The biggest trend change in history.
Supposedly collectivists will reap the rewards of the only things they produce—destruction and death. After the collapse, a global collectivist government will replace the current multiplicity of collectivist governments. Most of the collapse’s survivors will become slaves living on subsistence doled out by the small aristocracy that will rule the planet. The real work will be done by artificially intelligent machines. The slaves will be pacified chemically and electronically through ubiquitous virtual reality technologies and monitored ceaselessly while the aristocrats live in unimaginable splendor. Those who resist pacification and enslavement will be “corrected,” or if that fails, murdered.
This is simply a straight line projection of the present and recent past that ignores a fully evident counter-trend still gathering steam. After a centuries-long, bull-market run, government as an institution has topped out. The plans and predictions of the global totalitarians are the overconfident rationalizations of newly minted millionaires at the top of bull markets—the “permanently high plateau” in 1929, the “new economy” in 2000, “house prices only go up” in 2007, and “the Fed’s got our backs” now.
We already have shining examples of totalitarian collectivist failure in really big countries with lots of people—the Soviet Union and Communist China. The former collapsed after tens of millions died, the latter made a mid-course correction towards more freedom after tens of millions died.
Blithering idiots attribute those failures to incomplete control by the totalitarians or claim collectivism can only work when the whole world is completely enslaved. They ignore the core quandary of collectivist control—it produces nothing. Collectivist governments steal, they don’t produce. A global collectivist government will produce exactly what the current multiplicity of collectivist governments produce: nothing. Yet, this government will supposedly build the world back better from the ashes of financial, economic, and political collapse.
Collectivists have perfected a demand management technique that obscures but does not solve the productive inability of the economic systems over which they presided: murder a lot of people. People are producers so production shrinks faster than populations, exacerbated by the collectivists’ unerring ability to kill the most productive people. Today’s collectivist killers plan to use the same demand management technique, but this time AI machines will make up the shortfall.
Current AI technology isn’t there yet but somehow a slave society will produce the innovations necessary to get it up to snuff. The absurdity of this presumption is captured in the contradiction in terms that will supposedly fill the gap: state science. State science is the approved propaganda of the moment propagated by state functionaries and cohorts mislabelled as scientists—for instance the rampant convolutions, contortions, corrections, and prevarications that characterize the Covid travesty, climate change, and green energy.
As for slavery, Alexis de Tocqueville had the last word on its economics in 1835.
It is true that in Kentucky the planters are not obliged to pay the slaves whom they employ, but they derive small profits from their labor, while the wages paid to free workmen would be returned with interest in the value of their services. The free workman is paid but he does his work quicker than the slave; and rapidity of execution is one of the great elements of economy. The white sells his services, but they are purchased only when they may be useful; the black can claim no remuneration for his toil, but the expense of his maintenance is perpetual; he must be supported in his old age as well as in manhood, in his profitless infancy as well as in the productive years of youth, in sickness as well as in health. Payment must equally be made in order to obtain the services of either class of men: the free workman receives his wages in money; the slave in education, in food, in care, and in clothing. The money which a master spends in the maintenance of his slaves goes gradually and in detail, so that it is scarcely perceived; the salary of the free workman is paid in a round sum and appears to enrich only him who receives it; but in the end the slave has cost more than the free servant, and his labor is less productive.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume One, 1835
The slaves will own nothing because they’ll produce next to nothing. It’s doubtful they’ll be any happier with that state of affairs than slaves have been in the past.
Turning again to the historical record, the accomplishments of state science and industry are an almost undetectable molehill compared to the Everest of innovations and wealth flowing from free scientific inquiry and production. Picking through this meager molehill, one finds that many state “accomplishments” are merely new and improved ways to kill people.
