America Not in Decline

[PanzerJaeger]

Good thread, and lots of good articles. I guess it depends on how one defines 'decline'. As most of the world embraces some form of free market capitalism, GDP size will be increasingly correlated with population size. Even with her significant legal, regulatory, and technological advantages, America's ~400 million people cannot hope to support an economy the size of the one China's 1.3 billion people can. Feudalism, colonialism, internal strife, outside aggressors, and finally communism artificially held China (and India on many of those counts) back. Falling behind large-population nations on global rankings of the biggest this and the most that is definitely relative and not particularly important.

However, is America being held back, or indeed declining, in real terms? I think Sasaki's first article makes a strong case for that argument. America is clinging to a model built for a different era while other nations are building new, innovative, and more efficient models that correspond more closely to the 21st century. Our private economy is desperately (and in many cases successfully) trying to adapt to to the realities of the emerging global marketplace under the onerous burden of a governmental system stuck in the Great Society.

I really liked this from the article:

But today the words liberal and progressive have been hijacked and turned into their opposites: A “liberal” today is somebody who defends the 20th-century blue social model; a “progressive” is now somebody who thinks history has gone wrong and that we must restore the Iron Triangle of yesteryear to make things better. Most of what passes for liberal and progressive politics these days is a conservative reaction against economic and social changes the Left doesn’t like. The people who call themselves liberal in the United States today are fighting rearguard actions to save old policies and established institutions that once served noble purposes but that now need fundamental reform (and in some cases abolition), lest they thwart the very purposes for which they were created.

I have thought the same for a long time but have not seen it written so succinctly.

At the same time, I think a lot of those hoping to return to the gold standard must acknowledge the following.

We cannot realistically solve our problems by trying to return to the 3.0 liberalism of the 19th century because the American economy of that era depended on conditions we cannot reproduce today. Though some may think it desirable, we cannot return to a largely agrarian economy. Nor can we replicate the industrial system of the 19th century, with its extremely high tariffs against foreign goods and a completely laissez-faire national attitude toward immigration. Trying to recreate the American economy of a century ago would lead to massive dislocations, depressions and quite likely wars around the world, not to mention thoroughly wrecking the American economy and bankrupting many of our banks and biggest corporations.