Posted by Ben Curran on July 21, 2012 at 03:04:32:
I have given offence to friends by posting the comment ‘Fall of the Great City’. I apologise for any hurt or offence given, and wish to clarify this issue.
The issue which may in time lead to the collapse of the international financial and currency system lies not in any special defect in the individual countries or peoples or cultures that I listed. The issue is the common political system used in all those countries, namely a stable, multi-party democracy. It is strange that this is so, because until recently there was consensus that such a democracy was the highest political achievement of mankind as a whole. But since the credit crisis burst upon us in 2008, it has been dawning on conservative economists around the world that there may be an inherent flaw in this system.
It seems that wherever a country succeeds in establishing a stable multi-party democracy, the debt load incurred by that country increases over several decades, until it reaches a level of about eighty or ninety percent of the Gross Domestic Product. If at this point the government of the day starts a disciplined campaign to get the debt down, and if the electorate accepts the austerity measures necessary to do this, the economy of the country can be saved. But evidence from the last few years indicates that this is unlikely to happen.
What actually happens is that as soon as the austerity measures start to bite, the electorate votes the government of the day out of office.
It is this situation which led the commentator who I quoted in my previous post to make the colourful remarks that he did. The point here is that it is not the individual natures of the peoples and cultures involved. The point is rather that all large groups of human beings respond in the same way to being governed through a multi-party democracy.
Once again I apologise for any offence given, and I regret not having made this clear in my last post.