Tag: liberalism

On the Coming Financial Crisis

It should be obvious to everyone above the upper‑middle‑income poverty line that we must make a drastic and immediate change. There isn’t time for debate or argument; your petty ideological protectionism couched as philosophical protestation this moment won’t abide. We need action based on real data and hard science, and there is no time to wait.

No manufacturer is allowed to make another car that isn’t a hybrid. A car is transportation, not a status symbol, and the fact that you want it to be is shameful. Texas, California, and Florida – you don’t get another single all-wheel-drive passenger vehicle. Despite your imaginings, the return on investment doesn’t warrant it, and the perceived sense of increased safety is not merely unfounded, it is antithetical.

This is but an example of the sweeping changes required. But the first one is money.

Money is out. Sure, we’re going to use it as the medium of exchange, but it is no longer going to drive decision making. Outcomes and material constraints are.

There is about to be a huge, tragic, and entirely avoidable financial crisis. It will be largely manufactured by elites attempting to maintain their privilege (average Americans, this includes you), and it will have an outsized affect on the middle class (you again, average Americans). It won’t have legitimate root causes, but it will have real effects. Like almost every financial crisis, it will be induced by people seeking to preserve the disparity between rich and poor.

There is nothing in economics that demands this occur. The only thing that demands it is the desire to have more than your share, or at least more than the next person. Continued pursuit of that is ideological, and will result in your having less, I assure you.

I understand if you are dubious of these claims. My closest relations don’t believe me. When I say we have to cease almost all economic activity, they tell me that will lead to chaos and ruin. You probably agree, but you are mistaken.

The people who taught you to believe that are the very same people leading you to crisis. They claim that the economy must keep growing, but they are purposely vague about precisely why. It is because if it doesn’t they won’t be able to pay back the loans they made to one another, the returns on which they use to enrich themselves. This is why Elon Musk has very few personal possessions and is perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy; he deploys his wealth almost entirely in doing things. The vast majority of his peers (and the bulk of you, average Americans) don’t want to work; they want to walk around talking about working while others do the work. They certainly don’t want to labor. Egad! I might be too exhausted to CrossFit.

The economy doesn’t have to keep growing; in fact, it very much should not. But the financial system insists it must, and this is leading us into crisis.

Not that there isn’t a material crisis; there very much is. And it owes itself to two facts.

A single human produces approximately 6 tons CO₂e per year, while an elephant produces significantly less than one. And humans outnumber any other mammal on the planet by an order of magnitude. Except for rats.

This is not to say that the solution is to reduce the human population. It is to say that 6 tons CO₂e per person per year isn’t gonna fly (pun intended).

As E.F. Schumacher noted some time ago, it is critical that we adopt appropriate technology, not only in the so-called developing world, but indeed rolling back the use of excessive technology in already advanced economies. The story I like to tell to exemplify the inanity of capitalism is that when I was a kid all you needed to watch television was the hardware, electricity, and a tolerance for ads. Then came cable, which required the laying of cable, a set top box, and a subscription, on top of the aforementioned hardware and electricity, and you still got ads. Now we watch TV over the internet, which required the laying of another cable in the same location as the first, a router in addition to the set top box, paying a raft of streaming services on top of an internet service provider, and, somehow, after a brief hiatus, we’re still watching ads. Crazy, and yet the liberal economist describes this as rational.

Rational is also how they describe another of their delusionary hustles, comparative advantage, which is merely elite-speak for taking advantage of poor people. As theory would have it, comparative advantage is the mechanism by which China, by making stuff for Americans at a lower cost than Americans can make it themselves, becomes wealthy enough that they can turn to the Vietnamese to make stuff. This works for a while, but who does the last group of poor people turn to? Such is the infinite regression at which we have now arrived.

Our current economic system is driven by two things, both of which are anti-social. One is capital accumulation and the other is individual preference. Neither is beneficial.

I find it astounding that the average person accepts the premise that some people should have capital while others do not. Where did they get the capital, one might reasonably ask, and why don’t I have any? To quote Dave Mustaine, “I go to work every day, why do you think I’m broke?”

Similarly, why should someone get to choose to drive a giant Suburban rather than a small hybrid, when that choice is literally determining the fate of millions of people? Just because you want to and comparative advantage allows it? The tax levied on that horribly inefficient vehicle should make it financially unworkable to even buy it, if we priced in the pollution that the current system allows the individual to externalize to society at large.

All this to say – we must cease all superfluous economic activity. All the loans and stocks and bonds are null and void. They must be, so that when we stop making iPhones and flinging Starlink satellites into low earth orbit, the financial shock doesn’t cause people to starve in Africa.

We must redistribute the housing stock so that everyone has an adequate place to live. Adequate is the operative word here. Two people in a 13000 square foot mansion isn’t adequate; it’s ridiculous. And to head off the inevitable complaint, hard work didn’t get you that, taking advantage of people poorer than you did.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. No one is going to listen anyway. They are too busy being terrified of the very thing they themselves are causing, and the last thing they can imagine doing is getting off the amusement ride. Rather, they will march indignantly into a crisis of their own making, shaking their fists angrily at the impoverished scapegoats whose fate they both ensure and share.

Nationalism Is Not a Catalyst for Human Rights

“Most people, given the choice, will pick order. But order alone doesn’t deliver rights. That depends on the character of the community behind the state—its sense of “we,” its willingness to restrain itself, its capacity to act together rather than fracture into tribes. That civic cohesion is the essence of nationhood, with a shared story and reciprocal obligations strong enough to hold a diverse democracy together.” (Sharp, 2026)

However, cohesion and reciprocal obligation does not require a nation-state, and existence of a nation-state does not guarantee them. The nation-state – “A project meant to speak for people” – increasingly struggles not only to “speak to them”, as Sharp’s comment continues, but now presumes to overtly dictate the terms of the relationship, an inversion of the liberal ideal to which Sharp’s ideology aspires.

Importantly, what the Sharps of the world fail to incorporate into their idealistic distortion of liberalism, a construction that bears more resemblance to conservatism than the program of progress that Sharp’s article openly castigates, is physical reality. As Michael Crichton’s Dr. Ian Malcolm explains in Jurassic Park (Crichton, 1990), and James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis demonstrate (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974), the entire world is a singular system. Activity in any given quarter affects the whole. As fans of the 1993 movie will recall, “A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine”. (Spielberg, 1993)

In the face of such understanding, the nation-state, along with its necessary precursor and product – nationalism, is obviously insufficient to the task. Retrenchment of national sovereignty and its attendant nationalism, fashionable as those terms are among every commentator to the right of progress, are a non-starter for anyone who has listened to the report from every single astronaut who ever returned to Earth. Put best by Ron Garan, astronaut on the International Space Station, “From space, I saw Earth not as a collection of nations, but as a single entity with one destiny.” (Perring, 2023)

The problem lies not with cosmopolitism or universalism, but with elite capture. As Sharp notes, “What began as the modest, civilizational minimum of the 1948 Universal Declaration has grown into an intricate thicket of hundreds of treaty rights—rules drafted far from the publics expected to live under them.” This owes not to a technocratic project aimed at subsuming individual liberties, minimizing the United States’ place in the world order, or realizing some global utopia. It is rooted directly in the neoliberal incursion of elite interests on the rights and resources rightfully belonging to the rest of the world. 

The political philosophies of the 18th Century are incompatible with the 21st. For the demos, they are not alignments, they are ideologies, in the Marxian sense of the term. That is to say, they are systems of thought used to rationalize material class relations. There remains, of course, a place for both liberal and conservative policies: tariffs and monopoly objectively run counter to the public good; the accumulated wisdom embedded in institutions and traditional practices contains demonstrable value. But any clarion call espousing a return to liberal or conservative ideals as the cure-all for what ails the world screams “watch out”. Progress and universality hold the only path forward.

Sharp claims that “What the moment requires is not another round of international invention”. In this, he is not incorrect. His observation that progress requires “a recalibration that protects the essential floor of rights while recognizing that the work of building moral and political order happens closer to the ground” is both accurate and useful. Where his logic goes awry, however, is in founding this recalibration in a retrenchment of neoliberalism and the sovereign nation-state.

According to Sharp, “the nation remains the largest form of belonging capable of sustaining the loyalty required to deliver social services, enforce laws, and preserve basic order”. As any observer of history can attest, this is decidedly untrue. The Persian, Roman, and British empires held sway over much greater domains than any nation-state in history. Forms of social organization have evolved throughout history, with the nation-state merely being the most current, and by no means preeminent, example.

It is not known what “the largest form of belonging capable of sustaining the loyalty required to deliver social services, enforce laws, and preserve basic order” might be. Humanity is likely the conceptual limit. What is known is that the nation-state is neither the ideal nor the most effectual formulation. And this current wave of nationalism espoused by the likes of Sharp will no better serve the cause of humanity or progress than any of those that came before it.

References

Sharp, D. (2026, January 16). Why Human Rights Depend on the Nation State. Persuasion. Retrieved February 19, 2026, from https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-human-rights-depend-on-the-nation

Crichton, M. (1990). Jurassic Park. Knopf.

Spielberg, S. (Director). (1993). Jurassic Park [Film]. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/.

Lovelock, J., & Margulis, L. (1974). Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: the gaia hypothesis. Tellus. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1974.tb01946.xPerring, C. (2023, March 27). 10 Astronaut Quotes on the Overview Effect. EarthscapeVR.com. https://www.earthscapevr.com/10-astronaut-quotes-on-the-overview-effect