Helmuth,
The appreciation is mutual. I think every theory and ideological cake that is baked on our planet will be iced, decorated, and even co-opted at times by its decidedly nuttier fringes. Billions of lenses out there to see through. The irony of so many differing fantasy versions of reality, I think, is that reality itself is often no less fantastic, and no less perceived as the nuttiest of fringes (given enough time or differing perspective).
Our little "Honest Abe" Lincoln, for example, was a war mongering, currency debauching, nationalist ideologue, and it is no wonder that he was not a proponent of so-called "states rights", given his lack of a principled stance on individual rights, including slavery (as he stated so plainly). That unprincipled scoundrel plundered with self-impunity the basic fundamental principles that others held sacred, and upon which the Republic was founded - and based solely on his own marginal utility for each, which could be traded, sold or abolished in his impatient willfulness and determination to "keep the union together at all costs". That plunged this country into a bloody civil war that never, ever needed to be fought, and for which not a single shot ever needed to be fired. What he did really did end America as originally designed. All that was left was for the vacuum of plundered principles to be filled by self-interest, as the nation's corpse was taken over and reanimated from there. It is also no wonder to me that Obama holds him up as a role model, including his very Linconesque vision of "keep the union together at all costs", which he takes to unprecedented levels.
Reality changes while the primary labels we cling to remain the same. From the United States lens, a liberal is now a leftist, Lincoln was a savior of the union and a freer of slaves, a debauched currency is still called "a dollar"; debt is money; an intensely capitalist, oligarchy-led China is still called "communist", while a very collectivist, socialized, corporatized, protectionist, equally oligarchy-controlled U.S., with all its statutory layers of fear-based micro-control of individual lives is still called "the land of the free and the home of the brave". It's all in the labeling. Our Tommy Boys learned that they really can take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed. That's what we wanted, after all, and they have time.
Anton Chekhov once wrote, "When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured." So if you want something, anything, to be unfixable/incurable - whether it be a computer virus, or an entire economy, dismiss the root cause of its dysfunction as normal, and focus instead on complex and ill-defined terms of multiple symptoms and infinite remedies. For example, define inflation as "rising costs" rather than dilution of the money supply, and the root cause will be just one consideration. We don't even have a single word for "watering down the money supply" so "inflation" is conflated in a way that gets us all nicely pointing fingers and scapegoating in all directions, as we muddle about and fight over the causes for "rising costs".
While many look at concepts like society, government, economy, etc., as the all-important proxy behemoths, just itching to be programmed at the macro-design and macro-control level, most of us are not on that level, and never will be. And what does it matter? We are not a Constitutional Congress, let alone economic power-brokers, convening to decide how things ought to be, and looking for ratification. Even what I wrote in my last post is little more than a case of "that was then, this is now". If that. I fully accept that. I don't point it out to imply that we must reverse course and attempt to return to what might have been. That is gone forever, and exists only as a lesson for a very different present, and possibly different future.
It doesn't matter whether what we say is true or not, historically accurate or not. We may end up changing nothing at all, save a better grounding and a clearer vision for ourselves, as we attempt to see things as they actually are. In the end, that may only affect our individual choices, and that brings me to why we are here in the first place (or at least why I am here).
I believe in the power of seeds, life, individual cells and their scalability. The seed of a single vine can dislodge a stone roof over time, but who cares, when that is not the seed's objective. For it to lift a roof it had to live, and that's the most important part. The core of all government is seeded by individuals, and thus, the most fundamental of ALL government is within each of us. I hold that individual government is far more powerful, more sacred even, than any large scale collective-controlling machination that was ever devised by humans, who are constantly trying to out-clever themselves, and even their own stated principles, as they out-maneuver the "other". They all look silly to me. Clownish - even the ones that succeed. So before I ask what I can do for my country, or what use it is to me, or even what I think it ought to be, I first want to understand what it actually is now...without a single sentiment used to describe it, and with every a priori assumption fodder for examination.
In the words of Gandhi (in the movie) "I want to document, coldly, rationally, what is being done here."
From a strategy standpoint, we can only grow or change from where we really are - not where we think we are, or should have been, or ought to be by now. Just...core reality. Get clear bearings. What is it now.
I want to take that further. I don't want to waste time debating and battling the usual leaves and branches of things that are described with circular references, while the basic premises go unchallenged. That is, for me, a waste of time. I want to distill it all down to the seeds. Even Austrian economics, for all its relative simplicity or complexity, is something I value as but one operating system (regardless of different versions). Our current economy is now running on an entirely different operating system, with a different set of governing assumptions. Nothing more or less. What do I care about the accuracy or intricacy of millions of iterations of formulae that so-called positivists use to "describe" what happens to an operating system in a computer and hardware that must be fueled by a debauched currency before it could even work! At the very least, describe it accurately, and in positive terms that are clear, concise, and irrefutable. From there alone we can have a clear view from which to navigate - if but our own individual ships, if that is all we can do.
