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The Unpredictable Future And Winning Liberty
Submitted by Richard Ebeling via Epic Times,
As a new year begins, it is easy to consider that the prospects for freedom in America and in many other parts of the world to seem dim. After all, government continues to grow bigger and more intrusive, along with tax burdens that siphon off vast amounts of private wealth.
Extrapolating these trends out for the foreseeable future, it would seem that the chances for winning liberty are highly unlikely. There is only one problem with this pessimistic forecast: the future is unpredictable and apparent trends do change.
Many years ago the famous philosopher of science Karl Popper pointed out, “If there is such a thing as growing human knowledge, then we cannot anticipate today what we shall only know tomorrow.” What does this mean?
When I was in high school in the 1960s, I came across an issue ofPopular Science magazine published in the early 1950s that was devoted to predicting what life would be like for the average American family in the 1970s. It had a picture of a wife and child standing on an apartment building roof waving good-bye to dad as he went off to work—in his one-seat mini-helicopter!
As best as I can recall, the authors talked about such things as color televisions, various new household appliances, robots that would do much of our household work, and the use of jet planes for commercial travel. What was not mentioned, however, was the personal computer or the revolution in communication, knowledge, and work that it has brought about. When that issue of Popular Science was published, one essential element of the computer revolution had not yet been invented: the microchip.
We Cannot Predict Tomorrow’s Knowledge Today
Those authors could not imagine a worldwide technological revolution before the component that made it all possible was created by man. Our inescapably imperfect knowledge means we can never predict our own future. If we could predict tomorrow’s knowledge and its potentials, then we would already know everything today—and we would know we knew it!
This applies to social, political, and economic trends as well. Most people in 1900 expected the twentieth century to be an epoch of growing international peace and harmony. In 1911, the British free trader and peace advocate, Norman Angell (who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933), argued in The Great Illusion that war had become so costly in terms of financial expense and wasteful destruction that it would be irrational for the “Great Powers” of Europe or America to be drawn down that path any longer.
But, instead, in 1914, there began the First World War, that went on for four years, took the lives of at least 20 million soldiers, and cost (in 2014 dollars) over $3 trillion. And the relatively classical liberal and free market world that prevailed before the “Great War,” was shattered.
The twentieth century, as a whole, was the bloodiest and most destructive in modern history due to the rise of political and economic collectivism, in the forms of socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism and the interventionist-welfare state. The conflicts that collectivism brought in its wake have cost possibly 250 million lives over the last one hundred years. No one anticipated this turn of events in 1900.
The Unpredictability of Future Political-Economic Trends
When I was an undergraduate in the late 1960s the book assigned in my first economics class was the seventh edition of Paul Samuelson’s Economics (1967), the leading Keynesian-oriented textbook at the time.
There was a graph that tracked U.S. and Soviet Gross National Product (GNP) from 1945 to 1965. Samuelson then projected American and Soviet GNP through the rest of the century. He anticipated that possibly by the early 1980s, but certainly by 2000, Soviet GNP would be equal to or even greater than that of the United States. Notice his implicit prediction that there would be a Soviet Union in 2000, which in fact disappeared from the map of the world in December 1991.
Which of us really expected to see the end of the U.S.S.R. in our lifetimes, without either a nuclear cataclysm or a devastating and bloody civil war? In the mid-1980s the often perceptive French social critic Jean-François Revel published How Democracies Perish, in which he expressed his fear that the loss of moral and ideological commitment to freedom by intellectuals and many other people in the West meant that the global triumph of communism under Soviet leadership was a strong possibility. Instead it was Soviet communism that disappeared from the map of the globe.
Who in January 1990 anticipated that Saddam Hussein would invade Kuwait in August of that year, setting in motion a chain of events that resulted in two American invasions and a ten-year occupation of Iraq?
Who in 2000 would have anticipated that Bill Clinton’s eight years in office would seem, in retrospect, an era of restrained government compared to the explosion in government spending and intervention during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations?
Historical Chronology Does Not Mean Future Causality
And who today knows what the whole twenty-first century holds for us? Let me suggest that the answer is: nobody.
As the late Robert Nisbet, one of America’s great social thinkers, once pointed out, “How easy it is, as we look back over the past – that is, of course, the ‘past’ that has been selected for us by historians and social scientists – to see in it trends and tendencies that appear to possess the iron necessity and clear directionality of growth in a plant or organism . . . But the relation between the past, present, and future is chronological, not causal.”
The decades of relative global peace and market-based prosperity that preceded 1914 did not mean that war and destruction were impossible for the rest of the twentieth century. The ascendancy of Soviet communism, Italian fascism, and German Nazism in 1920s, 1930s and 1940s did not mean that freedom and democracy had reached their end, though the books and articles of some of the most insightful advocates of individual liberty and limited government in the years between the two World Wars carried the despair and fear that totalitarianism was the inescapable wave of the future.
The persistent and current growth in government intervention and the welfare state does not mean that a return to the classical-liberal ideas of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government is a pipe dream of the past.
Human Events are the Result of Human Action
Human events are the result of human action. Our actions are an outgrowth of our ideas and our will and willingness to try to implement them. The stranglehold of Big Government will persist only for as long as we allow it, for as long as we accept the arguments of our ideological opponents that the interventionist welfare state is “inevitable” and “irreversible.”
That is, the present trend will continue only for as long as we accept that the chronologically observed increase in government power over the last decades is somehow causally determined and inescapable in the stream of human affairs.
This could have been equally said about human slavery. Few institutions were so imbedded in the human circumstance throughout recorded history as the ownership of some men by others. Surely it was a pipe dream to suggest that all men should be free and equal before the law.
Yet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a new political ideal was born – that declared that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable individual rights to life, liberty and honestly acquired property, which no other mortals could take away. So slavery, which Aristotle considered to be the natural condition of some men, was brought to an end before the close of the nineteenth century through the power of ideas and human purpose.
In the 1700s, mercantilism – the eighteenth-century version of central planning – was considered both necessary and desirable for national prosperity. Even Adam Smith, in the Wealth of Nations(1776), believed that its hold over men’s minds and actions was too powerful to ever permit the triumph of free trade. Yet in one lifetime following Adam Smith’s death in 1790, freedom of trade and enterprise was established in Great Britain and the United States, and then slowly but surely through much of the rest of the world.
This was all made possible because of the rise and partial triumph of a political philosophy of individual rights that argued for the banishment of violence and oppression in the relationships among men.
Liberty’s Winning Ideas are Out There
We cannot imagine, today, how freedom will successfully prevail over our current paternalistic governments, any more than many people could imagine in 1940 a world without German Nazism and Soviet communism, or FDR’s New Deal. But that does not mean it’s impossible.
Precisely because the future is unknown, we may be confident that trends can and will change, just as they have in the past. We cannot fully know today what arguments friends of freedom will imagine and successfully articulate tomorrow to end government control of our lives. But those arguments are out there, waiting to be better formulated and presented, just as earlier friends of freedom succeeded in making the cases against slavery and mercantilism.
In 1951, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, “Now trends of [social] evolution can change, and hitherto they almost always have changed. But they changed only because they met firm opposition. The prevailing trend toward what Hilaire Belloc called the servile state will certainly not be reversed if nobody has the courage to attack its underlying dogmas.”
There is one thing, therefore, that we can predict: patience, persistence, and belief in the power of ideas and a well articulated defense of individual rights and free markets will provide the best chance we have to achieve the free society many of us so much desire.
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Should've crossed out the Future and left the Past.
We should be so lucky.
The future for Americans are very predictable. Here:
The only thing that can be expected from the next US president is more war, more murder, and more oppression of the gullible American people.
People as uninformed and as gullible as Americans have no future. Americans are a dead people that history is about to run over. - Paul Craig Roberts
The only way freedom can exist is if, somehow miraculously, the 99% of the people on earth who want government died or had their brains replaced with ones that want freedom.
Other than that, we're in a feedback loop that's going to self-destruct. The way intelligence develops and operates in nature assures its own destruction when advanced technology occurs.
As it has probably happened billions of times previously in the Universe
False dichotomy.
There is one thing, therefore, that we can predict: patience, persistence, and belief in the power of ideas and a well articulated defense of individual rights and free markets will provide the best chance we have to achieve the free society many of us so much desire.
Dear Richard Ebeling, your sincerity itself is pure bullshit.
This article smacks of desperation. "Well, we've tried everything we know. It's all failed. But there's always room for a miracle! Please let everything be ok, despite all of our fuckups!"
The implication you obviously missed is that you have to actually DO something.
my roomate's half-sister makes $65 /hr on the computer . She has been without work for 7 months but last month her pay check was $14940 just working on the computer for a few hours. you could try this out... www.works3.com
Glad that porn cam is working for her.
Pro Tip: A shave and some asshole bleach. She looks like a baboon when she goes doggie.
more utopian blather. man is man. the most important lesson of the bible is that man has never changed. your hope for peace is dielusional. even the buddhists have very little constraint on human behavior and they have spent 3000 years preaching nonviolence as the primary tenet of the philosophy with only modest success. thinking the violence prone west will somehow become enlightened in peaceis a fantasy.....but i guess we can't know the future, right?
Utopian? How so? Please do tell where it said the future was going to be all rainbows and unicorns.
the entire theme of the article and especially the last line. the quest for liberty is never attained. liberty is a utopian state of being at the societal level. the only hope one has is individual liberty. even that is only an illusion in the confines of a state.
You banty liberty around like its a lost cause at the societal level yet it is what every individual seeks.
Maybe we should stop asking the state to infringe on our neighbors liberty?
an individual has some ability to hide from the state. not totally, but close enough. there are great stories about mountain men and remote communal communities who enjoy the relative anonymity needed for liberty. they are sort of like the aboriginal tribes in south america who enjoy liberty until they are discovered by the state then have to rely on the state for protection, the end of liberty.
personally, all i require for an acceptable level of liberty is the ability to travel around in a state of anonyminity as far as the state is concerned as long as i am a law adibing citizen. there is no other legitimate reason for the state to bother me.
Unfortunately for you, there are now so many laws, rules and regulations that you cannot possibly be a law abiding citizen. Remember that ignorance of the law is no excuse, even if you could not possibly read all the laws, etc. even if you dedicated your life to doing so. In summation, the state will 'bother' you whenever it damn well pleases.
that's the rub, isn't it? name a .gov without those restrictions on liberty. the best one can hope for is a benevolent dictator who likes you. that is why there is no such thing as liberty living within a state, only the illusion of liberty.
that is why china ius a much more honest state than the usa. the usa preaches life, liberty and the pursuit of happoness yet interferes in one's quest at every turn while preaching the exceptionalism of the usa using those platitudes as proof. the chinese people know liberty is dispensed by the state and the state constantly remind the people this is so. there is no ambiguity and no such thing as a false arrest.
i like the chinese system only because i know the rules and the rules are followed. i know where i stand at all times. the usa applies rules when they are convenient and makes them up as we go along making it impossible to navigate the system. christ! they even criminalized being a child and playing cops and robbers and cowboys and indians and alien invasion and even marbles and hackeysack.
liberty is certainly utopia.
Personally, I've never been much on the pacifist thingy. There's not much of a future for me laying down in front of a tank driven by someone else.
But hey, you guys get it figured out first and then I'll be willing to listen ;-)
Stickybombs.
We can try and keep trying as individuals, but there is always "monkey want banana" when it comes to humanity.
If you think the most important lesson of the Bible is that man has never {or can never} change - by "bible" you plainly do not mean the New Testament.
Your statement sounds in the pessimism, violence and hate of the unedited, naked Old Testament cult of Yahweh.
Counterpunch, are you using old, hateful rubbish to combat old, hateful rubbish? Saint Augustine's views on Judaism? seriously? including his views on virginity?
The problems of the current monetary system are responsible for many of our ills. These can and will be addressed when the current system fails. A new system is already in the wings.
http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2011/05/return-to-honest-money.html
and
http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2010/07/debtors-and-savers.html
I would like to see FreeGold, but not sure it would fix any of societal ills........Let the collaspe happen and lets hope that debt based fiat currency dies for the good of humanity
The future looked survivable.
Until today.
Gartman says Gold will be the best investment 2015.
We're fucked.
Don't worry, He'll change his mind in a day or two.
"Hey, lets start a war with Russia!"
"Wow! That's never happened before! Nothing is more uncertain than the future! I say lets go for it!"
Yeah, sure. The past has no consequence to current actions...nor does is create "inevitabilities." No, sir not one bit.
If I recall correctly, we haven't invaded Russia for about 100 years. Time to pay them another visit, I guess. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Expeditionary_Force_Siberia
I read a hell of a good book about that strange little secret war.
I cant remember the title.
Future happens.... Many people think the future can be controlled but as was pointed out you can't control what you can't see. Our major problem is there are people who think they can and plan for certain things to fall a certain way and they will force it that way if needed. Unfortunately for them is they don't have a crystal ball and the future is a chaotic pattern. We can either try to fit the flow into a narrow channel or ride the rapids and see where it takes us.
Unpredictable future? Indeed.
Suppose, it depends on what level you see it all from. Freaking evil dark corruption seeks to sink the whole ship before she gets broadsided by PX. Stupid does not know all hands on board will be needed to save the Earth ship. Missing any more hands due to population reduction agendas will place in jeopardy the entire global flyer. All hands will be required to save it all thinking as one kinetic force of energy. All good hearts know it is an all or nothing adventure. There is no division in One Life force. One world's People. One Love.
If you have not heard these two hours of listening pleasure presented below, then you might should do it. IF, this is happening when they say it is, all the rest of the bantering, distractions deluxe, and jib-jab baloney suddenly all become moot. The focus of real quality life suddenly comes in to view.
Like really, who wants to haul around any amount of material things when it is known that it is the spirit world where one should build up the true richness of your karmic credit dept at, and not in the material one. It is well known that one can take the spiritual riches with them, but not the material things. Choose well between that which is temporary, and that which is eternal. There is NO ESCAPE from the well balanced scales.
Hr 2:
http://216.240.133.177/archives32/Hodges/2014/12/Hodges_2_122114_220000.mp3
Hr 3:
http://216.240.133.177/archives32/Hodges/2014/12/Hodges_3_122114_230000.mp3
Original link that has been disappeared for some reason on RBN, and on Hodges page. Moar hummmmmmmmm???????
http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/12/27/stunning-interview-bob-fletcher-nibiru-underground-bases/
Ya sees, ya has to see the first levels of consciousness (corruption and criminality) to know we are really in trouble as a world. But then, you has ta be a ready to embrace this biggest of all bits of info, be it true or not to SEE we are really really possibly in big huge deep doo-doo trouble beyond most peoples ability to even conceive. Unless it is on TV, of course. There have actually been many releases of information around this potential earth changing event that many already know is coming in various forms of media. Here is one great one.:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1307068/
Just where have all those trillions of dollars gone, Mr Rumsfield? Underground city hidey-holes for the elite, you say? See it through their controlling minds and ask yourself, what would you do to forestall this info from people while profiting from it? Heck, it could actually be yet another distraction from the impending well planned crash and babylonian takeover. Pitting all countries against each other to cause huge distractions from the criminality and corruption is such an old trick.
The world's People are sick and farking tired of the freaking shit show!
Victory Garden, God bless, but you are going off the reservation here. Stay focused on maintaining your rent and bills then just relax and get back to nature or something.
The Babylonian Brotherhood has been waging war on the human spirit for thousands of years. They have been winning, in part, because of our instinct to keep our heads down. So I welcome anyone who challenges them on that field of battle. Too much woowoo is better than none at all.
https://archive.org/details/TheBeastsOfTheApocalypse1959
Hey,
Why don't we all hold hands and levitate the Pentagon?
People of the past were oblivious of freedom, because they had no experience with it, no education about it, no comprehension of it, and so could not demand it.
We are ignorant of freedom, because we have experience with it, education about it, and a full comprehension of it, and yet do not demand it
Freedom is a demand, not an expectation.
The banksters need to repay us.
"Concealed weapons are for when the expectation of being mugging free must become a demand."
you don't need to know anything about freedom in order to demand it. you just need to know... oppression
in the past, shackles were out of steel. you don't needed an experience, education or comprehension of freedom in order to recognize that you were shackled, and ask for their removal
today, it's ideas. and strangely, the demand for total freedom is one of those shackles which is leading so many young Americans to debt serfdom through student debt
the roads to serfdom are paved with good intentions and requests for more freedom
+1
You can say all you want about America being a police state and being "unfree", but even just a hint of freedom or the illusion of freedom is enough to separate America from the collection of sad, defeated nations that do not have said hint or never benefited from said illusion.
This article failed to mention the invisible hand of the super rich evil bastards behind the wars and who greatly influence the direction of the world. I agree there are many things that no one could predict and that have changed things drastically, but these super rich evil bastards are dumbing down the population and controlling things to the point where they have developed a status quo they seek to maintian. Go ahead and come up with a world changing invention, clean and free energy, they will have you killed and your idea squashed to protect their control and money flows. The best you can do is break away from the system, buy some land, learn to do things yourself for you and your family. It is the only hope.
This is worth reading. V ineyard of the Saker WHITE PAPER
2014: Russia-China Resistance The DOUBLE HELIX: CHINA-RUSSIA The DOUBLE HELIX: CHINA-RUSSIAhttp://www.mediafire.com/view/08rzue8ffism94t/China-%20Russia_Double_Hel...
"So slavery, which Aristotle considered to be the natural condition of some men, was brought to an end before the close of the nineteenth century through the power of ideas and human purpose." Big fail on that one Richard. It was brought to an end by a bloody war and the death of 600,000 americans. Along with oppression of the south by the north for many years. It wasn't really about slavery anyway but that is a different topic.
And slavery continued to exist in other parts of the world. Mostly it was in countries of the Western world that slavery disappeared. Now that we've rejected Western Civ in the US, slavery can make a comeback. Except this time the slaveowner will be Uncle Sam, acting as a front man for TPTB.
He who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it.
Was that what happened to ancient empires?
Calm down doomers. There is way too much time left before we need wilderness. We should be getting out of this recession when the GDP/GNP gets to 2.9% which is very soon. Diversify portfolios and support local development.
“Although Rat’s life is controlled from cradle to grave, his infancy repeated and reflected in all activities and relationships, Rat needs constant affirmation to combat isolation. Rat goes mad if he is ignored.”
-BEB
Who needs liberty when they can have freedom?
Speaking of the Future... allow me to front run tomorrow's deluge of 2015 predictions:
After 5 years of "Next year will be the End", I predict that not only will many here say "2015 will be the End", but that we will repeat this exercise a year from now.
Except the dead ones.
They will be 100% correct.
So we are unable to predict the future of a water damage that doesn't get repaired.
Now you will argue our history, it's not only a composition of several water damages.
There is the point there must be too an ingenuity at work how to come round with.
While of course you can predict the outcome of a damage that doesn't get repaired and then the history with.
But the ingenuity to come along with, to even increase the flow, that's hard to predict.
If that is watered once too, I see a chance to come back on track with the predictable.
Back into the knowing that faults in resolving maneuvers always are spending a reason to hope for a future in where the pain finds relief.
Todd Rundgren, Future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrZRYzZsOOs
Sorry didn't read the article.
deleted response.
I believe that the cyclical nature of man is correct (Fourth Turning). The battle of ideas has begun. Many philosophers have contributed. Ron Paul lit the imagination of the younger adults, who started to get politically involved. His son Rand is carrying on this wave as well amongst the Tea Party. Justin Amash is doing well too. Liberty and freedom websites are too numerous to mention, as well as those who preach Austrian Economics. Soon, the turning point will be here, crash or no crash, war or no war, it won't matter. It is our destiny to reclaim our future from the ilk in power and then educate the masses (who need to be told each day how to tie their shoes and what to think).
This group put them all together if they do not address the concepts of what is happening the pointless electing the likes of Ron Paul if he becomes more of the same AKA Obama, Bush and the whole repeated line of ex presidents.
What we are viewing is a wakening conscience of what has been happening and those that have everything are never going to allow themselves to be removed from the top of the pyramid.
In the end it has to be war. like the king who refused to be bound by cromwell.
And Cromwell got funding from Jewish bankers on the Continent, giving them the quid pro quo of re-entry, after he had murdered tens of thousands in England, Scotland, and Ireland.
(who need to be told each day how to tie their shoes and what to think).
Lol.
Oh yeah, I can see a big improvement in attitude when you're in charge. I particularly like that 'told what to think' part. Nice touch.
You'd be surprised how many people actually do think like this.
I heard a story about a soldier in Vietnam who would go out on manuevers, whatever it was that was done to get the job done out there, carrying out orders, making the world a better place, I dunno. One day in the jungle while having lunch, an orangutan was nearby so the soldier offered some of his lunch to the orangutan. It went on for few days like that. On another day during lunch time the orangutan showed up for some more of the lunch time comradery, but this time the orangutan wanted all of the soldier's lunch, which the soldier refused to do. The orangutan promptly slapped the snot out of the soldier and took his lunch. The orangutan had a plan.
The orangutan predicted the future, the soldier didn't.
Stealing that one.
Here's a story that I heard:
I heard a story about a soldier in Vietnam who would go out on manuevers, whatever it was that was done to get the job done out there, carrying out orders, making the world a better place, I dunno...The platoon got sick and tired of going out on jungle maneuvers and shooting up villagers. One day they simply decided to shoot and kill their lieutenant and return to camp. They reported that the lieutenant had been killed by a sniper.
I too heard that one, from an anethesiologist that served who later did himself in after being ganged up on by other doctors for challenging the system.
That lieutenant was promptly replaced by a guy called Calley.
It's called fragging.
So you formulate an idea for change? It will never be allowed unless it maintains the position of the 1% and if you try to implement it will come only through war. THAT'S THE WAY IT WORKS. I view it slightly different now realising how dumb besides greedy the 1% are. Take a whole economic pie of 100% when you own all of it or so little left for the 99% choice now FIGHT OR STARVE COMES INTO PLAY.
In this world the economic mechanism we have that keeps needing to be reset comes from the 1% making the rules that best suit them not the sheep and to have ever more is inherently written into it and only way it will be allowed. Humanity is a failed species on the tree of life not because of humanity but by the demands, desires, greed, etc. of the 1%.
You could suggest wiping out this 1% and the 99% may one day agree but then look into ones own mind and see that you have that exact same flaw. So on that point extermination of the 1% like parasites will always be futile and in fact binding the 1% on how much any 1% can have in any form and the removal of the abilitiy to pass their vast riches on through inheritance so their children do not become the 1%. THE KING.
Because of the 1% refusal to be bound this way IT WILL ONLY EVER END IN WAR and the repetition of history over and over until such time mankind having never learned becomes extinct.
Wish I had been born into this universe as an alien instead of sitting on a pile of rock in the backwaters of the universe with a bunch of retards.
God if you exist you bastard you got some real shit to answer if I ever get up there.
Gee Whiz,
You must be the first person since...forever, to notice this minor flaw in human nature. You must be a genius!
Thanks for doing the heavy lifting for us retards. We really do appreciate your prodigeous efforts.
No, really...we do.
Future. Holy shit that is like right now. NYC look here come the Q99X2.
Yeah, lets argue our way to a future of liberty...#hopium
Tptb are psycopaths, not misguided altruists. And the winning arguments have been well articulated and are now being vehemently suppressed and buried in disinformation.
Prepare and stop smoking the hopium.
They are altruists.
Who else will do Gods work?
"Doing well while doing good."
Liberty? What happened to freedom?
It does not take a genius to SEE the prediction of what THIS means.:
http://o.canada.com/news/fallout-from-radioactive-fukushima-rising-in-we...