Venezuela Enters Phase II Of Apocalypse

First, the people have to do without. Then the government has to do without:

The courts? Closed most days. The bureau to start a business? Same thing. The public defender’s office? That’s been converted into a food bank for government employees.

Step by step, Venezuela has been shutting down.

This country has long been accustomed to painful shortages, even of basic foods. But Venezuela keeps drifting further into uncharted territory.

In recent weeks, the government has taken what may be one of the most desperate measures ever by a country to save electricity: A shutdown of many of its offices for all but two half-days each week.

But that is only the start of the country’s woes. Electricity and water are being rationed, and huge areas of the country have spent months with little of either.

Many people cannot make international calls from their phones because of a dispute between the government and phone companies over currency regulations and rates.

In a normal economic downturn, just the people have to do without, as government tides itself over on debt, soaking the rich, or some other measure. In the collapse to come, that will not be an option, so to that end, looking to Venezuela is informative.

There is one difference. An r-strategist nation needs the government. An r-strategist nation will sacrifice to keep the government, in the hopes it will spread the misery equally. An r-strategist nation will do anything to have a government protect them from freedom.

I suspect large swaths of America will be different. Large swaths of America have no need for the government. Large swaths have begun to see the federal government as a refuge of scoundrels, and a producer of misery. From healthcare, to surveillance, to environmental regulations, to firearms restrictions, to government targeting based on political beliefs, to forced settlement of Muslim foreigners, much of the federal government these days is at best, a costly non-entity, and at worst a net-negative to freedom and happiness. Personally, if tomorrow the federal government dissolved, and all that was left was local government, my life would be much more enjoyable.

There was a Russian political scientist who postulated that America would eventually see a debt crisis, and that this would produce a sudden dissolution of the federal government akin to what happened to the Soviet Union in the late eighties. The federal government would not have the money to pay it’s employees, and thus the employees would have to drift away to seek a means of support elsewhere. Once it lacked employees, the authority of the federal government and its ability to act would disappear, and the government would dissolve, replaced by loose amalgamations of states into several regional mini-nations. I crossed paths with an American who lived in Russia for a long time, and he said the Russians all took this ultimate outcome for granted, having seen it themselves from the inside. Looking at Venezuela, and the magnitude of the collapse to come, it doesn’t look as if they were that far off.

This is the problem the r-strategists face. The more the rabbits panic as things head downhill, and the more onerous they make the government as the Apocalypse approaches, the more the nation will embrace its dissolution as the Apocalypse approaches phase two.

It will be interesting to see if the removal of the federal government produces a sudden reversal of the decline, by eliminating regulations on industries, and freeing up capital that would otherwise have been scarfed up by the government. If there is one nation in history that will be able to lift itself up and bring greatness back, once no longer encumbered by the cesspool of corruption and incompetence that is Washington DC, it is America.