Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [35]
Manifestations of Political Complacency/Fatalism
The great danger of complacency is that a misplaced trust in the Powers That Be and their supposedly robust economic and political structures of control and distribution will lull us into the placid fantasy that the State will somehow rescue us from whatever crises befall the nation.
Ultimately, the belief in the almost godlike powers of the State breed a dangerous complacency. The writings left behind by citizens of the late Roman Empire speak with the utmost faith of Rome's everlasting power and its eternal glory. Yet a few decades hence the once-mighty global empire collapsed in a heap--a sharp reminder that no State is all-powerful or immune to financial ruin.
This faith in the powers of the Savior State manifests in several ways.
1. The State can provide us all with the FEW essentials (food, energy, water) in emergencies and extended crises.
In actuality, all the FEW systems are fragile and have low levels of redundancy. Most cities (and most of the populace in developed nations live in urban centers) have a week or so of food on hand and are dependent on long rail, trucking and shipping lines of supply which are themselves largely dependent on liquid petroleum.
While some nations possess enough nuclear generation capacity to provide electricity for their citizenry should petroleum supplied be disrupted, electricity will not fuel the tractors, trucks, petrochemical industries, etc. which are integral to agriculture and the global oil system.
Though the mainstream media marginalizes the "survivalist movement," the media itself rarely offers any realistic assessment of the FEW system's great vulnerabilities and dependency on cheap, abundant fossil fuels.
2. The State will provide the entitlements it has promised to us in our retirement years.
Is there any more pernicious misrepresentation than the endless assurances spewed by the Federal government and the mass media that the insolvent carcasses of Medicare and Social Security will continue to send out tens of millions of checks to the citizenry and its "healthcare providers" even as the entire government slides toward an inevitable insolvency?
The gap between projected tax revenues (and these estimates were made before the current Depression took hold) and projected entitlement spending in the next two decades is around $56 trillion--equivalent to the entire value of the U.S. and four times the nation's GDP.
Add in the costs of maintaining a global Empire and bailing out the banking and mortgages industries for a generation and it is simply not within the realm of possibility that the U.S. will be able to borrow $100 trillion on top of its already unsustainable "normal" deficit spending. It is misleading to the point of pure deception to claim that if the U.S. prints $100 trillion the resulting dollar will have any purchasing power whatsoever.
If your Social Security check bears a number around $1,000 but has the purchasing power of $5 today, will that fulfill the government's entitlement promises?
3. The State will act to protect private property.
There are numerous ways the State can fail to protect private property, or in essence steal it from its citizenry.
The most visible way the State can fail to protect private property is to be unable to stop or discourage outright "street crime" theft via burglary, robbery, etc. The reason why this is a plausible scenario is financial; as police officers now cost well over $100,000 each per year in salaries, benefits and pension costs, cities and counties may simply be unable to pay peace officers at these pay scales as their tax revenues plummet and their unsustainably generous pension plans require ever-larger sums.
A second more pernicious way the State can fail to protect