Why Google + (And Collected Stuff) Is Destroying America

By Shaun Kenney | Sunday, July 3rd, 2011 | Culture, Virginia

Because Twitter and Facebook were not enough, Google has jumped in with the aptly named Google +.  Google + is like nothing you’ve ever seen just a copy of what Facebook does, but people are jumping all over it as if it was the next big thing, knowing that if it really does become the next big thing, being on the ground floor as a bit of a homesteader makes them the top of the pyramid when the sheeple come in to get a slice of turf.

Homesteading is about as American a concept as one can derive.  Point west, settle in either unsettled (or recently cleared of its native inhabitants… or not) territory and get your 40 acres and a mule working.

This was Jeffersonian America at its finest.  Homesteaders and yeoman farmers staking a claim, working the soil, content with their own slice of paradise.  Millions of self-sufficient, hard working, republican (lowercase-r) farmers making their mark on the world.  Their children educated by both nature and the state — as Jefferson was an early proponent of public education — and sent forth to either establish new claims of their own, or take over the ones left by those who had moved on.

Contrast this 18th century ideal of the yeoman farmer with the 21st century “American dream” we’ve built today.  Instead of 40 acres and a mule, it’s 1 acre and 4,500 square feet of house with three cars in the garage and a gaggle of electronics.

Instead of self-sufficiency, it’s self-dependency.  Instead of autonomous individuals improving the soil, it’s HOAs and community sporting events.  Instead of a government aimed at creating new republicans (again, lowercase-r) and creating the conditions for a free society to flourish, we have a government aimed towards provision and an opposition wrapped around protecting what they have at tremendous cost to what will be passed on to future generations.

Am I the only one going crazy here?

Here’s something else that is fueling the feeding frenzy on stuff — or the more aptly named crap.  I read this commentary today and wretched.  ”19 Reasons Why Another Great Depression is Coming” screams the headlines, lines designed to work people up with evidence barely separated from fact — or better, speculation on other commodity markets to push people into buying gold.

Why are they creating this fear?  Because they know that as soon as the federal government sorts itself out, the economy is going to take off like a rocket.  Look at the basic indicators — unemployment was a healthy 7.4% in January 2009 — today it’s at 9.1%.  Growth is projected to be at an “anemic” 3.4% GDP for the next 12 months after a downgrade… that is $480 billion in new economic growth which far outpaces inflation.

Want to lose money?  Invest in gold this year.  That’s why people who have thought about this a hell of a lot more that you have are begging you — spending millions in advertising on Fox News — to get you to blow your cash.

“But!” scream the apologists, “that unemployment figure doesn’t take in the underemployed!  The unemployed who have given up!  The millions of new Americans coming online for new jobs!  The McDonalds jobs that Bush/Obama created during the recovery! ”  Follow this up with a whole bunch of revanchist America-is-in-decline nonsense and add to it your choice of either Media Matters/Move On progressive hate or Tea Party objectivism… and you’ve got yourself the right ingredients for CHANGE AT ALL COSTS!!!

William Pitt the Younger had it right, and for those of you who know me well, I’ve had this listed as a quote on just about everything I own for years now:

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

…and that’s what we’re trying to sell you.

Everything is geared to squeeze every dime out of you — marketing, advertising, politics, governance, charity, social media, etc.  Worse, we willingly participate in it all, and cry bloody murder when we’re deprived of the privileges we’ve now grow accustomed to qualify as “rights” enshrined in some mystical handout system called government.

Folks, there’s a reason why people want you to buy more crap, rack up your credit cards, and get you thinking that all is not well.  Here’s a bit of perspective:

• After the Second World War, Great Britain was bankrupt. They had to forfeit an empire carefully built over 350 years in order to pay down its debt — which they only recently accomplished.  The American taxpayer took on a similar burden, fought two wars, and inherited this empire from Britain (problems and all).  That’s the power of the American consumer.
• This last economic crisis? Had it occurred 80 years ago, it would have been on par with the Great Depression.  Yet there are no bread lines, no homeless wandering America, no families torn apart and sent to live with relatives, no riots, no “Bonus Army” camps on the National Mall, no rumblings of a Communist revolt — in fact, for such a crisis there seems to be an awful lot of people willing to spend a weekend in Washington railing about lost liberties, while spending hundreds of dollars into the D.C. tourist economy…
• For every American, there are four Chinese. Yet the American consumer makes 4x the amount of the average Chinese consumer.  That is a factor of 16, folks… and while America has resources to go into the next 300 years (or more), China is tapped out.  There is nowhere for China to grow unless it looks towards Russia and southern Africa.  Long term — we win.
• The European Union is an economic superpower of 600 million.  The United States is an economic superpower of 320 million with emerging markets in North America that far outstrip the rest of the world.  Japan — wedded to US markets — has an economy on par with that of China.  India is wedded to Anglo-American markets.  The Middle East is wedded to Euro-American consumption.  Sub-Saharan Africa is wedded to American exports.  Even emerging markets in Latin America depend heavily on American and European markets.  This is the world, folks.

Welcome to the Pax Americana.

I’m saying all of this to give you a bit of self-confidence.  America is not a nation in decline.  In fact, quite the opposite — American hegemony is the future of the 21st century whether China or the EU or Russia like it or not.

How will we wreck it?  Simple answer — the same way Rome did.

We will wreck the Pax Americana through the following: by living beyond our means, buy purchasing stuff beyond thinking of our own economic security, by mortgaging the future of our country through mountains of debt, by expecting more of government without expecting to pay for the cost (both material and moral), and by turning our back on the virtues and principles that made America great.

What can you do?  How can you do it?  Let me give you five easy steps you can think about this Independence Day Weekend:

1. Determine to live with less stuff. Here’s what you do — go on vacation for a week or two.  Go camping, go to the beach.  Unplug the phone and the television, and don’t bother reading the paper.  Come back home.  Did the news change?  Probably not — same news as last year, frankly.  What could you have lived without?  Television, that night out on the town, trips to the movies, etc?  That elliptical machine you’ve never used?  Just sell it — sell all of it.

2. Kill your credit and debt. Bottom line is that credit and debt is a tax we place upon ourselves for the privilege of “living right now” — and I’m certain that folks have found one or two occasions where the credit card came in handy for a car repair, or flights home to visit relatives.  That’s what a savings account is for, folks.  As for the credit cards, pay off those high percentage ones and just roll it forward into the next one.  Most folks would be shocked at how much they could save with just six months of aggression, self-respect, and a little bit of “I’m sick and tired of getting screwed by the gov’t, credit card companies, and banks” attitude.  Find your inner Jeffersonian and do what TJ couldn’t do — use this if it helps.

3. Grow a Victory Garden out back. Tell every member of your family they are duty bound to grow a 4 x 4 plot.  It costs $10 for all the seeds you could ever want at your local hardware or gardening store, and about an hour of digging to get a good 4 foot by 4 foot plot ready to go.  THIS IS WHAT YOUR GRANDFATHER DID DURING THE REAL DEPRESSION — and the Square Foot Gardening method is a great way to supplement your dinner table with real food that will save you a few hundred (yes — hundred) bucks this year.  It’s not too late to start a Victory Garden either, just don’t get too ambitious… start small, get comfortable, then get ambitious.

4. Take your hobby and share it. Now I will readily admit — I have too much going on to really take my hobby and turn it into a business.  But there are plenty of people who sit around all day and say “Gee — I hate this desk job… but if I could only do X all day long…”  I do hate to break it to you, but it is rare — genuinely rare — for that person to do what they love and love what they do.  Most of us work for the weekend, and as you do, pick up a hobby where you genuinely make something out of nothing.  Carpenter?  Build a bookshelf.  Gardener?  Make a Victory Garden and help friends establish one.  Music?  Start a local quartet or band.  Baking?  Offer to do things for friends and family, just for the sake of creating.  Let’s face it — it’s a heck of a lot more satisfying spending three hours making something you can enjoy for a lifetime than it is to vegetate and watch TV… and a local barter system is a great way to build community, culture, and recapture a little bit of that self-sufficiency we seem to have lost.

5. Blog about it! Right, right, right… you’d expect that from a blogger.  But think about it this way — your path needs a historian.  Your kids, your family, your community will want to enjoy and learn from your experiences.  It doesn’t have to be spectacular — it doesn’t even have to be well read (at first).  Learning to share these experiences is what, in the 18th century, one might have expected out of a commonplace book, a “garden book” or a “farm book” (both of which Jefferson kept), or a diary of old.  No one expects you to share every cup of coffee or every personal and intimate detail online… but if you have the plans to build this and are willing to take a bunch of corn, web design, or fundraising/communications work in trade, we should talk.

Now I am no romanticist… but there is something in Thoreau that strikes at the very heart of the American soul:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Somehow, I don’t believe Google + is the secret to living life deliberately.

The nonsense from the left about forcing “change” on America and living in nice sustainable communities?  No economy in the world was ever built on scarcity and survived.  The equally bloviated nonsense from the objectivist right about the downfall of American “empire”?  It’s the petulant whining of the right spectrum of Baby Boomer who have, frankly, run out of my money to live upon.

The Jeffersonian “empire of liberty” still exists in the backyard cookouts and sparklers of the 4th of July.  We’ve inherited a cathedral of trees and brick and steel., and America is and remains the greatest, best hope for mankind on Earth.

Let’s make a stand.  Let’s live up to the standard and the gift of republican virtue and determine that, one year from now, we are less dependent upon those who desire to be our masters — whether corporate or socialist — and more dependent upon ourselves, and not our stuff or the latest craze, for our own happiness.

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