29 October 2000

And why is it more intense?  Because there is more money (wealth) to spread around and the process of spreading is aggressive.

Drugs?  Oil?  Investments (gambling)?  Everyone scratching for whatever they can get, and what some can get is mucho.  Government officials on the take?  Oh my god!  The temptation is too much because there is too much money being spread around.

Whose fault?  Don't be naive.  The fault lies with those of us - all of us? - who really don't care as long as we've got ours and are living comfortably.  Comfortably?  What does that mean?  Look around; it means better and better; it means better than contemporaries.  Keeping up with (doing better than) the Jones has just about reached its limits.  Only the Jones are now out of reach because many are drug lords and oil sheiks.  And whose fault is that?

We are about to reap what "we" have sown.  Or what enough of us have sown to make it all possible.  Pain?  Oh, yeah.  How much?  Ahhh, that's the key question right now.  How much depends on how we handle it and what we do next.  The prospects are not rosy, but neither are they hopeless.  It really is up to us, and what we are made of.

But think of this: greed has not diminished, and greed will find a way.  Thus some will do better than others - legally or illegally.  It would be nice  in a rule of law world if legality would triumph, but even there we have done it to ourselves by assuming all wish to live by rule of law and liberty.  True?  Only when it's our ox being gored; otherwise too many are perfectly happy to either take advantage or be taken care of, and the former will become more powerful and the latter will learn to do with less, while the more aggesive quietly move on to elitism - the politics of envy and the justice of mediocrity, blinded by the propaganda of the "elite."

Perhaps democracy and free market enterprise were a noble experiment that have run their course, with the world reverting to its more normal and typical way. 

But then, perhaps not.