In “Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren”, Keynes predicted that living standards would rise between 4 and 8 times between 1930 and 2030. In addition, he expected by the terminal date, a 15 hour work-week could become the norm. As a cultural consequence, people would devote more of their time to arts, leisure, literature and raising their children.

What was missing in that rubric - at least most obviously - is 1) cultural changes which disfavor having children (or having many children), primarily because the perceived status of those children is based on significant investment in their education and training for the job market, 2) the nature of the leisure, which involves mostly today a post-literate society inundated with short-form video and excess screen time in place of what were traditionally third spaces (church, social clubs, reading groups or bowling teams), and 3) that drastic increases in government as a portion of GDP (from around 15% in many places in Keynes time to more than 50% in many developed countries today) would reduce overall productivity in such a manner that, while incomes remain higher, costs of most goods and services balloon and hence repress the tendency of workers to reproduce, pursue meaningful leisure, and ultimately avert the reduction in work hours that Keynes envisioned (because they want to remain employed, since employment is seen as still scarce).

According to current economic statistics (usually among the most bald-faced lies known to humankind), GDP per capita globally has grown at a near constant rate since consolidated statistics were first generated in 1960. According to the chart below from FRED, it was $3,600 per individual in 1960 (in 2010 USD) and had risen to $12,310 per individual as of 2025.

In the context of official statistics, this is a hair under the 4x that Keynes proposed over a 100-year timespan with 35 years remaining (30 to get to 1960, and an additional 5 to get from 2025 to 2030). Additionally, it equates to just under 2% annual real growth in global GDP per capita.

There is another measure of whether the constant 2010 USD is actually a good representation of the standard of living and dollar value that exists today compared to the past. Certain goods in the United States were more plentiful in the past - people seemed to eat more meat and dairy - while housing was generally more durable as it was built and consumer appliances lasted longer after their purchase date. Hedonic adjustments were introduced to CPI in 1998 (with a long history of number-fudging both before and after), hence while the nominal GDP per capita globally in 1960 was $452 and $761 in 1969, a Shadow Stats calculation (favorite alternative to the CPI, though it gets a little outlandish at times) would show that 1969 figure as being worth over $46,000 in 2022.

For those that want to play: https://www.halfhill.com/inflation_js.html

Nobody would believe this applies truthfully to global GDP and inflation today of course - much of the world’s population still lived in makeshift shelters and burned biomass for heat in 1969, and while many people still do today, the global population has greatly expanded around that relative “poverty” of experience - with the share of global energy usage as biomass consumption dropping from near 22% in 1960 to just over 6% today.

So, what is one to make of this outstanding progress, contrasted by a feeling of lack in Western economies? The first explanation would be that things were so good for so long in the post-war period, individual priorities became misaligned. In affluent societies, loyalties often devolve: instead of being focused on the strength of community and interpersonal bonds, individuals become more preoccupied with their cars, their houses, their status, keeping up with the Jones’s, or what they don’t have while others do. Screentime hasn’t helped this either - anyone who chooses to participate can find themselves bombarded with images of wealth, opulence and prosperity from the “haves” (or those claiming to be) and begin to feel inadequate, resentful, less-than or have-not as a result.

Gate-kept media imagery of the past was often a useful way for “power structures” (not conspiratorial, just coincidental) to induce some feeling of relative comfort. In the Soviet Union, lines for basic commodities (like toilet paper) showed that people were more able to spend time to line up for consumer goods than they were able to spend working. This is as much a scarcity of goods as a surplus of time, but in the West this was perceived as out-and-out scarcity. In the United States, grocery stores are full of goods and often empty of people except for peak shopping hours (much to the chagrin of Boris Yeltsin). This is a consequence of a surplus of productive capital relative to a scarcity of labor of those sufficiently capable to use it. In France today, people riot, as has often been the case since the 13th century, mostly because they have more time than money or goods, and they also use a lot of TikTok and Instagram, which can further increase the self-perceived have-not propensity.

As people have fewer children and global population plateaus, GDP per capita will likely only increase, but people will seem to feel less wealthy. Why is that? Financialization and debt? The overhang of too many years of schooling and education in lieu of being able to start a family? The lack of healthcare, housing and old-age care that makes even young people feel that they are competing against a ticking clock, indulging themselves in endless self-care and $20 avocado toast (perhaps we can say $25 avocado toast by now)?

The real reason, in the Austrian perspective at least, is that all these various regimes - high tax and benefits with reduced employment hours, or vice-versa and other variations - are essentially variations in the “Factors of production” which govern society. In order to have a clear division of labor, wages must be higher in some areas rather than others in order to attract skilled workers to those roles. If taxes are too high, that functions as a mild discouragement to those roles, but additionally, if services found in the market (particularly healthcare and education) are substituted by the government, the combination of bureaucratic path dependency - the everlonging need to expand - as well as the tendency of bureaucrats to shirk or overspecialize where they can, along with the economic limiters that come with invasive regulation, all combine to reduce the overall productivity and effectiveness of public services when compared to the private sectors.

In this case, many public services could be substituted with vouchers and quasi-public schemes or mandates - this is the case in the Dutch healthcare system, one of the most efficient in the world - and can be attested to with the rise of charter schools in the United States. Perhaps it is not reliable for individual consumers to understand what constitutes good healthcare or education, but the reduction of overhead will at least increase the efficiency of those services where good services are available.

Taking the example of France for instance - a country replete with social services and socialized costs, with a GDP per capita of $52,000 USD and government spending at 53 or 54% of GDP - what is to stop it from reducing overall spending by 5 or 10%, maintain 15 or 18% for provision of basic services and the military, and devote as much as 34% of GDP that remains to social transfers, vouchers, and redistributive spending instead of bureaucratic delivery of services? This amounts to nearly $18,000 USD per individual - including children and the elderly - while the average pension in France is approximately $1540 Euros per month - while a single direct universal GDP benefit would approximate $1300 USD per month.

It is not the fact of welfare states, but the fact of their inefficiency and their substitution of otherwise efficient markets, which is holding back productivity, increasing costs and artificially maintaining otherwise high working hours in the West, and additionally creating secondary costs when it comes to childcare, housing, education and reduced propensity to reproduce. People who work less can live farther away from work, devote more time to unpaid labor, and spend less on things they otherwise can do for themselves because they have the time to do them. Bureaucrats, on the other hand, create unnecessary labor - which they often fail to perform - because they must continue to justify their own position.

The substitution of current government services with direct payments would be both an equitable way to unwind overgrown welfare states and the bureaucracies that administer them, while also simplifying benefits, broadly balancing incomes, and increasing both growth and tax receipts - primarily through a mix of higher consumption for the most desirable services along with higher income tax receipts and sales taxes where applicable.

Government cannot fund itself today because it cannot create its own outlay to tax - this occurs only in the market economy, this was even the case in the Soviet Union, where increased taxes on alcohol ultimately drove the industry underground and bankrupted the state as a result. Voters need to be made to understand that fiscal balancing is not a matter of ideology, but simply a fact of life, and it can be done while maintaining existing benefits for seniors and without building another generation of civil servants trying to do from “first principles” what the private markets can ultimately do better - it is ultimately migrants, young workers, students, pensioners (where benefits are low) and the poor who pay most for policies like this, and resolving such discrepancies further serve as the best step to integrating them into society and economic activity in general.

President Trump’s contrived $5000 offer to adult Americans in exchange for a Congressional majority has been much maligned across the political spectrum as a manner of “buying votes”, but when it comes to the matter of the public purse, most parties in most advanced democracies have partaken in one side or the other of a sort of “balance of payments” ledger that exists between those who are net fiscal contributors to (or beneficiaries of) public finances.

This is a discourse that becomes particularly hostile in the matter of first generation immigrants - particularly in Europe - who require public support in excess of what they can contribute back during their own careers (notwithstanding the contributions of their progeny), or again in the hands of political consultants, most notably in the 2012 US Presidential campaign, which devolved partly along the lines of “Makers vs Takers” and “You Didn’t Build That”.

The sort of divisive language which, ironically, predates the Trump era, also illustrates the fundamental contradiction that exists between mainline pro-growth and pro-redistribution platforms, which in effect dominates the discourse in most Western democracies today, save France, where moderation of policy and a promise of deficit below 3% of GDP by Marine Le Pen - in contrast with student strikes at chronic education “underfunding” - arguably accelerated the bond sell off which France is attempting to now weather. Yes, in fact, if deficit at 3% of GDP is the far right position - 5 years from now, in a country that is expected to grow .4% this year - there may be in fact no hope for those holding the national debt of truly recouping there cost.

This is of course the long term consequence of voters who have voted themselves benefits and politicians who have been unwilling - or otherwise unable - to ignore the costs, primarily because of electoralism. Yes, in fact, if we could vote mummy and daddy out of office for not giving us ice cream after dinner, we probably would.

This is the primary reason that debt monetization is the only likely outcome for most Western Democracies, both in the United States and beyond. As demographic trends continue to age, increasing the dependency ratios of these countries, while immigration causes social distortions and is either insufficient or otherwise of insufficient quality (from a capital perspective) to grow productivity in such a manner that allows these nations to both pay down debt and still pay benefit schemes, debt will be repaid and benefits will be cut. No one, however, is of sufficient “stones” to propose these sorts of schemes to tax payers - without in the very least tax cuts in tow - in order to resolve this sticky issue.

The Great Financial Crisis of the 07-08 period has essentially come and gone with inflation higher, growth moderately higher, but public coffers threadbare. Even normally-chaste Germany’s debt-to-GDP will rise to nearly 80% by 2030, and it has been the lodestar of European fiscal rectitude. Outside the Eurozone, debt-to-GDP is 95% in the UK with growth forecast at 1.3%. Europe’s total population will peak in 2029, but old-age dependency will continue on high until 2100. At last estimate, the United States is only slightly better off: old-age dependency there will peak in 2060.

There are a few issues with this in that - without value judgement of course - when dependent classes can vote - those of limited land, labor or income - they are essentially stupid not to vote themselves benefits. It requires somewhat a state of high altruism to simply go with less because you know it’s “good for the nation”. As a corollary, productive tax-payers would have to practice a high-altruism of their own in order to willingly increase their tax burden, amidst a population that will otherwise always vote itself more benefits. What’s worse, as they vote themselves tax increases, they are essentially voting to diminish their own productivity, economic activity and propensity to spend.

What solutions remain? A tax on savings? Doesn’t sound very Protestant, does it. Mass disenfranchisement of the voter base? Well that would cause a revolution - we imagine. The incremental steps on this “road to serfdom” which we have travelled have led us here - in the midst of such dependency, people also stopped having kids, which was traditionally the only form of old-age security that existed. As such, there is basically no other solution but to monetize debt and make up a reconciliation of accounts based on the political intentions of the voting public. This is Stephanie Kelton for libertarians, as it were.

So, in returning to Donald Trump, what difference does it make when he promises voters a one-time payment of $5000 per adult, if the Democrats offer free healthcare, school debt forgiveness, investments in road, bridges and infrastructure, early childhood care, paid family leave - all benefits that add up to tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars per US adult over the course of their lifetimes, in a single election cycle, and they will only offer more benefits thereafter? Why, by comparison, Donald Trump begins to seem as stingy as the Duke of Marlborough.

The benefits offered by left-wing parties are meant to substitute high-cost goods and services that are otherwise obtained in private markets. The point of private markets should otherwise be to provide high enough incomes - along with sufficient vendor competition and price transparency - that these goods and services can be generally obtained without the need of government. If all men were angels we wouldn’t need government, but we know the latter scenario isn’t going to happen either, is it.

And so we will go on, debt raising, relative productivity falling, demographic decline continuing to the lowest possible decimal point for TFR, until some time past the year 2100, one single person remains to carry a productive economy, probably operating a leviathan AI data center domiciled somewhere near the center of the Earth. When Keynes wrote “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”, he perhaps took for mean what would otherwise be absent from the median.

Yesterday evening’s Quebec election produced transitional and polarizing results. the Parti Quebecois (PQ), titularly sovereignist, came back to power with a strong minority government but a limited mandate for social spending or interventionism, while the previously “Third Way” autonomist CAQ gave way to this more moderate version of the PQ or the Parti Conservateur du Quebec (PCQ), the latter primarily in the greater Quebec City Area.

Autonomism has been a “third way” principle between the Federalism of the provincial Liberal Party and the Nationalism of the PQ. Initially developed by a Liberal functionary (Jean Allaire) as a response to the collapse of Canada’s Meech Lake Accords, it advocated for greater devolution of powers to the provinces in place of the emphasis on a strong federal state, but was ultimately not pursued by a political party in Quebec until Allaire later founded (and Mario Dumont led) the ADQ (Action Democratique du Quebec). The ADQ was a bright star that shone shortly, peaking with 40 seats in 2007 before collapsing, but finding broad support in the various suburban belts of Quebec around Montreal, Quebec City and Trois Rivieres, as well as more developed portions of the Monteregie and other less remote regions along the Saint Lawrence River.

Historically, this is the corridor of industrial development for Quebec and/or Lower Canada, and to this day maintains an autonomist sensibility that could be identified in part with the Patriotes Rebellion of 1837-38, which in many ways was an uprising of a Canadian petty bourgeoisie against the more established moneyed interests of the British Empire centered in Montreal.

The British Empire is long gone, but the ressentiment remains. With the rise of sovereignty, Montreal lost its status as the economic center of Canada - with many corporate headquarters and other operations moving to Toronto in the late 60s through the early 1980s - while nearly 900,000 English-speaking and anglophone-adjacent Quebecers left Quebec between 1966 to 2021. This outmigration was primarily among those who could afford and were sufficiently interested to leave - mostly those who composed the similar petty bourgeois and private sector workers that could no longer tolerate the nationalist restrictions on the function and performing of business, as well as increases in the cost of living relative incomes elsewhere.

In this same period, Montreal’s tax base was hollowed out and its infrastructure suffered. To this day, there is no end in sight. The City of Montreal maintains $14.5b in direct debt - 151% of operating revenue - with debt servicing at $1.27b, $900m in annual infrastructure maintenance shortfalls and a $7b separate maintenance deficit for Montreal’s public transit system.

The total province of Quebec’s asset maintenance deficit now exceed $40b, 4 times more than where it was only 10 years ago, with Montreal’s much-maligned roadways as a primary driver. Most of Quebec’s new road and bridge development is already carried out by public-private partnerships, since despite pre-existing shortfalls, Quebec is already the highest-taxed jurisdiction in North America.

The current election is a wave response to the underlying fiscal irrectitude of the province, primarily driven by the Federalism v. Sovereignty debate which has distracted from the underlying economic malaise and demographic decline of the province. While the most remote regions vote PQ and the city of Montreal votes Liberal (with some, further left, Quebec Solidaire ridings), the outer suburbs in various areas - which once voted ADQ and CAQ - have now turned to the PCQ as a new potential saviour.

Most of the growing cities referenced above are in the upper Saint Lawrence region, and incidentally most of those areas turned to the PCQ this time around, as shown in the map below (with Montreal highlighted for relative position).

Incidentally, these are also areas where housing is more affordable, industrial policy more permissive, and actual economic growth also outpaces the provincial average.

For two previous elections (2018 and 2022), these provincial areas outside of the Island of Montreal primarily voted for the CAQ. While economic growth under the CAQ has been above the recent historical trend for Quebec, this period is in part what permitted the major infrastructural deficits on the island of Montreal (in addition to the consequences of the Charbonneau commission’s findings on corruption in Quebec’s construction industry). In the same period, Quebec has outpaced Ontario in economic growth, its nearest peer as a jurisdiction within Canada.

While the PCQ currently represents the substitution of CAQ largesse and economic interventionism with a more laissez-faire, anglophone-flirtatious commercial party, the broader implication is that Montreal is now also an economic pariah - a city left behind by decades of both generous social spending and nationalist, interventionist economic policy which drove away its most affluent, wealthy and productive demographic groups.

The leadership of the PCQ may understand this, with Eric Duhaime in his victory speech stating that anglophones should feel encouraged to “stop being a hostage to the Liberal party”. While most of Quebec’s choice reflects a desire to rein in the government’s desire to “pick winners and losers”, directionally there is a contradiction between a decline in the overall size of the provincial government while there remains a desire to increase investments in education and housing - where Quebec’s existing deficits are most flagrant outside transit infrastructure.

In the current balance of vote share - 28% for the PQ, 24% for the Liberals, nearly 21% for the PCQ and subsequently 12.4% and a remaining 13.3% for Quebec Solidaire and the CAQ respectively - a full 37% of the populace and 49 seats in the legislature voted for explicit promises of increased spending, and nearly 40 of those seats (and a large portion of that vote share) is on or adjacent to the Island of Montreal.

As of last measurement (in 2013), Montreal accounted for 49% of Quebec’s population, 53% of GDP and 50% of personal income taxes paid. In 2019, Montreal accounted for 56% of provincial GDP but only 49.6% share of GDP growth by 2023. This directional decline - which incidentally is not any different from the rest of the Quebec average in terms of overall productivity, despite being a major urban center - is walking headlong into a debt and deficit overhang which cannot be resolved without growth far in excess of what is observed in the rest of the province.

Without policy shifts, without cultural shifts, without a diminishment of the state and a fundamental reinvention of the traditional way business is done in Montreal, it is for all intents and purposes finished as a city within Quebec proper. Quebec has consistently awoken now for multiple election cycles to a pro-business, pro-growth agenda that would actually promise to resolve the fiscal contradictions brought on by the Quiet Revolution - while completely gutting the CAQ and showing a willingness to abandon parties that underperform expectations in this respect, and most of Montreal is still stuck in 1966 - for better or for worse, we can imagine the outcome that follows.

It has been understood for at least a few decades that some modest level of inflation is necessary to produce broad economic growth, because the velocity of money would otherwise decline if it only ever increased in value.

Through money creation at central banks and credit creation at private institutions, economies like those in China and Japan have gone from backward or dilapidated states into world powers with standards of living that are enviable to many.

While these strategies have also relied on currency devaluation to drive export-driven growth, their progress ultimately stagnates due to increasing cost of 1) inputs, 2) labor or 3) protectionism by their primary trading partners, usually to correct glaring trade imbalances.

In this context, however, the rate of money creation for more valuable currencies - and hence the currencies of trading partners with which export-driven economies hold a surplus - can ultimately diminish the availability or propensity of consumers in those economies to actually buy more goods from those export-driven economies. The primary point here in contemporary times is the comparison between China’s overall increase in money supply - which outstrips the United States - while it’s total share of the global economy has actually declined.

source: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/china/gdp_share/

The United States is living out a law-of-large-numbers version of the Triffin Dilemma in which it now must continue to monetize debt at an ever higher rate just to keep the global economy moving. Without increased inflationary policy - even if inflation is perceived as high - there simply isn’t enough make-work to justify existing paper valuations, supposed levels of wealth, or (indefinitely) consumer appetites.

Some observers have begun to use the term “Fedsury” to hybridize the twin missions of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury in steering the US (and effectively the global) economy. The Powell era saw a mistaken return to perceived sobriety which, while calming the exuberance which marked the post-financial-crisis era, ultimately misdiagnosed the fact that the US economy, the US standard of living and US corporate profits all depend on a continually expanding global economy which - without judicious taxes and redistributive policy - creates both domestic inequality and resentment towards debt.

Ultimately, Congress is unwilling or unable to abide judicious policy, even if the populace would generally adore it (look for instance at the sacrosanct nature of entitlements. Simultaneously, overnight markets cannot even support the Fed’s current minimalist attitude towards its balance sheet - even the Fed subtly acknowledges this - while Bessent’s twist operation is only meant to serve as a prelude to future debt monetization that is a foregone conclusion.

As a result, the Fed will need to pursue debt monetization simply to keep the global economy afloat and avoid recession in the United States, but the two instances in which the Fed has pursued this policy previously were both responses to specific crises - World War 2 and the “re-housing” of subprime mortgage loans. In the current frame, the Fed and other actors must accept that - similar to the concept of “sustainable” government fiscal deficits to helps increase long-term economic growth - the Fed must also enable “sustainable” debt monetization to maintain both liquidity in the financial markets and further growth in the developing world vis-a-vis the US as the center of the global financial system.

The current playbook being run by the “Fedsury” is only meant to make the Fed appear as the “monetizer of last resort”. In different contexts, both Warsh and Bessent may claim to be good Austrians - economically speaking, and at least in spirit - but to the extent that an industrial base is essential for a modern nation-state to survive and enforce the very contracts Austrians hold so dear - they must in fact begin to monetize the very thing which both parties have avoided since the 1980s: the industrial redevelopment of the United States.

This would not be, in a sense, for the consumer goods which Americans consume from overseas, but instead the primary materials and machine tools which could then - by benefit of the consumption such economic activity encourages - maintain the import of light-industrial goods from overseas while heavy industry maintains a center of mass in the United States. The implications of this may or may not be interesting, but could be explored at another time.

While this blog has maintained the the US does in fact benefit from reduced global oil flows given the United States’ position as a leading exporter, the US conflict with Iran is growing increasingly politically costly for the Trump administration and the US midterm elections are soon to rear their turgid faces.

In this context, Trump would benefit from an appropriate resolution to the conflict, but cannot afford embarrassment. His on-again, off-again strikes and “carrot and stick” negotiating style is increasingly emboldening the Iranian regime, while the pattern of TACO’ing on his worst threats (Trump Always Chickens Out) is growing increasingly costly with his base, who “want him to do something big”.

While the initial strikes came from a clear sense of asymmetric upside around decapitating, denuclearizing and de-militarizing (at least formally) the Iranian regime, the possibility of troops on the ground to “finish the job” would never have been politically feasible. Much as the regime is now emboldened and the country has experienced a “rally around the flag”, the US establishment can in fact achieve a game-breaking resolution out of this conflict: namely, if it is now legitimate for Iran to tax export through the Strait of Hormuz as a matter of compensation (or however it is rationalized), why should the United States not also engage in its own maritime entreaties across key passages, when it does in fact control the world’s most powerful Navy and has maintained a “world safe for commerce” for the past 80 years?

In this context of rationalizing what is ultimately the might makes right era of the mid-21st century, the United States has an opportunity to extract even more tax receipts from global commerce. With no foreseeable change to entitlement programs - at least until Baby Boomers have all moved on from Earth, which can still take another 20 or 30 years given modern medical technology - there is no feasible path forward for the US Federal System except to find receipts elsewhere.

Trump already attempted to furnish new receipts through direct and secondary tariffs, at one point expecting nearly $300 billion additionally per year. Despite legal setbacks and existing encumbering trade agreements, new assessments show that the US Federal Government can expect a net benefit of $1.2 trillion due to tariffs over the next decade, while the existing trade balanced has remained essentially unchanged, which would on one level imply that the market could absorb far more if there were otherwise more lenient legal circumstances - either from the courts or Congress.

This lends to a further nuance in the interaction between US global and domestic political priorities. Globally, the United States remains the center of the economic, political and financial system. US companies remain the largest and most powerful, drawing significant overseas investment, while limited market confidence has been conferred to China despite its consistent growth. Its currency is far less trustworthy than USD or Euro (saying something here) and it would never accept a strong currency to begin with because under no circumstances can it transition from an export-led growth model without fundamentally de-centering the CCP domestically.

This implied circumstance means that the US must continue to find revenues or monetizing debt, but monetizing debt has led to under-development domestically, inequality and political turmoil. Revenues can be found through taxes or state-capitalist investments (also an avenue of the US Sovereign Wealth Fund, where the government now holds stakes in more than 30 companies, though this roughly amounts to holdings under $20 billion). While in this circumstances, monetizing debt to facilitate trade deficits that lead to dollars which are ultimately recycled in US markets could make the US government quite rich on paper, it does not provide a solution to the underlying political tensions at home.

Cut to increasing revenues: what can the US actually due? Most Americans already perceive their tax burdens as quite too high. Most tax increases on the most affluent usually lead to more evasion and don’t necessarily drive increased revenues, as well as further discouraging domestic private investment (a set of problems that were addressed by the Kennedy Tax Cuts of the 1960s). Trump has left a mark of his style on the Republican Party for at least a generation, possibly two, but if Democrats were to take power, they would not only face a receipts problem, but they would arguably be under more pressure from “bond vigilantes” who can more often abide disorganized wars than they can the largesse of new social spending. While local socialists like Mamdani have implemented largely symbolic “pied-a-terre” taxes in order to undermine the position of the wealthy, they are hardly seeking to drive them out completely - they too are well aware of where America’s bread is buttered.

What follows is simple: Republicans are in need of revenues, and Democrats will be even more in need of revenues should they come to power. While most Americans believe tariffs have increased the cost of goods, it is not the primary source of Trump’s unpopularity. While inflation persists at a relatively modest hum, the impact of those tariffs have been mostly absorbed without much additional commentary. China must continue to supply its consumers, while a relatively strong domestic growth outlook means that wages can at least keep pace with the cost-of-living, which was not the case in the late stages of the Biden administration.

Any alteration to the current political mix achieved by the Trump administration would likely be a step backward for the US economy, while the US cannot credibly maintain increased foreign trade integration since the actions of Trump have essentially poisoned the well, undermining any possibility that the US will return in its adherence to the Washington Consensus. While left-economists have advocated increasing centralization of green investment and industrial policy as a means to maintain global growth, their lackluster history of picking winners and losers does not abide the simple fact that states must seek out security before they can seek prosperity. In this case, autarky in critical goods and industries is necessary before trade can be opened - much as the British Empire achieved a relatively advanced stage of industrial development before repealing Corn Laws in the mid-19th century, at which time is could press said manufacturing advantage on the world.

Essentially, the United States has created value for the world by maintaining global trade, but the populace does not feel that it extracts a concomitant amount of the value it has created. In this context, the US must reintroduce taxes on trade an order of magnitude larger than anything it has achieved from Trump’s initial tariffs, but it can only do so by finding rationale elsewhere in the international system.

Whether Trump realizes it or not, Iran has done that for him with the Strait of Hormuz. Where the United States can impose tariffs, export taxes and trade taxes - firstly on global seagoing passages in the Western Hemisphere, secondly increased tariffs on critical durable and industrial goods where it wants to maintain an advantage, and finally export taxes on energy and raw materials to Europe and Asia - could conceivably generate anywhere from $1 to $3 trillion in additional annual revenue depending on how aggressively global reaction plays out. One could imagine a couple hundred billion from energy, particularly as volumes stay high (Europe has committed to $250b in energy imports per year from the United States) and a few hundred billion between exports and trade passages (US has $2.1T in goods exports annually and 30% of nearly $14T in global trade crosses the North Atlantic Corridor alone, notwithstanding continued preference for the US in Southeast Asia ex. China) - and while export taxes would offer the most immediate reaction against growth, they are also the easiest tax to enforce (hence could be in smaller), and would go a long way to reducing prices domestically.

And while Trump may not take actions here, or may face too much resistance to pursue this entire set of actions, future administrations - of either party - will be forced to, because the overriding political constraints are simply too meaningful for any other policy choices to take precedence. This is, in fact, the easy way out - as painful as it may sound at first.

Over the long term, the new revenue generated will eventually decline - what you tax is ultimately what you discourage - but under this trade regime, the United States will also meaningful commit to its own reindustrialization and domestic redevelopment. Domestic receipts will rise in concert with increased economic growth, and much like when the US was the center of global exports, “Twin Deficits” can transition to some form of “Twin Surpluses”, which would have been conceivably possible in the 1960s save for the various instances of government largesse (Vietnam, Great Society, Landing on the Moon) at the time, mostly tied to maintaining the Global Empire which - in the modern day - both parties in Washington are mostly being forced to dismantle. In the truest of long-term states from there, some other version of a wage-price spiral could take this out, as was the case in the 1970s, but even as surpluses are realized (and a strong dollar remains relatively obvious), Washington will almost certainly find something else to spend all that money on.

In his 1969 pop-history “Civilisation”, Kenneth Clark described the experience of the 19th and 20th centuries as being defined by Heroic Materialism - essentially, the transformation of society around industrial development along with the increased expansion of equity and enfranchisement towards previously less powerful groups, primarily built on the back of the prosperity created, but also limited by waning seeds of doubt as to the decline of spiritual, intellectual and moral life. This malaise was typical of the late 1960s when Civilisation was first broadcast and prefigured the continued challenges of the 1970s in the West, while also expressing a desire to move on from purely material pursuits into a more broadly educated and equanimous society.

There are of course many means to both advocate and critique the sense of Heroic Materialism as it existed, both in that day and today, but less interesting is the outcome of the fundamental infrastructures for which the ground was laid in that time, specifically: new waves of globalization, instantaneous communication and increased presence of media in everyday life, and the rapidity of travel and trade that mingled different cultural influences to drive new attitudes and cultural transformations.

Consider, momentarily, the influence of Hip Hop as a genre of music, which began in streets and “ghettos” and is now a definitive genre everywhere from Africa to Scandanavia. While it can be brash and braggadocious, this is arguably the exact kind of cultural form that Clark would look back in retrospect, on a different era, as descriptive of the tendencies and preferences of the time - different only in form but not necessarily function to the mannerism of the pre-Renaissance era.

Drawing forward again closer to today, the prevalence and preference of digital streaming and short-form video has drawn the attention spans of individual viewers ever shorter and narrower. We can think of this as an admonition to the neglect of the intellectual spirit, but is this not also a democratization of the intellect through video essays and extensive threads laying out everything from the critical nuances of interpersonal relationships to broad-based corruption of the world’s most powerful leaders and politicians?

At a certain point, the development of a new mass culture - not one that is tied to radio and television, but to the smartphone and to the everyday interactions between groups of people - has broken down previous class distinctions and in their place substituted “affinity groups”. These “affinities” are defined by resistance to outside influence and the coalescing around critical “influencers” and “thought leaders” according to categories, whether it be health, wellness, nutrition, beauty, makeup, dating, relationships, engineering, design, politics or global affairs.

Our online culture, much as it is a panopticon, has something for everyone, and yet in this context the very discipline which Clark himself practiced - a deep and patient study of history, society, social, economic and material change - has fallen out of favor.

Why should this form of knowledge be devalued in a world of shorter and shorter attention spans? The answer should be as obvious as “the medium is the message”, but limited time and attention is as much a consequence of the instant gratification it gives you as it is the short-termism which is definitive of our culture overall. Whether it is corporate quarterly reporting or the need to make a buck short term, the desire for ever-increasing stock market gains while social institutions and pensions funds become effectively insolvent, or the limited capacity for individualism to know what they will be doing in 5, 10, 15 or 20 years because of the whipsaw of global trends, society in itself has become impatient because leadership, because those who control resources, also feel the same insecurity, because they also have no patience for it.

In this place, what is the appropriate solution? Will the coming of AI job replacement allow us to have an “AI dividend”, a minimum income based on unlimited wealth created by the advance of autonomous technology, one that will turn every ne’er-do-well and retail worker into a poet and philosopher king? Or how about the nationalization of resources, whether in response to energy prices or restrictions on critical minerals - could this create a sort of futuristic society that creates unlimited wealth through electrified mass transit, Mag-Lev trains and 3D-printed social housing, so that the masses may finally be free to study Kant and Wittgenstein and understand the primordial hollowness of the language games they play in their everyday life, reaching enlightenment shortly thereafter.

These are not purposefully absurd suppositions, but they are in fact informative of something Clark - perhaps seeking relevance - overlooked. Namely: the drive towards materialism ultimately coincides with the desire to achieve spiritual growth and divine providence. Surely in parts it can appear to undermine it, but if one is pursuing pleasure for its own sake, and one is continuously seeking outcomes which can only demand more of the senses, become more stimulating, excite the appetites for new experience, and in these contexts it is eventually only the intellectual, the composed “spiritual aristocrat”, who can remain - every other personality is simply washed out by their constant desire for more, until they finally have their fill and seek more in their inner life at last.

This is the kind of malaise which has so punished society today. While there is “grindset” and “hustle culture”, there is a total absence of emphasis on collaboration, on large social projects, of damning the torpedoes because that willingness to have desires and achieve great things - for one’s reach to exceed their grasp - is “gauche”, “hollow” and “spiritually misguided”. Much as the medieval peasant of old might never go 50 miles from the village of their birth, so too have so many recreated this limited scope - they’ve simply done so on a digital plantation, instead of a physical one.

Debt is more often suitably addressed on a relative basis rather than absolutes. It should be no surprise that as the Fed balance sheet increased to match COVID restrictions - the the US Federal Government channeled that monetization with direct transfers to households - inflation ran roughshod, even after supply constraints diminished.

Now, the Fed is in a state where it is having to curtail its asset drawdown simply to match its outstanding liabilities. How could this be possible? Isn’t China supposed to be surpassing the US as global imperator? Hasn’t America “practitioned” decades of waste, fraud and abuse - almost as explicit policy - while it’s inner cities decay and its hinterlands burn?

The reality is that the United States is still the center of the global financial system, and as the world economy continues to grow, the CCP is unwilling to let go of its position in that country and - concomitantly - the capital controls which otherwise permit it to remain the biggest fish in that pond, by keeping foreign capital at bay. Being that investments are highly contingent on policy in China, and Europe persists in desiring no investment at all, the US is still the only place for international dollars to find a stable capital market with steady reserves and an abundance of companies to be deployed in. While bond rates straggle higher, the US debt to GDP has actually shown signs of stabilizing for the first time since the 1990s, on the back of nothing in particular except that - despite Trump’s animosity to foreign trade - there is simply nowhere else for dollars to go.

In fact, on the margins, it may be in fact the relative deficit in trade to GDP which is beginning to stabilize the American fiscal situation - and create an environment where economic stimulus will actually increase growth while also ensuring that that growth (and spending, and taxes) are captured domestically, allowing the government to maintain the benefits of loose monetary policy without facing the downside of globalization. You could say that while Reagan won the Cold War, American workers lost the peace that followed.

The long term risk here is that American dollars wash out less and less overseas and hence find themselves less consistently “free floating” and seeking American debt and equities. Much as that party may be over, more dollars being recycled internal to the United States, and there is clearly less perceptible growth in manufacturing as a share of the US economy to compensate for foreign imports. Even as a base case for domestic production, it’s likely that automation is the primary mode, and this is simply to substitute as certain amount of fixed consumption, nothing variable, that would be too risky to capitalize an automated production facility to fulfill.

Global reserves of US currency are actually trending up slightly despite consistent year-over-year declines. In fact, Canada’s currency is as popular in reserve as China’s, despite China furnishing nearly 10 times the total exports of Canada globally.

source: https://data.imf.org/en/dashboards/cofer%20dashboard

In this context, global growth is seeing a relative flatlining after COVID-induced whiplash, and is unlikely to exceed the economic success of the mid-2000s, while US federal receipts are about as consistent as they have been since the Post-War period.

Global GDP growth: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDP_RPCH@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD

In order to lubricate the Global Economy and increase the United States’ already advantaged global position, the Fed must cut rates. It is simply essential in order to realize both domestic and global economic growth, as well as the tax receipts necessary for the US government to actually soften its total debt. The world has mostly accepted the new Trump Trade regime or is at least waiting it out, and the return on US assets continues to outperform the rest of the world, while China is altogether mum on the series of global conflicts that the United States seems bent on pushing to their limit. Rate decreases are unlikely to fail in an environment where dollars, otherwise constrained in their availability, become more desirable because they can be used to fuel the ever-increasing portfolio growth to which the rest of the globe is now increasingly becoming accustomed, and within which China is still providing no suitable substitute.

We are in the midst of an unprecedented marketing campaign, synchronized around a USA-hosted World Cup, a for-the-time-being peace in the Middle East and gas prices that are gradually returning to normal. While many European tourists remark at the lush affluence of American suburbs, the grandeur of Costco and the generous dispensation of indoor air conditioning, social media is being used to amplify these messages in concert with the usual Fourth of July rah-rah patriotism.

Some of this may be accurate to the global attitudes and perceptions towards the United States. While it is a global empire that works with its malevolent lacky Israel (just carrying forward the global characterization, here) to destabilize and undermine what would otherwise be peaceful and prosperous countries for its own benefit, it is also the center of global innovation, a power broker in every part of the world map, and (though only when politically convenient) does come to the defense of the poor and the downtrodden in many scenarios that otherwise are not considered the purview of a global hegemon.

The decline of international liberalism has increased a longing for it, but also shown how the “might makes right” return of history isn’t necessarily all its cracked up to be. The WEF contingent is pushing its “Middle Powers” approach but lacked any agency in the biggest international crisis since the launching of the Iraq War (the Iran War), while China and Russia are mostly mum on anything that is not directly on its borders.

Much of this may come down to the classic Mackinderan hypothesis - that sea powers must project outwards to grow while land powers are always preoccupied with internal stability - but in a consequentialist mood, we must ask ourselves, is there something about the sea powers that make them so powerful? Are there cultural attitudes or values which make them by their nature more able to project their culture outwards and encourage others to emulate them? In the past, the citizens of the USSR could never say no to a pair of blue jeans (so we’re told), but what other aspects of the “upstart” and “self-determined” culture that drives individuals to embrace the sea could be seen as advantageous, even for those accustomed to a land with lords and ladies, with boundaries that they cannot cross, and otherwise stable - though sometimes miserable - ways of life?

In the coming decades, a few forces will shape the global economy, barring any radical detour or interruption: global finance will become increasingly decentralized, manufacturing will become increasingly automated, the traffic of physical goods will be increasingly moved to space, and the attitudes towards land, hearth, home, growth and reproduction will become increasingly selective. The “return on capital” of an individual human being will not be as impactful as what is invested in that human being - whether it be acculturation, education, primary care, or even genetic engineering - and those human beings may go further with increasingly selective and hedonistic attitudes towards the actual reproduction they experience.

This is, of course, not a transition that will happen all at once, but in some series of stages that will appear both remarkable and banal depending on one’s time a place. It is perhaps a diffusion of prosperity, but also a release on the unrelenting ability of markets to deliver more goods (useful and not) at cheaper prices and while consuming fewer resources.

This does not mean that life will necessarily be better for most than other times in history, like the Post-WWII economic prosperity we will likely fantasize about for generations to come. If you had told most people that the “Gunsmoke” era was in fact a Golden Age, they may have laughed in your face, or spit out their ice cream, but this is again the combination of the remarkable and the banal - stable societies are far less interesting from the inside than the “outside looking in”, as it were.

Today’s America is far less stable than it was, but far less precarious than other nations in a world of globalization. There are no meaningful threats on its borders, it continues to attract foreign talent, it’s GDP growth remains vertiginous and it actually has one of the highest fertility rates in the developed world. The only thing stopping American culture from substituting global culture is in fact its American-ness - “Heritage” Americans in many ways view the United States as being defined on some level by its own nativism, isolationism, “city on a hill” characteristics.

Though these are often prejudiced opinions, the prejudice is not always the point - the idea of what is good about the United States being its exclusivity, despite the fact that it historically has arguably the most open borders of any country ever, ultimately allows people to think that exclusivity will by its nature make whatever is worth preserving ultimately become preservable, without even necessarily knowing what is actually to be preserved in the first place. Maybe that’s what happened in Rome too - “yeah, so what, citizenship is expanding pal, have you gotten a load of these loaves and circuses yet?”.

So, in many ways, American culture - particularly in its nationalist characteristics - is a sort of “Schrodinger’s Box” of attitudes. It is at once hierarchical and rewards only those who “work hard”, but a land where “anyone” can ultimately succeed. It is made up of reserved, Protestant, forthright people who resist collectivism but never hesitate to lend a hand, and yet of its most represented religion, Catholicism is now its most recognized denomination. While this for some may have appeal in a sultry love-of-life, is it not also what founders of English and Anglican stock viewed in some sense as a great nightmare?

America and Americanism are a kaleidoscope, a chameleon culture, and one that necessitates no culture at all as a starting point. This was in fact early Protestantism in many ways: bare churches were a blank slate for the soul, and it was in fact only the meritocracy of hard work which would give you even an off-chance of consorting with the divine in the beautiful hereafter.

So, in a sense, whether liberal, conservative, or some other arrangement, America 250 is in fact an America “not with me” - individualism is the only substrate on which the culture persists, even in its so called “Rise of Socialism”, and at its base, can a total reduction to individualism ever celebrate the state?

As the world becomes more American, perhaps in the way that Europe became Roman millennia ago, is it ultimately suspicion of the state which will be the most lasting characteristic? And, thus, in the end of nationalism, will the most free-associating nationalistic state on Earth ultimate lead to the total erosion of its most defining, patriotic ideology?

Much to consider, as it were.

Paul Krugman, bete-noire of anti-liberals and New York Times haters everywhere, rose to prominence in part due to his “New Trade Theory” which indicated that while countries can concentrate their supply chains into the production of particular goods, effects of consumer preference, product differentiation, diminishing marginal returns and a preference for home markets all indicate that while trade can become globalized, the global economy itself may never become a thoroughly integrated entity - at least as long as identity itself is not fully globalized as well.

In many ways, the current global vivisection of supply chains - primarily between the United States, China and Russia, but complicated by Iran and the EU - may increase the domestic production of certain goods while also increasing the propensity to trade critical goods in certain sectors. Russia and Iran must export energy to survive, whereas China must export low and medium-value-added manufactured goods and the EU must continue to export machine tools, pharmaceuticals, and other high value-added but also largely stagnant consumption items.

As far as the United States goes, it can continue to export food, agriculture and weapons, but it primarily relies on consumption of all other goods from foreign nations, the profits of said consumption then being recycled into US financial markets. This is in fact the only way such a small proportion of the global population can sustain its pre-eminence in global wealth, and yet the United States is now in the process of outsourcing the work of sustaining the global security regime (maritime trade, anti-proliferation and concentration of financial markets) that has made this possible.

As this scaffolding is reconfigured, secondary effects will persist for a generation or more, but the real impact is primarily a question of identity. Specifically, the concept of “home market preference” is in fact expensive where the technology otherwise exists to hyper-specialize every aspect of the global supply chain. The Division of Labor isn’t just on steroids, but speedballs, booze and Vicodin, just trying to go up and down with the waves and currents of the earth while concentrated resource, energy and manufacturing capacity will likely be the only way to have a hope of keeping up - even as the global population plateaus, people will still consume more.

Since this is a challenge for achieving a maximum of “peace and prosperity”, excluding underlying inequalities, and the possibility of new technologies to change geographic trends, the question of what it means to have a national identity is actually at the core of whether it is possible to ultimately live in peace.

Why is this the case? Russia is fighting ultimately not just for some territory to its West, but for what it means to be Russian as opposed to European. China is fighting for its own culture, still nursing wounds in the wake of the Century of Humiliation. The United States, in many instances, has a culture defined by isolationism, anti-internationalism and hyper-individualism that is on some level simply cognitively incompatible with more communitarian social outlooks found in the global south and East.

Europe is in some sense the most cosmopolitan and capable of merging complex global identities together while maintaining a meaningful core, but it is also selective, discriminating, and understanding the lingua franca of one nation or another’s way of life takes time, breathing room, and a willingness to let go of one’s own past (in love for another, of course).

In this context, we have to question what it means to even have a “global economy”. We can view cheap goods from overseas, whether energy, low or high-value added, as a sort of externality that accelerates or otherwise creates bottlenecks on the development of individual nations, and this has a downstream impact on various small and regional powers, whether in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East or Southeast Asia.

It is unlikely that all this preparation for the future actually makes things any different. While “the strong do what they may and the weak suffer what they must”, the actual cost of building meaningful domestic capacity is far more expensive than simply “being prepared to do so”, and in that preparation - much like the USSR’s perpetual war mobilization which cost it so much economic efficiency - may in the long run be too excessive for many nations, where their adversary may not even particularly benefit from a conflict coming to fruition.

So while nation’s like China would easily take Taiwan if there was no cost to doing so, a cost clearly remains, and what is the benefit of doing taking action where trade and integration already exist? If the benefit is to be a center of power, that can be well and good, but ultimately what increases prosperity for local states is to be a center of capital, and this can be achieved by financing conquest, but may actually be discouraged by conquest itself.

According to Twitter circles, TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) has now transitioned to NACHO: Not A Chance Hormuz Opens.

This is a welcome development to those understanding that the United States is placed at a relative advantage in the new global energy system, in which the US can offload its current overwhelming natural gas supplies while returning to its pre-WWII status as a creditor nation, while others come at beck and call to satisfy the political agenda of a “Greater North America”.

As in inflation, the cure for high prices is often high prices. It has been understood since the advent of the Triffin Dilemma that the US cannot maintain its position as reserve currency distributor without undermining its industrial base and domestic standard of living. While it would have been more difficult to throw off reserve currency status by simply “calling dollars back”, Trump has returned sobriety to the US money supply by making the dollars (and T-bills) increasingly undesirable.

For the time being the only solution is to chase US dollars to buy oil, but eventually as other oil supplies spin up in response to high prices, US currency will become again not only less desirable, but also less suitable to global trade, since the US will by that time occupy a retrenched position. That retrenched position is beneficial to the domestic populace and somewhat of a safer position for the local elites - though certainly less globalized and glamorous - but it also means that the US will intervene in future global conflicts only on the margins, perhaps apropos to what occurred in World Wars I & II. While China, Russia, and a weakened but resilient Iran run riot in their regions, they may eventually come in conflict - “Man in the High Castle” style - and ex. a US intervention will go begging for money and weapons while they destroy each other.

Europe is a wildcard, because - will it develop a spine, or simply be conquered by Russia? It can be a great customer to the United States, but it’s getting squeezed.

There is of course one “release valve” to all of this - China democratizing. On some levels, China functions according to the consent of the governed. The CCP is incredibly wary of civil unrest, but inflation and the domestic economic outlook continue to tax the populace. With their own battles to fight, Russia and Iran are not necessarily best suited to serve as creditors for Chinese growth, while unlocking better relations with Europe and Japan could be roundabout ways to avoid dealing with a stern “Daddy Trump”, those countries also fear the influence of China continuing to grow, because as China grows, so does the control of the CCP, which will place its institutional interest above all others, including the common markets.

At the same time, democratic institutions, a social welfare state, a stable demographic picture are all aspects of Chinese development which would hold back the institutional dependency that has developed between the populace and this specific political party. If there are cleavages within the party, that can be exploited into cadres, and possibly lead to the formation of a multi-party state, similar to the delightful “managed democracies” which exist in the West. This, however, would be a delicate equilibrium, and further tax the ability of the international system to subsidize rampant Chinese exports and over-financialization.

It seems when one buys stability in one region, it only leads instability to pop up someplace else.

The Iran Conflict of 2026 has had a few interesting twists and turns in recent weeks, which may or may not reveal an underlying trend in the transmogrification of US financial, technological and ideological empire:

1. US base strikes diminished in volume but critical assets (AWACS) were struck in a sufficiently precise manner to indicate satellite assistance from China or Russia

2. Through Pakistani mediation, Iran agreed to a ceasefire with the expectation that Hezbollah would also be included. When this proved not the case, it showed the Iran does in fact view Hezbollah as its proxy in its hostility towards Israel while diminishing the relative deniability of this practice, which they have historically leaned on to pursue their various asymmetric warfare strategies.

3. The Strait of Hormuz was to be opened, then not opened fast enough, then the US implemented a dueling blockade, which drew increased encouragement from China to ensure the Strait is in fact opened

4. As initial negotiations failed, the US postured a stance towards “economic warfare” that would continue to cripple Iran’s already fragile economy

5. The US is attempting to buy out Iran’s current stockpile of enriched uranium in order to achieve it’s pre-existing nonproliferation objective, mostly defined by “partners” in Israel

6. 40 of 47 Democrat senators voted to suspend arms sales to Israel. While this does not change actual policy change yet, it represents a clear turning point in the nature of US-Israel relations.

7. The US is the primary global exporter of oil and natural gas for the forthcoming months, if not longer.

8. The US has now isolated China prior to Xi and Trump’s Summit, currently scheduled for May.

The path of this conflict is so meandering that it is difficult to say that, in the vein of a true Trump believer, “this was the plan all along”. However it matches with the broad assumption of this previous article that the US’ aggressive actions effectively came with no downside risk. The United States is already the global primary exporter of advanced technology, has seen its reserve currency status diluted over decades and not just in recent years, and has persistent domestic social unrest due primarily to the wealth inequality produced by its pre-eminent position in the global economic system. It cannot any longer remain “American” and maintain its position of global hegemon, and so when faced with either its identity or its livelihood, it sees no problem risking both to get what it wants.

This is not just the attitude of the institutional structure, but also the means by which most Americans have viewed the conflict since its beginning - even though they question the acts involved, they are hardly tearing down the barricades to prevent the state from addressing themselves against a 5-decade antagonist to their foreign policy aims and general well-being. Panicans and collapsitarians (Douglas Mcgregor, John Mearsheimer anyone?) have continually predicted doom since the beginning of this conflict and yet here we are, on the precipice of it wrapping up, all major goals achieved (including regime change, as there is in fact a fundamentally regime in place if a deal does reach concurrence ) - first by military means and then by economic and diplomatic ones - with a government that effectively questioned the policy only on the margins.

Israel has become a noose around Trump’s neck, and what have the Democrats done for him? Opened up the discourse to reset relations, all while Trump provides the deep state its most meaningful desires in Iran and recenters the global energy system even more around US natural gas. There is simply no losing because there is no winning either, it is merely a continuation of pre-existing advantages in differing forms - old wine in new bottles, but still the same bottles from which “drunkards, fools and the United States of America” indulge (to paraphrase Chancellor Bismarck).

Furthermore, the future pursuit of asymmetric, fifth-generation warfare against the United States will only more directly invite direct confrontation, where targeted air power, sanctions (both primary and secondary) and the leveraging of continually higher echelons of technology will only drive further pre-eminence for the United States, but by an empire of “negation”. That is to say: no further intervention is required, only the proactive discouragement of policy which the US establishment dislikes.

And by contrast, what do they like? The natural progression of commerce, science and technology, because within the pre-existing transnational technocapitalist superstate, it is already wholly overweight to their interest.

So in the end, all the outcomes of this conflict, minus the lives and materiel lost, are “win-win-win, win-win-win, win-win, win-win”. Yes, it is an oppressive global economic system which produces alienation and destroys human freedom at the drop of the hat. But what’s the alternative, communism??

As of this writing, it is now 20 days since the United States and Israel attacked Iran and kicked off a protracted, standoff-weapons-driven conflict that has now turned primarily to the destruction of energy production and transmission, as well as the otherwise broad discouragement of travel to the Middle East (a non-irregular occurrence).

The Trump Administration, in attacking Iran, has exhibited the same general tendency it has in most of its foreign policy decision-making - that is to say that in domains where it has complete discretion and is unshackled by Congress (as has been the case for the Imperial Presidency for nearly 80 years now), Trump and his advisors opt for scenarios that present asymmetric upside: aggressive control of Greenland, deposing Maduro while maintaining the regime itself, aggressive tariffs whether they are legal or not, and opportunistic multilateralism (board of Peace, Gaza reinvestment and so on) that promotes the general acquisitiveness of the US establishment while not paying much attention to norms, rules or new first principles as established.

In attacking Iran - whether it was truly motivated by an attempt to pre-empt Israel (as Marco Rubio indicated) or not - the Trump administration is extending it’s desire to reorganize global energy production around an exclusively US-driven framework while playing both sides of the actual price of energy.

If Iran were to acquiesce to US coercion and bring forward a more liberal, moderate regime focused on economic integration, energy prices would go down and global growth would continue to accelerate.

If Iran resists and protests - causing disruption by targeting oil and LNG facilities in the Gulf States, not simply trying to respond directly at Israel - the cost of energy skyrockets and that facilitates further US shale exploitation and greater export volume from the United States, and perhaps also gives enough economic incentive to US oil conglomerates to meaningfully redevelop Venezuela and further drive US control and capacity up while the rest of the world’s energy capacity could enter a chaotic and possibly terminal decline.

There are moments in the history of the United States which help define its movement forward as a political, cultural and economic force. The Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Yalta Conference - these are all milestones on a road of seemingly continuous ascension. It is hard to say that whatever is happening now actually matches these events, but in a historical sequence, they are fairly evenly spaced. The prospect of the United States cornering the global energy supply - not only to curb China, but to bring Europe and other casual allies to heel - can equate to a new founding moment that will embolden the state with more absolute control, more opportunity to “create its own reality”, to borrow a phrase from Karl Rove, on a global scale that has never previously existed.

This pursuit of asymmetric upside means that no one nation can stop it, and no assemblage of “middle powers” is likely to assuage it. There perhaps only remains a “Russian exception”, by way of their nuclear deterrent, developed when they themselves were a superpower, in some ways facilitated only by lend-lease from the United States. Other states remain, but their standard of living is too dependent on the United States as the center of the global economic system - whether that is China, India, Europe, Pakistan or even North Korea by extension of the Chinese system.

In this context, it is important to remember the other half of Rubio’s rationalization, which cited the extensive missile capacity of Iran, but limited launcher capacity, while a surprise campaign could denude their launch capability no matter their actual missile inventory. Waiting to the last possible moment before Iran developed a strategic advantage is another sign of hyperpower - simply put, when an adversary is close to developing a capability you mistrust, you not only remove that capability, but also their ability to furnish such capabilities in the future. Even if Iran maintains launchers, they can be fewer, further between, and more easy to identify when positioned for launch even as they are driven more deeply underground.

At this time, even China is primarily interested in second-strike nuclear capability. They are not strategically positioned to pursue conflict, despite all their progress, and hence seek only to avoid it by appearing strong but feigning weakness when conflict comes about. They are, like the Europeans, unable to gather the physical capability or political will to involve themselves in the current Middle East conflict, despite having their energy sorer for the taking there too.

The United States will only benefit from troops on the ground for the sake of proving it still maintains military preeminence and no longer lacks the post-GWOT fear to act - same as was the case for “Vietnam Syndrome” or the comfort that overtook the nation in the Post-WWII period. No other nation on Earth fights out of a willingness to prove inconvenient to its enemies, the only nations that fight seem to be those whose survival are at risk, and even in those cases, much of the populace (including Iran’s) seems to retain a “come what may” attitude towards the downside.

Prior to the development of more robust ocean-going commerce in the late 15th century, Europe was typified by medieval fiefdoms, lords, knights, kinship bonds and clans, church tribute, and the proliferation of feasts and local festivals which maintained a strong social fabric to the exclusion of what was otherwise considered slow economic development - particularly in the wake of the Black Plague.

It was in part the disruption of the Plague which led to innovations in agricultural methods, increases in total productivity and the greater investment of time in artisanal trades an the improvement of manufactured goods - so much so that Europe did become the research lab for innovations like gunpowder, printing and other technologies from the East that hadn’t found suitable mechanics for growth in their regions of origin.

So in the process of exploring the world - primarily for the development of commerce - we would understand that Europe has become it’s “not self” (to borrow a Joycean phrase). This is the kind of not self, or not feeling thyself, which typifies the malaise, the slow reproduction, the confrontation with global multiculturalism, and the guilt over the history of the slave trade, colonization, neocolonialism, various total wars and so on, which has led a genus of the species to go from “not self” to perhaps “not exist at all”.

What is it, perhaps, in the “seeds of this history”, that can restore a sense of vitality? A basis of common understanding and a willingness to exchange again on equal, confident footing with the outside world? Ultimately these are forms of free association. Historically these may be guilds or civic societies, and in many ways the modern corporation is a structural descendent of the guilds of old, but now the corporation has consumed so much of the natural life of man that the associations it offers don’t enrich life - one doesn’t even see “company towns” anymore, they’re simply too expensive to support, and people know as soon as it gets too costly, the jobs would be shipped overseas forthwith.

Corporations at one time invested in their workforces because they needed a growing-yet-captive labor supply. This problematization meant that if they could capture their labor force with enough incentives, they could guarantee the production needed to meet the growing global demand that was found in the postwar “Golden Age of Capitalism”. We know that by the procession of the division of labor, guilds expanded to corporations and eventually overseas trade colonies emerged, which with time formed the need for new governments and colonial administration, but now we are attending the unwinding of this expansion, because the global population is expected to peak in the next 30-40 years, and even with its peaking, it’s unlikely that it will command ordinately greater capital intensity than what is already the case today (primarily limited by credible institutional development in the global south).

So where does western society go? Is it simply a low tax, low regulation regime which will drive a return to the private forms of association that seem to create greater dynamism and productivity? The answer is probably yes, but it is also in denying the “quest for security” that typifies the unwillingness to engage in meaningful work that we will perhaps outgrow the doldrums of the late information age, and see greater industrial expansion, the settling of new lands (including those beyond the atmosphere) and even wars of conquest and expansion - rather than simply strategic incompatibility.

It is not to say that these are good things, but based on the malaise and passivity we see today, is there possibly a better means to channel our energy overall? The social consequences of this are simple: enclave politics, but one that doesn’t necessarily come in direct conflict with multiculturalism - at least as affluent liberals would have it. The development of US suburbs prefigured this in the popular imagination by offering upwardly mobile, previously working class professionals and white-collar works the ability to find “clean, safe, spacious, affordable” accommodations, and in many cases that led the generations which followed to pursue “urbanism and walkable cities”, which by liberal definitions of the past may be a euphemistic vanguard for fascism.

The Great Recession led to the impoverishment of US suburbs, and in many ways that increased urbanism of the rich has contributed to lower birth rates (by virtue of there being less empty space to fill with children). With that in mind, enclave politics will probably generate greater prodigiousness in exurbs, homestead regions, or urban communal organizations (there would require more ethnic homogeneity than any to be sustained). Government policy should “do no harm” to these contexts if it wishes to maintain the vitality of these initiatives, lest like the suburbs, the perverse incentives and tax benefits created led to “glut” and the subsequent impoverishment we see today.

About 12 minutes into his “rousing” speech at the Munich Security Conference last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio (assuredly a holder of many other titles and roles) said outright the Europe and the United States should remain allied for particularly mercantilist ends: developing space commerce, maintaining western mineral supply chains, and supporting each other in gaining market access to the growing consumer base of the global south.

Further on in his speech, Rubio uses the aphorism of how the concept of cowboys actually comes from Spain - much as it is identified as American. The “Vaqueros” were horseback cattle drivers of old who took methods developed there and brought them to the new world, but so many were of mixed origin - African, indigenous, Caribbean, mestizo, and yes also eventually Scotch-Irish.

It is an interesting historical rhyme that the son of Cuban emigres would find himself in Germany speaking about the need for vitality to return to the West, and indeed presenting many thinly veiled arguments for the West to return to a sort of mercantilist imperialism of old in order to propel itself into the future. Indeed, if one were to extend his perspective on a much more “scaled” timeframe, we would find a sort of subtle unity among people of European origin in that most ancestry depends on the spread of Yamnaya peoples, the mingling of eastern and western steppe herders, the taming of horses and the standardization of dairy as a large portion of the diet. Indeed, in the era of crusades and conquests, these advantages often played out favorably for Europeans - knights and explorers were on average taller, stronger, fitter and more aggressive than their Central Asian, Arab and North African counterparts, which led (following a great deal of consumptive commerce, one might note) to the expansion of European influence following the era of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the reorganization of European life around the sort of industrial rationalism with which it is so strongly identified today.

And yet, that sort of transition is also what has led to the exhaustion of “European Races”, the degradation of the bonds of community, of mutual trust, of feast days and of social reciprocity in favor of markets have ultimately led the West to its “business model” of today: constant importation of new demographics and working classes, eager to achieve some sort of dream that was restricted to the successful workers of previous generations, but ultimately finding themselves in a new land where a deep alienation persists as to the nature of one’s own cultural, national and ethnic identity.

Easily enough, the analgesic for this historically has been the concept of “rugged individualism” or “the frontier”. Indeed, the closing of the frontier (dated to 1890) is what historian Frederick Jackson Turner identified in 1893 as a signal of the declining vitalism of the West. While technology and culture have continued to evolve, the strong motivation, the ambition, the ruthlessness which so markedly defined “European Man” (again in quotes, you see) between 1450 and 1850 also gives way to the need for stability, for familiarity, for community - marked in no little symbolism by the rise of socialism and social democratic movements in those same countries that exhausted themselves on the pyre of imperialism in the centuries before.

Again we are talking about Cowboys in order to convince ourselves of Western Vitalism, but the truth is the west has given up. Indeed Rubio represents a sort of newcomer class to the “West” - previously isolated Latinos who know make up a significant component of both US demography and the more aggressive end of the Republican party - and have returned to Europe to lecture them (more gently this time) on their values.

Just like Kennedy represented the rise of Irish Americans, with his team practicing plenty of the dirty tricks necessary for him to win. He too was forced to buy into the pre-existing “Anglo-Saxon” power structure, and save for the exception of the military industrial complex that probably killed him, his fresh blood did add vitalism to a broader movement, but the aftermath only brought on more decay.

Apocryphally, there are Twitter Race Science™ stories of those in developing nations demanding a sort of recolonization, whether in South Africa or elsewhere, because “white people managed things better”. Unfortunately for both parties, this is an imaginary claim - those white people are long gone, and they were only a measly portion of them to begin with! The decline of a natural aristocracy leads to decay and feeble attempts at revanchism like what Secretary Rubio was practicing last week, and while they may sustain nations in the short run, in the long run, the inevitable remains. Perhaps centuries from now, a new leadership class will arise to reintroduce vitality, but it certainly will be somewhere else on earth, and they certainly won’t be talking so much about cowboys.

The recent Super Bowl halftime performance by Bad Bunny revealed some interesting contradictions in the modern conservative political narrative around demographic change, integration, and the nature of American Empire. These could be named thricely: 1) demographic expansion in the United States leads to cultural interchange, which 2) then drives greater co-identification within a broader political sphere and eventually serves to 3) reinforce the core over the periphery, because the core is still seen as the “center of the action”, even as the periphery is increasingly recognized as relevant to the “discourse in the core”.

It is an interesting rehash, thus, of the Monroe Doctrine, that Bad Bunny effectively waving the flag of every North American country and saying “we are all American” while in the United States at a United States sporting event nudges at a political realignment that essentially puts conservatives in control - if they were to welcome it. The modern media environment is such that whatever gets clicks, engagements, attention is what has currency, and the pop culture of the past (or “segments” of it like Kid Rock that were never tremendously popular to begin with) simply fade into irrelevance as the great mass of men take control and drive the discourse forward.

This is to say: there is no longer any such thing as “discernment” in the cultural sense. The tides of history have swept away race, class, ethnic and social distinctions in order to create an “aggregocracy”: not a democracy in which the people exercise popular sovereignty in any meaningful way, but where society has reached such a tense, advanced state of development and equilibrium that nobody is willing to really upset the apple cart, which implies that people are getting enough of what they want most of the time that there is no purpose to really be preoccupied with social change - let the tides of change come as they will.

While this seems like an appropriate attitude in the United States, which has consistently outperformed other advanced countries (not counting China here) primarily because of the reach of 1) the reach of its corporate entities, 2) the laxity of its tax structure and 3) the ability to incorporate its vassal states in expansive supply chains and economies of scale that are simply not as attainable for countries like France, Germany, Australia or the “middle powers” that would presume to stand up to Donald Trump (as Mark Carney might have it, at least).

It is in this implicit incorporation of vassal states that the United States continues to see expansion in the future, merely by leveraging an increasingly distributed division of labor - even as efforts to re-shore production persist - should the wealth of this particular nation continue to expand.

And yet, this relative placitude in its populace also makes up the same conditions within prerevolutionary France or Weimar Germany - a sort of willingness to let bygones be bygones until some precipitating event introduces a new level of chaos and destitution, and ultimately leads to the accession of a “strongman” who promises to “set things right” and “restore the nation” to its former glory.

Many would say that Trump is this figure, but he fails to actively incorporate the kind of stakeholders he’s looking for in a new social contract, and constantly accepts the tradeoffs imposed on him by the national security state (whether in the Ukraine or Israel) while executing a sort of fascist performance theatre that he is personally in no particular manner really attached to (hence ICE’s recent exit from Minnesota).

Ultimately, Trump would love to be a “lib” president in that his deepest, darkest desire seems to be for popularity (his dalliances with Jeffrey Epstein notwithstanding). In this context, he would gladly sacrifice 5 or 10% of his “white” vote in order to gain 15 or 20% with Latinos and the concomitant popularity and acclaim that go with.

From the perspective of an American Empire that may or may not be seeking more active strategic conflict with China, achieving a state of oversupply with regards to manpower (primarily from Latin American countries and principalities) would be the first step to buffeting the otherwise still replete industrial and military logistics capacity of the United States (on top of the persistently low oil prices that Trump is also doing his part to architect).

At this stage, the Trump administration is reformulating the American Empire to be better aligned to withstand the vexations of a new pole to the East, and whether Trump is getting intentional or unintentional assists from American pop culture doesn’t matter as much as whether the cultural output of this period is built simply for snacking, for passive consumption, for droll chicanery, or whether it will actually add to the “American pop canon” in such a manner that it becomes recognizably and identifiably American, or whether it simply drives the United States further down the road of ethnic balkanization and regionalization from within.

Fixed capital and Human Capital must coexist to survive - namely, if a nation develops sufficient fixed capital, it will inevitably begin to import labor in conditions where human capital does not sustain the standard of living or expectations set forth by the population as a whole.

In the United States as a whole, the trend against mass immigration - rapid ICE protests notwithstanding - is 60 or 70 years in the making, at least since the Hart-Cellar Act. The narrative of the United States being a “Nation of Immigrants” originated in part from John F. Kennedy writing on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League, but the phrase has stuck on liberal lips and conservative craws as a means to define the United States as a country formed by the assent to the conceits of the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with… well, well, you know the thing”).

While the pendulum swings back and forth, the history of United States and western societies more generally as “open” and “free” is based firstly on honor-bound clan balances of power and secondly on the ability to import and integrate higher-value-added sources of labor. This is true all the way back to antiquity, where the aggregation of new stakeholders - whether it be in Athens or Rome - led to a more advanced political economy than neighboring states, and ultimately drove a virtuous cycle that enabled greater political autonomy, the defeat and subordination of a variety of enemies, and the subsequent incorporation of those enemies into a broader, more specialization-driven economic and trade system.

The downside of this cycle is the decline of the standard of living for a great many of the people who constitute the early “core” of an imperial structure, while eventually those on the “periphery” (to borrow framing from Immanuel Wallerstein) see it as more advantageous to participate in the core’s economic system and gain higher marginal benefits as a result.

This could potentially explain why it is actually many newcomer populations to the United States, mostly Latinos, who constitute the largest incremental vote gains for the “anti-immigration” side of the aisle - the Republicans. These voters, although not a majority of their own demographic, are fighting harder to maintain the marginal utility of a system which they are new to and which they still find benefits them sufficiently to fight in order to keep others out. It is no small coincidence that nearly 30% of ICE agents and 50% of Border Patrol agents in the United States are Latino. The reasons for this may vary, but even if it is simply because they want to hold down a job, the benefits of empire are sufficient for them to “turn their back on their kin” (a blood and soil liberal framing if we could ever conceive of one).

The impacts of increasingly nationalistic Latino populations on US politics will probably make the nation unfamiliar in other ways, but it also infuses the United States with new vitality and new energy. US Latinos are not short of astronauts, scientists, capable manufacturing engineers or committed soldiers - all the constituent stakeholders which allow for a strong national state to persist through instability. Furthermore, the willingness of US Latinos to integrate within “American” culture - while putting their own imprint on it - is effectively the only tool the economic system needs to continue driving a value-added expansion.

Despite China outstripping the United States in Capital Formation, its population will likely halve in the next 60 to 80 years, while the United States will continue to grow at a steady pace. This does not mean that China will ultimately lose a conflict with the United States, but it makes one unattractive, and if the population decline is sufficient, it will likely undermine the overall stability of the CCP and drive then Chinese populations into the arms of greater economic integration with the United States - where they will inevitably adopt a more servile position than they experience in their own institutions.

In fuller irony, the Maduro raid also raises the interest and loyalty of many US Latinos who have historically rejected or migrated away from Liberation Theology-tinged leftism which has predominated in Central and South America. This particular ethnic group will continue to drive more and more of the discourse in American politics, much the same way that North Africans, Near Easterners, Huns and Gauls began to predominate in the high period of the Roman Empire.

The real “theological” risk to the United States is that identity fails to reorient into a new basis of integration… “the center does not hold”, and ultimately individuals and groups will find it more attractive to fall back on tribal divisions than to devote their loyalty to a central state. Such are the wages of empire, but an empire that is predicated on growth will never survive without fresh blood: much as the Romans may have looked at the Rape of the Sabines as a necessary evil (if they discussed it at all), they also rationalized it by emphasizing that Sabine wives were treated humanely. Ultimately, this is a microcosm of what allowed that Empire to grow: the growth inherently involved dilution, but with that dilution also came vigor and energy.

It is eventually, perhaps, when all the new vigor of foreign lands does not hold that the center does in fact fall to pieces.

Military technology is not necessarily a scientific challenge or a tactical challenge as much as it is a challenge of engineering and experience. Military capability is a function of many factors, partly the size of one’s military, experience in both senior and junior ranks, and inherited learning both from continuous conflict (where possible) and also from the openness and “nurturing” warrior spirit needed to pass down meaningful learnings so new operators can avoid the mistakes of the past - and potentially even getting killed in the process.

To this end, the raid to arrest Maduro that was executed by Delta Force at the orders of the Trump Administration shows both a level of technical savvy and aggressive ability to execute that far exceeds the level of peer adversaries in Russia, China, Iran and - obviously - Venezuela. Such that “the strong do what they please and the weak suffer what they must” is an old maxim made new again in this “multipolar” world, but the themes emphasized in this blog (namely the “Strategic Competition as a Feature of Civilizational Decline”, “The New Unipolar Moment” and “The United States and China: Has The Torch Already Been Passed?”) much has been explored as to the nature of the current strategic impasse between China and the United States.

In history, where fading empires met rising ones, significant conflict was avoided primarily through integration. This could be considered the case of Greece into Rome or The British Empire into that of the United States. Between the United States, China and its entourage, there is limited capacity for strategic institutional integration because of 1) fundamental cultural differences 2) inherent contradictions between the style and function of the US Federal Bureaucracy and the CCP and 3) popular unwillingness to integrate - has even a single polling bureau thought it necessary to ask whether their is a desire for the US and China to become more tightly merged within themselves?

Additionally, as was explored in the Federalist Paper 10, the constitution of one or another state as they merge can form an oppressive faction which undermines the idea of a state as a unifying body. With this the case, there is limited possibility of strategic integration between China and the United States - except where one is a client of the other - and for that reason conflict will inevitably be the only alternative.

The Current State of the Strategic Conflict

As time proceeds and conflict intensifies, obviously the first order of business is maintaining air superiority in any hot strategic conflict, something for which effective air defense is one of the most meaningful countermeasures. With Venezuela, whether due to bribery, power outage, or actual technical failure, the first domino has already fallen.

Yes air superiority is also signified by a majority of force in the air, in addition to the ability to deny ground-based countermeasures through electronic warfare, along with the ability to sustain such capacity for the duration of a conflict, but on all those measures, it’s unlikely that China or Russia can actually exceed the capacity of the United States, which is now seeing a new investment cycle with the F47 and increased missile defense spending.

There are other means by which this can be undermined - total depletion of military infantry and ground warfare to protect strategic air chokepoints, broader political instability or economic collapse, but this is arguably as likely in China or Russia as it is in the United States. It’s already taking place in Venezuela. While Iran has stated it’s desire to substitute the loss of Venezuela’s meager oil output within BRICS, relations with Venezuela have been a critical economic lifeline for the current Iranian regime.

In recent days, this may have been so impactful as to help precipitate the observed collapse in Iran’s currency and the popular protests, repression of which has now turned violent, while the sequestering of these two client states seems to be more and more definite with their patrons in Russia and China unable to stop the collapsing “house of cards”. Iran already saw a failure at the hands of western air superiority in the “12 Day War” of June 2025, it is unlikely to be able to stop further airstrikes that could further destabilize or decapitate the Iranian regime if Trump seeks to pursue such a path.

The Real Grand Strategy at Play

In the wake of the Maduro Abduction, Trump welcomed oil executives to the White House, who demonstrated a sincere lack of interest in taking on the economic and political risks associated with rebuilding Venezuela’s oil production, particularly as prices trend ever lower.

It would appear in these circumstances that industry interests are actually not aligned with the Trump policy, so what could the angle be? It is well understood historically that much of what drove the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and collapse was low oil prices. While some of this is supposed to have occurred due to coordination between the Reagan Administration and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, the desire for competitors to outbid other sellers in the price war state that occurred in the 1980s global economy may have been the real driver, but only a driver inasmuch as the Soviet Union simply paid the price for its own mismanagement. With a modernized economy that has much the same export composition, Russia faces the same risks as the Soviet Union did, only 45-odd years on.

Thus, we must consider the strategic objectives at play today. In driving oil prices to unnatural lows, the Trump administration achieves a multitude of strategic goals which may not be obvious on the surface: 1) maintain lower prices for American consumers and the supply chains that serve them amidst a rampant Affordability Crisis, 2) undermine Russia’s ability to compete with other sources of energy on global markets (given that their fixed costs are higher than many Middle Eastern suppliers), 3) drive Chinese buyers into the arms of Saudi and the UAE, which make up the majority of China’s oil imports (ultimately recycling their accumulated capital into US markets given that the United States is their security guarantor, which Trump so cautiously guarded with his first international trip of his new adminstration) and 4) with the active destabilization of Iran and Venezuela, isolate China internationally, exacerbate its divisions with Russia, and force a dual end to both the Ukraine War and a conflict in Taiwan.

We already see economic pressure beginning to mount on the single lifeline Russia has had for external capital - exports to China and India - now that the US is both chasing down tankers and Russia is seeing a backlog on deliveries. While preventing the strategic loss of Taiwan and its chip capacity is ultimately the most uncertain aspect of this grand strategy, an isolated China is less able to act credibly on the international stage, and without conflicts in the Middle East and Europe beggaring attention, at the very least rebuffs what has been a crisis multiple decades in the making and allowing the US to continue maintaining its global security supremacy for at least another generation.

This very last point - US hegemony - is only possible because of other factors which show that the United States may have greater wherewithal to survive a strategic conflict than China, Russia or any other foe, primarily because of demographics, economic and capital multipliers, and the continued quality and loyalty of its military to the constitutional state. This is something that will be explored in a future article.

While we are reaching the peak of PowerPoint presidencies (after all an immigration slide did save Trump’s life), the address by Donald Trump last night failed to show the economic coherence necessary to actually break the United States out of its long term fiscal and consumer deficits - let us explain.

Trump made three key arguments and two key promises during his speech. The arguments: 1) prices are trending lower under Trump than Biden, 2) wage growth is beginning to exceed inflation for the first time since the last Trump administration and 3) many food categories have seen minor price decreases after substantial gains.

In contrast to the arguments, the two promises of substance offered were: 1) tax returns for the average family exceeding $11,000 USD and 2) a “warrior dividend” of $1,776 for each active serviceperson in the US military.

While the latter is obviously a backslide from the much-bandied “tariff dividend” (and a decent enough way to start building a mercenary mindset in the US military), the reality of these benefits is unfortunately reminiscent of the Biden administration, when the COVID-induced “American Rescue Plan” Act of 2021 promised additional tax credits and benefits of up to $10,000 for families of 4 below certain income thresholds, in addition to various other forms of stimulus which drew the avid criticism of Larry Summers.

It is no surprise that this legislation was followed by a surge in the costs of airfare, sporting events, cars, hotels, and all sorts of foodstuffs - these are the things that people with the highest propensity to consume end up consuming when they have a little extra cash. In fact, most stimulus taken on by the United States and western nations has seen the poor as simply a channel to subsidize demand - something generous enough, surely - but it is strictly opposite to the Chinese model of intensive subsidies in various components of the agricultural sector, including stockpiling, to maintain low food prices, low inflation, and consistently increasing productivity in the food sector.

Indeed, subsidies to alleviate bottlenecks in the food sector - whether it’s meat herd sizes, beef processing, the inputs for crops (which should be coming down with the price of oil), and incentives to increase the labor supply in these sectors - would all have direct impacts on the price of food. At the same time, food prices in particular, when high, do significant damage to productivity, whereas lower food prices enable other forms of consumption to benefit from scale and volume - whether that is in manufactured goods, hotel and leisure, or productive tools for work like electronics and home goods.

While imitating the Chinese model may seem un-American (hint: the “New Deal” showed that it really isn’t, even if it didn’t work all that well), subsidizing demand without adopting some aspects of “Capitalism with Chinese characteristics” will only make the situation worse. The American economy, due to its romance with neo-Liberalism, has become highly concentrated among large firms. In all aspects of the consumer economy, large firms will exhibit rent-seeking behavior around bottlenecks in the supply chain - something observed as early as another Roosevelt’s “Square Deal” - and government intervention is required to either break up the firms profiting from bottlenecks or otherwise taking direct economic action to alleviate the costs around the bottlenecks. When it comes to China, this same model is applied in almost every sector of the economy - energy and manufacturing the most notable.

While applying such methods to every sector will likely be an excess and undermine the overall efficiency of the US economy, adopting active state intervention around key bottlenecks will help drive: 1) increased social cohesion and family formation, 2) longer term sustained consumption and economic growth, 3) lower total debt to GDP, 4) increased total productive capacity within the US economy and 5) a better position to consolidation US empire while maintaining long term economic and demographic surpluses necessary to sustain US security concerns.

It may seem unbelievable right now, but these sorts of changes are absolutely necessary - without them, the United States will begin a terminal decline. The current administration is actually best positioned to implement this policy, as it is beholden to fewer special interests than the other side. The phrase “only Nixon could go to China” might apply, but one could also say that “only Trump could copy Xi”. For the libertarians in the crowd, it might be worthwhile to remind them that “the dose makes the poison”.

The development of a society and ultimately “civilizations” proper require a few key characteristics: physical security, economic growth, shared language and culture, a willingness to collaborate and a circumspect view towards out-groups or foreigners who may approach in large numbers.

In the concept of human relationships, this can be considered as simple as “defined boundaries” which allow a local population to grow in excess of its original capacity, causing it to often seek out new lands, new ideas and new ways of doing things - sometimes at the cost of other societies - in order to assert its “will to life” in the Nietzschean sense (the essential desire to grow and expand).

Alternatively, societies which fail to grow ultimately shrink and decline until they become terminal, as was the case for many ancient civilizations including that of Rome, but was also understood as recently as the decline of the Old South under Slavery (where secession was triggered by the resistance to new “slave states” entering the Union) or, indeed, Hitler’s Germany, where geographic segmentation following WWI drove revanchism, irredentism, and with consolidated power, a desire to conquer east for Lebensraum (which had been an idea of currency as early as the 19th century, long before Hitler used it as a selling point for the “master race”).

There are many small nationalities which may proclaim the desire to grow and expand - from Eastern Europe and the Balkans to West Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands - but ultimately as intergenerational globalization continues to progress, which the scale and complexity of markets demands as much new labor and capacity as can be procured - ethnonationalist states are simply not well-positioned to defeat non-ethno-essentialist peers even if their capacity to perform, their battlefield efficiency, their camaraderie or their social cohesion are much higher than their adversary.

The United States has historically been an integrationist power - all the way from English, Dutch, Irish and Scots to Swedes, Germans, Norwegians, Italians, Russian peasants and so on - and for that it has historically demonstrated more logistical capacity and greater ability to mobilize large forces than the ethnonationalist sensibilities of adversarial states could permit. Most starkly, those would be exemplified in Hitler’s Germany and the Confederate South.

In the modern day, it is actually societies which fail to welcome and integrate immigrants that are showing the most signs of ossification - particularly China, Japan and elsewhere. India still exists in a youth surplus demographically, but that will eventually subside given current birth rates. The ability of societies to enable new social and economic relationships, as well as new forms of entrepreneurship, innovation and communication, are what is essential to giving a “permission structure” for productivity and growth. Some indicate that the “fall of Rome” is a example to be weary of, but the Western Roman empire lasted 1200 years (from 700 BC to 500 AD), and in the east it lasted an additional millennium.

One could consider a form of social and political organization at such a height to “only have room to go down”, but there is no other form of social and political organization in history which is known to have lasted as long as Rome, been as durable, as capable of reform, or as responsive to external threats - yes, even if there are a myriad of examples of its failures. Contemporary speakers - uneducated ones, certainly - will make comparisons between Rome and the Third Reich, Rome and the British Empire, Rome and the Spanish Conquests of the Americas - but those institutions are incomparable. In all cases, the neophyte institutions reaffirm inequalities between ethnicities. In Rome, they incorporate them - at first through rape and slavery (shocking) - but ultimately, in the turnover of elites to ambitious commoners who may or may not have even been of roman heritage on the Italian peninsula.

In many ways, the fall of Rome was not due to the discouragement of the common people, but a lack in the willingness of elites to sacrifice in order to preserve institutions. From generations of civil war to barracks emperors to the final barbarian invasions, policy decisions imply sacrifice and compromise which - in a world of increasingly frequent “elite turnover” - become unattractive, because the pre-existing elites may ultimately not be around to benefit from the institutions they fight to preserve anyway.

In this is perhaps a lesson for the modern era. We are in an age of global capital, where elites travel the world searching for deals while workers (the modern serfs) remain domestic, tied to their land, lineage, language and heritage. Indeed, the cultural bifurcation of elites and commoners is a relationship which Spengler would have observed as requiring of discipline - discipline of the commoners by the elite. In our day and age, perhaps it is the reverse.

What should that mean? Elites need to be able to ape the “working man and woman”, but beyond that need to do it credibly if they wish to maintain control. FDR is the strongest example of this in modern political contexts - even if we was entirely endogenous as an elite, someone who had no personal experience of struggle, he represented common WASP ethics and manners which the plurality of the United States at the time still believed to be the cultural standards. He was far more of an everyman than Coolidge who preceded him or Truman who followed - even if Truman was a country bumpkin, most Americans at that stage were more urbane and cosmopolitan, notwithstanding of course the racism and segregation that still existed in his day.

Currently in the United States, there is no national leader which represents the actual ethos of the modern “working” American. They are alienated in wealth, culture and can fundamentally generate no legitimacy for greater social action. Ethnonationalist tendencies could emerge as an effort to mimic a unified state, but the dilution of both “whiteness” and broader social standards means that hardly a meaningful plurality can emerge to make life easier for a consolidated working class. In most other western countries, the actual demographic that works, produces goods and pays taxes is far more connected to modern hyper-globalized culture - bass-thumping music, short-form video, constant new spectacles in food, sports and entertainment - to have a cohesive cultural basis for social action. This is perhaps by design, hard to say if that is really the case, but it also means that an elite - if it wishes to proffer any vaguely “ethnonationalist” agenda in order to achieve a mimic of cultural unity - will gain neither and lose both in the attempt.

The apocryphal Marie-Antoinette, upon hearing about the lack of bread among the peasantry, was supposed to have proclaimed “let them eat cake”. This drew such a furor at her alienation with the struggle of the common people that it led to hers and Louis XVII’s hanging. In our own age, it is much more common and apropos to show consideration and petty admiration for the struggles of the poor, while the language of elites is much more enclosed and cumbersome, difficult to understand from the outside looking in. Where did you spend summer? What schools did your children go to? How many times has your name appeared on the side of a building? For our modern class separation, the division of cake and bread would seem only so simple to return to.

And yet, as we consume these experiences of culture, authority and structure in our day to day lives, we also experience culture as a sort of mainstreamed porridge, with social indicators and passive consumption of content - whether its White Lotus or whatever appears on Obama’s year-end list - there to maintain the concept of class, camp and status in a covertly political sense and an overtly civilized sense. Most of what we are exposed to regarding elite culture, and by extension high culture, is a matter of manners and taste.

This is in contrast to what is perhaps more classically understood as actual high culture, which would relate to classic literature, classical music (with even eminent figures like Wagner regarded as base and camp), and poetry like that of Milton or the attempts of TS Eliot to contend with the nature of human existence, sanity, original sin, and crimes like rape, incest, pederasty and untold moral failings which are meant to cast into light good and positive, socially constructive values.

Most “high” culture, historically, is reliant on internal drama, a development of a philosophy of the self, and a differentiation of the self primarily from one’s family (like the Oedipal cycle of Sophocles) but also from one’s city or one’s state. This sort of abandonment of social constraint should be considered positive by the elites of today, but as it exists they are captured by the same forces of middle class aesthetics, mass media, and a desire for communicability of culture that reduce the human experience to what can be resembled, rather than what can be thought.

This means: 1) a limitation of internal monologue, 2) a limitation of the exploration of internal contradiction (e.g. stories where they are always “good guys” and “bad guys” and 3) a desire of prerequisite basis of interest in media (e.g. comic book franchises, vs the consumption of media for its own sake).

The decline of unencumbered or “indulgent” forms like this is not merely a consequence of a disappeared landed gentry, but of a limited attention span which has increasingly diminished the capacity for humanity’s complex thought. Indeed, as short-form-video cements its position as the dominant media format of the 2020s, the medium itself is seeing players elongate the attention into serials and soap operas - similar to the style attempted by Quibi - but watching them entails relying on the drama, tropes, conflicts and habits of viewership that are developed through engagement with deeper, longer, more complex pieces of content.

In fact, as cinema is no longer the dominant form of media, cinema itself also becomes more like short-form video: modern movies are typically children’s movies, musicals, horror movies, or superhero flicks, and for the most part they are an assemblage of setpiece action sequences without the need for a strong narrative connection between them. They almost happen as inconsequential coincidences from one to the next, kind of like how life probably now feels for most people, most of the time.

More ironic in this context is the recession of once mainstream, middle class forms of media into elite novelty niches - once Jazz, soon hip hop perhaps, in some ways baseball, which is growing in financial capacity despite overall declines in popularity - the passage of time has cast out media and cultural practices which the middle class once adored in order for elites to collect, picking up the pieces and demonstrating status with their ability to “cosplay” as middle class patrons of old.

High culture served a purpose in past eras which we are lacking today: in previous centuries, high culture pastimes created a clear social order, in the same way the festivity around public executions might have. Yes, they were both something to do, but they also created a sort of etiquette that reinforced the social order: beautiful ballerinas were adored quietly, meandering criminals were hung by the gallows. In our modern context, ritual reinforcement of social order is seen as gauche, but it is also apparently necessary to maintain order and good function of day-to-day society. As such, any economic nationalist agenda not only needs to have an aesthetic component, but also aesthetic regulation by the state - state subsidy for high culture as a means to maintain the consistency, the hegemony and the good order of a functioning society - and yes perhaps also a return to public executions as well.