The world is going to pay for Brexit.
In a good way.
One of people's favorite fantasies is to believe they are smarter than
your average concrete block when we all know bricks appear brilliant compared
to humans.
A few years, back one of a hoard of new gold sites sent me an email
pronouncing that they were having a price of gold prediction contest. They
were going to those they considered the top 150 commentators have predict the
price of gold at a point six months later. I puffed up at once realizing that
at least someone in the world understood my brilliance. Actually I probably
should have asked if I was #1 on their list or a fill in for #150 after five
of their list had died in the last week.
They asked for my prediction. I gave them my answer. Months later they
posted the results. I was the only person to get it dead right. And before
you start believing that that should move me up to at least #2 or #3 on the
list if not #1, my answer was that only an idiot would believe he could
predict with great accuracy the price of any commodity that far in the
future. There are simply too many variables.
Sure, you say, but someone else of the 149 who made guesses must have
gotten pretty close. And while that's true, it's also utterly meaningless.
You could have 150 people predict a coin toss for 20 times and someone would
probably get it dead right. That wouldn't make the person brilliant; if 150
people guess about something such as a coin toss, the odds suggest someone will
get it right. That's not brilliant prediction, that's nothing more than an
uninformed guess.
You can go to any chat board on the web of any stock or any commodity and
find all sorts of comments and predictions from a variety of people utterly
without any qualifications but all holding a firm belief that they can
predict prices a day in advance or month or year. They will defend those
beliefs to the death because after all they are qualified to hold an opinion
because they own a keyboard. I pretty much ignore all the chat boards.
In the past two days, the world was awash with opinions about the meaning
of Brexit and how every investment would react. The vast majority means
little because the UK and EU have two years for the divorce and the papers
don't even get filed until at least October.
Everyone has an opinion and they don't have a cat's chance of getting it
right. There are simply way too many alternatives to even have an intelligent
guess. The very best we can hope for is to try to figure out what triggered
the action.
I did stumble across one kernel of brilliance delivered by Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard writing for the Telegraph where he said.
"Angry reproaches are flying in all directions, but let us not
forget that the root cause of this unhappy divorce is the conduct of the EU
elites themselves. It is they who have pushed Utopian ventures, and
mismanaged the consequences disastrously. It is they who have laid siege to
the historic nation states, and who fatally crossed the line of democratic
legitimacy with the Lisbon Treaty. This was bound to come to a head, and now
it has."
I can't say that he is absolutely correct but we both agree the problem in
both the EU and the U.S. is governments growing out of control in a way
similar to any other cancer.
The concept of nation-states goes back to the Treaty
of Westphalia signed in 1648 ending both the Thirty-Years' War within the
Holy Roman Empire and the Eighty-Years War between Spain and the Dutch
Republic. The negotiations took place between representatives of 109
different governments.
The Peace of Westphalia came to mean that individual nation-states had
borders, were ruled by some sort of government, and made their own laws that
were supposed to be respected by other nation states. Aggressive warfare was
illegal and military response was appropriate only when attacked. It more or
less worked for the next three hundred years. Europe changed from a continent
faced with constant warfare to an economic powerhouse with the most freedom
in history. The Treaty didn't end conflicts; however, through use of a
balance of power, many potential wars were nipped in the bud.
Those three hundred years of relative peace through successful conflict
resolution ended in the 20th century. Indeed the entire concept of
individual nation states responsible for their destiny came to a screaming
halt. A multipolar balance of power prior to World War II became a bipolar
balance of terror after WW II, which transformed into a unipolar world
dictatorship with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
We desperately need to go back to the concept of nation states and
multipolar balances of power. The EU is a failed state as is the U.S.
The unelected functionaries of the EU hold power without accountability.
Ten thousand of them, no one is quite sure of the exact number, make more
money than the Prime Minister of the UK. In a perfect accident of timing, on
the same day the UK electorate gave the middle finger to the EU, the EU made
the third payment of 10.3 million Euros to Greece, bailing it out once more.
Any British taxpayer who believes it makes sense to hand their money to a
serial deadbeat is probably also too stupid to mark an X in a voting box
allowing them the right to breathe free air.
In a brilliantly written and produced free video called Brexit: The Movie,
Nigel Farage was quoted as saying,
"This is the only parliament the world has ever invented where you
cannot initiate legislation; propose legislation or even the repeal of
legislation. All of that comes from the unelected European Commission."
But how stupid is stupid? When do we know an organization is utterly
dysfunctional? Watch the hour-long movie. It's even more brilliant in
hindsight.
For example there are five EU regulations that govern pillowcases. That
seems a bit extreme until you learn that there are 109 laws controlling the
pillow inside. That looks absurd until you count the 225 sets of regulations
dictating the requirements governing eyeglasses.
Ten laws about duvets with 39 more controlling sheets. Toothbrushes
require 31 regulations. Mirrors are far more serious, the EU needs a series
of 172 rules, shampoos somewhat less only needing 118. Towels require
controls of 454 regulations; bread an incredible 1,246 and the toasters to
cook them in need 52. Milk on the other hand is far more serious and needs
12,653 individual sets of laws. Bowls can get by with 99 regulations, but
spoons need another 210 laws for people to know how to produce and use them.
The majority of UK voters who put an X in the box for leave voted to kill
big government, the complete lack of accountability, rules being dictated by
lobbyists and to return to the concept of government at the smallest unit
possible. The EU is out of control; it's bloated and the ultimate in government
by committee. It can't possibly work and the sooner someone shoots it and
kills it dead, the sooner Europe and the rest of the world can recover.
Lest the reader conclude the out of control government of the U.S. is
somehow better than the EU, let me remind you, it was the U.S. that created
the unipolar world after 1991. When NATO should have been buried and a peace
dividend declared, instead the behind the scenes rulers over in the U.S.
pushed the U.S. into one incredibly stupid war after another.
No one has ever been held accountable for the debacle that we call Iraq.
Afghanistan has been in a state of war since the U.S. invaded in 2001.
Alexander the Great couldn't conquer the country, what made the Boobsie twins
of Bush and Obama think they could?
If you start a war and it's going on fifteen years later there is should
be some sort of rule that says, "You lost, get over it." But U.S.
generals are so clueless or are so looking forward to that nice job after
retirement with a fat defense contractor that they keep pouring money into a
lost cause. The only good event on the battlefield is that at least they got
poppy production up 1,500% over the Taliban years.
If you spend $1 trillion on a slick new fighter jet that is 10 years
overdue, the software doesn't work and previous model aircraft already in the
boneyard can whip its tail in air-to-air combat, maybe
you should admit it's a waste of both time and money. But you can't do that
in the U.S. because Raytheon has contracts in 45 states. Congress can't
afford to kill the bloated program because they know it would chop their
campaign contributions.
As the direct result of 911 and the bloating of intelligence agencies in
the U.S. and trashing of all civil protections against an out of control
government, Americans today are the most spied on group in world history. The
Stasi or Gestapo would have been thrilled to have half the power held by the
NSA. Every phone call is monitored, every email recorded for posterity. If
you post a picture of your new child on social media, Maryland knows about it
before your parents. If you have a security camera in your home that you can
monitor from your office, so can the NSA. Hint: you might want to move the
camera to point to the closet doors, not the center of the bed. We don't want
to distract the watchers.
Is the U.S. safer? I don't think so. The country has an out of control
police force nationwide. Six cops in Baltimore can throw a handcuffed suspect
in the back of a van and watch, laughing, as the driver slams on the brakes
and accelerates again and again. When they get to the station house and the
now barely alive suspect is dragged out of the van, he has a broken neck.
That stuff happens everywhere in the world, but in the U.S. no one is ever
held accountable. There are laws for citizens and there are laws for cops and
never the twain shall meet.
Trillions of dollars of fraud and outright theft took place in America
leading up to 2008 and beyond. No one went to jail. It continues today. The
entire financial system worldwide is a Ponzi scheme, a house of cards about
to tumble down. The U.S. government has only made the problem far worse and
the cost to fix far higher.
When I wrote "The Art of Peace" in November, I predicted a
worldwide revolution and that at the end we would have a far better world
because we would have less government. The farther away the power to make
decisions resides from the people who will be affected, the dumber the
decisions get. That's why local school boards do a pretty good job in the
U.S. and the Secretary of Education is a meaningless department that can only
screw up education. Keep the decisions as local as possible always works.
On Thursday, June 23, the voters of the UK voted to pull the plug on the
biggest cesspool in world history. It doesn't matter what anyone does from
here. You can't unring a bell. Like most people I know, I believed that if
the vote was too close that UK officials would simply do what the U.S. does
in elections, rig them the way they want. But they didn't, the people spoke
and they will be heard.
We need less government, and we can do it the easy way or the hard way,
but we will get less government.
Bob and Barb Moriarty brought 321gold.com
to the Internet almost 14 years ago. They later added 321energy.com to
cover oil, natural gas, gasoline, coal, solar, wind and nuclear energy. Both
sites feature articles, editorial opinions, pricing figures and updates on
current events affecting both sectors. Previously, Moriarty was a Marine F-4B
and O-1 pilot with more than 820 missions in Vietnam. He holds 14
international aviation records.
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