I’m 81 years old today. I don’t come from a long-lived family, and I have what they call a pre-existing medical condition, so I don’t expects decades more of life ahead of me.
I sometimes regret I won’t see what the future holds in store. But the more I think about the future, the more I’m relieved that I won’t.
The odds are good that I will win what Ian Welsh calls the death bet – the bet that I will have enjoyed the good things the world has to offer and die before I have to pay the price. If you are 60 years old are younger, the odds are that you will lose.
Right before the financial crash of 2008, there was a saying among Wall Street speculators about when the financial bubble would burst. “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.”
In fact none of them suffered any bad consequences from their actions, up to and including financial fraud. President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner arranged to have the big banks and investment firms bailed out of the consequences of their mistakes, and Attorney-General Eric Holder declined to prosecute financial fraud by heads of companies deemed “too big to fail.”
The Federal Reserve Board and Treasury Department prioritized reviving the stock market, to the great benefit of owners of stocks and bonds, including investors in mutual funds such as myself. But then, even under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the financial markets recovered before the job markets did.
Now the U.S. economy is in another bubble, just like the last one—overhangs of debt that can’t be paid, increasing concentration of wealth at the top, the decline of the mass consumer market and the failure of either corporations or the government to invest for the future.
It’s probable, but not certain, that the government will succeed in bailing out the big players, just like the last time. What is certain is that this can’t go on forever. Without big changes in the financial system, there will be a final crash in which the institutions are not too big to fail, but are too big to rescue.
For more than 60 years, the United States government’s policy toward nuclear war was deterrence. The theory is that the best way to be safe from war is to have nuclear weapons and be willing to use them if necessary. In other words, if you want peace, be prepared to go to war.
So far this policy has worked. We’ve gone to the brink of war a couple of times, sometimes knowingly and sometimes unknowingly, but we’ve always pulled back in time. There have long been factions in the U.S. government that wanted to pre-emptively use nuclear weapons, but they’ve always been sidelined or disregarded.
I think it is likely to work—right up until the time it doesn’t work, and it only has to fail once. If you play a game of Russian roulette, you’re likely—although not certain—to win. If you continually play Russian roulette, you’re certain to someday lose.
I don’t expect nuclear war with North Korea, although the chances are more than zero. I don’t expect nuclear war with Russia, although the chances are greater than war with North Korea. But unless our policy changes, both concerning armaments and our foreign policy in general, there will be a war in which we and everybody else will be the loser.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 