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Wednesday, July 08, 2009

PREDICTION - SOCIETY TO BE DESTROYED BY GOVERNMENT PARASITES BY 2012.

Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, is renowned for his accuracy in predicting future world and economic events, which will send a chill down your spine considering what he told Fox News this week. Or so it says. Now on the one hand just because he says it doesn't mean it is the case. His site lists a lot of things he is said to have predicted correctly - The "Collapse of '09", "Panic of '08", Tax Revolts, Economic 9/11, Dollar Down, Gold to Soar, Cyberworld TV, Real Estate Fizz, Alternative Energy Biz to Boom, Recession 2007, US to Lose Iraq War (one month before war began), Go for Gold - Beginning of gold bull market, 2001 Recession, A Dot-Com correction by the second quarter of 2000 - which is a pretty reasonable record though since it is advertising we don't know when he guessed wrong. On the 3rd hand he is making a living selling forecasts to industry so he looks like the best guesser around.

Here is his forecast for America & by implication even moreso for other western economies that have been hollowing out their real economy for years & covering it by seeing people get rich through owning their own house ie us.

by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.

“We’re going to see the end of the retail Christmas….we’re going to see a fundamental shift take place….putting food on the table is going to be more important that putting gifts under the Christmas tree,” said Celente, adding that the situation would be “worse than the great depression”.

“America’s going to go through a transition the likes of which no one is prepared for,” said Celente, noting that people’s refusal to acknowledge that America was even in a recession highlights how big a problem denial is in being ready for the true scale of the crisis

&

“There will be a revolution in this country,” he said. “It’s not going to come yet, but it’s going to come down the line and we’re going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen.”

“The first thing to do is organize with tax revolts. That’s going to be the big one because people can’t afford to pay more school tax, property tax, any kind of tax. You’re going to start seeing those kinds of protests start to develop.”

“It’s going to be very bleak. Very sad. And there is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of which we have never seen before. Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we’re going to see many more.”

“We’re going to start seeing huge areas of vacant real estate and squatters living in them as well. It’s going to be a picture the likes of which Americans are not going to be used to. It’s going to come as a shock and with it, there’s going to be a lot of crime. And the crime is going to be a lot worse than it was before because in the last 1929 Depression, people’s minds weren’t wrecked on all these modern drugs – over-the-counter drugs, or crystal meth or whatever it might be. So, you have a huge underclass of very desperate people with their minds chemically blown beyond anybody’s comprehension.”


Good news is that I don't agree with him about food getting that expensive, at least not in the US. For technological states food is not that difficult - it could be easier if the Luddites were to allow us to use GM plants but we do know how to make a lot of it. Indeed I think we are probably getting to the technological level where you can be an undeveloped country without that much hardship as long as you don't want to drive, or fly, or keep warm, & are healthy & only want to watch TV.

Bad news is that I can go with the rest of it. We have destroyed most of our industrial capacity on the theory that China & India would be prepared to do the actual work forever. We have a government which regulates half the economy out of existence & spends half of what is left. Here is an article on the nonsensical regulation government has to introduce to provide makework for those on the payroll. That we have survived so much parasitism so long shows how productive our modern society can be. And how well we could be doing without it. Right now why would anybody set up a productive business under such parasitism when he could go to India or China? But if nobody does then Celente's forecasts will be optimistic.

In Scotland instead of government parasitism taking 75% it spends 60% of GNP, & we are more heavily regulated too, at least 60% which leaves 16% for us. Most of the remainder will be destroyed by Scotland's CO2 bansturbators as their cutting of CO2 by 425 over the next few years destroys half our current economy. What we have is a society built as a reverse pyramid where the productive base is equal to only 16% of the country. here is a reason why Pharaohs didn't build their pyramids that way up.

This is what our Ministry of Defence is preparing for. When the people come for the parasites with a rope I do not think the MoD should expect the army to protect them.

Yet we could fix the economy almost instantly - just fire the parasites, cut government's take to 20% & its regulatory cost to 5% & 3/4s rather than under 1/4 would be left for people to spend themselves. Technology is expanding so rapidly (Moore's law improves computers 50% annually) that any semi-competently run country could have a growth rate comparable to China & India's 10% & indeed the semi-competently run ones do.

Here is Celente's trends for 2009 which is indeed socially pessimistic but also technologically optimistic.

PS Hat tip to Jerry Pournelle's site, which i cannot praise to highly, for the original link here.

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Comments:
Indeed I think we are probably getting to the technological level where you can be an undeveloped country without that much hardship as long as you don't want to drive, or fly, or keep warm, & are healthy & only want to watch TV.

You comment about keeping warm brings up something I hadn't thought of in a long while. Heating a house during the winter in the northern half of the US takes more energy than cooling a house in the southern half during the summer. During the Second World War POW camps were built in the southern half of the country in order to conserve heating fuel.

However, even if the US economy were to contract 70% we would still be able to heat the houses in the northern half with our abundant coal supplies, some of which can be mined without advanced equipment. The only real trouble would be to allow the average person to make use of their legitimate skills to make at least some living, and to allow prices for most capital items like houses to contract to levels consistent with current economic activity.

Really, the biggest disasters require the participation of the State, both to happen and to be magnified.
 
If the state were not taking 50% of GNP for itself (less in the USA but it returns less in health care) the legitimate living would be easier. If it were not destroying 50% in pointless regulation it would be very much easier.
 
There will come a point when people realise the government is the problem. When that happens, the recovery begins
 
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