For you to know where I’m coming from you would have to know something about natural humanity, of which you know little. To you I probably come off as intelligent but a little wacko. To me you come off as intelligent but ignorant. It’s like Plato’s cave reversed, where outside the cave lies natural reality. I’ve seen what’s outside the cave of civilization, you haven’t.

I don’t expect you to ever have the experience of leading essentially a nomadic tribe living life on our own terms, like I have. However, I encourage you to read either Limited Wants, Unlimited Means or Stone Age Economics. There are others I could suggest but those provide a good overview of “uncivilized” humanity.

Until you educate yourself in this manner you only have a civilized “cave” view of what democracy, natural rights, social behavior, public interest and quality of life are all about. I expect you would still be turned off by my position, since you have not had my experiences and reading alone won’t convince you, but at least you would have a better idea what my position is and what lies behind it. Otherwise your comments, though at times entertaining, come across to me as those of an ignorant cave dweller interpreting shadows on the wall. Please educate yourself (beyond think tanks and corporate media venues) and provide some evidence of that before commenting further.

Since I do not expect you to do that–you’ve got civilization figured out for yourself so why look beyond that–I’ll just wish you well with your life now. Bye.

Democracy is not for sissies.

“We need to marginalize campaigning in our society, which means we need to marginalize parties.”

Democray is not for the intellectually lazy.

“I do trudge myself out to vote because, well, I guess I’m sufficiently brainwashed.”

One choice is always better than the other, even if only by a small measure.

“But I am entirely cool with people that don’t vote …”

It is precisely because of people like this that the political process has become degraded to the extent that it has.

Why, I could not have said it better myself.

You do allude to a fair line of inquiry, though your presentation of it is what one might expect from someone who thinks anonymity is a virtue. What’s so special about me explaining why the collapse happened two years in advance when others predicted it as well? I have three answers to that.

1. I presented data of quite a few unbalanced trends extending back to the seventies. Both the depth and the breadth of the data I present is greater than Schiff or most other pundits.

2. I point out that such data is effectively hidden or ignored (even by folks like Schiff) and this type of misinformation is at the heart of the problem more than specific economic policies. Indeed, a few months before the economic meltdown I drove home that point on this blog post in a serendipitous response to a WSJ article about keeping balanced trends in perspective.

3. I correlated the unbalanced trends with the growth of a public relations infrastructure intended to misinform us about the role of corporations in an economy. Indeed, I also have a blog post reporting on the white paper Think Tank Explosion, regarding the industry that now receives over a billion dollars a year funneled in from corporations. Schiff and others explain “why” in terms of the economic mistakes made. I explain “why” in terms of what dooms us to make such mistakes and prevent us from rectifying them.

Meh:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....re=related

Now, if you could explain that the whole thing was planned and why it was planned (not why it happened), that would be impressive.

Ah, but if I’m to have a platform that speaks out against dogmatic ideology I realize I need to practice what I preach. Regardless of past history when I experience a current comment that would entertain my readership I should let it go, and your comment was entertaining. Nice job!

I have one small quibble, which I hesitate to add to an entertaining comment. I think “War Profiteering” may be, at least at times, too positive. After all, people can profit through an honest day’s productivity put to good use. As a counterexample, in the case of Haliburton you have a corporation that could not survive without stockholders and no-bid contracts constructing 63 out of 65 contaminated water plants (the numbers are off the top of my head and may be slightly in error), while forbidding representatives to inform our own Marines they were using contaminated water.

No, when the product does not matter at all because making money through government coddled investments is the goal, I think “War Investing” is a much better term to apply to folks like Bush II and Truman … and a good many stockholders out there.

Say instead we had “non-profit weapons manufacturing”. It just doesn’t sound bad-ass enough. How could an enemy take this seriously? “Non-profit” conjures up images of Birckenstock-clad, windchime-hanging, organic herb garden-growing pinko hippies, totally unsuited for the manufacturing of effective weaponry.

Better to stick with the “profiteering”, even if only at least for the sake of image.