"France, Spain, And The Fate Of The United States"
by John Wilder
"Over a decade ago, I was reading a post by John Michael Greer (here’s a (LINK) to his current blog). In that post, he talked about time compression and our tendency to not think about historical events in the timeframe that people actually lived them. His example was that of a young girl, born at the time of the French Revolution.
In my mind, the French Revolution turned to the Napoleonic era and the defeat at Waterloo in a fairly short time. I mean, I knew it took longer than the two days we spent on it in World History in high school, but that young girl, born when heads were rolling on the guillotine, would have been 25 or 26 and likely had her own children when Napoleon got waffled in Belgium. And that poor French girl couldn’t even post about how tough her life was on TikTok®!
26 years. That’s a number that, back when I read Greer’s post, surprised me. From a distance of 230 some years, four years of Biden is an eyeblink.
The amazing amount of debt that’s been printed in the last four years along with the rampant inflation made me think back to that young French girl. I think that in 100 years, people will look back on our time and compress it, and I think that they’ll talk about it as the time when the United States sank to third world standards in what, to them, will be just a paragraph in a history book.
There’s plenty of precedent for it. Spain, after the colonization of the New World, brought back ship after ship filled with massive amounts of gold and silver for a period of about 100 years. This caused several related things to happen:
• The inflation from the huge supply of gold and silver distorted the entire economy of Europe, causing an inflation that lasted at least 100 years.
• The huge amount of wealth caused the Spanish to import labor (a lot of to do the work that Spaniards refused to do, you know, like sweeping or making the bed). The Spanish aristocracy also was allergic to work, since they considered it low class. Apparently, the exceptions were being a professor or a priest, but mainly they just sat around in fancy clothes sweating.
• Spain then got caught in an endless web of pointless wars, probably because they were bored.
• Oh, and when the gold and silver stopped flowing from the New World? Yeah, they didn’t stop spending, they just went bankrupt again and again.
This is not a good combination. In less than 100 years, Spain went from being THE world power and the largest economy in the world, by far, to being poor and irrelevant.
I imagine the world in Spain as it declined in decadence just slowly got crappier and more expensive every day, just like we’re seeing today, as we see a long, slow slide to becoming the third world. I wrote last week about the encrapification of the Internet, but other businesses are doing it, too. McDonald’s® has record profits, but I’ve seen Big Mac® meals advertised for $15 or so.
The Mrs. bought a McFish© sandwich the other day and put it in the fridge, perhaps as some sort of religious ritual since I have no evidence that humans actually eat them. I opened it up to give it a look, and was surprised to see a biscuit-sized sandwich.
It's been a while since I’ve even seen a Filet-O-Fish©, but the last time I ate one it wasn’t made out of a single goldfish. Heck, I think the last time I ordered one was sometime during the Bush Administration. Which one? Much like Bill Clinton, I can’t remember which Bush because there were too many. Back then it was a full-sized sandwich, but at some point, it became bite-sized.
I could come up with more examples from other companies, but that one will do. Keep this in mind: McDonald’s is now a luxury food. Are McDonald’s™ sales number up? Sure! Prices have doubled. But I haven’t been there in months (which is probably good for me) due to my inability to rationalize the idea that a Big Mac™ meal costs more than a pound of ribeye steak.
What’s the outcome? Middle class people aren’t going to restaurants nearly as much, which is causing them to fail. Examples abound:
• Red Lobster© closed 87 locations
• TGI Fridays® is closing 36 locations
• Applebee’s™ closed up to 35 locations last year
• Denny’s© closed 57 locations last year
• Outback® has closed down 41 locations
Middle class people are now too poor to go to these restaurant chains. Period. Inflation has priced them out and wages, held down by continual streams of illegal aliens have not kept up. This is part of the slow, creeping third worldism showing up in the United States.
Over the span of 26 years, where does this take us? My answer is that, just like France before the Revolution couldn’t imagine what the world would be like after Napoleon, and just like the Spanish who brought the great heaps of gold and silver back to Spain thought it was going to be totally awesome (el awesomo, I think is the Spanish translation), our first world wealth is rapidly slipping away.
The next twenty years will be, generally, poorer in the United States and in the West. The good news, however, is poorer equals poorer, not necessarily unhappier. Who knows, we might even be happier if we lose the Internet and can’t access TikTok© anymore."
No comments:
Post a Comment