Thursday, April 29, 2010

Sheep or Goats, It Doesn’t Matter, They’re Both F*cked

Eric S. Raymond considers the rise of long-term unemployment in a post titled Sheep from Goats: the rise in long-term unemployment, and concludes his thoughts this way.

The unemployment numbers and the deficit numbers aren’t simultaneously going crazy by accident. They’re two facets of the same systemic illness, two major symptoms of what I have previously dubbed an Olsonian collapse. It took us twenty years longer, but we’re now reaching the same crisis point the planned economies of the Communist Bloc hit around 1990. The regulatory megastate is in the process of being destroyed by its own contradictions.

If you hit that “Olsonian collapse” link, you’ll read an an excerpt Raymond posted from a review of the book Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, which reads as follows.

This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class–communism’s establishment, or “uncivil society.” The Communists borrowed from the West like drunken sailors to buy mass consumer goods, then were unable to pay back the hard-currency debts and so borrowed even more. In Eastern Europe, communism came to resemble a Ponzi scheme, one whose implosion carries enduring lessons.

This quote causes Raymond to state.

I found myself wondering “And this differs from our political class…how?”

Indeed.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/29 at 09:33 AM
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