is that it approaches these issues in an original and interesting way. Picketty (the rich get richer), Gordon (the important innovations are already behind us), and Tainter (it’s too complicated) all have theories about why the twenty-first century is such a disappointment. James Dale Davidson connects the dots, but more dots—and more unexpected dots—than perhaps anyone.

Chapter One

Will the United States Go the Way of the Soviet Union?

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

—John Steinbeck

The thesis of this book is that the United States is no longer a dynamic, free market economy but a stagnant, rigged economy all but certain to collapse. The American political economy has been perverted by decades of antimarket plunder into a consortium of crony capitalist rackets, propped up by trillions in fictitious capital—credit conjured out of thin air. The semblance of prosperity sporadically enjoyed in recent decades was simulated by spending from an empty pocket, funded by history’s greatest debt bubble. Simple math shows that the United States is headed for economic disaster. In the decade after 2007, nominal economic growth in the United States averaged 2.92 percent. Over that period, $60 trillion in public and private debt was added, bringing the total to about $200 trillion, or about 300 percent of GDP. If the average interest rate is 2 percent, then the 300 percent debt-to-GDP ratio means that in order to cover interest, the economy would need to grow at a nominal rate of 6 percent. In fact, average nominal GDP growth in the decade since 2007 now involves an annual shortfall of half a trillion dollars below the growth margin required to cover interest. An economy that depends for growth on ever-increasing amounts of debt that cannot even be serviced at the lowest interest rates in 5,000 years must inevitably reach the Breaking Point.

The Breaking Point is where the long run meets the present. It is the point where the car runs out of road—where systems that no longer pay their way exhaust their credit and go broke. The Breaking Point is a nonlinear departure on the road to nowhere. It occurs when collateral collapses, burying the public’s faith in fiat money and the institutions that create and regulate it.

The day will come when the debt can no longer be kited. Ever-diminishing returns from operating a system built for rapid growth at stall speed imply that the Breaking Point will come soon. Overly large and overly costly institutions will break down. Commerce will seize up. Malinvestments will be exposed and repriced on a gargantuan scale. Wealth will evaporate. Complex systems will be superseded by simpler, cheaper ways of doing things. And the discontents implied by change on that unexpected scale, manifested by the unexpected popularity of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, will mount to full-throated fury.

Of course, the jeopardy I explore here may seem unlikely to those inclined to believe official pronouncements. Donald Trump told you that it was all lies. But Donald also said that he could make America great again. Those two propositions may be too far apart to straddle the normal span of credibility. Any way you look at it, you are at a disadvantage in trying to deconstruct the fabric of lies that shrouds your view of the future. Judging from past experience, forecasts of discontinuities are seldom credible in advance.

Starting in the mid-1980s, the late Lord William Rees-Mogg and I risked our dignity (of which he had considerably more than I) on the crazy forecast that the Soviet Union was on the threshold of collapse.

Unhappily, there is less dignity at stake with this analysis. Lord Rees-Mogg died of throat cancer in 2012, so he cannot be held to account for my errant hunches, deductions, and grumblings about the looming terminal crisis that will bring the US imperium to the Breaking Point.

Megapolitics Revisited

How were Rees-Mogg and I able to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union when the experts in academia and the CIA missed it? Very simple. While they were focusing on the present through the lens of conventional thinking, we looked ahead and saw an unsustainable situation. The main factor informing our confidence in the brazen prediction that the Soviet Union would collapse was a theory of megapolitics. Megapolitics is an analysis of the boundary forces that set the rules for life’s games. Resorting to analyzing megapolitics represents a departure from the normal practice of projecting the future through a simpleminded linear projection of trends.

Most attempts at forward vision rely almost solely on extrapolation of trends. To see what I mean, try googling World population in 2100. Science News offers this factoid World population likely to surpass 11 billion in 2100. Will it? I consider that projection most unlikely, notwithstanding the fact that it is endorsed by the United Nations, the American Statistical Association, and hordes of population experts. You can better understand their approach courtesy of the website OurWorldInData.org. A post on World Population Growth makes clear that the only factors incorporated in the forecast of the growth of world population to 11 billion in 2100 are the data incorporated in existing trend lines: The rate of growth corresponds to the slope of the line tracing the total world population over time.

Lord Rees-Mogg was fond of saying, Trees don’t grow to the heavens. No one with a basic grasp of reality expects a tree that has grown fifty feet high to continue growing until it stretches fifty miles into the sky. We formulated megapolitics as a framework for understanding some of the basic factors that counteract and reverse apparently well-established trends. To help specify those factors, we turned to a lost 211-year-old treasure trove of investment secrets: An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations by William Playfair. Ironically, Playfair was the genius who invented the trend line, the pie chart, the bar graph, and the other familiar formats for the representation of statistical information. But Playfair did not stop there. He was a technological visionary and assistant to James Watt, inventor of the steam engine. Playfair understood that technology changes power relations and thereby changes societies. Playfair wrote:

The invention of gunpowder . . . changed the art of war, not only in its manner, but in its effect . . . While human force was the power by which men were annoyed, in cases of hostility, bodily strength laid the foundation for the greatness of individual men, as well as of whole nations. So long as this was the case, it was impossible for any nation to cultivate the arts of peace, (as at the present time.) without becoming much inferior in physical force to nations that preferred hunting and made war their study; or to such as preferred exercising the body, as rude nations do, to gratifying the appetites as practised in wealthy ones. To be wealthy and powerful was then impossible . . .

Those discoveries, then, by altering the physical powers of men, by changing their relations and their connections, as well as by opening new fields for commerce, and new channels for carrying it on, form a very distinct epoch in the history of wealth and power.¹

The theory of megapolitics, as developed here, is an attempt to identify and decipher the boundary forces that inform life’s games. Roughly speaking, there are three such games you must understand:

1. There is the economic game in which people attempt to prosper within the rules. By and large, this is the realm of the free market.

2. Above that is the political game in which individuals and groups attempt to prosper by changing the rules. This is the realm of the antimarket, dominated by corporatist crony capitalists who rent the power of government to pick your pocket.

3. And finally, we come to the largest game of them all, nonconstitutional politics. "The highest and biggest game of all is nonconstitutional . . . politics," as Jack Hirshliefer put it in Economic Behavior in Adversity. This biggest game of social interaction is subject only to the laws of nature. There are no property rights, and the ultimate arbiter is the physical force of individuals or the coalitions they can form. This is the realm of the pickpocket, warlords, the Mafia, terrorists, and other predators.

Far more than we tend to understand, the direction of social evolution, and the outcomes of life’s games, is determined by megapolitics and the shifts in these boundary forces that determine the costs and rewards of violence.

About The Laws of Nature

The famed Franco-Brazilian historian Fernand Braudel, who helped found the University of São Paulo, characterized the upper layer of the antimarket in The Wheels of Commerce as the zone where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates.² In our era, these predators are primarily active in the realm of constitutional politics, including the lobbyists, lawyers, and legislators who negotiate the advance sale of stolen goods appropriated through politics.

Even though the law of the jungle seems to generally favor the great predators, measured in terms of size, this need not necessarily be so. After many centuries in which the characteristics of technology supported the exercise of power at an ever-larger scale, culminating in the industrial nation-state—the biggest, most expensive government the world has ever seen—I suspect that we are now entering an era of the devolution of power. This will lead to an outcome that may now seem most unlikely: a new era of economic freedom.

How could this be? This book aims to explain that mystery. The answer may not be obvious, considering that the world has probably never been so unfree. But only the most oblivious could miss the mounting evidence that the status quo is faltering.

The Breaking Point Is Nearer than We Suppose

We used to amuse ourselves with the fantasy that we could postpone the day of reckoning by spending ever-larger sums of money out of an empty pocket. Of course, this required that we expunge even rudimentary principles of accounting from our consciousness. And it also necessitated that we ignore the prudential warnings from one of the few economists who could foresee long ago the inevitable crisis we now face in the Breaking Point. F. A. Hayek warned that all our efforts to postpone the inevitable crisis by a new inflationary push, may temporarily succeed and make the eventual breakdown even worse.³ That is wisdom that is too sublime for our time.

We can’t even come to grips with the fact that funny money entails double ledger bookkeeping. Not even digital credits conjured out of thin air are truly free.

While we have been settling in to enjoy quantitative easing to infinity, if need be, the unwelcome consequences have been piling up. As reported by Bloomberg in November of 2015, according to Michael Hartnett, Bank of America’s chief investment strategist, Zero rates and asset purchases of central banks have, thus far, proved much more favorable to Wall Street, capitalists, shadow banks, ‘unicorns,’ and so on than it has for Main Street, workers, savers, banks and the jobs market . . . For every job created in the US this decade, companies spent $296,000 buying back their stocks.⁴

We expected to encounter such tribulations only in the long run.

Feeling as we do, that the long run is far away, we may even feel a twinge of guilt for bequeathing a bankrupt world to our children and grandchildren. If so, we have been wildly optimistic. The long run—a.k.a., the Breaking Point—is much nearer than we thought. Evidence that the antiquated system no longer pays its way is there for all to see in the gaping budget deficits that are common to almost all advanced economies. In Europe, North America, and Japan, government revenues fall far short of paying for generous welfare provision, especially Social Security retirement pensions and medical entitlements. The inability of the mature nation-state to pay its way not only explains the prevalence of corporatist fiat money systems that grant banks the extravagant power to create money—much of which is devoted to financing the state’s yawning deficits—but also hints at bigger truths. The whole jerry-rigged system could implode at almost any time. Watch out below.

Given that the United States has been the hegemonic power in the world system, part of this analysis places the US decline in the context of previous hegemonic transitions.

It goes without saying that neither Lord Rees-Mogg, Peter Thiel, nor any other brave soul whose contributions I acknowledge share any responsibility for the views put forward in this book or any mistakes that may have crept in.

That said, if he were still living, I am confident that Lord Rees-Mogg would be in accord with the thesis of this book. He agreed that anything that can’t go on forever will come to an end. And he already suggested that the US imperium will indeed go the way of the late Soviet Union.

While we have a pretty good idea of what is coming, no one can be sure when it will happen.

The mysteries about timing are all the more acute because the conventions of citizenship discourage open discussion of the make-believe view that the modern nation-state will endure forever, as King Arthur’s Court could not.

A Political Economy of Illusions

You cannot depend on normal information channels to orient you as the Breaking Point approaches. The message of the mainstream media is that high stock prices trump swarms of other indicators that all is not well, such as declining median income and dwindling energy uptake and capacity utilization. Where income is concerned, the evidence is bleak. According to Frank Hollenbeck’s 2015 article Our Current Illusion of Prosperity, from the peak of the last expansion in 2007 through 2014, real wages declined 4.9 percent for workers with a high school education, fell 2.5 percent for workers with a college degree, and rose a pitiful 0.2 percent for workers with an advanced degree. Overall, real wages have flat-lined or declined for decades.⁵

A more recent calculation by the Pew Charitable Trust concluded that real median income fell by 13 percent from 2004 through 2014, while necessary expenditures for housing, food, and health care have soared by 14 percent over the same period, meaning that median net disposable income after expenses has plunged.⁶

The upside of falling wages is that it implies higher operating profits for companies. In some fields, like food and beverage, labor costs can account for 40 percent or more of revenues. So with wage bills falling, profits should have risen. And they did. But much of the hype in the stock market has been leveraged from the creation of trillions of fiat dollars out of thin air. Note that corporate revenue growth since 2009 is 30 percent, while earnings per share have surged by 250 percent due to massive share buybacks financed by cheap debt. In February 2015 alone, authorized share buybacks soared to a record $118.32 billion, as reported by Robert Wiedemer in The Aftershock Investor Report.⁷

Don’t believe official statistics that portray an accelerating rebound. They are a current version of what economist Peter Boettke dubbed the malpractice of economic measurement in Why Perestroika Failed, his study of Soviet economic collapse.⁸

Today, the personalities are different, and the alphabet is Latin rather than Cyrillic, but the dedication to fabricating a fake prosperity is the same. In spite of the fact that the total number of US business closures exceeded the total number of businesses being created during every year of Barack Obama’s presidency, you are told that the economy is recovering. There is supposed to be a robust recovery in real GDP under way. Don’t believe it. Forget the headline GDP reports. You are far better advised to gauge the strength of the economy, or lack thereof, on the basis of reported nominal GDP growth. That series is not distorted by the government’s phony deflator calculations. On a nominal basis, GDP has flat-lined since 2010. Or worse.

Consider that nominal GDP over the past three business cycles shows a strong secular trend toward slowing. During the recovery from the Savings and Loan Crisis (S&L Crisis) in the 1990s, nominal GDP grew at a 5.6 percent annual rate. After the dot-com bubble burst, nominal GDP grew at 5.3 percent during the recovery into the subprime bubble after 2001. After that bubble collapsed into the Great Recession of 2008–9, nominal GDP grew at a rate of 4 percent during the first three years of recovery after the bottom. Since Q2 of 2012, nominal GDP growth has been steadily decelerating. In looking at Q3 of 2015, we saw a sad 2.9 percent GDP growth over the prior year, further proving that the US economy was continuing to stall.

Of course, the rate of nominal growth is crucial to determining how heavily the deflationary burden of debt weighs on the economy. Servicing $62.1 trillion in credit market debt outstanding—an amount equal to about 350 percent of reported GDP—obviously grows more difficult the further the rate of nominal GDP growth sinks below the carry cost of debt.

Bureaucrats in the TsSU, the Central Statistical Agency of the Soviet Union, issued glowing economic reports portraying what was evidently fake prosperity right up until the Soviet state collapsed. They were reporting a comfortable 3 percent national income growth, higher than the reported average US real GDP growth of 2.37 percent since 2009. Meanwhile, however, dissident statistician G. I. Khanin, who disclosed that official statistics overstated the growth of Soviet national income from 1928 through 1985 by thirteenfold, saw a sharp compound decline in the Soviet economy beginning in the late ’80s. History has shown who was right.

Remember, as well, that fabricated growth and make believe well-being reported by Soviet statisticians seem to have hoaxed Western experts, as well as the mainstream news media. As late as May 1988, The RAND Corporation was reporting that the Soviet Union [had] transformed itself from an undeveloped economy into a modern industrial state with a GNP second only to that of the United States.⁹

More amazing, as late as 1989, Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Samuelson declared in the thirteenth edition of his textbook that the Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.¹⁰ Shows how little they knew.

It also hints at the common ground that corporatist, welfare state capitalism shared with the state capitalist (Lenin’s term) system known popularly as Communism. Both systems were varieties of crony capitalism in different guises. Both involved the hoarding of antimarket privileges created at the expense of the general public. Both were all about rewarding the insiders, a.k.a. the nomenklatura. This similarity was veiled by the very different political theater in Washington and Moscow. But appearances aside, both systems shared common roots in what Sir John Hicks called the modern phase of fixed industrial capitalism.¹¹ The more monopolistic and brittle of the two—the Soviet state capitalist/Communist system—collapsed first.

Remember that by his own account, Lenin aspired to a utopia organized on the lines of a state capitalist monopoly. He declared his ambition to organize the whole national economy on the lines of the postal service and said that the technicians, foreman, bookkeepers, as well as all officials, shall receive salaries no higher than ‘a workman’s wage,’ all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat—this is our immediate aim.¹²

Boettke well described the Soviet system: Throughout its history the defining characteristic of the mature model of Soviet-style socialism was political and economic monopoly. The vast system of interlocked monopolies, and the nomenklatura system, worked to provide perquisites to those in positions of power and controlled access to these positions. The Soviet system created a loyal caste of bureaucrats who benefited directly from maintaining the system.¹³ But while Western economists were celebrating the imaginary economic success of the Soviet Union, promises of future abundance rang hollow to the Russian masses. They saw that the Soviet economy was imploding.

By the final days of the Soviet Union, in the words of economic historian Mark Harrison, the scale of the downturn in the Soviet economy had already substantially exceeded that of Western market economies in the slump of 1929–1932, but with the difference that there was no prospect of recovery.¹⁴ Today, the bureaucrats who report on US economic performance are just as enthusiastic about their fake statistics as were their Soviet counterparts.

The danger of economic lies and exaggerations, as illustrated by the Soviet collapse, is that they blanked out the true picture.¹⁵ A realistic understanding of the challenges you face is a prerequisite for getting the better of the bureaucrats. You will be hard-pressed to make the necessary adjustments to prosper in a rapidly changing world if you are complacently swaddled in official lies.

Things Fall Apart

The age of big government is over, not just in the Soviet Union, but throughout the globe. The nation-state endures as a not-so-colorful, well-surveyed abstraction, but it has lost its vitality and is now a dysfunctional legacy institution trading on past glories. In the years since the collapse of the subprime bubble almost brought down the world financial system, it has been kept on life support with trillions of dollars created out of thin air by central banks and more trillions spent from an empty treasury by bankrupt central states.

Popularly known as kicking the can down the road, this game of extend and pretend has not resolved the fundamental structural problems. To the contrary, it has made them worse. The phony remedies to past crises only increase the amplitude of the terminal crisis to come that will eventually bring the tottering system to the Breaking Point.

From Pastels to Earth Tones

In this sense, it is appropriate that the latest edition of the National Geographic map of the world depicts nations in somber earth tones rather than the bright pastels I remember from the maps of my mid-twentieth-century childhood. Somalia appears as a flat stretch of ochre, bordering the Indian Ocean. Syria along the Mediterranean is the same color. Iraq and Yemen are represented to scale, more or less, in burnt umber; Argentina is a purplish gray, while Pakistan is brown; and Libya, Afghanistan, and Nigeria appear in an unlovely shade of green that I believe interior designers call olive drab. The colors offer no clue to distinguish failed and failing states from apparently more stable jurisdictions at the core that share similar tones and hues elsewhere on the map. But that doesn’t change the reality that the collapse of the nation-state that began on the periphery is working its way toward the center.

A group like ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Daesh, after its Arabic abbreviation [al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham]) is both a catalyst and consequence of the breakdown of nation-states, as the poet foresaw almost a century ago:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.¹⁶

William Butler Yeats was referring not to ISIS carrying out its pitiless atrocities under shadows of the indignant desert birds but to his intuition of a rough beast . . . slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born, which resonates with the headlines.

In February of 2015, Politifact.com presented reports indicating that ISIS and its supporters post as many as 200,000 social media messages online daily. Their hyperactive use of the Internet for propaganda pays off with astonishing success in recruitment from around the world. The BBC reports that as many as sixty British teenaged girls have flown to the Mideast to join ISIS as jihadi brides.

You are a witness to the spasms of a world system sputtering toward collapse. During major transitions in civilization, it is common that institutions of power that no longer suit the underlying circumstances of their time become dysfunctional. Equally, the leaders of a failing system tend to compound the challenges it faces by cleaving to outdated techniques for asserting power that tend to backfire and aggravate the vulnerability of the system. Just as the late medieval church could not turn back the assault on feudalism launched with gunpowder weapons by threats of excommunication, so air strikes and the big battalions will not stem the tide of devolution that is eroding big government everywhere.

This is evident in the fact that the US response to the unraveling of nation-states in the Middle East and Central Asia has been to launch a sequence of ill-conceived military interventions, including attempts at regime changes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. The United States also sought to shore up the government of Yemen. These costly wars have been a disaster. The United States quite literally spawned the Islamic State. As detailed in an August 2015 article in The Times of Israel, ISIS is led by more than one hundred of Saddam Hussein’s former officers, including ex-generals who have created structure and discipline among the jihadist group, developing what some call a proto-state. US intervention in Iraq clearly let the Islamic State genie out of the bottle.

Rather than stabilizing fraught situations, US interventions only seemed to accelerate the process of collapse, opening the way for the Islamic State to seize control of portions of Iraq, Syria, and Libya, while a resurgent Taliban made gains in Afghanistan, dominating territory on the outskirts of Kabul. And in Yemen, the US-backed government fell to Houthi rebels. Trillions of dollars and many thousands of lives later, chaos reigns supreme.

We live in an obsolete system, though of course obsolete systems can endure long after their use by dates. The global financial crisis of 2008 highlighted the dysfunction of systemic leadership carried over from the Modern Age—the common nickname for the recent period of history from the end of the fifteenth century through the late twentieth—when the returns to violence were high and rising.

The Start of the Modern Age

The start of the modern era was announced with a bang in 1494, when Charles VIII, king of France, invaded Italy with new high-compression bronze siege cannons. (Although usually given second billing, the effectiveness of French artillery was enhanced by the handiwork of brothers Jean and Gaspard Bureau, who supplanted the large rocks previously fired by cannons, with iron cannon balls cast to fit snuggly in the barrel of the cannons.)

The first impact of the high-compression siege cannon firing iron cannon balls was felt at the Tuscan fortress of Fivizzano, which was quickly reduced to gravel and its garrison ruthlessly slaughtered.¹⁷ But the signal demonstration of the effectiveness of the new weapons was the destruction of the Neapolitan fortress of Monte San Giovanni, whose eleventh-century walls fell after eight hours of bombardment, having previously withstood a siege of seven years.¹⁸ This dramatically highlighted the dominance of the big battalions. Military historian Max Boot put it this way:

The cost of both a state-of-the-art fortress and the forces needed to besiege it properly was steep. When Charles VIII’s successor, King Louis XII of France, asked what would be necessary carryout his planned invasion of Milan in 1499, one of his advisers replied bluntly, money, more money, and again more money. The petty lords of Europe did not have enough money. To compete in the gunpowder age required the resources of a super-Lord, a king, ruling over a large kingdom providing substantial revenues. Thus the dictates of the battlefield—or the siege site—gave a powerful impetus to the development of sovereign states.

The End of the Modern Age

That impetus continued to play out for five centuries before petering out in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Lord Rees-Mogg and I took the view that the Modern Age ended with the death of the Soviet Union in 1991. That epic collapse showed that the big battalions now mattered less than they had over the previous five centuries.

But just as every eleventh-century tower did not collapse when Charles VIII opened fire on Monte San Giovanni, so many of the obsolete institutions of the Modern Age still stand. Everywhere on the globe, economies are cluttered with a legacy of dysfunction from the dying nation-state.

Not the least of these legacy issues is the heritage of a debt supercycle dating to 1945, when British hegemony came to an end and the systemic leadership of the United States was inaugurated. The thoroughgoing financialization of the economy by big banks has had far-reaching effects. As former US assistant secretary of the treasury Paul Craig Roberts put it, big banks are converting the entirety of the economic surplus to paying interest on debt.¹⁹

The legacy of metastasizing debt is only a part of the overhang from the modern era of nation-states that is destined to be unwound. It is also part of the institutional legacy of fiat money issued through a banking system regulated by central banks. The full story is not yet told, but as the Telegraph of London put it, How might the present explosion in debt end? The only thing that can be said with certainty is ‘badly.’²⁰

The Unfree Economy Costs You $125,000 per Year

A related legacy of the obsolete nation-state system is an unfree economy lumbered with innumerable crony capitalist distortions. As a result, many sectors are characterized by declining marginal returns—another way of saying that accelerating inefficiency plagues the economy.

Recent research concludes that the proliferation of regulation has deleterious effects on economic activity. An estimated growth rate reduction of about 2 percent per annum implies a massive compound loss of annual income due to crony capitalism. A 2013 study published in the Journal of Economic Growth concludes that increased regulation since 1949 had cost the economy $37 billion in lost annual GDP as of 2011, implying that the average American (man, woman, or child) would have an additional $125,000 to spend per year, if not for the fluorescence of crony capitalist rip-offs.²¹

It would come as a surprise to most victims of this grand larceny to learn that they have been robbed of more than they ever had. In this respect, a faltering education system that leaves many incapable of understanding counterfactuals may temporarily help shore up stability. But ignorance is rarely bliss.

A Legacy of Debt and Dysfunction

To the extent that regulation has dampened growth, the greatest cost of this compound slowdown has undoubtedly been visited on those at the bottom of the income ladder. Evidence of how far the bottom 50 percent of America’s wealth distribution has fallen comes from Credit Suisse in its 2014 Global Wealth Databook. As interpreted by Mike Krieger, the data show that the bottom half of America’s wealth distribution ranks dead last among forty major economies, with 1.3 percent of national wealth. Russia, at 1.9 percent, was the only other major economy of those forty that came close.²²

But the comparison is even more dismal than Krieger lets on. When the comparison is extended to the sixth decile, the United States ties with Russia at dead last for the smallest percentage of wealth owned by the bottom 60 percent of the population. In both countries, the bottom 60 percent owns only 3.4 percent of the total holdings of wealth according to Credit Suisse. The United States ranks below other countries with famously unequal holdings of wealth; Indonesia (5.6 percent), Brazil (5.8 percent), and Mexico (8.8 percent) all rank considerably above the United States in percentage terms. In other words, a clear majority of Americans are riding the down escalator. Not only is the annual wage of 80 percent of the workforce not growing, but it is in fact collapsing to the lowest levels since the Lehman crisis.

This has troubling implications for your future. For one thing, it says that the majority of Americans appear to be unable to compete economically and create wealth in the twenty-first century. The same Credit Suisse wealth assessment that showed the bottom 60 percent of Americans trailing the world in their share of total wealth, however, also showed that the United States led the world in the number of millionaires and in total wealth creation. According to Credit Suisse, average wealth in the United States in 2014 was 19 percent above the 2006 precrisis peak and 50 percent above the 2008 postcrisis low. Since 2008, $31.5 trillion has been added to US household wealth, which is equivalent to almost two years’ GDP.

If you are one of the 14.2 million Americans who are millionaires, not to mention the 62,800 Americans whose net worth exceeds $50 million, the political arithmetic implied by Obama’s impoverishment of the middle class gives cause for alarm. While the greatest reason for the wealth and income shortfall for the middle class may well be the accumulation since the middle of the last century of crony capitalist rip-offs, the fact that so many people now seem to find it impossible to compete and recover lost wealth in the face of rigged markets is bad news. It implies that they may well tire of losing a game they apparently can’t win.

While one could easily overestimate the influence that voters exert over the direction of policy in Washington, it could also be a mistake to discount their role altogether. There is a high likelihood that disgruntled voters will fail to distinguish between the ill-gotten gains of corporatist crony capitalists who use the political process to pick your pocket and the laudable success of entrepreneurs who create wealth in the free market. If market forces amplify income dispersion in the years to come, there will be a greater risk of this confusion intensifying.

As I explore in the coming chapters, the continued necessity of work does not necessarily imply superior incomes for the masses. Characteristic technologies of the Information Age do not presage a surge in demand for persons of modest skill. Because the marginal costs of digital goods are vanishingly small, capacity constraints on their sale and distribution are immaterial. This means that one competitor, in principle, could fill orders from millions of customers with few or no employees. This amplifies the winner-take-all character of the economy, rewarding the most talented 1 percent while leaving those in the lower deciles of talent scrambling for jobs as baristas.

The Education Promise Broken

At the same time, the more distributed character of the information economy undermines the value of credentials, which were so