Is it just me, or are the people in charge just starting to lose their grip?  Everywhere you look things fall apart, it’s like the system is starting to collapse under its own weight.  The experts who run things, and the officials we put in place to run things for us just can’t seem to cope any more.

The economy is a shambles.  Why? The workers are all there, the capital is there, the factories and mines and farms are there.  Production capacity and infrastructure are under-utilized and worker productivity is higher than ever.  What is wrong with the system? Businessmen can’t seem to operate it any more, what with bad investments, stock market crashes, sketchy loans, huge bonuses and salary increases and stock options for managers and executives who can’t seem to get anything right.  And it’s not just the private sector, government officials and elected politicians can’t seem to get it straight either.  Political debate is all cliches and soundbites, and the government is just a shadow for the big corporations. Taxes go up, the public debt goes up, services decline, quality and efficiency is slipping, and no one seems to be able to sit down and do anything together that governments are supposed to do, like govern.  There is no cooperation, no compromise, no leadership, and no policy.  Just name calling and finger pointing. And it’s not just us.  The paralysis is world-wide.

The mighty US armed forces seem to be bogged down in endless wars that never seem to be resolved in our favor, no matter how many lives and resources we throw into them. And again, its not just us, the Russians didn’t get anywhere in Afghanistan either, the same gang of ignorant tribesmen that whipped them has fought us to a standstill. The combined armadas of the world’s navies can’t seem to clean out a bunch of teen-age amateur pirates in Africa.  What is wrong here?

Debt has taken over.  The government is in debt, the banks are in debt, the consumer is in debt, businesses are in debt, whole nations are in debt, and the ones that aren’t are holding the worthless IOUs of others and using them as collateral to get even further into debt.  Stock markets jump around all over the place and the economists come on TV telling us what is going wrong in great detail, except they can’t agree with each other, which does little to boost our confidence in their expertise.

What used to be routine and civil transactions, like talking to a merchant about a mistake in your bill, is now a baffling run-around with automated voicemails and robot clerks, telephone trees and cybermazes or faceless drones with foreign accents talking to you through muffled microphones, apparently wrapped in burlap, sounding like they had a mouth full of curry.  And the great global network of computers and automated satellite com links that now manages the world’s commercial, defense, industrial, government and financial systems is routinely hacked by pimply teenagers, terrorists and ghetto brothers. And of course, the technocracy is trying to sell us protective services that will defend our data and privacy from these felons, data which they can’t protect after they insist on collecting from us so they can ‘serve us better’. Think about it.  It’s like a bank charging you a fee for protecting your savings from bank robbers, or a computer company selling you anti-virus software.  Isn’t that their job?

I don’t think this is economic, or political, or ideological.  I just think the system has gotten too complicated and too vulnerable to function properly any more.  It must have been like this in Rome just before the bottom fell out.