Category Archives: Economics

Every Great Civilization Collapsed the Same Way

Due to diminishing returns on complexity

Video by ‘The Archivist’s Journal’ (7 minutes)

From the transcript:

Joseph Tanter is a historian who’s pretty much spent his whole career trying to identify how all this went down. And he landed on what he calls diminishing returns on complexity.

Every problem Rome faced, they solved by adding something. More soldiers, more administrators, more subsidies, more regulations. Each solution worked, but each one also added a permanent cost. And once you build those systems, you can’t really walk them back. You can’t cancel grain subsidies without riots. You can’t cut the army without losing territory. So, the machine just keeps getting bigger and more expensive every year. And eventually, the cost of maintaining it outpaces what it can produce. 

Climate Hysteria Update | Tom Woods Show

Interview with James Taylor, president of the Heartland Institute.

From the video description:

We cover the “97% consensus” playbook and why alarmists stopped debating the facts, why today’s temperatures are still unusually cold compared to most of the last 6,000 years of human civilization, and why recovering from the Little Ice Age is good news, not a crisis. Plus:

  • Extreme weather truth check: hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and wildfires — including NASA satellite data showing 24% less land burned since 1998, and 2026’s record-quiet Atlantic hurricane season
  • Trump EPA wins: repealing the Obama-era “endangerment finding” and unleashing American energy
  • Why wind costs 7x and solar 10x more than natural gas when you count full system costs (Rice University 2022), and why electricity prices jumped 22% from 2020-2024
  • Nuclear power, Fukushima, and why the arguments against it are ideological
  • What the Obama EPA actually found on fracking
  • Energy prices and the affordability crisis
  • “Climate reparations” — why cold kills 19x more people than heat, why CO2 at 420 ppm is starving plants that thrived at 1,200 ppm, and record corn, rice, and wheat yields
  • Data centers, AI, water/land scaremongering, and why a low-tech future means China wins
  • Are we winning? Glacier National Park’s still-there glaciers, Kamala Harris dropping climate from the campaign, and that absurd New York Times oyster story debunked

5 Reasons Why the Renaissance Began in Italy

Article by Lily Johnson.

Note in particular point 3: ‘Its city-states allowed art and new ideas to flourish’

Quote: ‘The Medici family had a huge hand in the explosion of arts and culture that occurred in their city, leading Florence to be widely considered the home of the Renaissance itself. Founding the eminent Medici Bank in 1397, the family became valuable patrons to some of the country’s greatest artists.’

That’s just a few decades after the Black Death, which made individuals (those who had survived) much more valuable, thus starting ‘individualism’.

BTW here’s the AI answer:

The Renaissance began in Italy primarily due to the region’s unprecedented wealth from Mediterranean trade, its direct physical connection to the legacy of Ancient Rome, and a competitive political structure of independent city-states.

  • Economic Prosperity: Italy’s strategic location made it a hub for commerce with Asia and the Byzantine Empire, creating a wealthy merchant class capable of funding the arts.
  • Classical Heritage: As the heart of the former Roman Empire, Italy was filled with ancient ruins and texts, sparking a revival of classical ideals known as humanism.
  • Political Competition: Independent city-states like Florence, Venice, and Rome fiercely competed for prestige, while powerful families like the Medici and the Vatican acted as major patrons of artists and scholars.
  • Intellectual Influx: The fall of Constantinople in 1453 brought Greek scholars and classical manuscripts to Italy, further accelerating intellectual and artistic innovation. 

What Climate Science Actually Says vs. What You’ve Been Told It Says

Steve Koonin gives a talk at the ARC conference.

Some guy refutes what Koonin says, to some degree, here.

What the second guy does not refer to is Koonin’s description of how things get ‘blown up’ from science report, to IPCC summaries, to media reports. He also does not refer to the huge increase in young people’s mental health problems caused by climate change apocalyptic talk.

The amazing disappearance of GOLD from the American psyche

Article by ‘Schiff Sovereign’.

November 22, 2013
Dallas, Texas

In George Orwell’s seminal work 1984, there’s a really great scene early in the book between Winston (the main character) and Syme, a low-level functionary at the Ministry of Truth.

Syme is working on the 11th Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary, and he explains to Winston how the Ministry of Truth is actually removing words from the English vocabulary.

In Newspeak, words like -freedom- have been struck from the dictionary altogether, to the point that the mere concept of liberty would be incommunicable in the future.

I thought about this scene recently as I was testing out Google’s new Ngram Viewer tool.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Google has digitized over a million books that were printed as far back as 1500, and they’ve made the contents searchable within their own database.

The Ngram Viewer allows you to search for particular keywords. And you can see over time how prevalent the search terms were for particular years.

Out of curiosity, I searched for the term “gold” in English language books starting in 1776.

As one would expect back in the 18th and 19th centuries when gold was actually considered money, the instances of the word ‘gold’ favored prevalently in English language books at the time.

The trend continued into the early part of the 20th century.

But then something interesting happened in the mid-1930s. The use of the word ‘gold’ in English language books reached its peak… and began a steep, multi-decade decline.

Further investigation shows that the peak actually occurred in 1933. And as any student of gold in modern history knows, 1933 was the same year that the President of the United States (FDR) criminalized the private ownership of gold.

It remained this way for four decades. And by the time Gerald Ford repealed the prohibition on gold ownership, the concept of gold being money had been permanently struck from the American psyche, just as the Orwellian Newspeak dictionary had done.

By the mid-1970s (and through today), people have become readily accepting of the idea that money was nothing more than pieces of paper conjured at will by central bankers.

The good news is that, according to Google’s data, there seems to be slight uptick in the number of instances of the word ‘gold’ in English language books over the last 10-years or so.

No doubt, this probably has a lot to do with gold’s seemingly interminable rise relative to paper currency.

One can hope that the trend will hold… that more people will wake up to the reality that the central-bank controlled fiat currency system is a total fraud.

Passive Ponzi—How Your Retirement Became the Collateral

Another good article by Wendy Williamson.

Excerpts:

The 1694 inversion and the Ponzi geometry of the American retirement system

In 1694, a king with bad credit accidentally built the modern financial world.

The Bank of England took a king’s debt and turned it into a permanent, tradable financial asset. The debt did not have to be repaid in the ordinary sense. It could be held, traded, and used as collateral. The king’s obligation became a public asset.

That was the inversion on which the entire financial system was built. Debt was no longer merely a burden to be repaid and extinguished. It became a foundation for wealth. It could be held indefinitely, generate income indefinitely, and support further lending. A liability that once had to be settled could now serve as the basis for expanding financial claims.

The chain of belief that held it together ran from the banknote to the government’s promise, from Parliament’s taxing power to the English economy, and ultimately to the willingness of the English people to work, pay, and trust the government with the power it claimed.

Every link was real. But the chain as a whole depended on something that could not be audited in advance. It could only be trusted.