Can aANation Be Built?

Suddenly Government Is Thought To Be Efficacious.

By Steven Horwitz
Posted September 23, 2010
Courtesy Of "The Freeman"

In the wake of both the collapse of the Soviet empire and the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have seen a lively debate on the topic of nation-building.  In particular, many people who are ordinarily skeptical about the benevolent power of the U.S. government at home have come to believe it can accomplish what they see as the noble task of nation-building in areas of the world that have been plunged into some degree of chaos by political upheaval and/or war.

Although the phrase nation-building sounds much more constructive and well-intentioned than the destruction and death that has normally accompanied the use of American military power around the world, attempts to build nations are just as likely to fail.  What the nation-builders overlook is a distinction made by Ludwig von Mises almost 100 years ago:  A nation is not necessarily the same as “the State.”  In his much under-appreciated little book Nation, State, and Economy, Mises argued that “nations” are defined not by geography or by political institutions, but most fundamentally by language and other similar cultural institutions that provide a basis for “mutual understanding.”

Therefore the nation, Mises argues, cannot be understood as a static object that we can manipulate as we wish: “Nations and languages are not unchangeable categories but, rather, provisional results of a process in constant flux;  they change from day to day, and so we see before us a wealth of intermediate forms whose classification requires some pondering.”  Put in the language of F. A. Hayek, nations are spontaneous orders that emerge from the daily choices of people about the language they use and the other ways in which they participate in or withdraw from a variety of cultural forms.  Only the people themselves constitute a “nation” by their own individual choices.

And it is nations constituted this way that make the decision to create a State.  States imposed on nations by princes, Mises argues, are doomed to fail because they normally attempt to eliminate all forms of community that lie between the prince and the people.  If it doesn’t come from the State, it is to be dissolved.  In other words, imposed States dislike and destroy the delicate, complex, and evolved connections that comprise a true nation.

By engaging in nation-building, governments take on a task that is no different in principle from the attempt to plan an economy domestically.  Once we understand that true nations are the unintended consequence of decentralized cultural processes involving the millions of choices of millions of people, the absurdity of trying to build a nation as if it were a child’s toy or even a skyscraper becomes clear.  Once we start to muck around in processes that are complex and whose relevant causal connections are beyond our ability to understand, we are certain to produce unintended and undesirable consequences precisely because we act from the hubris of the planner.

Knowledge Problem

As the economist Chris Coyne points out in his wonderful book, After War, postwar reconstruction (which is one form nation-building has taken) suffers from the same sort of knowledge problem as domestic economic planning.  If Mises and Hayek were right about the impossibility of socialist planning because economies are simply too complex to be surveyed by one mind, then nation-building is equally impossible since the social connections that form shared language and culture are no less daunting in their complexity.  Just as the intervention of economic planners inevitably produces results that run counter to their stated goals, leading them to intervene again to solve those problems, so will nation-building create resistance and new forms of culture and community that frustrate the designs of the builders.  The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan are clear evidence for this argument.

Perhaps because of the accidental alliances created by the Cold War, many have forgotten that the classical-liberal tradition is anti-imperialist and cosmopolitan.  Classical liberals have always believed that the best way to encourage national development is through trade in goods, services, and ideas, and not through intervention in the name of helping others.  Nations and cultures cannot be built by even the best-intentioned outsiders – those things emerge and evolve just like the markets that are part of them.  It is but another “fatal conceit” to think that nations were ever built by anyone or that we can today rebuild them.

The spontaneous orders of language and culture that are the defining characteristics of nationhood work best when left to evolve in the directions their citizens take them.  The best we can do to support the emergence of “good” nations is to encourage unhampered social evolution within those nations and to refrain from thinking we can build something better.

15 Signs American Society Is Coming Apart At The Seams

Are we nearing a tipping point as rapacious elites push a heavily armed populace too far?

By David DeGraw,
Amped Status.
Posted November 21, 2009.
Courtesy Of Alter Net

Editor's note: The following is an edited excerpt from the Amped Status report, "The Critical Unraveling of U.S. Society."

The economic elite have launched an attack on the U.S. public and society is unraveling at an increased rate. You may have missed it in the mainstream news media, but statistical societal indicators are reading red across the board. Let’s look at the top 15 statistics that prove we are under attack.

1) The inequality of wealth in the United States is soaring to an unprecedented level. The U.S. already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the middle class and poor much harder than the top 1 percent, the gap between the top 1 percent and the remaining 99 percent of the U.S. population has grown to a record high.

2) As the stock market went over the 10,000 mark and just surged to a 13-month high, the three big banks that took taxpayer money and benefited the most from the government bailout have just set a new global economic record by issuing $30 billion in annual bonuses this year, “up 60 percent from last year.” Bloomberg reported: “Goldman Sachs, the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, had a record profit in the first nine months of this year and set aside $16.7 billion for compensation expenses.” Goldman Sachs is on pace for the best year in the firm’s history, and it is also benefiting by only paying 1 percent in taxes.

3) The profits of the economic elite are “now underwritten by taxpayers with $23.7 trillion worth of national wealth."

As the looting is occurring at the top, the U.S. middle class is just beginning to collapse.

4) Workers between the ages of 55 to 60, who have worked for 20 to 29 years, have lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. During the same time period, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans went up by $30 billion, bringing their total combined wealth to $1.57 trillion.

5) Home foreclosure filings "hit a record high in the third quarter (of 2009)… They were the worst three months of all time… 937,840 homes received a foreclosure letter" in this three-month period; “3.4 million homes are expected to enter foreclosure by year’s end, with some experts estimating that next year will be even worse.”

President Obama has enacted a $75 billion taxpayer funded program that has been a spectacular failure in stemming the foreclosure crisis and has proven to be another massive waste of billions of taxpayer dollars.

6) 25 million people are unemployed or underemployed.

This means we have 25 million people who urgently need to increase their income, and they’re quickly running out of options. The unemployment rate is expected to rise further and remain high for several years. “The president’s chief economic adviser warned that the nation’s unemployment rate could stay ‘unacceptably high’ for years to come."

The New York Times reports: "Americans now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever in the current recession, and employment prospects are still getting worse. Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking….” As this ratio continues to grow, it will lead to a further reduction in wages -- average worker wages have seen a sharp decline over the past year.

Economist Nouriel Roubini, a man who accurately predicted our current crisis, just reported on unemployment stating: “Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening…. So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just are not coming back.”

7) As the few elite banks thrive, there have been 123 U.S. bank failures thus far this year. Recently, three banks that the government declared “healthy” and gave taxpayer money, have folded. The Wall Street Journal reports: “U.S. regulators have seized or threatened at least 27 banks that got capital infusions from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, including some lenders government officials knew were troubled when they awarded the money. The troubles put taxpayers at risk of losing as much as $5.1 billion invested in the banks since TARP was launched in October 2008.”

8) As bankruptcies surge across the board, 10 U.S. states are on the verge of bankruptcy, with several ready to declare a financial state of emergency. California, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin are all “barreling toward economic disaster, raising the likelihood of higher taxes, more government layoffs and deep cuts in services."

9) This is occurring at a time when the “federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that just ended was $1.4 trillion, nearly a trillion dollars greater than the year before." In total, "U.S. public debt topped $12 trillion for the first time in history… The public debt topped $10 trillion in September 2008. The debt is quickly approaching the statutory limit of $12.104 trillion, meaning Congress would have to raise the ceiling to prevent a shutdown of government operations."

Economist Dean Baker explains the risk of running such a large deficit: "The debt limit must be increased at regular intervals in order to allow the government to function normally because the government is currently operating at a deficit. If the debt limit is not passed, then at some point the government will not be able to pay workers and contractors. It won’t be able to send out Social Security checks or make payments for Medicaid and unemployment insurance to state governments. And, it will not be able to make interest payments on government bonds, effectively defaulting on the national debt."

Needless to say, all of this will make life drastically more difficult for American citizens. As the middle class continues on the path of economic decline, the number of citizens living in poverty has already hit an all-time high.

10) Although the government’s official figure tries to low-ball the number, 47.4 million U.S. citizens live in poverty, and the U.S. poverty rate is the highest in the industrialized world.

Predictably, homelessness is rising at an increased rate as well. "The U.S. government does not tally the numbers but interested organizations say that more than 3 million people were homeless at some point over the past year…. The fastest growing segment of the homeless population is families with children.”

Children have been hit especially hard by the economic crisis:

11) * 50 percent of U.S. children, one out of every two children, will need to use food stamps to eat.

One out of every two children in the United States of America will need to use a food stamp… to EAT!

If you didn’t think starvation was a serious threat in the U.S., just read this new Washington Post report: “The nation’s economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people — including almost one child in four — struggled last year to get enough to eat… Several independent advocates and policy experts on hunger said that they had been bracing for the latest report to show deepening shortages, but that they were nevertheless astonished by how much the problem has worsened. 'This is unthinkable. It’s like we are living in a Third World country,' said Vicki Escarra, president of Feeding America."

The United States Department of Agriculture released these findings in a study that was completed in December 2008, which means these numbers don’t take into account the millions more unemployed throughout 2009. The numbers of people living in poverty and struggling to eat has seen a significant increase since then.

This a national tragedy. But it gets much worse.

12) In 2008, according to the Census Bureau, the number of U.S. citizens without health care grew to a record 46.3 million. “The new figures, however, understate the severity of the economic downturn because a large portion of the nation’s job losses and unemployment rate increases occurred after the Census survey data was collected in March as part of the annual Current Population Survey."

13) Lack of health insurance has caused 45,000 preventable U.S. citizen deaths in the past year. The American Journal of Medicine recently released a study that stated, “Nearly two out of three bankruptcies stem from medical bills, and even people with health insurance face financial disaster if they experience a serious illness.”

A Johns Hopkins Children’s Center study reported that 17,000 children have died due to lack of health care. You can also add in a recent report that revealed that 2,266 U.S. veterans have died in 2008 due to lack of insurance.

The 50 million now uninsured and the 45,000 preventable deaths per year statistics are expected to drastically rise over the next few years. As the Senate continues to strip meaningful amendments from a health care bill that wouldn’t even take effect until 2013, it has become clear that, despite the media hype, the health care bill is going to fall far short of meaningful reform and continue to rig the game in favor of large insurance company profits at the expense of the U.S. population. With the highest cost healthcare in the world, current trends will continue and much needed change is not on the horizon.

Never before has the United States had so many citizens with so little means, little to no income and heavy debt. Debt and costs of living have now shackled U.S. citizens just as they have shackled people throughout the world. The economic hit men have now hit the United States as well and millions of American citizens are now effectively sentenced to a slow death.

Economic Imperial blowback has hit the mainland.

And the clock is ticking louder by the day…

And here’s two more facts for you:

14) The gun and ammunition manufacturing industry in the United States has over 200 companies producing billions of dollars in annual revenues. This huge manufacturing base cannot fulfill demand quickly enough. The demand for guns and ammunition has hit a record high and the gun industry cannot produce enough bullets to keep up with orders.

Americans are arming themselves to the teeth!

15) In the past year, 100 new armed militia groups have been formed, as militia members have doubled in numbers. Federal authorities are gravely concerned about the “uptick in militia activities." One federal authority recently said, “All it’s lacking is a spark. I think it’s only a matter of time before you see threats and violence."

So let’s break down these numbers.

You have a population of 50 million people who are in desperate need of money, they most likely have no health insurance and can’t afford to get health care or help of any kind. Part of this population probably also has loved ones who can’t get life sustaining medical treatments, or loved ones who have already died due to lack of costly medical treatment. The clock is ticking loud for these people and they are running out of options fast, and time delayed is time closer to death.

While the richest 1 percent have never had it so good, a significant percentage of the U.S. population now has firsthand experience in this. Millions upon millions of Americans are poor, broke, struggling, starving, desperate… and armed.

We are sitting on a powder keg!

We are now witnessing the critical unraveling of U.S. society.

You can read the rest of the report here.

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U.S. Will Splinter Into Separate States

Igor Panarin warns that the U.S. will splinter into separate states controlled by foreign powers in 2010. Conservative activists think he may be on to something.

By Nick Baumann,
Source: Mother Jones Online
Posted November 9, 2009
Courtesy Of Alter Net

For more than a decade Dr. Igor Panarin, a Russian academic, has been predicting that sometime around 2010 the United States will collapse, splintering into separate states, some of them controlled by foreign powers. Outside of Russia, no one's put much stock in his crackpot and stereotype-based theories -- until now, that is. Who are the newest members of the Igor Panarin fan club? Tea partiers who’ve rallied against the Obama administration's policies and blasted the president for pushing a "socialist" agenda. And he's especially big among tea party activists in Texas, who have hosted Panarin and promoted his work.

In Russia, Panarin, who hosts a weekly radio show, is considered a mainstream expert on the United States. Like Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Panarin used to work for the KGB. He clearly has the support of the Kremlin, for he teaches at* the school that trains Russia's diplomats. And since the election of Barack Obama last November, Panarin has found a new audience in America among far right activists, many of whom believe Obama is destroying the country.

According to Panarin, the US will collapse within the next year because of its economic problems and deep racial and ethnic divisions. He changes the details from year to year, but here's the general gist: the South, "with its Hispanics," Panarin says, will break away from the union and merge or ally with Mexico. The rest of America will split into several other countries, some becoming the protectorates of other major powers. Alaska, naturally, will go to Russia. The Chinese will take over the West Coast. (Why? Panarin points out that most Californians' laptops are made in China and that the West has a "growing Chinese population.") "Five of the poorer central states, with their large Native American populations, and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong," will compose two other countries, he explained in Moscow last year. The Northeast, he says, will fall under the sway of "global capital and finance" based in London -- an idea, no doubt, that appeals to those tea partiers who worry about nefarious international forces exerting influence over the US economy.

Since the Drudge Report first highlighted his theories last November, several conservative websites and blogs have featured him. In September, Chuck Baldwin, a perennial far-right presidential candidate on the Constitution Party ticket, observed that Panarin's predictions of "some sort of break up of the United States in the near future" was a "very realistic probability." (Columnist and MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan linked to Baldwin's article on Panarin.) Joseph Farah, the founder of the arch-conservative website WorldNetDaily, which is famous for promoting "birther" allegations questioning Obama's citizenship,wrote in December that he wasn't "buying into Panarin's entire prediction" but that "there's something to it." More than half of the nearly 3,000 WND readers who responded to a poll attached to Farah's piece agreed that "the US is on course to break up soon, and another 18 percent said they thought the United States wouldn't break up, but would 'continue to lose sovereignty to the UN and other global entities.'"

This week Panarin made a trip to the United States. Tea party activists were waiting. On Monday night, the Houston Tea Party Patriots sponsored a speech by Panarin at a local Hilton. The event was titled "Global Crisis: Can the United States Remain United?" Panarin's hosts, according to a flier promoting the event, want to "make sure" Panarin's scenario "never happens." But they weren't sure it wouldn't come to pass. In a blog post promoting the event, these tea party activists noted that Panarin's prediction has been dismissed as a "radical impossibility. But is it?"

Texas was an appropriate place for Panarin to visit. He has said that he views Republican Gov. Rick Perry's talk of secession, Chuck Norris' offer to run for president of Texas, and the country's political battles over immigration as evidence for his thesis. And it certainly doesn't hurt Panarin's appeal to the far right that he is deeply critical of President Obama, whom he has compared to Mikhail Gorbachev. Obama, he says, "likes to talk but hasn’t really managed to do anything." Panarin also talks about America's "moral" collapse -- a theme popular among social conservatives.

After his lecture in Texas, Panarin traveled to Washington, DC, on Tuesday to debate his America-is-doomed theory at the city's Russian Cultural Center. He gave his usual spiel -- that the US is on the verge of breakup -- without producing much in the way of evidence or argument. In the audience were a group of conservative activists who dominated the question-and-answer period. One of them, Bob Hoy, a tea party organizer from Northern Virginia, echoed Panarin's prediction of racial strife, but differed with the Russian on the timeline for America's impending disintegration. He thought it would be a matter of decades, not months. Hoy said that by 2065, "100 years after Ted Kennedy changed the immigration laws," America would be no more, due to an invasion of immigrants. Hoy warned that America, "founded by Europeans," was under siege. "No one wants to live in an integrated neighborhood," he added, arguing that white people flee "black" areas as soon as they can.

When Panarin polled the audience on whether they agreed with his theory, about 10 of the 50 or so people present raised their hands. With the tea partiers embracing Panarin, he can rest assured that if he falls out of favor in Russia, he'll have a receptive audience in America -- that is, if America still exists.