Crony Government Is The Threat
Politics / Government Intervention Mar 30, 2013 - 06:37 PM GMTBy: Andrew_McKillop
DOCTRINAL DEFAULT
Some, like Brandon Smith of Alt-market blog (http://www.alt-market.com/articles/1417-big-government-an-unnecessary-evil-that-should-be-abolished) claim the basic problem is as simple as the fundamental dichotomy, even schizophrenia of all persons who on the one hand will defend freedom of action and choice but want sure, reliable laws, order and authority. Smith says it is a split between those persons who value freedom regardless of risk or pain, and those who value slavish obedience in a desperate bid to avoid risk and pain.
The problem is this can be one and the same person.
When we look at what types or choices ever existed for political regimes in all human history, the classic Greek philosopher Plato defined five only: Aristocracy, Timocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy and Tyranny sometimes using alternate synonyms and terms for each of these, for example monarchy can be categorized as a mix of Aristocracy and Timocracy, itself "degraded aristocracy". Oligarchic-type rule, as we know from Putin's Russia can be a form of military backed core business elite for whom the "democratic" playact means nothing. In other words Tyranny. For Plato, the main deciding factor was the split or ratio in each type of regime, between using physical force to control the people, or using intellectual persuasion, that is reason and logic. As the regimes degenerate, force wins out.
Plato and his mentor Socrates ranked Democracy a long way down the scale, on the route to dictators and tyranny and underlined that at any time, there can be mix-and-mingle. Monarchic Democracy for example combines Timocracy, Oligarchy and Democracy. One of their arguments for this pessimistic-seeming argument was that even in their time, around 400 BC in the Athenian Republic, democracy was easy to hijack. It was based, just like today on who talks loudest, wins. Socrates paid with his life for arguing that patriotism towards a worthless state, calling itself Democratic but engaged in long and worthless small wars (what we call "designer wars" today) was a crime against human reason and humanity itself. He was executed by a kangaroo court for "incitation to treason".
WEAK WEAK WEAK
Several of the Plato-Socrates dialogues and discussions, in different ways gave attention to the primoridal role of fear in shaping what type of political regimes the people get. One sophisticated argument they placed on view is that persons who value freedom above all things, fear its loss or fear they will never have it. Those who crave for authority to rule their lives in every detail, fear the "wilderness of choice" or being forced to make up their minds and act in consequence. Both these philosophers had enough experience of society around them to very clearly note that any one of their 5 regimes, when it exists, will degenerate.
We can ask how does Tyranny degenerate, but that is simple to answer. It degenerates into Anarchy which was the "sixth regime" of Plato and Socrates. Also, anarchy was for them a recurring transitional phase or process in regime-change through degeneration. This is especially important to us, today, looking at the economic disaster thrown at us by anarchic-acting (but oligarchic-minded) Big Government deciders. In Plato's and Socrates' time the economy was almost a complete side-issue, but in fact had been shown as able to be heavily manipulated, to his own direct benefit by one of their forerunner Ancient Greek philosophers, Thales of Miletos, about 585 BC.
Rule by fear is always the easiest route, for any elite, any aristocrat, any tyrant, any oligarch. This can be traced to Elite Fear of the type that drives them to pursue the chimera of Total Control: control of the world, their environment, control of opinion, physical control of all persons - enabling them, they believe, to control the future. In turn this underlines the fundamental basic psychology of Elites - the constant mix and mingle of megalomania and paranoia.
The problem of elite fear in no way stops there, with their unattractive schizoid mix of megalomania and paranoia. The fear-based profile of elite minds is a self fulfilling hypothesis due to the constant need to hunt down and destroy any challenge to predictability, everything untamed or unknown. Their dream and our nightmare is to beat socity into the mould of pure predictability, and zero responsibility. Their ideal society is amorphous and inert. No decision can be made by The Herd. To be sure, in the Democratic regime as defined by Plato, plenty is done to fool the crowd into believing "it decided", but this is in no way the case. Never.
In the times of Plato and Socrates, with vastly smaller states than today, the processes and stages they described operated faster and were much clearer to see. This underlines what we treat, or are told to treat as "unthinkable" today: Government is nothing but an abstraction. Simply due to scale, we can argue, the figleaf of "liberal democratic" government is more fantasist and unreal today - than even its Athenian version of 2400 years ago. It simply doesnt exist. The principle is as follows:
The bigger the government, the smaller the Club of Deciders which own and operate it. The trappings are designed to keep The Herd mindless, but when needed the gloves will be taken off.
ELITE IRRESPONSIBILITY
The Cyprus bail-in, bail-out circus is above all pure and simple theft. This theft is almost certainly the "template for further Eurozone liquidations", Reuters reported one high ranking Eurozone finance minister as saying, 29 March. The gloves are off. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/29/us-cyprus-parliament-idUSBRE92G03I20130329
Kleptocracy is easy to categorize using the Plato-Socrates scale: it can be included in any of the regimes they describe, but particularly fits the most degraded of all: Tyranny. Organized theft by the elite is however merely a tool serving their interests at a given time. Much more important and as yet hardly discussed with relation to the Cyprus theft of bank depositors' funds, this now naked action by the Eurozone elite is part of the indoctrination process decided by the elite, and foisted on us by them. It is the imposition of their ideology on us all. We can call it Totalitarian. We do not have to accept it.
The smaller the dominant group, the more corrupt and criminal the government generally is. Only in divine exceptions, of the type Plato and Socrates hoped for (neither were religious, so they did not pray for these exceptions) would it be possible to have a despotic inner sanctum of elite deciders who acted non-despotically and for the real benefit of everybody. Much more relevant to our real world, Plato and Socrates described, from the world around them, how any government will reach extremes of despotism when its Club of real deciders are under pressure from those they really fear, the iron-fisted power elite, often an Oligarchy, sometimes a single arch Tyrant, that lurks somewhere, almost always hidden and out of focus.
This process is more dramatic and dangerous when the public have become so brainwashed, so reduced to total Couched Potato Consumer status, that the removal of checks and balances, the complete removal of public involvement in the political process is possible. This needs an infantilized citizenry, the stupid mass which is engineered or created by the elite, enabling it to do whatever it wants. One spinoff is the elite's use of an oligarchic-type Technocracy, replacing former Bureaucracy.
The breakdown of both respect for, and interest in government is now remarkably advanced in all of the so-called "Western liberal democracies". Big Government is taken as "inevitable", "we have no choice", "a necessary evil" and other infantilized one-liners are mumbled by the Couched Potatoes, who are nevertheless dimly aware they have lost something, and a lot has changed. Thanks to political communication, advertising, crony media and brainwashing from kindergarten-level education upward, Big Government has further corrupted the people by passing itself off as a "social vanity mirror". In other words the most fragile and egoist of individual fantasies and fleeting desires are acted out by glove puppet politicians in powerless parliaments - but these fantasies of the braindead public do not include the theft of their life savings, with leftovers dumped in a Bad Bank.
That does not figure in the Want-It Pack of the butterfly-minded "advanced nation voting democrat".
Big Government means Big Lie. Until the core group super-elite has been formed, and creates a power vacuum around its Charmed Circle, we find that big government will encourage, even force the people to project their collective desires, prejudices, shortcomings and fears on the Democratic Deciders, the crony government glove puppets who decorate the news-TV studios of the Western world. But at key points in time, in the Cycle of Regime change, the structure of big government morphs into a new and worse format from the preceding stage built "only" on deceit, manipulation and misrepresentation.
Big government stops being a “necessary evil” and becomes simply evil, only evil.
THE MORPH
All kinds of signs and symptoms exist for this decisive phase in the degeneration process. One very simple one is the end of Left-Right politics. They become identical and interchangable. Anarchy in the form of total irresponsibility of the elite is another key sign. Naked Kleptocracy is another.
Across Europe today, almost every imaginable type of "party labels" exist for the glove puppets who fill the parliaments and obey their Controllers. We have nationalists, reformed communists, socialists, liberals, workers' rights parties, ecologists, conservatives, christian parties, Europeanists, and of course "democrats". In the US case, the Democrats of Barack Obama have no problems using drones to kill persons in countries with which the US is not formally at war, with no approval from Congress, and to install and then back completely corrupt regimes like the Karzai oligarchy running Afghanistan.
It is not possible to be "surprised" at the near-total incompetence of these pseudo-democratic regimes bringing together all that is worst in every type of regime described by Plato and Socrates 2400 years ago. The shortest description is that the anarchic phase of regime change, through degeneration, is now operating and self-intensifying. What started with partial and occasional acts of irresponsibility, so-called "leadership defects", "isolated bad decisions", becomes system-wide and permanent.
International linkage of what we could (not jokingly) call the Global Governors, used in the sense of "Godfathers", is now stark. In the case of the Cyprus bail-in or bail-out, major ot sizeable Russian funds lodged in Cyprus were removed long before the confiscation measures were started. The playact that "Russian oligarchs" were punished is a simple lie, as well as a distraction. The real Russian elite, exactly like its Western counterpart has moved on and up to promoting the use of government theft of private citizens' funds as “moral under special circumstances”. The elite will decide these special circumstances - in fact it will create them, always by surprise - for the "small guys". Rather soon we will be hearing somber-faced glove puppet spokespersons in their lounge suits announcing that government theft of private funds is "the moral equivalent of war".
Far more than simply a financial and economic disaster, the Cyprus disaster has shown us a rare, but decreasingly rare glimpse of where we are headed. For the elite, there is no such thing as the individual person, and therefore anything you own, is theirs. This is Tyranny.
The process is likely to move fast, now. Other key signals and symptoms can be expected, including much larger use of "government by decree" or fiat declaration, short-circuiting even the glove puppet parliaments, on the pretext of "exceptional circumstances". These will become much more so, as politicians cease to produce major legislation. It will come from On High., for example through Technocrats and their Think Tanks. This will merely bring out in the open what we know already.
In the degenerate evolution of big government, we have reached the point where the Oligarchy, inner sanctum, core group (or your preferred term) has attained enough to feel safe in admitting its true intentions and dumping the tinsel wraps of Democracy, like faded Christmas tree decorations months after Christmas. This is always for the “greater good”.
By Andrew McKillop
Contact: xtran9@gmail.com
Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights
Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012
Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.
© 2013 Copyright Andrew McKillop - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisor.
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