How To Discern The Euro-Zone Problem

It’s beginning to look a lot like the 1930’s as France goes ‘Socialist’ in its latest election.  Needless to say, the United States has been there since 2008.  The difference is understood within the discreet immeasurable social aggregates that animate our Union; people throughout this Nation are fed up, most seek to check the Socialist agenda that has grounded the American left since The New Deal.  My guess is that innumerable fiscal and social crisis’ similar to the failure of the international system that underwrote the pretense of stability throughout Western Europe in its prewar era will play out again.  We hope contemporary political parties throughout Europe don’t lose the allegiance of its citizenry for that would be the first step towards another round of radicalized politics that animated the 1930’s.

For those not informed regarding the social and political impact that is the ‘Eurozone’ this post will examine both the trajectory that animated the writers of the Eurozone and its failure; but particular attention will be played to the sheer ignorance that Eurozone Socialists embody as they display populist fiscal rhetoric as a bid to forestall the inevitable.

The European Union’s government structure is far closer to the US Articles of Confederation of the 1780’s than it is to the federal system that animates our current Republic.

Each Nation within the Eurozone has a separate Treasury, but each is firmly tied to the European Central Bank.  Structural governance is only part of the problem.  Essentially, each Nation must be self-sufficient in revenues or borrowing to fund its expenditures.  Spendthrift Nations like Greece tax/spend more than they grow; this is intrinsic to the political culture of socialist regimes. The European Commission lacks the taxing resources to fund nation-state shortages.  How else to put it:  what the Socialists could not get politically they gained through an economic federation, and a weak one at that!   The European Union is self-imposed Socialism just look at the results in Greece!

Similar to how all other Revolutions end, Socialists seek passionate partisan wedge issues from which to promote radical ideas of equality.  We have this agenda today in Gay Marriage.  Nevertheless, Socialist partisans seek rents in the form of political support.  At the least these partisan utopian radicals decry a market based system that is inherently unjust.

Fredrick Hayek wrote for decades how free market competition would not necessarily reward the deserving.  We don’t cooperate because we sense the need to properly reward the merits of others.  We cooperate in the free market system simple because the mark of a free individual is to be dependent for his livelihood not on other people’s views of his merit but solely on what he has to offer others.  Peter Drucker was right to scold idealist students into accepting a stark reality:  wealth is inseparable from the creation of value.

With today’s revolutionary credo of decentralized, small, self-organized, voluntary aggregates of individuals pursuing value on a globalized scale, why opt for greater centralization whether it be Dodd-Frank or the Eurozone?

A market system cannot work properly if a society aims to dole out rewards and punishments like a teacher in a classroom.  Market institutions are anonymous and blind.  Imposing preordained scheme of merit and reward will make coordination between individuals, and therefore wealth creation more difficult.  Any technocratic vision of budget acumen has its informed mores from the Socialists in France & Germany.  As the European social model has now reached its inevitable breaking point, we should anticipate how America will suffer if we elect more technocrats.

“The cost of forcing heterogeneous populations with disparate histories, languages and cultures into a single national currency will be prohibitively high.”  That was Milton Friedman in 1999. The Continental United States and all of North America will enact what is playing out in Athens.  Let’s explain.

What did Friedman know that the Socialists that constructed the Eurozone didn’t?  He knew that any proposed Eurozone would not be an optimal currency area.  Europe lacked wage flexibility and labor market mobility, both necessary for a functioning monetary union.  Europe lacked a system of federal fiscal transfers like our Central Bank that functions to maintain liquidity.  Given relative developments of inflation among Union member states, Eurozone members were forbidden from currency depreciation to boost exports.  The austerity that is now eating away at the southern periphery of the Mediterranean is consequence of not pursuing pro-growth policies.

Absent from having to acknowledge the utter intellectual failure that is Keynesian thought, Euro-Socialists and their fellow travelling laze faire technocrats only have austerity to fall back on.  Whatever happened to classical economics?  Given how liberals like the authoritarian mien of centralization, they ignore any idea that actually might thwart a ruling elite.

The fiscal, economic issues facing the Eurozone can only be resolved through an intellectual revolution that favors classical economics: one that appreciates economic fundamentals like wage growth, price discovery, currency appreciation and political ideals like individual sovereignty.  Productivity can be raised dramatically in a short time by incentivizing people; dump arbitrary regulation, the very essence of tyranny is power expressed arbitrarily; regulatory, fiscal and classical macroeconomic aggregates that sustain market efficiency are responsible for wealth creation.  Market volatility will remain until either an election or classical ideals are implemented.

The technocrat’s vision of efficiency and authority, the twin enormities that dominate the fiscal and economic intellectual lives of technocrats are on display throughout Europe today:  a stronger Eurozone Union that increases the expressed authority of bureaucrats will not help nor enhance the quality of democracy that underwrites the American Republic.  Dido for Europe.  Nor can the proposed interests of equality, fairness or harmonization.  All violate the principle of subsidiarity; the foundation of equity in a free market economy.

Its easy, you either decide to help finance government or you help finance growth.  Unfortunately, they’re not the same nor do they have the same interests.

How does this end?  The Eurozone will fracture along sectarian lines, this will push the Socialists to pursue a centralizing agenda inimical to democracy.  As for Eurozone Socialists:  they can begin reading the Federalist Papers, for it is there they can inform their specialized fiscal banter to the contours of our present political economy:  decentralized, agile and hungry to enjoy the arduous labor that accompanies personal growth.

Dr. Brendan Simms: Strategery

I’ve always loved how the experts, the specialized mandarins and policy wonks ridiculed Bush for his malapropisms. The overly specialized development of precise language does have its flaws, if only exposed in the caldron of the mundane.  Where else is that found if not in war?

Bush knew his limitations.  He also knew how perilous we were in 2006.  The whole ‘bloody’ mess (as the British say) of Iraq, nearly brought the entire edifice down.  This says nothing of our adversaries.  It points to the intrinsic weakness of not shaping Republican institutions of government.  The ‘founding’ was understood to be decentralized, that is why we employ the terms ‘limited’ and ‘enumerated’ to evidence the strength our American Angelo insight that ‘monolithic’ is dangerously suspect to collapse.    I dare say we nearly lost it all in late 2006.  But the strength of our executive saw it through.  I cannot hope that we’ll be so lucky the next time around.

Its not that Henry Kissenger is all the rage; its the simple fact that democracy is not the solution to unfree societies.

What we are witnessing throughout the Levant and North Africa is dangerously close to how Lenin and his satanic cohorts co-opted the Russian Revolution:  Red October has its precedence with other militancy embodied in Marx et al.

This is why ‘offshore balancing’ (term used by students of international security studies) to denote the option our current President will use as he ‘secures’ our retreat in the AfPak region is dangerous.

I  understand that no single nation can change Afghan culture.  Without decades of Imperial style rule; be it direct or indirect, Afghan culture is impervious to the social and political entreaties that dominate the west.  I also understand that when we leave this region and give the imperative of action over to the Taliban, we in the West have abdicated.  ’Offshore balancing’ does nothing to address this impact.

As Dr. Petraeus noted throughout his writings, when American soldiers secured the civilian population, the quality of intelligence skyrocketed. A previous political impasse was resolved in favor of an American balance of power.  This only proves the hollowness of an Air-centric mindset that dominates the doctrines of American institutions.  But any reading of Arnold Toynbee or Marshall McLuhan could have demonstrated that!

What I fear as we engage the AfPak theatre is that ‘offshore balancing’; counter-terrorism measures that ground our deployment in terms tied to failed Air-centric doctrines, will be the final refuge for political opponents of our ‘War on Terror’.

This will not play well in Islamabad or Karachi.  Our enemies will read a measure of our force posture consistent to the exposed weakness our flaccid liberalism has become and draw their own conclusions.  You can’t fight a war using the means of political correctness!

I think a proper hermeneutics would expose a fallacy!  A close look at ‘offshore balancing’ and the tactics of counter-terrorism will expose both bad strategy and bad history.  For the story of the past century is the story of very bloody and expensive but sustained and successful interventions in Europe and Asia.

The misplaced historical emphasis is that Britain became great by avoiding a Continental commitment, exploiting maritime relations to build an empire linked by trade.

This interpretation (misplaced as it is) shaped the life and motivation of Alfred Thayer Mahan, and through him Theodore Roosevelt.  By simply controlling the commons, Britain excused herself from becoming embroiled in land wars on the European Continent.

If only it were true.

This interpretation is a caricature of British strategy.  As Dr. Brendan Simms of Cambridge University so convincingly argues in his recent ‘Thee Victories & A Defeat:  The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire”, the pattern of Britain’s success was not in sheltering behind the Royal Navy but in maintaining either through subsidizing allies or by directly intervening, the liberties of Europe.  Through this political means, Whitehall maintained a balance of power favorable to itself.  This system of realism was embodied throughout the lowlands of Belgium and Holland, where Whig leadership found a niche and thrived to advance British Imperial social and political interests.

This strategy gave win for both the 18th & 19th centuries; the defeat described by Dr. Simms is the loss of the American colonies; the result of Tory rule and the embrace of pure navalism.

Properly understood, sea power- the security and ability to efficiently trade upon the international commons BEGINS ASHORE.  Like Britain in the lowlands, Americans must secure the outer, continental perimeter to ensure our interests and the common interest in a stable and relatively liberal, if even authoritarian international system.

This expresses the clear pattern of American strategic behavior throughout the early 20th century.  For the deepening American involvement in the greater Near East centered around the Persian Gulf cutting across the region from West Africa to Southwest Asia, likewise conforms to this STRATEGERY.  America has already pursued ‘failed’ ‘offshore balancing’ from Franklin Roosevelt’s agreements with Ibn Saud through dual containment of the Clinton years.  Both failed to produce a satisfactory outcome.

I think Petraeus’ hard fought sentiments are true:  the United States & NATO are a long way from securing the liberties of the region, but it would be both difficult and dangerous to renege on this continental commitment.

The American display of strategic genius will not be found in de Gaulle or Bismark (ironically, both are realists), but in a willingness to persevere like Imperial Brits, to occasionally regroup without retreating, and to remember that ultimate success is to be found ashore.

Perhaps all those specialized policy wonks at State and Pentagon could start reading Arnold Toynbee, specifically his remarks on the idolization of ephemeral technique as the criteria embodying imminent failure.

Jeane Kirkpatrick: Reagan’s Iron Lady In Waiting

During the Reagan Administration no one threatened James Baker more than Dr. Jeane Kirkpatrick.  How I miss Reagan’s Iron Lady!

Professor of International Relations at Columbia University, Cold War hawk; a Conservative with credentials and temperament that horsewhipped the Shia throughout the lands of Arabia, the Levant and Nicaragua.  If ever there was a women with balls it was Dr. Kirkpatrick.

A born Democrat in an age when Republicans were lost isolationists.  She embodied that arduous spirit of the Frontier that Fredrick Jackson Turner so lovingly engaged.  Come to think of it she was the perfect embodiment of a Cold War child that is found throughout the corpus of Billy Joel, I have in mind the tenor of ‘Leningrad’.

Born during the Great Depression to hard-scrabble oil drilling parents in 1926;  Jeane would call Duncan, Oklahoma home.  Socially grounded in the conservative, Lincolnphile patois that dominates most of North America.  She left that sheltered world to pursue her intellectual ambitions in New York and later Washington.

Her story is significant for several reasons, for the current domestic and foreign policy fight that continue to rage as our ‘culture war’ are deeply rooted in battles that were fought decades ago.  Yes, today’s political action is rearguard; a look at the ground and you’ll see the battle scars of previous stalwarts, smitten, exhausted but RIGHT!

Jeane Kirkpatrick was at the center of every significant domestic and foreign policy battle  that raged within the White House.  She excelled in hand-to-hand intellectual in-fighting, the kind where both reputations and livelihoods were made and destroyed; SHE HAD A SHOVING MATACH WITH ED MEESE OVER THE ‘GO AHEAD’ TO IGNORE CONGRESSIONAL AMENDMENTS SHE KNEW WERE UNCONSTITUTIONAL.  Truth bet told, she was right, for the Boland and Church amendments violated the separation of powers doctrine.  The impact was the false outrage that became Iran Contra.  She knew the Congressional ‘dog-and-pony’ show that dressed itself up in populist outrage, was nothing more than false righteousness.

How did she come to such hardened political insight?

She new the Satanic grasp that became atheist Marxism.  In the middle of the 1980′s, during the height of glasnost, the Russian GULAG dissident Andrei Sakharov approached the American delegation with great ambition screaming, ‘Kirkpatski, Kirkpatski, where is Kirkpatski’.  Upon finding her and seizing her hand he said with great emotion: YOUR NAME IS KNOWN IN EVERY CELL OF THE GULAG.

Absolutely no other official in the Reagan administration had as much throw-weight as Jeane.

As a public intellectual who wrote engaging, influential articles about American foreign policy and that nature of totalitarianism, she refused to shrink from her responsibilities as an American chosen to represent American interests, which to her thinking were moral imperatives.

As U.S. ambassador to the U.N.,  she relished how after Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s tenure there, she would often be sighted crossing Manhattan avenues where traffic would stop and New Yawkers scream:  ”Give’m Hell Jeane”.  She had it in spades and brooked no sentiments as she engaged brutal regimes throughout the U.N.

As a Reagan cabinet official who helped shape the formal policy that brought down Soviet Marxism, it is now time to draw close and examine with relish the very cultural, political insights that drove this most humble public servant.

Dr. Peter Collier has done just that with the release of ‘Political Women:  The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick’, Encounter Books 2012.

It is now more than five years since her death, and more than twenty-five years since she formally left public service to teach at Georgetown University.  This book is an earnest; a down payment one can return to often, even in prayer.  By God the women suffered for her intellectual convictions.

The Republican ideals and values that Kirkpatrick defended amid a tumult of controversy remain relevant; her career shed bright light on how a private citizen can rise to prominence and advance the ideals of American democracy; to the benefit of all:  she equals both Reagan and Karol Wojtyla!

Jeane Kirkpatrick resented being called ‘tough’ for having attitudes that would, among men, be considered assertive.  She really didn’t like the feminist movement, which derided her, even though, she was the most influential women in the history of American foreign policy.

All her life, she resisted the appeal to radical politics.  At Barnard College in New York City, she discovered her mentor:  Franz Newmann.  Only one man had her heart:  Evron Kirkpatrick, a political scientist with a background in foreign intelligence with State whom she married in 1955.  It was here that we find Jeane mentoring Hubert Humphrey at the University of Minnesota.

These Cold War liberals became increasingly embattled throughout the 1960′s with the rise of the New Left and radical feminism; but it remained for the Democratic Party to collapse and the Cold War consensus favoring a containment strategy to prevail before she would settle in and sharpen her way forward to an impasse.

With Humphrey’s defeat in 1968; the death toll was ringing for Cold War liberals.  She resisted this by organizing the Coalition for a Democratic Majority immediately after Humphrey.  She failed.  After the resounding defeat of McGovern in 1972 the CDM effort came to a close when Jimmy Carter beat Henry Scoop Jackson.  This was 1976, Carter and his coterie ignored CDM.  Jeane pulled up her convictions and rode out the storm.

She immediately became very alarmed by the Carter foreign policy, and in November of 1979 penned the infamous essay in Commentary magazine titled ‘Dictatorships & Double Standards.’  The essay was an attempt to explain what she believed was the administrations responsibility for two disastrous setbacks to democracy and American interests that had occurred on Carters watch:  the overthrow of the Shah of Iran by Islamic student radicals and the triumph of Jesuit Sandinistas in Nicaragua following the coup against Anastasio Somoza.

Kirkpatrick’s scholarly polemic was built on three core ideas.  Her first political ideal was a reflection on how DEMOCRACY IS NOT THE ANSWER TO UN-FREE SOCIETIES.  This was her political insight to studying the Peron system in Argentina and later the subject of her first book in 1971, titled ‘Leader & Vanguard in Mass Society’.  Dr. Kirkpatrick deeply believed that authoritarian societies (the kind that dominate Central/South America) were far less repressive and controlling than totalitarian societies.  For Kirkpatrick, authoritarian societies don’t seek to impose revolutionary idealism upon the individual.  In her view, they were more likely to evolve in a liberal direction.

Her second insight was the firm cultural belief that democracy evolves slowly after a nations long tenure with limited forms of political participation.  For Kirkpatrick, it was the height of folly to demand democracy in a nation/culture besieged by an insurgency.  Her third insight was the firm knowledge that America must assist authoritarian nations who are weak and susceptible to the passionate rhetoric that ground the appeal to revolutionary autocracy.

She was no idealist.  Kirkpatrick changed US behavior throughout her tenure at the UN in fundamental ways.  She deployed her political team in a manner that evidenced a common voice, instructing them to NEVER clear their speeches with State bureaucracy.  She also insisted that her political appointees at the UN treat the UN like a political operation in Chicago, where tough deals were cut on the basis of enlightened self interest.    She absolutely demanded from Congress and the UN that all foreign aid must be linked to favorable UN votes.  NOW THAT’S BALLS!!!!

As her star was waning within the Reagan administration; due to the personal intrigue of James Baker.  Kirkpatrick made her broadside in the 1984 Republican convention where she lambasted the ‘San Francisco Democrats’ as the ‘blame America first crowd.’  It remained the speech of the political season.  Because of it, she became a celebrity and was asked to run a Presidential primary.  She refused for the simple reason that her humility and self knowledge curtailed her competitive ambition.

Her last book before her death was ‘Making War To Keep Peace’.  This remains the finest political expose on the limitations of idealism in American foreign policy.  Her insight was simple:  America must balance both security and democracy.  This became the twin goals of American foreign policy.

Her husband died in 1995, she was loved by two sons.  One is a lawyer in Miami, another is a Buddhist monk.

Her final years were wrought with the recognition that she had indeed prepared herself by a lifetime of exacting study, by strenuous encounters in the public square to acknowledge America as the new order for the ages.  When she was asked to serve upon the center stage of history, she was able to play her part with brilliance and lasting effect. She is best remembered not so much as a political leader, but a model citizen.

If Lincoln ever wore a skirt:  it was Jeane Kirkpatrick.

I miss her.

Castlereagh: The Irish Brit

The daunting challenge for politicos is reconciling realism to morality.  Without ‘Natural Rights’ doctrine, this cannot be done!  All the more difficult when your Lord Casterleagh, the man responsible for the creation of Presbyterian ‘Orangemen’ that ran the ‘Troubles’ in the north.  I must say, such a reconciliation is far easier when performed from inside a pure ideological grasp of history, one that views ‘stability’ as the final good.  But what of the Arab Spring?  What of revolutions that seek to ground a regime in natural right?  What of the conventions of the majority?  What of the rights of the minority?  Although Madison and the Americans got much right, how is one to reconcile the achievements of Metternich or Casterleagh outside moral realism.  Tricky right!

Being an Irish Catholic, I was hard pressed when reading John Bew’s biography of ‘Casterleagh:  Enlightenment, War and Tyranny’.  I had the same problem when divining, grasping the motivations of those throughout Southeast Asia who admired the impact that became the Truman Doctrine.  I suppose you just have to judge policy (not individual behavior) from the contingencies of the time.  Fair enough.  And what of the need to reconcile?  Is understanding enough!

My own education shapes me to move past understanding, to something far more less empirical, yet just as true; an understanding of moral realism from within the necessity of expressed power.  Ironically, Lincoln like Lord Acton, both knew this was perilous; might cannot make right!  What if ones understanding of right (moral) fortified a policy of violence?  Then the act of violence must be in defense of moral norms.

None of this clarifies Casterleagh and his tenure of Northern Ireland.  Historians find relief in propping up the necessity that London and its proxies in Ireland should construct a Union as bulwark against Republicanism.  True enough.  But how to make sense of the genocidal grasp the Orangemen had over the Fenians?  Has Ian Paisley the depth of Karol Wojtyla?  Is there more to Ulster Unionism than the necessarily constrained view of besieged settlers?

A citation grounded in ‘historicism’ is simply not sufficient.

I’m left believing that Winston Churchill had a far more sophisticated grasp of Casterleagh’s Orangeman than Casterleagh.

I wonder though, can a truly enlightened perspective, a synoptic view of both the limitations of ‘historicism’ and the necessity of realist power be reconciled?  They can, if we honor natural right.  I have in mind James Joyce.

Presently, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) if often portrayed as illiberal and retrogressive, this stands in sharp contrast to the prevailing cosmopolitan outlook that grounded Belfast Unionism.  How did such benign enlightenment impact Joyce?

Casterleagh died in 1822.  A full hundred years before Joyce.  I understand the horrors of academic ignorance; the kind of pastiche that rules the postmodern sensibility.  I have in mind something practical when I city Joyce as an earnest from which to wade though the impact that was Casterleagh and the need to reconcile both the failure of ‘historicism’ as an answer resolving the need to discern a path through ‘power’ & ‘right’.  Joyce is a modernist.  He hated being Irish.  My previous post of Joyce cannot be cited here, but his world-view portrays a self loathing, a devout hatred that borders the satanic.  For Joyce, their is no grace, no foundation from which an individual can find his/her way in the world.  A remorselessness pervades his pages; a grasp totally at odds with sacramental realism.  Only America (natural right doctrine) solves the passionate partisan tribute that was Casterleagh and its impact that became the misplaced optimism of Joyce.  Toynbee, speaks lovingly of ‘penalization’ and its political, social impact in new lands:  Australia, America come to mind.  I struggle to admit it, but I find only within new frontiers of a ‘promised land’ can the perplexed contorted policy of Casterleagh be resolved.  The only other ‘non answer’ is a sentimental optimism, a reflexive moralism unsuited to the rigors of serious inquiry.

My own need to resolve Casterleagh was discovered in the insight that goaded Churchill throughout his time in Whitehall.  The man had boatloads of character!

It is understandable that Dr. Bew’s biography of an unsympathetic subject is a most difficult endeavor.  I found myself at the end of this biography deeply sympathetic to a most difficult man.

Dr. Bew like Churchill, helped an Irish Catholic understand a man and his perilous times. But for the Grace of God . . .

The Weakness of Idolizing Achievements: Lord Acton

I’d like to quote a letter from Lord Acton (John Edward Dalberg) to Mandell Creighton, a historian of the papcy and a bishop in the Anglican Church.  This is by far the most significant critique of the demonstrative failure of idolization.  Peter Drucker, Henri De Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar would have agreed.

“You say that people in authority are not to be snubbed at from our pinnacle of conscious rectitude.  I really don’t know whether you exempt them because of their rank, or of their success and power.

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong.  If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases.  Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  GREAT MEN ARE ALMOST ALWAYS BAD MEN, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you add the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authenticity.  THERE IS NO WORSE HERESY THAN THE OFFICE SANCTIFIES THE HOLDER OF IT. . .

The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of History.  IF WE DEBASE THE CURRENCY FOR THE SAKE OF GENIUS, OR SUCCESS, OR RANK, OR REPUTATION, WE MAY DEBASE IT FOR THE SAKE OF A MAN’S INFLUENCE, OF HIS RELIGION, HIS PARTY, OF THE GOOD CAUSE WHICH PROSPERS BY HIS CREDIT.

Then History ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide for a moral standard which the powers of the earth and religion itself tend constantly to depress.  It serves where it ought to reign; and its serves the worst cause better than the purest. “

On the Stupidity of Being an Expert

The expert as expert, a bookish sort consulting what is already known, cannot by his nature learn anything new, because then he wouldn’t be an expert.  He would be an entrepreneur, a statesman, or an artist.  The expert critic can make these non-expert entrepreneurs more wise, perhaps, by telling them about the past.  But he must settle for low wages.  Smartness of the experts sort cannot proceed to riches.

Deidre McCloskey’s ‘If You’re So Smart:  The Narrative of Economic Expertise’ 1990.

Structural Unemployment: The New Reality

Other than George Orwell, I can only think of two men who engagingly wrote about the social impact of superior technology on permanent unemployment:  Milton Friedman & Peter Drucker.  Dr. Drucker is a far more sophisticaed realist than the arcane specialist like Friedman.  Although Friedman had truck loads of common sense, his mastery of arcane aggregates gave him unrivaled authority.  I’ve always preferred Dr. Peter Drucker, if only because of his superior historical and philosophical background.  For Drucker, (who spent his lifetime reading/studying Toynbee and McLuhan) the American political and social economy is entering a volatile time of ‘structural unemployment’.  This is defined as permanent job loss, most often because an intrinsic change in the nature of an indigenous economy.  Our rapidly changing, and technologially advanced economy is only fit for those who seek mobility.  Hopefully the rest of our political economy will catch up.  Who needs a 30 year mortgage when jobs don’t exist?  Let’s face it, the nature of the American economy has drastically changed.  If we had policies that accommodated this reality it woud not hurt so much, given a weakened currency, high inflation, massive trade deficits coupled to high unemployment makes this recession even more intractable.

So where’s the good news?

Our digital domestic technology gives Americans the ability to create and define new skill sets that traditional schooling could never shape.  The career paths that young people have been trained for are narrowing, and they are going to have to launch out in directions they and their families didn’t expect.  As Walter Russell Mead said “they were bred and groomed to live as house pets; they are going to have to learn to thrive in the wild.”

The American immediate future is filled with enterprises not yet born, jobs that don’t exist yet, wealth that hasn’t been created, wonderful products and life altering services not yet given form.

Like prehistoric man, digital tribal man is free to create themselves unlike their parents who had to submit to the social authority of centralization.  Creating your own career will produce stronger individuals, with stronger identities and greater abilities.  The impending sense of satisfaction and fulfillment is worthwhile.

What’s required is self discipine and courage.  In a word:  Virtue.

Something an institution cannot forge.