Why are we getting poorer as a nation? If your first thought was "inflation," that is only part of the story. John Wilder's latest piece, "Singapore Got Rich on a Tiny Rock. We’re Getting Poor on a Vast Continent. Here’s Why" explores the factors that allow a country to become rich and explains how the U.S. has taken the wrong course. The factors are:
- Raw materials (whether your country has them or easy access to them from another country)
- Cheap energy.
- Capital investment (e.g., factories and infrastructure)
- Drive and ingenuity
- Skilled labor and physical craftmanship
- The right kind of legal environment
- A scoring system that rewards the productive
And as John points out, the U.S. has squandered its advantages in every category. For example:
Capital investment? We offshored it to China and called it “globalization.” Factories, machine tools, entire supply chains are all gone. Sure, some capital flowed back in the form of stock buybacks and McMansions, but the productive kind? That’s building Chang’s future now.
Drive and ingenuity? Our schools turned into indoctrination camps. Merit is racist, excellence is oppressive, and every kid gets a participation trophy. The spark of genius gets smothered under layers of “equity.” Steve Jobs couldn’t get hired at Apple™ today and with the regulations, couldn’t even start Apple© today.
Labor and craftsmanship? We imported millions of low-skill workers who consume more in services than they produce in output, while our own kids rack up six-figure debts for gender studies degrees. The skilled trades? Stigmatized as “dirty jobs” for decades. Now we wonder why nothing gets built on time or on budget. Welding productivity is half what it was in 1960.
John also discusses why the it was allowed to happen (it has enriched those in charge) and warns that our opportunity to turn it around will be painful.
John doesn't discuss what it will take to turn things around, however, but I suspect that it will take something akin to a revolution or the rise of a Caesar.
For instance, as to the legal environment, John observes that we need "[e]nough government to stop anarchy, not so much that you end up with Pol Pot’s people party. ... Too little law and warlords loot your factory. Too much and the bureaucrats loot it for you." But what we have is "more government than ever [with] regulations thicker than a Manhattan phone book ..., agencies with SWAT teams, and a bureaucracy that treats citizens like the enemy."
John is underestimating the amount of regulations. Just the federal regulations--the Code of Federal Regulations ("CFR") was 190,260 pages spanning 245 volumes at the end of 2023, and more is added every year." And these figures don’t even account for the unknown number of guidance documents issued by agencies that, although not legally binding, direct the interpretation of their rules," the cited article adds.
It’s safe to say that the regulatory burden on everyday Americans is not alleviated in any meaningful sense as long as the code keeps increasing. This breadth and complexity makes it nearly impossible for any normal citizen to know what the law requires.
The Framers understood the threat posed by an ever-changing, ever-increasing mass of laws. Such legal metastasizing “poisons the blessing of liberty itself,” as James Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 62. And the purpose of representative government is defeated, according to Madison, “if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they…undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.”
Are we truly free if we have no reasonable way of knowing the laws to which we’re subject, when the overwhelming majority of them come from unelected bureaucrats instead of our elected representatives in Congress? With a six-figure code, the ominous maxim “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” becomes a reality for too many Americans.
How will this change? Congress isn't going to engage in mass repeals of law; nor will the bureaucracy willingly eliminate their regulations. And even if they did, the individual states similarly have their administrative codes and regulations.
We've never seen governments as complex as today's which complexity is only possible because of the immense wealth of the country to afford it. There is no historical precedent. Nevertheless, Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies argues that societies collapse when the costs of maintaining their complexity outweighs the benefits. So one resolution is that our society collapses. This could be mass uprisings where the elites are simply killed (e.g., the Mayans) or disintegration from wars or revolution (e.g., the Bronze Age Collapse).
Or the government could be forcibly reformed such as through Caesarism: the rise of someone with the military and political power to simply cut through the Gordian knot of the bureaucracy and regulations. Oswald Spengler noted that every great civilization goes through a period of rule by a Caesar type figure who wields the necessary force to change the laws and control competing factions, and predicted it would be the end stage of democracy.
Obama's comment in the face of Congressional deadlock--"I've got a pen, and I've got a phone"--is an example of an attitude of Caesarism. Even Trump's aborted attempt to use DOGE to uncover and stop government waste and corruption is an example, even if it stalled in the face of opposition from the judiciary, Congress, and the bureaucracy.
But perhaps there will come a President that will have sufficient support that he or she can simply ignore Congress, the courts, and/or the bureaucracy. We saw this recently in El Salvador where President Nayib Bukele and the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly removed corrupt judges that prevented any meaningful reform and control of criminal gangs. Bukele tweeted, for instance:
If you don’t impeach the corrupt judges, you CANNOT fix the country.
They will form a cartel (a judicial dictatorship) and block all reforms, protecting the systemic corruption that put them in their seats.
We may live to see "interesting times".
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