Guns and Butter

 This is my favourite phrase.  It describes government policy:   you can spend money on guns or butter, but there is a limit on how much you can spend.  It was a phrase of the Bismark era, when guns and battleships represented sources of wealth.  You could conquer and oppress colonies and steal their resources.  A great source of wealth.  Butter represents social spending to pacify the populace, like the Roman bread and circuses.

The world always goes into these extreme cycles.  Guns generate wealth with no butter, until people recoil and demand butter.  Butter, by definition, does not generate any wealth, but rational social spending can generate wealth.  The education of minorities and women generated great wealth for the West.  Rational welfare, as a social safety net, generates wealth.  There are endless forms of butter that generate no wealth.

The world has had many cycles.  The Victorians were all guns and no butter, until Dickens came along.  Then everything in Europe was spent in endless, useless wars.  The US generated great wealth by brutalizing the natives, and then it all went into a civil war.

After the wars, there was a great era for cold, hard rationalists -- the 50's!  Eisenhower and interstates, oil and steel.  No butter.  That great era ended with the 60's, JFK and Camelot, hippies, etc.  There was great rationality with the Space Race, but that went along with the Vietnam war, a total waste.

We paid for it in the 70's, no money for anything.  But we came out of it with nuclear power, and world free trade.  All that wealth was attacked by the forces of left, but the wealth kept being generated.

In the western world, guns and butter was represented by having two parties.  The old reps in the US were for guns.  The dems were for butter.

The US generated wealth on the West coast by having no taxes for software and computer people.  If you ever visited there, you know there is no butter.  The computers created a spurt of wealth by increasing productivity, and no butter there.

Now we are in an era of 'all butter all the time'.  The US right wing has gone all for their own form of butter - abortion, protectionism, assault rifles, etc.  The are not the party of wealth creation.  The dems are all butter like they have always been.  Equality, wind mills, etc.

Obviously, in a modern era, we should even out those cycles.  But there is nobody for 'hard rationality' which always involves economics and physics.  Everything is 'philosophy' which has always been a fine academic exercise, but not a wealth generator.

Of course, the butter addicts have no concept of reality, and don't see a problem.  The Albertans just want to kill people.  The right doesn't want to take the vaccine.  This is all philosophy.

What happens is that all the money is spent, and we go into a massive global recession.  We've been there before many times.  The big problem is that I don't see a way out of it, in my lifetime.  We could have an era of cheap fusion, or space could mine asteroids.  They all take a lot of money out of butter.

So in summary, we are now in a big era of Big Butter, spurred by Facebook and Twitter.  The money will run out.  I don't see that Zoom will give us wealth creation, it just encourages verbalizers.  We will go into the 70's along with the cold weather.  We don't give a hoot for our children's children.

I'm okay for my lifetime since I suck off a pension, paid by declining nuclear power plants.  They are all dropping off, one by one.  New York can live off Quebec for a while, and there is some wealth generated in flooding all the land.

However, we've done this many times, and there is always a new technology to dig us out.  As we enter the hole, we never know what will dig us out, but it has always been there.  Good luck!

ps.  China and Russia are still the advocates of Bismark.  :)

pps.  I was thinking that 3d printing would lift us, but that's proving to be a loser.