Before you read another word, ask yourself: A year on from the US Presidential election, would the world be a better, safer place if Kamala Harris were now in the White House?
If your answer is Yes, you’re definitely not going to like what follows. In a world of ever-evolving complexity, very few single truths survive analysis, but here’s one that does: LTX2 – low-tax, low-touch – democracies with small commitments to the welfare state can reinvent themselves. Democracies that think the duty of a state is to mind its citizens from creation to cremation are in the longer term doomed.
Why? Because such states are vulnerable to the fatal influence of those foul “not-for-profits” or “quangos”: Quasi-autonomous non-government agencies, whose existence and budgets depend entirely on the volume of their screeches. Greens, Wind Good, Oil Evil, Multiculturalists, Immigration Good, Controls Racist, Leftists, More on Health, Less on Defence, Conservatives, Low Rise Good, Multistorey Bad, Environmentalists, Toads Good, Roads Bad. In general, Virtue Nice, Vice Unnice.
This is fridge-magnet governance, and the level that Harris was operating at, as was the 48 per cent of the US population that voted for her. A troubling thought, but not nearly as troubling as the fate of Europe, which is not so much lagging behind the USA as seeing its back for the second time as America laps us again.
One reason is that the USA is a true democracy whereas the EU is not: It mimics democracy, rather like hoverflies mimic wasps. Which would you prefer to swat in unstung safety – wasps or hoverflies? Trump’s USA or von der Leyen’s EU? Let me think now…
The French National Assembly has finally woken up to some reality with its rejection of Prime Minister Lecornu’s plan to levy a wealth tax on the super-rich. Sigh. Did he not read the runes? The worldwide demand for executive jets is rising so fast – 30 per cent up on pre-Covid levels – that engine-manufacturers can’t keep up with it. What does this tell us? Well, yes, the super-rich can be often be financially frivolous, but also, they’ll flee as fast as a Dassault Falcon 7X to escape taxation. This is a no-choice choice, because by the time any new tax laws are passed, their targets will already be heels-up in the UAE or Panama – but certainly not London, where the tragically-hideous Starmer government is clearly taking its inspiration from Enver Hoxha’s Albania, circa 1965.
Indeed, the UK is a warning to the world how consensual governance is a stairway to hell. Tories and Labour sought to buy their way into power by crop-dusting the electorate with benefits while purchasing morality credit-notes on immigration with influential but implacable quangos. The icing on the cake of national suicide – my, how the mixed-metaphors are flying thick and fast! – has come from a politicised and self-regarding (therefore irreformable) judiciary. The outcome? The UK spends 24 per cent of its national budget on welfare, with approximately the same percentage of the entire population living on benefits. These catastrophic numbers almost kabbalistically match the UK’s obesity levels, amongst the highest anywhere.
Ah, but toxic statism hardly explains the USA’s obesity epidemic, surely? Sorry, but it most emphatically does. The debauching of the USA’s electorate began with President Johnson’s Great Society experiment, which created dependency-constituencies across America. Admittedly, the agri-lobby played its heroic part in this obesity-disaster with the smuggling of high-fructose corn-syrup into American diets, via soft-drinks. But you can be sure the tech-wizards of Silicon Valley never allow their children anywhere near that unprocessible poison or the equally unprocessible poison of cell-phones. Silikids probably rehydrate with pure Andean ice-melt while studying Latin subjunctives.
Two points about Silivalley adults: One, don’t trust them, and two, they tend to cancel one another out. Tend to: that’s all. Peter Thiel is not Mark Zuckerberg, and more than that I cannot say, only this: These people inhabit an incomprehensible universe. The circuits on Thiel’s latest chip are narrower than the wavelength of light, so requiring a special kind of light-beam that doesn’t exist on earth. Try to tax that, big government, and watch it disappear as fast as any previously-unknown light. Where to? Taiwan, Pluto, just anywhere out of range. But never fear, readers, for Europe is also working on a new light-making machine: previously called flint.
Today, all roads lead to AI, which used to be artificial insemination before mutating into auto-immune and is now artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley has acquired $200 billion (€173 billion) in loans to finance AI development, which is peanuts compared to the market value of AI’s Nvidia, which recently became the first $5 trillion (€4.3 trillion) company. Microsoft, aided by investment in OpenAI, is now worth $4 trillion (€3.5 trillion). That’s point One. Point Two: Under no circumstances should readers believe that this columnist’s apparent fluency with numbers in any way matches his even greater mastery of innumeracy, voodoo and the number that he first thought of.
Point Three – the final one – is that two business models are competing for world domination: One Chinese, which is statist and centralised, the other American, which is LTX2 and recruits genius internationally: Thiel is German, his young chip-lieutenant James Proud is English. Note: Both are in the USA, not Europe. Put your money on the USA to win this global battle, though never underestimate China’s astonishing ability to mobilise genius from its ancient imperial heart.
Sixty-five years ago, Chinese peasants were beating sparrows to death in the Five Year Plan known as The Great Leap Forward while millions of people starved. Today China, in its 15th Five Year Plan, now leads the EU in all technological matters. Its weird demographic, created by decades of one-child families, will apparently be “solved” by AI, as robots wipe old people’s bottoms, with the cooking being done by different robots (or so diners hope) while yet other robots invent some new and interesting diseases. The key here is that while we Anglophones usually forget, the Chinese never do. That’s why they insist that we spell, Peking, their capital in our letters in their way, as in Beijing. Having won that cultural victory, their longer term project probably is to launch COVID-II, in revenge for the Opium Wars and The Sack of the Summer Palace.
Hmmm. Difficult one to negotiate.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Ireland’s walls have been breached