THE GREAT DECENTRALIZATION

THE GREAT DECENTRALIZATION



A quiet insurrection is underway, dear reader. Participants already number in the hundreds of thousands. Perhaps millions. Some are only vaguely aware they are a part of it. Others think of little else. The rebellion grows, regardless. Hour by hour… day by day…

As for the movement’s modus operandi…

No shots will be fired. No soldiers conscripted. No taxes levied. In fact, this revolution will not be televised… mostly because it is not a revolution at all.

By definition, revolutions simply return us to our point of origin. It’s why they say history repeats… or at least rhymes. Kings are toppled, tsars slain, prime ministers ousted and presidents assassinated. And what changes? One gang of thugs is marched up the scaffold… just in time for another to take its place… on the thrown, in the White House, the Casa Rosada, Downing Street.

To repeat: This is NOT a revolution. It is an evolution.

First, a little background…

Seining through the pages of history, we come to discover cycles great and small. Some, like news cycles or fashion cycles, happen in an instant. Unless you’re paying close attention, these cycles can pass right by without your even noticing them.

We’re talking about background chatter… cocktail party banter… the ho-hum white noise of a workaday existence.

Other cycles, like stock market cycles or election cycles, occur over a slightly longer period of time. At three… four… five years, they are small enough to remain vaguely comprehensible… intellectually digestible… available even to our poorly evolved, mammalian brains. (The average bull market in stocks since the Great Depression, for instance, lasts about 4 1/2 years. We’re currently about 5 1/2 years into this one…)

Monitoring these cycles, armchair analysts can reasonably hope to see many ups and downs during their own lifetimes. Bears follow bulls; donkeys succeed elephants. For those of us in the cheap seats, it’s all part of the entertainment.

Grander cycles require a still wider lens. We have to stand further back, to broaden our scope, just to view them. Take, for example, bond-market cycles. Most economists reckon on about 30 years for a typical downtrend (like the one from 1920 to 1949) followed by about the same for the upswing (from 1949 to 1981). At 33 years and counting, the current downtrend may also be a little long in the tooth…

All in all, it takes two whole generations for a bond-market cycle to complete its run from top, to bottom, to top again. A bond investor might go his entire professional career without seeing the market return to one or the other extreme (low to high to low… or high to low to high).

In the grand scheme of things, however, this too is a relatively short cycle.

Zooming out still further, we come to notice even larger cycles… great movements that lay hidden in plain sight from our granular, daily focus.

Here we refer to the inhalation and exhalation of political power over time.

At one moment – the height of an empire, say – we find that it coagulates, congeals, coalesces. Power consolidates. It centralizes. We watch it swirl around the drain of a capital city… a Rome or a London or a Washington, D.C. While mighty militaries patrol the distant frontiers, wealth and influence are sucked toward the center. Sensing the direction of the loot, degenerates, sociopaths and depraved criminals gravitate in the same direction.

Power brokers. Power meetings. Power players. Power lunches. Power mongers.

Bribing… conniving… contriving…

Muckraking… phone hacking… unashamed Faustian pacting.

Politicking.

The District of Columbia – and surrounding area – is an obvious example of this centralizing trend. Look at the grafters and opportunists lining its pretty avenues. Witness the lobbyists scurrying hither and thither up and down K Street. Count the dollars sloshing around at feeding/election time.

The website opensecrets.org set for itself the impossible, presumably thankless task of tracking special-interest spending in the nation’s capital. So far this year, according to its data, more than 11,500 lobbyists have shelled out some $2.4 billion currying political favors and courting preferential treatment on behalf of their paymasters. That’s up from just over $1.4 billion in 1998, when the organization began keeping score.

Trawl around the site for a while and follow the literally thousands of millions of dollars passing from one greased palm to another. Finance… insurance… real estate… defense… construction… labor… transport… health… there is not a sector of the economy absent from the table. (Here are the big spenders… and the top recipients.)

Even so, you can be sure the funds you see and hear represent a mere fraction of the actual amount shuffled around. Both behind closed doors and on telescreens across the world, political actors dance for the camera. The show goes on. Bread and circuses for all.

For the poor outsider, it seems as if the game is consciously rigged against him. It is as though a guiding hand is working the machine, ensuring that he is kept out of the loop. An omnipotent director is posited to account for the direction for the current. But no such operator exists…

No doubt there are nefarious actors involved, rabid parasites feeding at the system’s core. One might call to mind, for example, any number of dot-gov acronyms… TSA, DEA, DHS, etc., etc., etc…

Think the Fed… think NSA… think Academi LLC and the unholy, symbiotic alliance between State and corporate interests…

But these are merely byproducts of centralization, odious symptoms of a trend already in motion.

As the cycle of centralization continues, the cesspool at its dark heart gains in both mass and weight. Unable to move as quickly as it once could, it becomes taut… rigid… ill-adapted to absorb stressors… susceptible to disruption.

It is at this point, when the center can no longer hold, when the heaving political apparatus is laden with crushing financial debt and malignant public doubt, that we hear history cry out for a catalyst… a stimulant… an agent of change.

It’s been over half a millennium since the last such catalyst reshaped the world around it. Might the next moment already be upon us?

Stay tuned for Part II…

Cheers,

Joel Bowman
for Free Market Café
Follow Joel on Twitter @JoelBowman