As a member of the ‘neo reactionary right’, being an economic optimist makes me something of an oddity among a group of people that are already pretty odd to begin with.
Physics, bay Area Real estate, and web 2.0 will catapult America ahead of the rest of the world in the 21st century, as if we aren’t already running laps around everyone else. Europe and Russia are in a borderline recession while the U.S. is still growing briskly at 3% a year. It’s not just the fed, thank the tireless consumer and exporters for the strong economy. Compared to the rest of the world, America, especially around the West and East coasts, is a uniquely intellectual place that rewards risk taking and intelligence. That’s what makes our economy and free market exceptional as other regions such as Europe and South America struggle with sluggish growth and or high borrowing costs. America and its multinationals can borrow for next to nothing, because everyone wants to buy our safe debt.
Betting against the best minds in the world is always a losing proposition in the long run (with brief periods of success like in 2008 or in 1929). Those who bet against America, the consumer, and the resolve of the best and brightest to fix the financial problem lost their shirts if they didn’t cover before the huge rally. This happens over and over again. You have a problem that the media tries to distort into a crisis; fools or ‘dumb money’ think the world is coming to an end so they sell the market short, and when the dust settles they have to scramble to cover their shorts at a large loss.
Everything is awesome, yet if you read the comments on some of the most popular blogs, no one is happy. While the crisis-seeking left whines about not enough jobs being created or too much wealth inequality, America is in an intellectual Renaissance. People are getting richer and smarter than ever. So much wealth being created, especially in the past five years alone, as the stock market closes at another record high. If you’re smart and rich, now couldn’t be a better time to be alive. To be a web 2.0 founder, to by a physicist, to be an economist and to be smart means you’re an important person, a part of the national debate & process, and economically useful. Wealth and IQ should be celebrated, because smart and rich people are creating all these amazing technologies such as Tesla, Facebook, and Snapchat that are making our lives better, with infinite prosperity for the founders and early investors and just getting by for most Americans. Sometimes in a strong economic recovery, like the one we have now, not everyone can participate at once, or even at all. Only those who are worthy, which includes the cognitive elite, should get first dibs in the recovery; everyone else has to wait. It may seem unfair, but in a meritocracy, as exemplified by the American economy, the best and the brightest keep coming out ahead, no matter how hard the left seeks to create a level playing field. Social Darwinism means survival of the smartest. To try to change this would be like meddling with evolution – not only is it expensive and time consuming, but by interceding you make everyone worse off by threatening the homeostasis of the ecosystem.
Welfare liberals seek failure because they cannot create wealth and prosperity; they can only spread it around from the most successful to the least. Furthermore, liberals like Paul Krugman, Robert Reich and Joseph Stiglitz have been warning for years, to no avail, about the alleged economic consequences of rising wealth inequality, and they still keep being wrong.
Some examples of Krugman’s bad predictions include that the Euro would fail, a Eurozone country would default, a country would have to leave the Eurozone, and that the sequester and fiscal cliff would badly hurt the economy. The exact opposite happened: the sequester and fiscal cliff were just speedbumps, as this blog correctly predicted. So some blog is better at forecasting the economy than even two Nobel laureates and a midget. Other failed liberal predictions include: a student loan crisis, that America is Greece, a housing market crash, profits and earnings contraction, consumer being maxed out, consumer deleveraging, a bear market, a debt crisis, and high inflation – all wrong.
As an example of smart people making the world better, from lion and the WSJ The Golden Age of Neuroscience Has Arrived
One day we might have a “library of souls,” in which we can have a scintillating discussion with our long-dead ancestors or even historical figures. We could talk to a hologram of an ancestor, for instance, which can access all that person’s memories and personality.
A possible futuristic technology discussed earlier in this blog is the ability to program memories to allow people to implant positive experiences/memories and erase or cover up bad ones, like the movie Total Recall and the short story by Philip K. Dick. Memory modification and the ‘library of souls’ are both highly speculative and probably not feasible for hundreds of years, if ever. The closest approximation to an ‘alternate reality’ are psychotropic drugs and virtual reality.