Reblogged: How’s Your Objectivity Today?

[ScottP]

How’s your objectivity today?

Let’s do a little check-up.

If America continued to accumulate 1-1.5 Trillion deficits, and as “unfunded liabilities” accumulated, it went bankrupt in the next ten years, would that lead to positive changes, or negative ones, in America’s form of government and in the culture at large?

Would it be an opportunity for a strong, articulate “balanced budget” or “constitutionalist” faction to sway political leaders towards genuine reform, and to make a public argument for a new better way of doing things?

Or would it be a crisis that would lead to an entrenchment of the “aristocracy of pull” in a new, complex scheme, which the populace, numbed by a collaborationist disintegrated journalist profession would be unable to decipher, and thus succumb to?

Or perhaps neither, something different?

No matter.  Take a few minutes, say just five minutes — you know, not long — to think about it, and justify your own answer to yourself.  Preferably, write it down.  Use a timer so as not to spend to long on it.  (I did.)

Then come back, and keep reading.  (Don’t go on just yet.  Take five minutes, and then come back.)

…So what did you think/write?

I’m not particularly interested in whether or not you take an optimistic, pessimistic, or neutral view.   The outcome is not really the issue.

What I would invite you to look at is the basis of your view, and especially the method you used to approach the question.

…Here’s what my subconscious came back with, when I posed the question of myself:

• Is bankruptcy really possible?
• What happens when countries go bankrupt?
• When do countries go bankrupt, and how?
• What typically results?  What are exceptions, if any?
• What explains the range and variety (assuming there is one) of outcomes, and what would be relevant to any such situation unfolding today?
• What would be the fundamental similarities between the current case and previous ones?
• What are aspects of the present context that might differentiate the present moment from previous ones?

Then, my mind started to plot out a few initial answers:

• America is in a historically unprecedented position.
• It has the world’s reserve currency (that by itself is *not* unprecedented, there have been many cases of that, including imperial Spain and before the US, Great Britain)  so that has to be a factor, when currency is combined with a geo-political reality that America is far more militarily powerful that the rest of the world combined. So if America experiences an economic crisis, an important question is: how do the economic variables interrelate with other variables, to shape the context in which Americans would respond to the crisis.

Then my mind leaped to that external context, with other thoughts and questions:

• Japan will go bankrupt first.  What effect will this have?
• What is China doing, and where is China going?  We know they are accumulating gold reserves at a frantic pace.
• Can Russia and China really work together, when push comes to shove?

Then:

• To the essential point: What is the state of American political culture? The DIM Hypothesis indicates either continued DIS-integration, or repudiation  of the “D” framework, and an economic crisis as a “trigger” for M2 takeover. This is the heart of the question, because the issue is: how will *Americans* respond, i.e. by what method of thinking will they even approach the issues before them.  I do not see any basis for an “I” method to have a significant place at the table.   Even if there are some better elements in the mix, they will, at best, be undermined by modal inconsistencies.

So that’s what I came up with in five minutes.
As you know, if you’ve been reading my recent pieces, I take a negative view.  But, when I put the question to my subconscious, the first thing that started to happen was that my subconscious responded with a series of relevant questions that it expects to bring to bear.

That may seem strange. I asked my mind for answers, and it came back with questions.

Not only questions, of course, it started to flow towards filling in the picture. -So the first thing that happened, was my (subconscious) mind insisted on clarifying what is involved, by  signalling my conscious self that to answer such a question requires answering a host of related  questions. Then it started to provide my conscious mind with a series of contextual issues to start setting up the context for a proper consideration of the outcome: world’s reserve currency, military power, Japan, China, DIM…

That would have been just the start.  I had to stop at five minutes.

So what did your mind tell you?

Did you immediately state the answer to yourself and start justifying it?

Did you even have the guts to take this objectivity pop quiz, or were you afraid?  Are you in a position of having to admit to yourself that you would not have a clue how to answer such a question?

That, at least would be a sign of intellectual honesty.  Although, I certainly would not call it objectivity, if you haven’t even bothered to define a view and a justification for it, given the obviously negative trends in society today.  Your life is at stake.   What do you spend your time thinking about?!

If you did have a strong answer to the question I posed, let me ask you something else: did it include a factorization of:

• an awareness of America’s world’s reserve currency status, and what that means, and how that is evolving?
• a thought about military power and how it relates to economic questions, say in relation to how Britain, the world’s most recent superpower before America lost its reserve currency status to the US as it went bankrupt from the world wars?
• a thought about how the current debt crises in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Japan are unfolding both in sequence and in parallel to each other, and how central banks and the people are responding?
• a thought about China’s massive dollar holdings, and the nature of the US-China trade relationship?

I know that none of these things directly relates to the question.  But they form the context.
The context of any particular issue is “the sum of cognitive items conditioning” it in your thinking–in this case, conditioning your personal outlook or prediction, i.e. a claim to knowledge.

So how’s your context today?

A rich pageantry of historical precedents and logically interconnected concretes culminating in a nice fully parametrized causal perspective on the world today and where it is going?

Predicting the future of America is not a deduction from Objectivist principles.  It’s an induction from historical examples,  and a historical awareness of the present, philosophically integrated.

So how’s your objectivity today?

Isn’t it time you made historical literacy a part of your intellectual life?

Of course, the question is: how?

Answer:  Stay tuned! 

Link to Original

[Reidy]

Kevin Williamson's The End is Near, and It's Going to Be Awesome (which I haven't read) is said to do a good job on some of your questions - how would financial ruin work out in practice.  He seems to think it would work out well.

[Harrison Danneskjold]

Did you immediately state the answer to yourself and start justifying it?

 Yes, and I'm going to work on that.  I like your approach much better.

 

But about China:

When France went through its own revolution, didn't the new-France declare that its debt to America belonged to old-France and therefore new-France simply wouldn't pay it?  I seem to remember something about that; is there a pattern to such international financing behavior?

 

If so then, considering how much money we owe to China, it's in the Chinese government's best-interest to ensure that America never goes bankrupt. . . Which, at first glance, would have some very bad implications. . .

[softwareNerd]

If I take a "5 minutes, top-of-the-mind" approach, I come up with this:

 

The U.S. will go bankrupt if, and only if nothing changes about our entitlement programs

I think it is almost certain that entitlements will be changed

Social security is easy to change if the upper middle classes ($100k p.a. and up take a 20-25% hit on what is coming to them), since these families have typically saved a few 100,000's they'll simply have to live with the 20-25% cut. In addition, people earning over 250K will be taxed even more. Along with this, some tweaking will be done: extending the retirement age, perhaps raising the payroll taxes by a percent, changing the inflation-adjustment, etc. so that the upper middle class feel that those poorer than they are also taking at least some hit.

Health care is easy to change if one simply goes the NHS/Canadian route, and then slams a budget limit. Then, the millionaires will have their private doctors and the rest will simply wait in line.

That, in my view, is nearly the worst-case scenario: that we will be like Canada!!

 

In terms of positive political prospects, there is some chance that somewhere in the next 20 years, we'll have a politician who appears like a straight talker. Not any huge defender of capitalism, but just someone who can push through Ronald Reagan type tax-reform. Someone like a Chris Christie.

 

While all this takes place, private businesses and inventors will continue to make progress... like the cheap gas that has given U.S. manufacturing an energy edge over almost all other countries. As the gap between U.S. and Chinese labor narrows and as automation continues to grow, real wealth will increase.

 

5 minutes are up.