Is Western Civilization Seeking Suicide?
Ottoman depiction of the siege of Vienna by Muslim forces in 1529.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/”Istanbul”, Hachette, Collection “Voir” (PD-Art)
It is rapidly becoming obvious to a number of people that Western Civilization as a whole may be courting suicide. As an example of these concerns, consider the post by Victor David Hanson on the National Review, Europe at the Edge of the Abyss, and my recent post, Europe’s Challenge: Evolve or Die.
The Jihadist Threat
This is not to say suicide is yet probable, just that it is becoming more probable as time progresses. Hanson in his own essay feels less hopeful for Europe than for the United States. In his view the biggest threat to the survival of Western European Civilization is a self-identity problem that collides with the desires of Leftist politicians and with Political Correctness. Because of societal guilt felt because of their imperial pasts, guilt for being well off when others are poor, guilt for having felt a superiority over other cultures, or for other historical and cultural reasons, Western Europeans have either forgotten (on purpose) who they are culturally, or are reluctant to express their own cultural identity. In the past European Leftists had seized on this guilt to encourage multiculturalism and the migration of people from the Mideast and Northern Africa. Economically, this has had the benefit of providing cheap labor for the economy, and socially multiculturalism has benefitted the Left by providing another population dependent on the state upon whose votes (at least until recently) the Left could depend.
The result in Hanson’s view is a “shrinking, statist, and agnostic society that does not believe in transcendence, either familial or religious … “ If European society has no feelings of transcendence, no feelings of being special in some way (c.f. American exceptionalism), they can not bring themselves to require immigrants from different cultures to meet some standards of assimilation, such as learning the host country’s language, or even accepting its system of justice. In many of the Muslim “no-go zones” in Europe – areas in a city where the country’s law enforcement officers, fire fighters, meter-readers, ambulance attendants, social workers, or other representatives of the state can not enter except with massed force – sharia law is enforced, not the law of the host country.
I have already written in Europe’s Challenge: Evolve or Die about how a failed multiculturalism and a large Muslim immigration into Europe have created the “no-go zones” of Muslims in Europe. These provide safe havens, material support, and recruiting areas for new soldiers for ISIS.
The major point of Hanson’s essay is that all of the phenomena that have created the European Muslim threat are present with us here in the United States. Essentially unassimilated Middle Eastern refugees live in America’s version of no-go zones, or if those areas are not yet no-go zones, they soon will be. We face the same dangers Europe does. He writes:
Without open borders, the Democrats would have had to explain to Americans how and why more taxes, larger government, more subsidies, less personal freedom, racial separatism, ethnic chauvinism, and a smaller military make them more prosperous and secure. Yet importing the poor and the uneducated expands the Democratic constituency. The Democrats logically fear measured, meritocratic, and racially and religiously blind legal immigration of those who want to come to America to seek freedom from statism. If a poor Oaxacan, who crossed into the U.S. three years ago — without education, legality, or knowledge of English — does not have a good car, adequate living space, and federalized health care, then the Koch brothers, Wall Street, Fox News, or the Chamber of Commerce — fill in the blank — is to blame, and legions of progressives are available to be hired out to redress such social injustice.
But it is not just the threat of Islamic jihadism that we share with Europe. Other threats to our existence as an independent nation that we share with Europe are Russian imperialism and the threat of a decaying economy.
The Russian Threat
The end of the cold war and the dissolution of the Soviet Union severely embarrassed the Russian elites, and they – with Vladimir Putin at their head – are looking for payback. From what we have seen of Russian operations in the Ukraine and in the Baltic Sea, a Russian effort to regain their old Eastern European and Baltic Sea States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) possessions seems quite likely. We have President Obama to thank for encouraging them in their efforts with the prospect of an extraordinarily weak U.S. President. They have approximately nine months left of Obama’s administration before they would have to face a possibly more resolute president, making these last nine months a particularly dangerous time for both Europe and us.
Russia has certainly been exerting a lot of military pressure on all the countries bounding the Baltic Sea. Russia has issued threats of nuclear attacks on Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, should they join or otherwise cooperate with NATO. In the case of Finland, Russia just wants to get it back into their empire, no matter what.
What makes the Baltic particularly dangerous for us is the very special status of the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia): They are all full members of NATO. If they should come under Russian attack, the United States and other NATO members would be obligated under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty to come to their defense and make war on Russia. The former head of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has warned, “There is a high probability that he [Putin] will intervene in the Baltics to test NATO’s Article 5.”
In addition, by inserting Russia into the Syrian Civil War and the fight with ISIS, Putin has secured a naval base at Tartus and an air base, the Hmeymim airbase at Latakia. Both of these installations are on the Eastern Mediterranean coast, and if reinforced they could present threats to southern NATO. The presence of military threats from both ISIS and Russia then emphasizes the final common threat to Europe and the United States: our very weak economies and the effect that has on our military capabilities.
The Economic Threat
The economies of the United States and Europe are both extremely weak, Europe’s more so than the United States’. There is a common explanation for the weakness of both, which in fact is the same explanation for the weak economies of Japan, China, and Russia. The explanation for all these economies is the assumption by the authorities in control of economic policies that the state can intrude on the workings of the economy with primarily beneficial results.
This is a very faulty assumption according to historical experience, observations, and economic theory. In judging whether the previous statement is true or not, the biggest weights should be given to historical experience and observations, since theory is validated by experiences including observations, not the other way around. However, because the theory casts an explanatory light on the experiences, and also because the theory in itself is beautiful and fascinating, I will start with the theory first.
As I noted in How to Solve Problems in Chaotic Social Systems, any real economy is a chaotic system in the meaning of chaos provided by the mathematical theory of chaos. See Reference [S3]. This means that if you start with two identical economies with initial states infinitesimally different, after the elapse of a finite amount of time, the states of the two economies will be very far apart. It is said that economies are systems that are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. For aficionados of the Jurassic Park films, particularly for the original film, this means that any chaotic system evidences the Butterfly Effect. Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT, gave the name to the effect in a 1972 paper presented to a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?. The flap of the butterfly’s wings creates the infinitesimal departure from initial conditions that results in the tornado in Texas. Lorenz is most renowned for showing that weather systems are chaotic by showing attempts to recreate computer simulations of weather systems by re-running the simulations often failed; Round-off errors of the initial conditions created by the finite accuracy of the computer-represented numbers was enough to produce divergent results.
The fact that weather systems are chaotic gives a very big hint as to the nature of chaotic systems. I will not claim what I am about to write is necessarily true for all chaotic systems, but only that it is true for a class of them. These kinds of systems are composed of a very large number of interacting “atoms”, which are not necessarily identical. For example, in a weather system the interacting atoms are various molecules of different species that compose the atmosphere. The state of the system can be specified if one knows the state of all the component atoms. The state of a component atom is known if you can determine its position in a “phase space” composed of the variables that define the component’s state. For example, for a single molecule in the atmosphere this space is the six dimensional space formed by the three coordinates of position and the three components of velocity. If there are N molecules in the weather system, the state of the system at any one time is completely determined by the positions of the N points in the six dimensional phase space. The dimensionality of the phase space in any particular system of interest is determined by the number of variables required to specify the state of one particular system atom.
Very large systems with a very large number of degrees of freedom, i.e. number of unconstrained coordinates, are sometimes chaotic. In any such system some coordinates are constrained by some sort of relationship between the coordinates of the atoms. Examples of such constraints in a physical system are provided by conservation of total energy and conservation of total momentum. Each constraint reduces the total degrees of freedom, starting with the total number of system coordinates, by one. If you start with a humongous number of total system coordinates, you will generally end up with a very large number of degrees of freedom provided the interactions between system atoms are local in the phase space; that is, atoms will interact only if they are very close to each other in the phase space.
In a phase space for an economy, the interacting system atoms are often called economic agents, which are individuals and groups of individuals, e.g. companies, which buy and sell goods and services. The state of economic agents is determined by the types, numbers, and prices of the goods they are willing to buy or sell, guaranteeing a huge number of degrees of freedom in a realistic economy. There will be an interaction between buyer and seller economic agents only if they agree on the quantity and price of a good to be exchanged between them, i.e. the buyer and seller will have to occupy the same position of phase space or there will be no deal, i.e. no interaction. This guarantees the locality of the interaction in phase space. Local interaction between a humongous number of system atoms, i.e. economic agents, is enough to determine that any economy is chaotic.
Now, what does all this have to do with the dismal economic performance of the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and Russia (among others)? We know from implications of the law of supply and demand any economy operates most efficiently and smoothly when the quantities and prices for a sale of goods provided by a supplier equal the quantity and prices at which a consumer is willing to buy. This is exactly the condition required for maximal interactions between buyers and sellers in our theory. In other conditions, there will be either a shortage or a surplus of the goods, either one of which will decrease total economic activity, i.e. GDP.
But we also know from our theory that if interactions are local, the balance of supply and demand is not strongly influenced by numbers of buyers and sellers of many goods far away in phase space from the economic exchange of interest. Perturbations of numbers of buyers and sellers of other goods far from the phase space position of our transaction/interaction may eventually propagate to our transaction to interact weakly with it, but most of the influences on our transaction will be from phase space points close to our interaction. That is what “locality” means in interactions.
What happens then if the state decides to intrude into the economy to perturb it strongly in some way. Almost always governments intrude by introducing a large perturbation, many times globally as with tax policy or monetary policy, sometimes locally as when the government invests in a particular company. However the government intrudes into the economy, it perturbs supply and demand away from what the society would otherwise want. Since an economy is a chaotic system, this perturbation will propagate through the phase space in generally unpredictable ways, given the complexity of the system. As the government’s perturbation propagates through economic phase space, it will upset supply and demand balances throughout the economy in oftentimes unpredictable ways. It is an axiom that whenever supply and demand balances are upset for a finite amount of time, GDP will be decreased.
This is why economies all over the world are performing poorly. All over the world countries under the influence of Keynesian dogma are depending on governments to solve economic problems. Another way of saying that is countries are relying on governments to put all unbalanced supply and demand relationships back into balance. However, by constantly perturbing those relationships, governments deny each a chance to find an equilibrium. Governments should worry far more about microeconomics than about macroeconomics.
As for historical experience, we have the fact absolutely no socialist economy in all the history that we know has worked well. We also have the observations that Keynesian monetary policy has been counterproductive, as I discussed in the posts Economic Damage Created by the Fed, BOJ Also Losing Credibility And Its QE War, The Insanity of Negative Interest Rates, and The Bad Examples of the ECB and BOJ. We also have the observation I made in the post Bending History that India and China did not begin to grow well until after they moved away from socialist policies.
How Not to Commit National Suicide
So how can we choose to avoid national suicide? Looking at our economic problems, we have to remove governments’ constant perturbation of supply and demand relationships as much as possible. Clearly, we can not totally accomplish this. Government must spend a lot of money on a defense establishment to defend us from Russia and Islamic jihadis, as well as on a number of other functions, such as a legal system, allowing government to be the necessary traffic cop enforcing universally acknowledged rules of conduct. Nevertheless, government can greatly reduce the volume of regulations on private businesses, which absorb a very large fraction of the GDP in their enforcement. The costs of Federal regulations to American consumers and businesses in lost economic productivity and higher prices is estimated to be $1.88 trillion in 2014 – about 10% of the nation’s annual GDP. One gigantic improvement would be to repeal the monstrous Dodd-Frank Act, which in any case was based on the lie that the Great Recession was caused by greedy bankers and investors in the private sector. In addition, economically destructive regulations introduced by Obamacare can be removed by repealing the so-called “Affordable Care Act”, and replacing it with measures that are much more market-friendly.
Another important way the federal government distorts the economy is with the large tax burden on both individuals and companies. Indeed, excepting Chad and the United Arab Emirates, the United States has the largest marginal corporate tax rates in the world, making our companies internationally uncompetitive. Corporate taxes are so bad that even with the bad European economic environment, European taxes are sufficiently smaller to motivate many of our largest companies to abandon the United States to resettle in Europe. In the post The Rahn Curve, Hauser’s Law, the Laffer Curve and Flat Taxes, it was established we can increase both economic growth and government revenues by reducing both taxes and government expenditures. It is absolutely necessary to do both in order to increase the share of GDP that goes to the production of new wealth, i.e. that goes to the private sector wealth creators, private companies. One of the best measures to partially accomplish this goal is to institute a flat tax that is territorially based.
Most important of all is to cut and control spending on the entitlements: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. These social programs have become so ravenous that they threaten in the very near future to gobble up most government revenues and a huge fraction of the GDP. The Heritage Foundation projects entitlement spending at 34% of GDP by 2035. However, this leaves out Obamacare, which should be an expensive and growing entitlement by then if it is not repealed. The Heritage Foundation probably also assumes a GDP growth rate of our longterm average of over 3%. If we have entered an age of secular stagnation with a long term average GDP growth of 2%, the entitlement crisis will hit far, far sooner.
Fixing these economic problems would give us the increased economic growth that would allow us to increase defense spending to meet the challenges of Russia and ISIS. Both of these military threats (with quite possibly a third threat from China) must be met far more robustly than Obama’s administration has demonstrated so far, as I have discussed in the posts A Failed, “Lead From Behind” Foreign Policy (1), A Failed, “Lead From Behind” Foreign Policy (2), Consequences of a Weak US President, A Death Trap of Wishful Thinking, and President Obama’s Passions.
If we and Europe fail to meet these challenges, we will cease to exist as independent nations.
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