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https://www.truthdig.com/articles/goodbye-to-the-dollar/
The inept and corrupt presidency of Donald Trump has unwittingly triggered the fatal blow to the American empire—the abandonment of the dollar as the world’s principal reserve currency. Nations around the globe, especially in Europe, have lost confidence in the United States to act rationally, much less lead, in issues of international finance, trade, diplomacy and war. These nations are quietly dismantling the seven-decade-old alliance with the United States and building alternative systems of bilateral trade. This reconfiguring of the world’s financial system will be fatal to the American empire, as the historian Alfred McCoy and the economist Michael Hudson have long pointed out. It will trigger an economic death spiral, including high inflation, which will necessitate a massive military contraction overseas and plunge the United States into a prolonged depression. Trump, rather than make America great again, has turned out, unwittingly, to be the empire’s most aggressive gravedigger.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @03:32PM (1 child)
We know what a social contract is, but do you?
Just like a dwarf planet is not a planet, and a veggie burger is not a burger, a social contract is not a contract.
Real contracts are voluntary. The "social contract" is imposed on you from birth.
Real contracts have terms agreed on in a meeting of the minds. The terms of the "social contract" may be altered at any time by 51% of voters, and the new terms apply to everyone, whether they accept or reject them.
The social contract is a political tool, a fiction created and propagated to give the state moral high ground, and deny rebels against the state moral equivalence. Where people with unclouded vision see a civil war as two groups willing to kill each other for power, and have to ask what each group intends to do with that power in order to form a moral judgement, those who believe in the social contract see a noble government defending itself against oathbreakers, and need to look no deeper.
It's basically the republican equivalent of the monarchist's "divine right" fiction.
In the colonial era, this fiction was a lot more believable -- after all, while real contracts are opt-in, at least someone with enough money could theoretically opt-out of the social contract by sailing to some unsettled region of the New World, and building their own life where they owe nothing to, and are owed nothing by, a nation an ocean away. The cost and risk was of course prohibitive, but at least it was an option.
You can't even pretend there's a way to opt-out anymore; the best you can do is trade one social contract for another by changing citizenship, and that's generally a ~decade-long process that requires the permission of one or both masters.
So it's losing its grip -- more and more people are seeing it for the sham it's always been. Don't worry, I'm sure the statists will settle on a replacement fiction sometime within this century, just as they invented the social contract when divine right became useless.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday February 05 2019, @09:06PM
Consider that in the Boy Scouts, we went camping once per month year round with no regard whatsoever for the weather. A couple times I was woefully unprepared for such weather: that resulted in my fellow Scouts knocking my tent down while I was in it, in a driving rainstorm.
The second time nobody knew other than myself, but they all came pretty close to finding a dead body in my sleeping bag come morning: Hypothermia.
So I know from trekking in the wilderness.
I also have the First Aid and Wilderness Survival Merit Badge, as well as an Idaho State Gun Safety Card. I'm a lousy shot but that is easily fixed. Can't buy guns 'cause I'm a wingnut? Guess Again: Gun Shows. There's one every single month in Portland.
With all that put together, there are a great many places where I could freely go to live off the land.
But I don't do so, because I would rather contribute to society - especially _American_ society, for example by writing essays such as It Must Not Happen Here [warplife.com].
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]