poor prognostication for police state

The ruling elite hell-bent on destroying our free country is banking on their police state to keep them alive and in the catbird’s seat. The Straight Line Logic website published a thoughtful article from Robert Gore that suggests their assumptions may be far too optomistic. Their assessment of we their avowed enemies may be gross underestimations.

Needless to say, I like that view. So I share a snippet of it here with a link to the full article.

– Ted –

The Illusion of Control, Part Two

by Robert Gore

When the violence comes—and it will come—the military and militarized police forces will face domestic insurgents who are better armed, trained, supplied, coordinated, and technologically proficient than the foreign insurgents the military has heretofore been unable to defeat. Among the insurgents will be hackers proficient in shutting down computer and communication systems, or perhaps switching off the poorly protected electric grid. The many hacks of government and business systems, now almost daily, indicate they will have little trouble throwing spikes on the information superhighway, partially or totally disrupting government and corporate computer, communications, and power systems. The havoc insurgents can potentially wreak is limited only by their imaginations.

A police state bent on repressing, incarcerating, torturing, or executing anyone who steps out of line will invariably suppress many of its most productive people. That destroys economic productivity, which is why the relatively brief interludes of human peace and prosperity coincide with the times when humans were most free. Police state economies are stagnant, at best, and eventually decay, wither, and die. (Watch the Chinese economic “miracle” fade as the Chinese government fully implements its social credit system and other repressive measures.)

The elimination of incentives, free markets, and iconoclastic entrepreneurialism leaves police states with little for their sustenance. A dying economy yields dwindling tax revenues, and the purchasing power of the government’s and central bank’s debts—pieces of paper and computer entries—head towards their intrinsic value, worthlessness.

When the government can only pay the military and police in worthless scrip, the end is nigh. They will be waging violence on their fellow citizens, including friends and relatives, and won’t be getting paid for it. With the empire crumbling, it may well be the last war the praetorians ever fight. Some will have paralyzing qualms, balk, or quit and join the resistance. Some will go free lance, joining other criminals terrorizing the populace. Contrary to police statists’ pipe dreams, chaos, not their illusions of enforced order, will reign supreme.

A historical epoch draws to a close. Since the end of the Medieval Ages, order, for better or worse, has been imposed by governments, culminating in the totalitarian governments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They failed or will fail because failure is the inevitable outcome for order imposed by violence. The decentralization inherent in personal computing, cell phones, the internet, 3D printing, encryption, cryptocurrencies, drones, IEDs, alternative medicines, alternative media, alternative farming, widespread private ownership of firearms, secession movements, and a host of other innovations and features of modern life are straining centralized systems past their breaking points.

The coming age will be one of decentralization, dissolution, and chaos. Many political arrangements, possibly including the US as a single nation, will not survive. The rulers, commanders, controllers, police statists, and everyone else bent on forcing others to comply with their dictates will resist to the bitter end. That there will be chaos is perhaps the only clear prediction that can be made about the future; the contours of chaos are notoriously hard to predict.