https://straightlinelogic.com/2019/11/18/the-builders-by-robert-gore/

Robert Gore

The builders will be in the driver’s seat.

Debt is any enemy of government’s perfect ally. The more a government borrows the more it’s weakened. The consequences of debt, required repayment of principal, and compounding interest are inexorable, forestalled by central bank and government machinations but never prevented. The longer they forestall the more severe the consequences. Central banks and governments have fostered the world’s greatest debt bubble and promoted negative interest rates to facilitate it. An unprecedented tsunami of debt has creditors paying borrowers to lend them money. This weird and anomalous combination, impossible in a world without central banking, portends global disaster.

The enemies of government have only to wait. When the reckoning arrives, governments will find they no longer have the means to wage war or control their populations (see “The Illusion of Control,” Part 1 and Part 2, Robert Gore, SLL ). Their demands on their nations’ productive taxpayers and their depreciation of currencies have stripped their countries of their wealth and ability to produce. Be it by creditors, revolutionaries, or invaders, or some combination of the three, these governments will be toppled and replaced by something new. It’s a story as old as human history…

Sand is sand until somebody figures out how to make glass, semiconductors, and solar panels. For centuries petroleum was considered a nuisance. It didn’t become valuable until somebody discovered its constituent elements could be used for, among other things, light, heat, and powering internal combustion engines. Gold was just another rock until humanity discovered its many virtues, which make it ideal for, among other things, jewelry, microcircuitry, and money (see “Real Money,” Robert Gore, SLL).

A resource, natural or otherwise, is a resource because it has at least one use. Resources are not the ultimate source of wealth, the minds that discover uses for them are. Very few wealth-creating ideas are tabula rasa, without antecedent. They build on prior discoveries and ideas. Innovation, when allowed to proceed, is a compounding, exponential process, creating new possibilities that lead to more innovation. It epitomizes organic adaptation, the bottom-up, decentralized progress that humanity makes when it’s not smothered by its diametric opposite—top-down, centralized command-and-control.

Reality-based intelligence, competence, and innovation will be prized as the world is forced to organically adapt to economic collapse, entropic decentralization, and much smaller political subdivisions. Those who would build new societies will need builders. Engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, farmers, plumbers, electricians, mechanics, carpenters, computer programmers, machine-tool operators, doctors, technicians, etc.—people who know how to do useful things—will find their skills, ingenuity, and industriousness in demand. Politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, lawyers, crony-socialist executives, administrators, college professors, think tank propagandists, criminals, celebrities, safe-space students, perpetually aggrieved whiners, a menagerie of misanthropic misfits, the indolent, the entitled, etc.—people with little or no useful skills—will be so much disposable baggage. Ironically, within this latter group there are numerous proponents of population reduction. Without an exercisable claim on the talents and production of the former group, they may well find themselves at the head of their own line.

The first question those who would found new societies may ask is: What must we do to attract the builders? The proper question will be: what must we not do to attract the builders? For once builders will be in the driver’s seat, and it’s not difficult to imagine their answers. They’d like to hold on to what they earn, so forget theft under the euphemism of taxation. Why should they fund senseless wars or the lifestyles of people they neither know or care about, and probably despise? Bye-bye warfare and welfare states. Forget the frauds of fiat debt, legal tender laws, and central banking; individuals and markets will decide the accepted medium or mediums of exchange.

Builders don’t cotton to people who know less than they do about their occupations telling them what to do, so you can toss hundreds of thousands of laws, regulations, and codes out the window. As a matter of fact, they don’t particularly like other people telling them what to do, period. Isn’t there an ancient parchment somewhere that says: that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? What must be done to attract the builders? Leave them alone to pursue their happiness!

As the world splinters into a thousand or more enclaves, they will be experiments into what works and what doesn’t, confronting two basic issues: supporting their populations and defending themselves. The most successful at the former will undoubtedly be the most successful at the latter because both stem from a common source—productive human minds that are free to innovate, produce, and voluntarily cooperate and exchange, and thus have a stake in defending what they build from armed invasion, parasitic immigration, and internal corruption and subversion. The multiplicity of enclaves will give builders the option to leave failing ones and find or start ones more to their liking…

However, the dinosaur—predatory government—faces its extinction. Those who worship and those who hate state power both sense that titanic forces are at work, that earthshaking changes are coming. Real power, the power to create, invent, build, and produce—the power of the mind—awaits its full liberation. The war for freedom will be bloody and chaotic, but it’s a war that must be fought…and won.

On the other side of that valley, havens will emerge in which humanity is finally free to reach its vast, glorious potential. That’s worth fighting for.

Be seeing you