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Full Fathom Five: 5.0 Liberalism and the Future of the State

We are trapped into debates between the advocates of spendthrift compassion (maintain Medicare and add new entitlements whether or not we can pay for them because they are needed) or cut budgets even though some of the services lost are, in fact, necessary for millions of people.

What disappears from this debate is the possibility that the transition into a higher form of social organization and governance will make society so much more affluent, and so bring down the costs of important services, that we can strengthen our health care provisions without strangling the economy or busting the budget....

Right now we are having an argument about whether the blue model is in irreversible decline and whether its remnants should be liquidated or defended. But as the model continues to decompose, and it will, the argument will inevitably shift.

Unfortunately, Obama represents the senescent blue model, and the absurd idea that the future lies in expanding that template, to be paid for through redistribution.  It won't work, of course, because it can't work.  It hasn't worked anywhere, except as a temporary and destructive expedient, a way to forestall fundamental change that will not be avoided and that will arrive faster than nearly anybody now imagines. The key attribute of this new world will be the sheer speed of adaptive change through widely distributed decision-making, parallel to the way free markets operate. Centralized hierarchies and administered control structures of every kind are about to evaporate before our eyes. Obama does not represent that future in any respect; he's all about patching the old dikes and building new ones that are nothing but Version 1.1 of the old ones. Good luck with that, Obie. 

With his outmoded ideas and severely limited vision, all "Shovel Ready" Obama can do is to continue what he's been doing -- futilely piling up massive, inter-generational debt to keep the old arrangements in place and to shore them up by investing in Ver. 1.1. That doesn't even qualify as re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic -- it's burning them for fuel to keep a doomed ship afloat for another mile or two. But it's all he knows, and it makes him a conservative of the worst kind, in the worst meaning of the term.

The idea the Barack Obama represents anything like forward-thinking change is perfectly ludicrous. He's a man trapped in the New Deal past, championing an obsolete agenda. For one telling example, the web-distributed Kahn Academy represents the future of education, while public school bureaucracies and teachers unions represent the past. Does anyone have to ask which of those Obama champions? He might as well stand at the microphone with a sign that says "Look For the Union Label" and sing the "Internationale."  As he proved in his dealings with the DC schools, he's nothing but an obstacle, bought-and-paid-for by the old entrenched interests, and clueless about the future.

Barack Obama is a relic who comes dressed in the entire panoply of futile, played-out approaches and ideas. He has everything to do with the past, nothing to do with the future. 

Byron