"The Farmers Revolt"
All across Europe the natives are getting restless...
by Bill Bonner
Paris, France - "The natives are getting restless. Driving through France, you see road signs turned upside down. We didn’t know what to make of it. “That’s the farmers,” a friend informed us. “They’re turning the signs upside down because they say the whole system of farm regulations is upside down.”
Bloomberg: "Farmers’ Revolt Threatens Election Year Upsets Around the World." "Eric Foucault is driving his hulking green tractor more slowly than he can walk. Shouting into his mobile phone above the cacophony of engines and horns, the farmer from south of Paris is one of 200 others clogging up the highway into the French capital. Foucault and his fellow protesters are restless, their list of grievances long: soaring costs, increasing bureaucracy, new European Union regulations in its Green Deal and imports diluting their markets. “He who sows misery reaps anger,” says one of their placards."
France isn’t the only country where the feds are planting misery. The Guardian: "Thousands of tractors block Berlin…An estimated 30,000 protesters, including farmers supported by a wide range of representatives from other industries from fishing to gastronomy to logistics, blocked the streets around the government quarter on Monday with their vehicles, including lorries and forklift trucks, and even children’s toy tractors."
The Cost of Government: As we saw yesterday, ‘inflation’ takes several forms. There’s monetary inflation, fiscal inflation, and regulatory inflation. Choose your poison. Either way, the ‘inflation’ is a cost of government; prices are higher than they would be otherwise because of some government policy. The more policies, the higher the prices.
Joseph Tainter proposes that the rise and fall of civilizations traces an arc of inflation. Inevitably, a society faces challenges. Its elites find solutions…which inevitably lead to more wealth and power for the elite themselves. Each ‘solution’ imposes some form of cost, aka inflation – via taxes, regulations, controls, government spending or money-printing. Finally, the costs become so great that the society sinks into ‘the swamp.’
This implies that the cost of government is actually a lot higher than you think – and eventually, fatal. And you can’t measure it only by adding up consumer prices and taxes. Look at countries that have had large, ambitious governments – the Soviet Union, North Korea, or Hitlerian Germany. (In 1945, nearly half of Germany’s entire GDP was devoted to its military and firepower industries.) People in these countries do not necessarily suffer from rising consumer prices; prices are typically controlled, along with everything else. But they always suffer. And usually from a form of state-imposed shrinkflation, where the availability and quality of goods and services shrinks…until there is little left. And then, it is just a matter of time (perhaps a long time) before the system fails completely.
Pretending to Pay: In the Soviet Union people used to say ‘we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.’ The ‘work’ – directed as it was by the deciders – was largely useless. Taxi drivers, for example, were paid on the basis of how many miles they drove each day. They soon developed a scam…jacking up the rear of the taxi, they idled the motor as the wheels turned and the odometer spun around. Then, they took the ration of gas that they hadn’t used, by not picking up passengers and not taking them where they wanted to go, and sold it on the black market. But when they got paid, they discovered that other parts of the economy had been similarly corrupted; there was nothing much to buy.
To reduce this to a memorable axiom: the larger the government, the poorer the people. And it’s not just the farmers who are up in arms. Here’s the latest from France. The Western Journal: "Nationalist and populist movements are making great strides across Europe – even in France, where the once-thought-powerless right-wing National Rally party is surging in the polls. While the next presidential election in France is still three years away, a new poll shows National Rally's Marine Le Pen is leading and could win the 2027 race."
In Pakistan, voters just sent the political establishment a warning: “It is now evident that there is much anger against the establishment’s open and constant interference in civilian matters - interference which has only grown over the years because there has been no firm political consensus against it,” Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper wrote in a post-election editorial.
In Argentina, Mr. Milei, the most audacious of the reformers, tries to undo 70 years of policy mistakes. The OCRegister: "As Milei proved in Argentina, far-left status quos can’t last forever and can be defeated."
Straw Poll: In America, voters face a grim choice – between a geriatric hack…and a political grifter; what can they do? Dan Denning reports: Watched the Super Bowl last night with family and friends...the ads are always a big deal. The three ads everyone remembered:
1. A State Farm ad with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
2. An ad about Jesus ...showing people who are traditionally enemies/adversaries washing one another's feet.
3. And RFK, Jr. for President as an Independent using the theme song and images from JFK's campaign (evocative of all the Camelot nostalgia).
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"The Collapse Of Complex Societies"
"Political disintegration is a persistent feature of world history. "The Collapse of Complex Societies," though written by an archaeologist, will therefore strike a chord throughout the social sciences. Any explanation of societal collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all such societies in both the present and future. Dr. Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses."
Freely download “The Collapse of Complex Societies” here;
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