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View Full Version : Doug Casey Prediction "Nation-state is a dead man walking"




Jeros
04-04-2010, 02:17 AM
This has got to be among my favorite predictions.


That said, only an idiot fails to recognize that in an advanced technological economy an individual can have an immense, disproportionate, effect if he wants to do damage. It's not like in pre-industrial days, when a single person was limited to perhaps setting a fire, or maybe stabbing someone. Today, an individual terrorist can alter the direction of society. And there are hundreds of millions of candidates for that role.

In my view, the trend towards terrorism as the next evolution of warfare is about as certain as they come. It's not just the U.S.; all the big nation-states are on the ragged edge of bankruptcy. Their huge bureaucracies, oppressive tax systems, complicated regulatory regimes, subsidies, bailouts, fiat currencies, and welfare programs are – every one of them – near collapse. They were confidence schemes. It's not just standing armies, but the nation-state itself is a dead man walking at this point.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/casey/casey44.1.html

nbruno322
04-04-2010, 03:32 AM
Doug Casey is great, truly fantastic investment insight and worldview. I would highly recommend his publications, some of which are free. Lots of great stuff on his website, check it out:

http://www.caseyresearch.com/


Also, he and Ron Paul debated a bunch of Neocon clowns at Freedom Fest 2007, here is part 1, good stuff.


YouTube - FreedomFest 2007 - Ron Paul & Doug Casey Vs Neocons (Part 1/7) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY2qw_MM_Ag)

ctiger2
04-04-2010, 09:06 AM
YouTube - Is Limited Government an Oxymoron? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpmqy9tC4uI)

BuddyRey
04-04-2010, 02:31 PM
Doug Casey is great, truly fantastic investment insight and worldview. I would highly recommend his publications, some of which are free. Lots of great stuff on his website, check it out:

http://www.caseyresearch.com/


Also, he and Ron Paul debated a bunch of Neocon clowns at Freedom Fest 2007, here is part 1, good stuff.


YouTube - FreedomFest 2007 - Ron Paul & Doug Casey Vs Neocons (Part 1/7) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY2qw_MM_Ag)

That was a great debate! I want to learn more about this Doug Casey guy.

Cowlesy
04-04-2010, 02:33 PM
Doug's right.

The only thing is, while we all think the tax system is oppressive, my feeling is it could be far, far worse than it is currently.

Anti Federalist
04-04-2010, 03:04 PM
Doug's right.

The only thing is, while we all think the tax system is oppressive, my feeling is it could be far, far worse than it is currently.

The VAT which will touted as a "fair tax" or "sales tax" is next.

It will be coupled with a national sales ID card that will record every transaction.

It will be much more intrusive than the income tax.

phill4paul
04-04-2010, 03:08 PM
The VAT which will touted as a "fair tax" or "sales tax" is next.

It will be coupled with a national sales ID card that will record every transaction.

It will be much more intrusive than the income tax.

Quite and it will be levied not as an alternative to income tax but as an addition.

Jeros
04-04-2010, 09:51 PM
Doug's right.

The only thing is, while we all think the tax system is oppressive, my feeling is it could be far, far worse than it is currently.

The tax system doesn't seem oppressive yet. Manufacturing efficiency and technology has advanced to a point where the markets can support a massive government and still provide an agreeable quality of life for most people. The worlds monetary system has been transferring wealth to Americans for decades, allowing the size of government to grow even further beyond what our economy can support while ensuring a severely diminished future quality of life for those that remain under the authority of the US government.

The "yet" refers to the point when the size of government is too large to be supported by the markets and the foreign loans, or when the loans just disappear. (Which may be repetitive)

In our case, spending will lead to oppressive taxation. The taxation will not necessarily be more than it is now. It may be less in real and/or nominal terms, but incomes will be so low that it will be oppressive without actually being more.

I do consider the tax system oppressive though. Americans are just too stupid to realize that government operates through force and violence. They are content with their slavery.

Is slavery okay if accompanied by comfort? What if comfort was replaced with apathy? I suppose it is better than some alternatives.

Dunedain
04-05-2010, 12:32 PM
When the Soviet Union collapsed, it created multiple nation-states each defined by ethnic borders lines.

The same will happen in all western nations after their collapse...as Pat B explains:



The Wars of Tribe and Faith
By Patrick J. Buchanan

When the Soviet Union disintegrated, most Americans likely had never heard of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan.

Yet the ethnonationalism of these Asian peoples, boiling to the surface after centuries of tsarist and communist repression, helped tear apart one of the great empires of history.

There swiftly followed the collapse of Yugoslavia.

Yet, if one knew nothing of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires or the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, one would likely have been surprised by the sudden emergence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo on the map of Europe.

What the splintering of the Soviet Union and of a Yugoslavia whose baptismal certificate dated to the Paris peace conference of 1919 revealed was the accuracy of Arthur Schlesinger’s insight in his 1991 Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society:

“Nationalism remains after two centuries the most vital political emotion in the world — far more vital than social ideologies such a communism or fascism or even democracy. … Within nation-states, nationalism takes the form of ethnicity or tribalism.”

Ethnic ties, Schlesinger wrote, might prove more powerful and historically important than the forces of globalism and democratism, which then seemed ascendant. He only neglected to mention religious faith as often a “far more vital” emotion than ideology.

And though the Iraq elections have been hailed as a triumph of democracy, they would seem to prove him right.

Kurds voted for Kurds, Shia for Shia, Sunni for Sunni on a slate led by Ayad Allawi, a secular Shia who campaigned on a unity ticket.

The election results resemble a national census.

In the struggle between Allawi and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to put together a government, both are courting the Kurds, whose near-term goal is Kirkuk, control of which would mean control of 40 percent of Iraq’s oil reserves. If the Kurds, who have been forcing their way into Kirkuk and pushing Arabs out, can annex the city, they will have the economic base of a Kurdistan nation, the dream of a people whose kinfolk are spread across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

The Kurds are using democratic means for ethnonational ends.

Maliki’s strength is in the Shia south and the capital, Baghdad, that has been slowly cleansed of Sunni.

Among Allawi’s weaknesses is that the Shia majority may not support as Iraq’s prime minister a Shia secularist whose strength comes from a Sunni minority that was the bulwark of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein.

Among the Shia are leaders who spent the Iran-Iraq war in exile in Iran, and whose ties to the Iranian Shia seem stronger than any ties to their Sunni countrymen.

Hence, as we indulge in self-congratulation for having brought democracy to Iraq, Iraqis seem to be using the process to advance ethnonational and sectarian ends that are the antithesis of U.S. democracy. We see democracy as an end in itself. Many in that part of the world see it as a means of establishing their ascendancy and hegemony over other religious and ethnic minorities.

In 2005, George W. Bush, then promoting global democracy as the answer to all of mankind’s ills and an essential precondition for any permanent security for the United States, demanded free elections in Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine. The winners: the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas. A perplexed Bush refused to accept the results or recognize and talk to the winners.

Before the invasion, most Americans were probably unaware of the tribal and sectarian divisions in Iraq that may yet produce a new Saddam to keep that country from coming apart in sectarian and civil war.

And how many Americans were aware of the ethnic divisions in Afghanistan, among Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and Pashtun, before we invaded? A program is underway to bring more Pashtun into the army and police, lest the Pashtun in the south feel invaded and occupied by alien tribes.

Globalization is no longer on the march, but on the defensive. Economic nationalism is rising. Across the Third World, we see an upsurge of ethnonationalism and fundamentalism, especially among the Islamic peoples. From Nigeria to Sudan to Mindanao, Muslims battle Christians, as Christians are persecuted in Egypt, Iraq and Pakistan.

In India and Thailand, Muslims battle Hindu and Buddhists. In the Northern Caucasus, they fight Russians.

Ethnonationalism, that relentless drive of peoples to secede and dwell apart, to establish their own nation-state, where their faith is predominant, their language spoken, their heroes and history revered, and they rule to the exclusion of all others, is rampant.

In China, Tibetans fight assimilation and the mass migration of Han Chinese into what was their country, as do the Uighurs in the west who dream of an East Turkestan breaking away and taking its place among the nations of the world.

In speaking of the rising tribalism abroad, Schlesinger added, “The ethnic upsurge in America, far from being unique, partakes of the global fever.”

Indeed, separatism and secessionism seem to be in the air.

bobbyw24
04-05-2010, 12:38 PM
Yep-the Globalists' dream is to destroy the nation-state

Pericles
04-05-2010, 12:44 PM
When the Soviet Union collapsed, it created multiple nation-states each defined by ethnic borders lines.

The same will happen in all western nations after their collapse...as Pat B explains:

This - people tend to want to hang with others they think are "like them".

wizardwatson
04-05-2010, 12:50 PM
My favorite part:


L: You don't think America can win the War on Terror?

Doug: [Sighs deeply] No. Not only is that impossible, the very idea is meaningless. Terrorism is not an enemy – it's a tactic. You can't have a war on terrorism any more than you can have a war on artillery barrages, cavalry charges – or a war on war, for that matter. The first step in winning a conflict is to identify the actual enemy. And the fools in DC can't even do that.

But before we look at the future, it's worth noting that terrorism has long been a favored tool of those in power, going all the way back to ancient times.

And accompanying supportive insight from a dead social philosopher.



To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny. -Simone Weil

Terrorism is that notion.