{"id":23761,"date":"2017-04-25T18:36:21","date_gmt":"2017-04-25T23:36:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23761"},"modified":"2017-04-25T18:36:21","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T23:36:21","slug":"cataclysm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23761","title":{"rendered":"Cataclysm"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cataclysm<\/a><\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\n

Collapse generally comes as a surprise, even to those who predict it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The USSR didn\u2019t just fail one day, as does a person who dies of a sudden heart attack or stroke. It was more like a wasting illness brought on by an unhealthy lifestyle. A physician tells a morbidly obese patient: \u201cYour daily consumption of twelve cocktails, three packs of cigarettes, and 4,000 calories, and your refusal to engage in exercise more strenuous than walking to the refrigerator will kill you, but I can\u2019t say when.\u201d For both individuals and governments, certain choices are incompatible with continued existence, and the Soviet government made plenty of those.<\/p>\n

Very few people foresaw its failure when it was imminent, even purported experts. The small group who said Soviet communism wouldn\u2019t work because it couldn\u2019t work were disparaged right up until it didn\u2019t work. However, the deck is always stacked in favor of those predicting this or that government will fail. Ultimately they all do because they all come to rest on a foundation of coercion and fraud, which doesn\u2019t work because it can\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

There is both a quantitative and qualitative calculus for individuals subject to a government: what the government takes versus what individuals get back. Government is a protection racket: turn over your money and it promises physical security from invasion and crime, and adjudication and restitution in the event of civil or criminal wrongs. The quantitative calculus: am I getting more back than I put in? The qualitative calculus: what activities and people does the government help or hinder?<\/p>\n

Protection rackets are often indistinguishable from extortion rackets, the \u201cprotector\u201d a bigger threat to the \u201cprotected\u201d than the threats against which they\u2019re supposedly protected. Such is the case with the US government, as it was with the former Soviet government.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cataclysm Collapse generally comes as a surprise, even to those who predict it. The USSR didn\u2019t just fail one day, as does a person who dies of a sudden heart attack or stroke. It was more like a wasting illness brought on by an unhealthy lifestyle. A physician tells a morbidly obese patient: \u201cYour daily […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[10923,150,379,10532,12280,712,12281,827,1878],"class_list":["post-23761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-cataclysm","tag-collapse","tag-government","tag-protection-racket","tag-robert-gore","tag-security","tag-straight-line-logic","tag-united-states","tag-ussr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23761"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23762,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23761\/revisions\/23762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}