Active Response Training: When Did The US Become A Third-World Country?

 In his post, "Developing World Problems in the USA," Greg Ellifritz relates how his recent travels within the U.S. has shown him a multitude of problem that he used to only experience in developing countries: broken down equipment such as inoperative coffee makers and card readers (with no set date for repairs), unprofessional looking police, sewage and plumbing issues in businesses, hotels using tricks from the third world to save money, stores regularly out of items, shortages of coins to make change, constant airline cancellations and delays, and heightened security such as locking products up because of increased shop lifting. "I’m starting to think that the United Sates is rapidly becoming a third world country," he writes. "The things that once 'worked' don’t work the same way anymore.  The decline is stunningly similar to what I’ve experienced in my travels in the developing world."

    He concludes:

    I don’t know what to think of these disturbing changes.  I don’t know how to fix things.  I think it’s only going to get worse in the future.  Within the next decade, it’s possible that the United States will be downgraded to an economic “second world” nation.  All the signs are here.  Pay attention and have a plan to live a far less luxurious lifestyle in the future.

    I never thought I would be considering my travels in the developing world as critical training and experience for navigating everyday life in the USA.  I predict a rough ride ahead.

    You know that saying about bankruptcy: it happens slowly and then suddenly? Well, the U.S. has entered the "suddenly" phase.

    And I don't believe this is a transitory phase. The reality is that we are becoming a third-world country. There are many interrelated reasons why this is happening but the following are probably the main reasons:

    1.     Due to Covid lockdowns and the resulting supply chain disruptions (and I would note that China is still periodically locking down portions of its country), the profligate spending by the Federal government over the past two years, as well as the energy policies pursued by the Biden Administration, we are seeing unprecedented inflation. While the official version is that inflation is running about 8%, I have seen other measures of inflation (including methods which would have been used prior to the 1980s) putting inflation at twice that. Consequently, business are tightening their belts even if that means putting off maintenance or cutting back on services or perks.

    2.     The people that keep this country running (and I'm mostly looking at men) are dropping out, whether it is retiring or quitting jobs, "laying down" on the job, or never showing up in the first place. 

    One of the things that the Covid lockdowns and forced unemployment showed people was that there was more to life than working in a thankless job, and so many never went back to work mentally or physically. Older workers have retired, became "disabled" or cut back on work. Old and young workers just aren't putting in the effort. And younger men are increasingly just dropping out of society--something that Glenn Reynolds has explored at length at Instapundit. 

    Don't believe me? The Richmond Federal Reserve Bank reported last year that "[o]ver the past 50 years, male labor force participation in the United States has fallen over 10 percentage points, from 80 percent in January 1970 to 69 percent in January 2020. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it has fallen further." You might want to click over and read what they have to say about declining labor force participation among young men due to declining marriage rates. See also this article at the New York Post on "Why American boys are failing at school—and men are losing in life." 

    3.     Longer term, we are replacing our first-world population with a third-world population and, as a result, getting a third-world society. As Joseph Henrich's research has shown, there are certain cultural and psycho-social traits that distinguished the first-world from the third-world; traits which led to the prosperity and success that the West has enjoyed. Steven Pinker, in his book, The Better Angels Of Our Nature, also describes processes, most of which occurred exclusively in Western societies over the last several hundred years, that made us less criminal and violent. So, no, notwithstanding what the talking heads tell us, we are not all the same.

     And the problem is that things are just going to get worse. Our immigration and border polices are broken because employers want the cheap labor and our ruling class seriously believes that people are fungible. The war on men, as Glenn Reynolds has called it, would cause all sort of outrage if it were impacting any group other than men (and mostly white men)--similar declines in graduation rates or in college enrollment among women or racial minorities would lead to howls of outrage from liberals and elites everywhere, but instead we hear crickets. Because our ruling class doesn't care. 

    In fact, our ruling class not only doesn't care but it appears to be actively trying to destroy our civilization in every way it can. It's not just grooming of children in school and brainwashing them into believing that boys are girls and girls are boys, the "anti-racism" racism against white people (as Michael Walsh explains, those pushing diversity, inclusion and equity really do want you of a pasty complexion to die), but also the deliberate destruction of our economies and infrastructure starting out in the hollowing out of our manufacturing sector by outsourcing jobs to the Far East and Central America, but the blatant acts intended to destroy our energy sector under the excuse of global warming. As the author of the Burning Platform blog puts it:

It isn’t a coincidence that hundreds of food processing plants have been burnt to the ground in the last year. The shutting down of nuclear power plants across Europe, with no replacement energy sources is madness, but is being done by globalist puppet leaders across the continent. Biden and his handlers have banned pipelines, fracking, drilling and anything designed to produce more fossil fuel energy. The green energy lies are spewed 24/7, based upon fantasy thinking. These evil acolytes of Satan want you to starve and freeze and then beg them to save you by surrendering your freedom, liberty, and lives to their totalitarian whims.

And from another author:

    In recent years, we have found gigantic copper deposits in Minnesota and a large lithium deposit in Nevada. Both are needed for an on-demand energy information economy. Will environmental wackos let them be mined? No.

    California really needs a lot of fresh water. If you think that global warming is happening, they really need a lot of fresh water. Will they build desalination plants along the coast to pump water to farmers in the Central Valley that need it? No. The environmental wackos are against it and people that live on the coast think they will be eyesores.

    Instead, no one does anything. Politicians score political points. The problems remain and the citizens get screwed. How do you like paying your taxes now?

      And now, as Philip Pilkington, writing at The Spectator, warns, we are facing an impending global depression. He writes:

    The rapid economic collapse that Britain is facing is simply an accelerated version of what the whole of Europe is about to go through; unsustainable borrowing to fund the gap between high energy prices and what households can actually afford. With the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, there is now no feasible way back. Europe can no longer physically import Russian gas – prices will remain high until Europe builds more energy capacity, which could take years.

    What is likely to come of this? High energy prices will render European manufacturing uncompetitive. European manufacturers will be forced to pass through the higher energy costs in the form of higher prices and consumers will find it cheaper to buy products from countries with normal energy prices. The only logical European response to the threat of widespread deindustrialisation is to raise tariffs. This is the only way to equalise prices between more expensive European goods and cheaper foreign goods, therefore artificially supporting European manufacturing. This strategy will lower living standards, depriving Europeans of cheaper goods, but it will at least preserve some manufacturing jobs.

    This process looks remarkably like the start of the Great Depression. In the 1920s, due to lopsided financial arrangements initiated in the Treaty of Versailles, western economies accumulated enormous amounts of debt. In 1929, the collapse of the American stock market removed one of the key remaining props and the western economies collapsed. Europe went first and, as trade dried up, America followed it down the hole.

    Modern western economies have been accumulating debt for decades. But since the lockdowns in early 2020, this debt accumulation has gone into overdrive. In 2019, Eurozone government debt-to-GDP was 83.8 per cent. In 2020, after the lockdown bailouts were unveiled it shot up to 97.2 per cent. In the same period, Britain’s debt-to-GDP ratio went from 83.8 per cent to 93.9 per cent. These are the largest single increases in history. The run-up in debt during the lockdown was probably unavoidable. But it certainly triggered the beginning of the inflationary pressures we now see everywhere, especially because the lockdowns themselves completely demolished supply chains. So, more money chasing fewer goods. But what has happened since the start of this year is something else entirely.

    The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered an energy price war in Europe that is forcing even higher levels of government borrowing to cover energy costs. Unlike the lockdowns, these energy price increases are putting direct pressure on both prices and the trade balance between countries. Higher energy prices mean that Europe must send more euros and pounds abroad to get energy and so the value of imports rises and these higher import costs are fed through to consumers as businesses try to offset rising energy costs by raising prices. The situation is no longer remotely sustainable. This is almost certainly our 1929 moment.

    In the 1930s, Europe fell into an economic black hole. Its economy collapsed and so all the trade that it did with the rest of the world was sucked down the hole with it. Europe then turned in on itself and started raising trade barriers to eke out some semblance of economic normality. This was a classic case of what economists called the ‘fallacy of composition’: what was good for Europe in particular, was bad for the world economy and since Europe was part of the world economy, it turned out to be bad for Europe too. The world slipped into depression.

    Could the same thing happen today? The Office of the United States Trade Representative estimates that the United States engaged in over $5.6 trillion of trade – roughly 26 per cent of GDP – in 2019. In the same year, trade with the European Union was estimated at $1.1 trillion – that is approximately 20 per cent of total trade. As European falls into the hole, this trade will fall with it. The American economy, already frail, will likely fall too.

    One key difference this time around is that there is a rival economic bloc that could be insulated from these dynamics, the emerging Brics+: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and Argentina – with Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia also joining the queue. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the Brics countries have been solidifying trade and financial ties and adding new members. It appears that the goal is for these economies to decouple as much as possible from the West. If they are successful in doing that – and it looks like they may be – they may avoid the depression. The Nord Stream sabotage could be the point at which future historians mark the end of western dominance.

Well, we will see. While experts believe India will weather a coming global recession, this is because it is truly decoupled from other economies. China is not as its economy depends on foreign trade. In fact, declining trade is already taking a toll on the Chinese economy as the yuen has fallen far enough in value that China is preparing its banks dump dollars in order to buy foreign held yuen in order to try and boost the value of the Chinese currency and probably to offset depreciation pressure due to the People's Bank of China (it's central bank) is pumping money like crazy into the economy.

    Getting back to the point of this post, a declining economy means that businesses have less money to spend on things like fixing toilets or running the air conditioning in hallways. But don't worry because soon you'll own nothing and you will be happy.