The Faltering Empire

Commentary By Ron Beasley

If you don't read Dave Cohen at Decline of Empire daily you should.  Dave sees the future much like I do but he says it a lot better.  In yesterday's post he had this to say.

If we assume that Empires rise & fall, and history tells us they always do, the question becomes where do we stand? Again, it is crystal clear that our power is waning, to wit�

• The Imperial Capital (aka. Washington, D.C) is now mostly out of touch with the citizenry, and thus no longer serves their interests.


• Corruption is rife in the Capital, with corporate special interests, especially in Finance, dominating any actions taken there. This makes a mockery of our so-called "Democracy."


• The things that made us great are falling apart. For example, our Middle Class is disappearing at an alarming rate. Wealth & income disparity in the United States is greater than at any time since the late 1920s before the 1929 crash and the subsequent Great Depression. These developments are related to the outsourcing of our manufacturing base, which began in earnest in the early 1990s during the Age of Globalization.


• The United States is effectively broke, or soon will be. The private sector no longer functions. Our failed domestic sectors are bankrupting us (e.g. Banking or Housing�see Citigroup, or Fannie & Freddie). The public sector grows overly large. We can no longer afford our Imperial Adventures, and must borrow money from rising powers like China to carry them out (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan).


• The United States is heavily dependent on resources (chiefly oil) that it does not produce domestically. Thus America must defend far-flung supply chains to secure these resources, but its ability to do so, or coerce others to sell us what we need, becomes weaker & weaker over time.


• Corruption itself, aside from plain vanilla bribery, is a symptom of a lack of Vitality and a tendency toward Paralysis & Complexity which always arises when an Empire goes downhill. It happened in Britain, it happened in Rome, and it is happening here. I have written that our get up and go got up and went. In other words, we are riding The Wheel of Suffering.


• 

This is where we are at but how did we get here?  Dave's bullet points above indeed show a faltering empire.  Empires don't fail on the battle field as often as they simply go broke.  It also shows signs of a society that is getting old and as a result has become too complex to support itself.  

Is it possible that the benefits of complexity can reach a point
where they no longer justify the expense? Tainter supplies four concepts
to help answer the above questions:

1. human societies are problem-solving organizations;


2. sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;


3. increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita;
   and


4. investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving
   response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.

We live in a society where the government cannot address current problems - peak oil, climate change, increasing income disparity and at the same time can't give up dreams of empire. A recipe for a faltering fail.  Obama was elected on a platform of change but once elected was unable or unwilling to change anything.