Have you ever built a dry stack wall? First of all you need to grade the landscape and use some gravel that is leveled where your blocks are going to go. You have to buy good blocks that have been manufactured to last, that are consistent in shape and size and that are of a shape useful in wall building. In order to get a stable wall made from your blocks, you need tools to help you to achieve the three blessings that every wall needs: plumb, square and level. You need the tools to help you check that you are plumb square and level. If your wall isn’t plumb square and level your wall will look bad and it might fall down.

Likewise, in building a stable society you need good tools too. Society has a politic and economy. In order to get a stable society, you need three things: good laws, stable banking and infrequent warfare. To have good laws a society follows rule of law guidelines. That is, the law should apply to everyone, be easy for people to understand and be published and consistent. Banking must be regulated so that money maintains its value so that it can act as a store of value. Money serves many functions but if it fails to maintain value or if banks become insolvent, money can’t support exchanges in a well functioning economy. Warfare has been necessary over history at times but those times should be infrequent. Warfare is expensive: it uses up lives and money. Constant warfare can lead to disastrous taxation and tyranny.

Lastly, governments are supposed to regulate the politic with just laws that protect private property so that people have an incentive to work. Markets, that is the mutually beneficial exchage of goods and services, can combine the efforts of many people to assemble a good economy. Prosperity happens when gains are protected so that people can build on their gains. Most people gradually improve when they are allowed to work for their own prosperity. When governments interfere with markets, government becomes corrupt, markets fail to prosper and people can’t build on their gains to create a better future.

If you want to learn about history, economy and politics buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Just a quick comment, today about an article I read on Zerohedge yesterday by Tyler Durden. He was writing about subsistence labor. He argued that unmeasured subsistence labor where a person works several jobs just to stay alive can still happen in an economy reporting high labor non-participation. This argument doesn’t matter in an economic sense because economies are complex adaptive systems where the individual’s contribution can only count toward economic wealth when it produces a surplus that helps the economy to grow. Surpluses can build an economy toward prosperity. Subsistence can’t do that.

Imagine a farmer who only works hard enough or with soil fertile enough to maintain a subsistence lifestyle. Over his lifespan he will get older but no richer. It is only when he can sell something in excess that he can get ahead and use his profits to invest in his farm and make it more productive. He can buy more land or get more livestock or more seed or better inputs of whatever kind that increase his outputs that he can sell in order to get ahead. When economic surpluses are used to grow greater surpluses, and when many people can do that, economies grow. Subsistence isn’t unimportant to individuals who use it to survive, but it can’t grow an economy.

This matters because of the many ways that governments can parasitize economic profits so that they aren’t reinvested in making the economy grow. When governments take economic profits in taxes, it undermines the incentive to create a surplus and it also directly reduces economic growth. Even though there are people working in government who want to have a government job, that job never creates a surplus that can be reinvested in the form of capital. Instead it uses up capital taken out of the economy. When there is too much taxation, economies can become stunted. Debts can pile up. That debt represents a tax on tomorrow’s surplus. If there isn’t a surplus, the debt can’t be paid and it blocks the ability of a surplus to help the economy to grow.

A society has a political system that can either protect economic surpluses or squander them. The social group’s ability to enjoy prosperity depends on protecting each person’s surplus so that that person can increase their production which can add up eventually with other surpluses and lead to social wealth. That wealth can diversify society so that people’s labor can specialize. But without a productive surplus as you have in the case of subsistence, a person’s production can’t grow an economy, can’t support economic diversity, can’t store up wealth and can’t do research and development to discover new ways to make more surplus that can be reinvested in economic growth.

In 2015, I self-published a book, Political Catsup with Economy Fries, that discusses the history of the U.S. by describing 3 different political ideologies over American history. In that book, I also describe the way the the economy and politic work together to sustain or destroy society. You can buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries at Amazon.com.

The 2020 U.S. elections were clearly fraudulent. I have written about that in the past. Numerous witnesses came forward with eye witness testimony and several different methods were used to steal the 2020 election and appoint non-elected persons into key positions. The electronic voting fraud which the courts and Congress failed to investigate despite well documented fraud appears to have played a nefarious role in stealing elections for years previous to 2020, by moving legitimate votes away from the people’s choices to some other choice that doesn’t represent the will of America. When the majority of Americans selected Donald Trump for another term, the fraud to steal the election and change the result to a Biden win was so obvious that the secret was out. Elections here in America for a while have been faked with electronic voting and also by additional and obvious other means in 2020.

Many Americans who recognized that fraud had occurrred were afraid for the United States. How can Americans fight against this kind of corruption? Many wondered how to end the electronic voting when people in control positions that are supposed to safeguard elections were failing to do so. There hasn’t been a national move since 2020 to stop using electronic voting machines. How do we get rid of electronic voting that is fraudulent when most courts refuse to address the issue? We have been worried since 2020 about a sequence of bad and worse outcomes when the will of the American people is thwarted. We have seen some bad outcomes already for ordinary Americans under the Biden Administration.

Now in addition to recession and inflation in America, we have a global catastrophe of enormous size and threat to all of Europe that has happened under the Biden Administration. The destruction of the Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2 pipeline will cause hardships and deaths in Europe. This morning, Kunstler.com referenced Monkeywerx.com in a discussion of U.S. direct action against Nordstream 1 and 2. A U.S. bomber, according to MonkeyWerx.com appears to be responsible for the destructions of those pipeline-lifelines which would have supplied natural gas to Europe this winter.

If it is true that those pipelines were destroyed by U.S. missiles that is a terrible act against American interests. If true, the Biden Administration appears to have acted against our allies in breach of treaty. The Biden Administration has acted also against Americans in destroying this pipeline. It is an act of war that endangers Americans and Europeans. Shouldn’t Biden be immediately impeached along with his Vice-President who is also illegitimate and should also be removed from office? Many have been arguing that Biden should be removed because he is senile, but I would argue that he should be removed because he was never selected by popular vote for the office that he holds. And now he is acting against American treaty interests and against global peace.

This planned catastrophe shows how damaging election fraud is. By placing illegitimate candidates in the American Presidency and other offices serving the United States the world and the U.S. are placed into peril. The destruction of Nordstream 1 and 2 also begs the following questions: “Who wants to have Biden in the U.S. Presidency? If Americans didn’t choose him, who did? Whose interests are served by damaging the American/European alliance?”

To learn more about politics and economics and history in the United States and across the world stage, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

3 Oct 2022 ADDENDUM: According to Https://thelawdogfiles.com/2022/10/nordstream-ii-electric-instapundit.html The Electric Instapundit Lawdog 97 comments: there is a way for pipelines to fail (when they have stationary natural gas as Nordstream 2 did for two months in a shut down pipeline) which may have caused the ruptures we have seen in Nordstream one and two. There’s a “pig” that goes through the pipe when it is operational to keep it cleaner than it would be without a “pig”. The pig helps to remove impurities like hydrogen sulfide which can cause pipe ruptures. A shutdown pipeline isn’t getting cleaned. Natural gas pipelines are less at risk of rupture when they are frequently cleaned by the pig to remove impurities. Although some have said that the ruptures of 2 pipelines proves sabotage, the pipes (according to another source) sometimes come close enough together that a rupture of one might damage and rupture the other. According to Lawdog, there were 2 different times when ruptures occurred: 2:03 and 19:03. This doesn’t prove that no sabotage occurred but it does indicate a process that might happen to a shut down pipeline that might lead to failure.