Has the Industrial Age just been a long economic bubble?

Interesting thoughts from a guy who made some very serious money betting on technology . . .

Utopian Pessimist Calls on Radical Tech to Save Economy | Magazine

. . .

Wired: You say that we have big problems in the US economy and that investors have unrealistic expectations. We’ve certainly been through a major crisis, but over the long term the stock market seems to grow fairly reliably.

Thiel: People take it for granted that their retirement funds can earn 8.5 percent a year. That’s what their financial planners tell them. And sure, you look back over the past 100 years, the stock market has generally gone up 6 to 8 percent a year. But in a larger historical perspective, that kind of growth is exceptional. If you had done the equivalent of investing in the stock market from, say, 1000 to 1100 AD, you would not have made 8 percent a year. During the fall of the Roman Empire, you’d have been lucky to get zero. We’ve been living in a unique period of accelerating technological progress. We’ve gone from horses to cars to planes to rockets to computers to the Internet in a very short time. It’s not automatic that that continues.

Wired: What happens if we don’t get the growth everyone expects?

Thiel: If it doesn’t happen, people will go bankrupt in retirement. There are systemic consequences, too. If we don’t have enough growth, we will see a powerful shift away from capitalism. There are good things and bad things about capitalism, but inequality becomes completely intolerable to society when everything’s static.

Wired: You’re worried about economic stagnation, but you’re optimistic about artificial intelligence and space?

Thiel: I think we have to make those things happen. We should be looking at technologies that might lead to really big breakthroughs. As a starting point, let’s just go back to the science fiction novels of the 1950s and ’60s and try to run the past 40 years again.

Wired: We need underwater cities and flying cars, otherwise we’re going bankrupt?

Thiel: We go bankrupt if radical progress doesn’t happen and we don’t realize it’s not happening. That’s a dangerous combination.

Wired: We’ve had tremendous growth in the Internet, which is how you made your fortune. Why not look there?

Thiel: Obviously we’ve done well online. But how much more progress is there going to be? How many big new Internet companies are there? In the ’90s we had Netscape, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon. In the past eight years there have been only two: Google and Facebook.

Wired: Twitter?

Thiel: Possibly. Still, the numbers suggest a maturing industry. The Internet may be culturally important, just as the automobile was culturally more important in the ’50s than the ’20s, as we got suburbia and built the Interstate Highway System. But the last successful car company started in the US was Jeep in 1941.

Emphasis added

Chrysler Resumes Viper Production

Good news for Chrysler employees - unfortunately, there are now a lot fewer dealerships to sell these vehicles. It makes sense to start with a low volume product that is also highly profitable.

Chrysler's Plants Resume Production, Starting with Viper Operations – Automotive News & Car Rumors at Automobile Magazine:
"After a month-long bankruptcy during which all its plants were on standby, Chrysler is starting to switch the lights back on at its plants - starting with the Conner Avenue plant in Detroit that makes the Dodge Viper.

'At this time, we cannot give exact timing in regards to the start of production at our other manufacturing facilities,' the automaker said in a statement. It shut down all its plants after filing for bankruptcy on April 30th. Executives have said most plants will be back up and running by the end of June.

Chrysler will initially start manufacturing more 2009 model year vehicles, before switching to 2010 production during a normal shutdown in July."

American capitalism gone with a whimper - Pravda.Ru

Fascinating to see how our country is viewed by others in the world. This blog was reprinted in Pravda, once the official newspaper of the Soviet Union.

American capitalism gone with a whimper - Pravda.Ru:
". . . the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed,
. . .
First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives.
. . .
Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses
. . .
The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.
. . .
it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies.
. . .
The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left."

It would be interesting to see what this author says after the 2010 elections.

Penske to buy Saturn from GM

Roger Penske has been a very smart businessman over the last few decades - I hope he does well with his newest venture. He's not getting any factories, but he is getting some good dealerships and the parts operation. He'll also have the right to buy models from manufacturers around the world and sell them as Saturns. A lot of companies make good products but don't have the financial muscle to create a US dealership network - they're going to be lining up to provide products for Saturn.

GM to sell Saturn brand to Penske dealership chain - Forbes.com:
"General Motors Corp. has a tentative deal to sell its Saturn brand to auto racing magnate Roger Penske's dealership group, both companies said Friday.

Penske has signed a memorandum of understanding that would give his dealership chain, Penske Automotive Group ( PAG - news - people ), Saturn's 350 dealerships, the companies said. Penske said that he expects to offer all the dealers new franchise agreements and will retain all 13,000 Saturn employees for now.
. . .
Initially, GM will continue to produce on a contract basis the Saturn Aura sedan as well as the Vue and Outlook SUVs. But Penske said he is in talks with global car manufacturers about building Saturn cars in the future.
. . .
Despite a cult-like following that drew thousands to annual reunions in Spring Hill, the brand never made money for GM.
. . .
"Saturn was kind of an unpolished gem at GM," said Brad Coulter, director at the Bloomfield Hills, Mich., turnaround firm O'Keefe and Associates. "They had never really fully exploited what they developed. Saturn is known for having some of the best-run dealerships. The brand is highly rated. It's a top-notch sales organization."

Today, Saturn production is scattered at plants across the U.S. The Aura is built at GM's factory at Kansas City, Kansas. The Outlook is built in Lansing, Mich., while the Vue is built in Ramos Arizpe, Mexico.

The Saturn Sky roadster is built in Wilmington, Del., but that plant is scheduled to close in July and the model will be discontinued. The Saturn Astra compact hatchback was imported from GM's plant in Antwerp, Belgium, and was discontinued last year.

Penske Automotive will take over the separate Saturn parts warehouse and distribution center in Spring Hill.

Penske in an interview said foreign automakers would be key to his making Saturn succeed, but they will have to match GM's quality standards before Saturn's dealer network will distribute their products.

"As people around the world look at that, they have the opportunity to tap us on the shoulder and say we have product that we'd like to bring into the U.S." he said.
. . .
Detroit-based GM, which filed for bankruptcy court protection Monday, has said it plans to shed its Saturn, Hummer, Pontiac and Saab brands. Earlier this week, GM said it found a buyer for Hummer in China's Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co."

Energy Regulatory Chief Jon Wellinghoff speaks

Chairman Wellinghof clearly doesn't understand the computing power used to make (for example) airline reservations or credit card processing (only mainframes can do big jobs like this cost effectively), so how can we accept his word on energy production? The point of growing our baseline power is to ensure that needed energy is available on a continuous basis. Brownouts & rolling blackouts are bad for people and expensive to industries and eventually their customers.

Solar and wind energy can't be used as baseline power without resorting to costly storage systems (like a big pile of batteries). Nuclear power can be provided at a price that competes very well with both solar and wind power (particularly for the 2nd - nth plants of the same design), and nuclear takes far less space than a solar or wind farm. Coal has plenty of issues, but it currently provides about half of all electricity produced here, and we can produce that electricity much more cleanly if we build modern facilities. This experience would also enable us to compete in supplying other countries that are building their energy infrastructures.

This blindness to our reality of a growing population and a (hopefully) growing economy is a terrible attribute for a policy maker in this position.

Energy Regulatory Chief Says New Coal, Nuclear Plants May Be Unnecessary - NYTimes.com:
"No new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in the United States, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said today.

'We may not need any, ever,' Jon Wellinghoff told reporters at a U.S. Energy Association forum.

The FERC chairman's comments go beyond those of other Obama administration officials, who have strongly endorsed greater efficiency and renewables deployment but also say nuclear and fossil energies will continue playing a major role.
. . .
Jay Apt, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Electricity Industry Center, expressed skepticism about the feasibility of relying so heavily on renewable energy. "I don't think we're where Chairman Wellinghoff would like us to be," Apt said. "You need firm power to fill in when the wind doesn't blow. There is just no getting around that."

Some combination of more gas- or coal-fired generation, or nuclear power, will be needed, he said. "Demand response can provide a significant buffering of the power fluctuations coming from wind. Interacting widely scattered wind farms cannot provide smooth power."

Wellinghoff said renewables like wind, solar and biomass will provide enough energy to meet baseload capacity and future energy demands. Nuclear and coal plants are too expensive, he added.

"I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism," he said. "Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind's going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you'll dispatch that first."

He added, "People talk about, 'Oh, we need baseload.' It's like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don't need mainframes, we have distributed computing."

The technology for renewable energies has come far enough to allow his vision to move forward, he said. For instance, there are systems now available for concentrated solar plants that can provide 15 hours of storage.
. . .
"I think it's being settled by the digital grid moving forward," he said. "We are going to have to go to a smart grid to get to this point I'm talking about. But if we don't go to that digital grid, we're not going to be able to move these renewables, anyway. So it's all going to be an integral part of operating that grid efficiently."
. . .
Congress created significant financial incentives to encourage the construction of perhaps a half-dozen nuclear plants with innovative designs, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu has promised Congress to accelerate awards of federal loan guarantees for some of these proposals.

But a major expansion in U.S. nuclear energy would require a high effective tax on carbon emissions from coal plants, or an extended loan guarantee and tax incentive policy, according to the Congressional Research Service and outside consultants. The leading energy bills before Congress do not provide more loan guarantees.

"If expansion of nuclear plants is the nation's policy, then Congress has to recognize that the U.S. energy companies cannot afford to do this alone," said Paul Genoa, policy director for the Nuclear Energy Institute, in a recent interview.

"The president needs to show his cards on nuclear energy," said energy consultant Joseph Stanislaw, a Duke University professor. "He cannot keep this industry, which must make investments with a 50-year or longer horizon, in limbo for much longer."
. . .
Unlike coal and nuclear, natural gas will continue to play a role in generating electricity, he said.

"Natural gas is going to be there for a while, because it's going to be there to get us through this transition that's going to take 30 or more years."

Chu reiterated before the House Energy and Commerce Committee today that he supports loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants and is working with the White House on the issue.

"I believe nuclear power has to be part of the energy mix in this century," Chu said.

Chu also noted today that nuclear technology, along with renewables, is an area where the United States has lost its lead. "We are trying to start the American nuclear industry again," he said.

Coal currently provides half of U.S. power, while nuclear energy accounts for about 20 percent."

Harnessing Power From the Sea

Science Fiction slowly becoming reality - this is one component amongst the many we need to keep bringing the benefits of technology to the world with a reduced environmental cost.

Renewing Efforts to Harness Power From the Sea - NYTimes.com:
"LOCKHEED MARTIN is best known for building stealth fighters, satellites and other military equipment. But since late 2006 the company has taken on a different kind of enterprise — generating renewable power from the ocean.
. . .
Lockheed and a few other companies are pursuing ocean thermal energy conversion, which uses the difference in temperature between the ocean’s warm surface and its chilly depths to generate electricity.

Experts say that the balmy waters off Hawaii and Puerto Rico, as well as near United States military bases on islands like Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or Guam in the Pacific, would be good sites for developing this type of energy.
. . .
In the approach that Lockheed is pursuing (with another company, Makai Ocean Engineering), the water on the ocean’s surface is used to heat a pressurized liquid, usually ammonia, which boils at a temperature slightly below that of warm seawater. That liquid becomes gas, which powers a turbine generator. Cold water is then pumped from the ocean’s depths through a giant pipe to condense the gas back into a liquid, and the cycle is repeated.

An important advantage of this method of producing energy is that it could run all the time, unlike solar plants, which cannot work at night, or wind turbines, which stop in calm conditions.

But the technology is expensive and can work in only a limited number of places, like the tropics, where there is a large difference in temperature between the ocean’s layers. This excludes many major population centers, although proponents hope that Florida and the Gulf Coast could also be markets. (Other types of ocean energy being explored would harness the tides and waves.)
. . .
Lockheed and the federal government have worked on this type of energy before, after the 1970s oil crises. In 1979, a 50-kilowatt test project was briefly run off the coast of Hawaii’s Big Island. Financing for ocean-energy projects was slashed significantly by the Reagan administration, and Lockheed abandoned its pursuit of the technology in the mid-1980s.

Proponents say that since the last attempt to develop it, the technology has improved enormously. Offshore oil platforms similar to the platforms needed for the ocean energy system have become more sophisticated, for example in their ability to withstand hurricanes and to moor in deeper water.
. . .
Robert Varley, who is helping to lead Lockheed’s efforts, estimated that just 3.5 percent of the potential energy from the warm water pumped might actually be used. “In reality that doesn’t matter — the fuel is free,” he said.

But building and operating the platform will be costly. Harry Jackson, the president of Ocees International, an engineering firm based in Honolulu also working on the technology, estimated that a test plant of the size Hawaii is planning — which is still far smaller than commercial scale — would cost $150 million to $250 million.

Some environmental groups are cautiously embracing the technology as one of many approaches that could help reduce fossil fuel consumption and thus combat climate change."

UAW will sell Chrysler stock

While probably a reasonable strategy, this isn't the headline the union needs now - it makes some folks think that the union leadership doesn't expect Chrysler to survive.

UAW Says Won't Control Chrysler - WSJ.com:
"The United Auto Workers president is seeking to distance his union from direct responsibility for the future of Chrysler LLC, noting 55% of the auto maker will be owned by a retiree health care trust fund and not the union itself.
. . .
The trust--known as a Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association, or VEBA--is supposed to take ownership of 55% of Chrysler as part of a government-brokered cost-cutting plan that union workers ratified earlier this week. Chrysler filed for federal bankruptcy protection Thursday.
. . .
As part of a restructuring worked out before the bankruptcy filing Thursday, the UAW agreed to take half of its debt obligation to its retiree health care trust in equity.
. . .
"This creates additional risk for the retirees' health care; however, with the company being successful, we'll need to turn that stock around, and we have provisions worked in the agreement that even though it won't be a public company until later on, we'll be able to sell those shares under certain circumstances," Mr. Gettelfinger said in his television interview.

Here is another take on the same story.

Health Care Marketplace UAW Planning To Sell Chrysler Stock Obtained From Bankruptcy Deal To Fund VEBA - Kaisernetwork.org:
"United Auto Workers will sell its 55% stake in the reorganized Chrysler as soon as possible to fund a trust that will cover retirees' health care costs, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said Monday, the AP/Houston Chronicle reports. Chrysler owes about $10.9 billion to the UAW-operated voluntary employees' beneficiary association, which will cover health benefits for about 82,000 retirees and their spouses, as well as future retirees. The trust will start paying out in 2010.

Gettelfinger expressed confidence in the fund but said that it 'will be on life support initially.' Dental and vision benefits for retirees already have been cut from the VEBA, and further cuts are possible, he said (Johnson, AP/Houston Chronicle, 5/4). The fund will start with $1.5 billion from an existing health care trust, and will receive about $300 million from Chrysler next year. Gettelfinger added that all money from the sale of the Chrysler stock will go to the VEBA (Bennett, Wall Street Journal, 5/5)."

Chrysler Bankruptcy Plan

Where are the lawyers? This seems like WW-II era Italy

Chrysler Bankruptcy Plan Is Announced - NYTimes.com:
"WASHINGTON — President Obama forced Chrysler into federal bankruptcy protection on Thursday so it could pursue a lifesaving alliance with the Italian automaker Fiat, in yet another extraordinary intervention into private industry by the federal government.
. . .
The arrangement came after an intensive round of White House-sponsored negotiations among the Treasury Department, the union and Chrysler’s executives and creditors. After working through the night, a small group of debtholders balked at Mr. Obama’s final terms, leading the president to decide that bankruptcy could not be averted.

It was a stark moment, and one unseen in modern times, as the fledgling president deepened his involvement in a struggling but iconic American company. Chrysler, which Mr. Obama called “a pillar” of the industrial economy, invented the minivan and owns the Jeep brand.

With Thursday’s filing, Chrysler became the first major American automaker to seek bankruptcy protection since Studebaker did so in 1933."

Global Warming Alarmism

Before we destroy our economy by sending all our industry to China (where they will pollute far more than we do to produce the same goods) we need to examine the Global Warming paranoia. Turning America into a 3rd world nation will do nothing to improve life for others on the globe, and it will make life far worse for us.

Global Warming: A Classic Case of Alarmism - JoNova:













The big temperature picture. Graph and insight from Dr Syun Akasofu (2009 International Conference on Climate Change, New York, March 2009).

"The global temperature has been rising at a steady trend rate of 0.5°C per century since the end of the little ice age in the 1700s (when the Thames River would freeze over every winter). On top of the trend are oscillations that last about thirty years in each direction:
1882 – 1910 Cooling
1910 – 1944 Warming
1944 – 1975 Cooling
1975 – 2001 Warming

In 2009 we are where the green arrow points, with temperature leveling off. The pattern suggests that the world has entered a period of slight cooling until about 2030.

There was a cooling scare in the early 1970s at the end of the last cooling phase. The current global warming alarm is based on the last warming oscillation, from 1975 to 2001. The IPCC predictions simply extrapolated the last warming as if it would last forever, a textbook case of alarmism. However the last warming period ended after the usual thirty years or so, and the global temperature is now definitely tracking below the IPCC predictions."

the Stimulus Plan Viewed With Suspicion

There are lots of criticisms of the Stimulus Bill floating around - this suggestion that it is intended to destroy our political & economic systems goes further than most. What do you think?

American Thinker: The Cloward/Piven Strategy of Economic Recovery:
"The assumption that Obama will need the nation to prosper in order to protect the 2010 mid-term election incorrectly assumes that he esteems free market capitalism. He does not. Rather than win through superior ideas and policies, the Democrat plan for success in the mid-term elections is to win by destroying political opposition.

Obama adheres to the Saul Alinksy Rules for Radicals method of politics, which teaches the dark art of destroying political adversaries. However, that text reveals only one front in the radical left's war against America. The Cloward/Piven Strategy is another method employed by the radical Left to create and manage crisis. This strategy explains Rahm Emanuel's ominous statement, 'You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.'

The Cloward/Piven Strategy is named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their goal is to overthrow capitalism by overwhelming the government bureaucracy with entitlement demands. The created crisis provides the impetus to bring about radical political change.

. . .
Making an already weak economy even worse is the intent of the Cloward/Piven Strategy. It is imperative that we view the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan's spending on items like food stamps, jobless benefits, and health care through this end goal. This strategy explains why the Democrat plan to "stimulate" the economy involves massive deficit spending projects. It includes billions for ACORN and its subgroups such as SHOP and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. Expanding the S-Chip Program through deficit spending in a supposed effort to "save the children" only makes a faltering economy worse.

If Congress were to allow a robust economy, parents would be able to provide for their children themselves by earning and keeping more of their own money. Democrats, quick to not waste a crisis, would consider that a lost opportunity.

. . . .
Because these programs are financed with deficit spending, the effect of the Cloward/Piven Strategy becomes doubly destructive. Talk about a perfect storm! The Democrat stimulus plan is a mechanism whose goal is the destruction of the traditional American way of life. It is bitter irony that the American taxpayer will actually fund the destruction of his own ability to live according to the values of our Founding Documents. It is not alarmist to identify this situation as a coup d'etat."

In these discussions, we need to be thankful that Congressional Representatives get re-elected every two years. I think the Democrats will overreach, and end up getting replaced by conservatives in 2010 who will begin to withdraw us from this socialist experiment.

Our Problems Can't be Fixed by the Congress That Caused Them

This article by Harvey Golub is on Senator John Kyl's recommended reading list - I'm glad I found it.
Click the link to read the entire article.

I Vote No Confidence in Congress - WSJ.com:
"In recent months, Congress has displayed a fundamental lack of understanding of how our economy and our financial markets actually work. Members believe they can say a bank is likely to become insolvent and that will not lead to a run on the bank, or say a major insurance company is in trouble and not have insurance stocks tank. They believe they can extend a $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) beyond its charter and not have every institution under the sun try to get what they believe is cheap capital.

Most significantly, although Congress is a large cause of the collapse of the home-mortgage market (witness the folly of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), members believe the markets are too stupid to recognize Congress's culpability and will maintain confidence in Congress's ability to resolve the financial crisis."

A Civilian National Security Force?

I have friend who is worried that Barack Obama will succeed in one of his campaign promises - the creation of a Civilian National Security Force. Here is my response to his concerns:

"There's been a buzz on what the President had said on 2 Jul 08 about a "civilian security force" which would be "as large and well funded as the military."

I've seen clips of Mr. Obama actually saying this in his speech."

Right now I think the Democrat's plans to politicize the Census may be a bigger threat - the Census is used to determine how voting districts are laid out, and can have a big effect on which party gets control of a district.

Regarding the topic of a Civilian National Security Force:

My initial thoughts were -
1. Is was just campaign rhetoric & he won't try to implement it

2. Fortunately we didn't elect an emperor, so he can't implement it on his own

3. The Democrats are so busy spending our great-grandchildren's money that they won't have time to implement this

4. If they try to implement this, the public will boo them out of office (remember the amnesty for illegals bill a couple of years ago?)

5. The longer Democrats are in charge, the more likely it is that they'll implement this new force in tiny incremental steps (like the cigarette bans)

A national force like this, used internally, would inevitably be used to make the government stronger - at the expense of citizens rights & liberties. At some point government overreaches so far that we can't cure it with the ballot box, but I don't think we're there yet - in fact I think the Democrats will lose a lot of seats in the next congressional election. I do wish we had an alternative to big-government-Republicans that was actually electable.

On further discussion & reflection, I responded to my friend's points -

"Obama was addressing, among others, veterans. I think Obama is smart enough to try to keep the veterans in his back pocket in case there is an "emergency".

Let us suppose he intends to somehow invoke the law that makes veterans under 65 subject to recall.

Suppose he requires veteans to register with local law enforcement as potential recruits and /or police auxilaries.

Suppose he require civilian employees of law enforcement to become auxilaries.

Suppose he requires younger gunowners to join the National Guard and the others to become police auxilaries. Suppose he requires the younger vets to be in the Guard?

These developments would enforce and uphold the Second Amendment under the well regulated militia clause."

* Veterans are as politically diverse as the rest of the country - trying to keep them in Obama's back pocket is probably futile. Our life experiences let us know when we're being taken advantage of and/or being lied to by politicians.

* Invoking a law that makes veterans under 65 subject to recall would result in a blizzard of law-suits and in massive non-compliance, unless there is really serious problems like a world war (possibly another Crusade).

* Requiring veterans to register with local law enforcement for any purpose would likewise result in law-suits and massive non-compliance, along with people filing false paperwork - registering Bugs Bunny etc.

* A lot of veterans might agree to be police auxiliaries - however this cooperation is more likely if it is a local program (like we have in Phoenix) than a Federal one. Veterans have seen the Federal government up close - in service we learned lifetime lessons about "waste, fraud, & abuse" in government bureaucracies.

* Requiring civilian employees of law enforcement to become auxiliaries might be more successful, especially if they feared for their jobs if they didn't comply. Still, such a program couldn't be kept quiet, and lawsuits & voter protests would follow. We've shown in the last few years that voter protests can move Congress (although offensive legislation usually comes back after several months in stealthier forms).

* I know of no mechanism that could be used require younger gun owners to join the National Guard or anyone to become police auxiliaries. We don't currently have a Draft, but if we did, using it selectively to draft gun owners would almost certainly be tossed out by the Supreme Court, and an administration that tried it would be hard pressed to win the next election. "Rule of Law" may be inconvenient, but it usually works to our benefit.

* It might be possible to encourage or force younger veterans to join the National Guard, but if so, they still couldn't plan to act against the public without those plans becoming coming common knowledge, once again causing lawsuits, protests to Congress, and political difficulty for those seeking reelection.

* The Congress is always on a two-year leash - remember the huge political reversal in 1994 - this has the unfortunate effect that our congress-critters are always campaigning and always indebted to contributors, but it also means that the Federal Government can't turn us into a Soviet state - there isn't enough time to get it done before the next election. (For another view, see We're All Socialists Now)

* Creating a totalitarian society (my view of the threat caused by a Civilian National Security Force) without cooperation of Congress requires that the military take over. While this is easy in some countries, I don't think it can be accomplished in ours. Our military leaders (at all levels) have some lines they won't cross, and remaking their home in the image of what they've fought for generations is certainly one of them.

I know young people who thought some citizens would revolt before Obama was sworn in. In responding to such comments, I realized my life experience shows me that whatever our troubles, this too shall pass. Liberal or conservative, Presidential desires get blunted by the realities of getting legislation passed into law, and bad laws tend to be mellowed by court actions and subsequent legislative modifications.

I personally wish our government was smaller an less intrusive, but I'm comforted by the knowledge that flawed as it is, this is still best country on Earth to live in. (We survived Jimmie Carter, & we'll survive this administration too.)

We Are All Socialists Now?

Through buying vast blocks of stock in the nation's largest banks, our government has come close to nationalizing this industry. If we don't sell this stock when these troubles are through, then we will have taken a significant steps towards socialism.

It has taken us generations to get to this European Style nanny-state, and it may take generations to reverse this trend. Reversal is important because as a (European) socialist country; the inevitable poor economy will cost us our leadership of the free world, and force us to become a client state of a more successful country like China or India.

In addition if we continue to educate citizens to be dependent on government for every need, we will lose the pioneering spirit and the inventiveness that has carried us through the last few decades.

We Are All Socialists Now | Newsweek Business | Newsweek.com: "The interview was nearly over. on the Fox News Channel last Wednesday evening, Sean Hannity was coming to the end of a segment with Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, the chair of the House Republican Conference and a vociferous foe of President Obama's nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill. How, Pence had asked rhetorically, was $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts going to put people back to work in Indiana? How would $20 million for 'fish passage barriers' (a provision to pay for the removal of barriers in rivers and streams so that fish could migrate freely) help create jobs? Hannity could not have agreed more. 'It is … the European Socialist Act of 2009,' the host said, signing off. 'We're counting on you to stop it. Thank you, congressman.'

. . . Whether we want to admit it or not—and many, especially Congressman Pence and Hannity, do not—the America of 2009 is moving toward a modern European state.

We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly. People on the right and the left want government to invest in alternative energies in order to break our addiction to foreign oil. And it is unlikely that even the reddest of states will decline federal money for infrastructural improvements.

. . .
Bush brought the Age of Reagan to a close; now Obama has gone further, reversing Bill Clinton's end of big government. The story, as always, is complicated. Polls show that Americans don't trust government and still don't want big government. They do, however, want what government delivers, like health care and national defense and, now, protections from banking and housing failure. During the roughly three decades since Reagan made big government the enemy and "liberal" an epithet, government did not shrink. It grew. But the economy grew just as fast, so government as a percentage of GDP remained about the same."

Baby boomers need to consider whether retiring in the soft lap of the Nanny-State is worth the cost to future generations. The current economic stimulus legislation effectively borrows tax dollars from our grand-children (and their children) - a cost they may find difficult to bear.

Where's the Buzz? Does a lack of high-tech hype hurt our economy?

John Dvorak has an interesting column online this month. Starting with the current sad economic state, he discusses the role technologies companies may have had in causing our recent problems.

Summarizing the Death Throes of 2008 - Columns by PC Magazine:
"Tech is the tail that wags the economic dog, in case you haven't noticed. When something big is going on in tech—such as dotcom mania in the late 1990s—then everything heats up. Right now there's virtually nothing going on in tech except minutiae. Let's examine the problem.

First of all, the newest technologies have not been well promoted. Promotion has always been the key to tech. For example, name the top ten new technologies that were developed last year. Better yet, just name five. Nothing?
. . .

What's missing is the buzz that used to be generated, mainly utilizing a complex mechanism that no longer exists due to neglect—the computer magazine.

. . . while everyone claims that "you can get information online nowadays," the fact is that the online experience is totally different. The writing is different, and the kind of information that can be displayed effectively is different. Both can easily exist side by side. But magazines cannot survive when advertisers have decided en masse that online is a better place to advertise, completely abandoning print.

When you combine this with the push to take what was a unique American industry and pretty much hand it over to Asia, because it's cheaper to do things over there, then pretty soon everything is done there. While this in itself isn't a bad thing, Asians as a whole have no interest in print magazine advertising.

. . . once the advertising support for computer magazines dried up, the fortunes of AMD, Intel, Seagate, even Dell and Microsoft began to wane—as did their stock prices. The horrible reputation of Vista can be directly attributed to this phenomenon. Once magazines lost their realistic and calming influence, reputations were at the mercy of the online mob, much of which, egged on by Apple, hated Microsoft.

In many ways things are just as exciting as they ever were, but you'd never know it, would you? Information is scattered every which way."

Excitement over technologies still drives some of our purchases (Ex: touch screen cell-phones), but many folks are now accepting good-enough over seeking the newest or the best. Perhaps Dvorak is correct that this attitude has affected our economy. I think we can get through this current bad spot and emerge in an era where gadgets serve us, but we don't measure how cool others are by the gadgets they use. The time we spent reading about technology may be better used, but the lack of computer magazines certainly makes it difficult to feel in-touch with the high-tech industries - even if you work in them.