It’s too bad the chart cut off the British Empire after it collapsed after WWII. As journalist Malcolm Muggeridge quipped, “[It was] a time when we have lost an Empire on which the sun never set, and acquired a Commonwealth on which it never rises.” The UK economy was slammed by two world wars. But after WWII, they went full-tilt socialist and became the “sick man of Europe” until the 1979 revival under Margaret Thatcher. Since, under the Cool Britannia socialism of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, 1997-2010, the country sank so low it hasn’t recovered, and Scotland now might bolt.

Russia is included through the USSR, but not after the end of communism in 1991. And Germany is not included at all, nor is Japan.

But we do see the fast rise of the United States under its free-market system until about 1913, then a leveling off, then a sharp ascendance to total global preeminence after World War II, when all the other major economies were bombed out and bankrupt. Then it declined to about 20 percent of the global economy and stayed there until around 2001, when the horrible Bush policies started digging in: massive new spending, deficits and debt; badly designed tax “cuts”; and intrusive new anti-business regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley. The anti-production policies have continued under Obama.

For China, the chart shows its role in 1820, due to its huge population and ancient civilization, as by far the world’s biggest economy. But then China had difficulty with the Europeans rising with their might from the Industrial Revolution, and Chinese society to a great extent collapsed. It hit rock bottom under Mao’s communism, 1949-1976. Then Deng’s capitalist reforms rocketed China back upward, soon to be No. 1 again.

But who knows how long that will last. America currently is weighted down by more than $200 trillion (with a “t”) in unfunded liabilities for the federal government. It’s more than $700,000 owed by every American family. That can’t possibly be paid. Mainly hurt will be senior-citizen Baby Boomers when the Social Security and Medicare benefits sharply are cut.

Defaulting on the debt, which is inevitable, will clear the books, allowing for Deng-style reforms that end socialism and bring back free markets.

That could change as foreign countries have become upset at the NSA’s ubiquitous snooping, even on friendly countries. According to The Hindu:

Brazil plans to divorce itself from the US-centric internet over Washington’s widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward politically fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.

President Dilma Rousseff has ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the US National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company’s network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to US tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

And according to WashingtonsBlog.com about BRICS (stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa):

A consortium of telecom and undersea cable companies competing for the contracts for the proposed BRICS cable show what they think the project should look like [see above graphic]…

The BRICS countries have the muscle to pull this off.  Each of the BRICS countries are in the top 25 largest economies in the world. China has the world’s 2nd largest economy, India is 3rd, Russia 6th, Brazil 7th, and South Africa 25th….

China is also dropping IBM hardware like a hot potato due to security concerns.  Intel and AMD may not be far behind.

Economic powerhouse Germany is also rolling out a system that would keep all data within Germany’s national borders.

If these countries drop our technology to avoid NSA snooping, that will mean fewer jobs for Americans, especially Californians. Once again, our own government will have sabotaged us.

This reminds me of the old Soviet Union, which closely controlled technology. For example, every copier had to be licensed, with examples of each copier’s “footprint” — every copier left telltale marks in its copies, sort of like fingerprints — kept on file with the KGB. Thus, if a copier was used to produce copies of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” and the copies were discovered after a dissident was tortured, the origin of the copies also could be found, and the rebels arrested.

Computers, including the few personal computers imported from the West, also were tightly controlled.

Such tight security retarded scientific development, which depends on the free flow of information. Which in turn retarded the Soviet economy until it finally collapsed in 1991.

Et tu, America?

SACRAMENTO — Having faith in freedom, Igor Birman is hoping voters “hire” him for Congress. “I’m here on a job interview asking you to hire me,” Birman tells voters he meets.

Birman, a Russian Jewish Immigrant and Republican, announced in September he is running for Congress against Rep. Ami Bera, a Democrat from Congressional District 7. At 32, Birman has a unique ability to reach young and ethnic voters who historically have been wooed by Democrats. At a Sacramento coffee shop, he sat down to talk to me.

“I was defined by freedom,” Birman said when we met this week. “But that freedom now is in great jeopardy based on the policies of many leaders in our government.”

“This is all in your hands”

Birman is the former Chief of Staff to Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Elk Grove, a post he held since 2009. McClintock has endorsed Birman.

Birman was born in the Soviet Union in 1981. His father father is a physicist and a Refusenik, a term for Soviet Jews who were denied permission to emigrate abroad. Soviet officials said Birman’s mother could leave the country and take Igor and his younger brother, but officials would not let his father go because of his scientific expertise. Finally, after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, eventually the family was allowed to leave in 1994, when Igor was 13.

Birman said a few days before the family left Russia, his parents discovered the secret police had been conducting surveillance of them. The police tore apart their small Moscow apartment trying to intimidate the family. Birman said his parents risked everything and gave up everything they owned to come to America.

“This will never happen there,” Birman said his mother repeatedly assured him.

As the Birman family was preparing to leave, his father received a suspicious letter claiming to be from the American Embassy. “But it was in Russian,” Birman said. The letter read:

“Dear Mr. Birman,

“Due to the new fiscal year, the U.S. is no longer accepting new immigrants. Please cancel your plans to come.”

Igor said since his English was good, he called the U.S. Embassy for his parents and asked officials about the suspicious letter. He was told it was a fake. “Come, and come right away,” the U.S. Embassy representative told him.

“My parents risked their lives to get me here, to live in freedom, to flourish,” Igor said. “And now that that same freedom is being threatened by our own leaders, how can I not dedicate my life to make sure that my children and grandchildren are born into a society that I came here to find?”

Consequences of an overgrown government

Birman said Americans are faced with the consequences of an overgrown government everywhere. Obamacare is just one example.

“You don’t have to look much further than families who can no longer find full-time jobs, or who now find themselves with less than full-time work, with 29-1/2 hour work weeks,” Birman said. “Families whose husbands and wives came home and reported their companies no longer carry health care coverage. That’s not because the ingenuity of the American people is sapped. It’s because of government policies that ultimately are up to us to reverse. Many of these folks realize it’s public policy to blame, and that’s why I’m running.”

People are the sovereigns

“People are the sovereigns,” Birman said, meaning that “the people” have all of the rights of kings.

Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court found in Yick Wo vs. Hopkins, “Sovereignty itself is, of course, not subject to law, for it is the author and source of law.”

“But instead, the people have become supplicants to government,” Birman said. “They tell us what to do, but we hire them.” He said this is reversible. “This is all in your hands,” he tells constituents.

Congressional District 7 contenders

Rep. Ami Bera narrowly won a 2012 election rematch against Rep. Dan Lungren, a veteran Republican, with a long history of holding political office, including as California attorney general. Bera is vulnerable in the district, with 39 percent registered Democratic voters, and 38 percent Republican voters.

In the new “top two” voting system, the two candidates with the most votes in the June primary face off in a November 2014 runoff. Bera almost certainly will be one of those two. Which means that, for the second slot, Birman is challenging Republicans Doug Ose, a former California congressman from 1999 to 2005; and  Elizabeth Emken, who in 2012 ran as the Republican Party nominee for U.S. Senator, losing to incumbent Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

“Do your best to stand for freedom,” Birman said. “If you lose, history will remember you. If you win, my God! Then everyone wins. Americans want someone who will uphold freedom. You don’t win every battle when you stand on principle. But you may win many.”

By John Seiler

When the Soviet Union existed, Russians traveling to the free, capitalist West would pick up goods that were difficult or impossible to get back in the USSR: stereos, cameras, French perfume, etc.

California now is like that:

“Disparate gun laws make it easier for residents of California, for example, to travel to Nevada to buy just about any weapon they choose without undergoing background checks. The issue is a topic of discussion in Congress and among state lawmakers across the country.

“California’s laws are among the most stringent in the country. Only seven states, including California, ban the sale of large-capacity magazines. Eleven states, California included, require waiting periods of up to two weeks between the purchase of a gun and the transfer of the gun. The other 39 have no waiting periods.”

Free states respect our sacred Second Amendment “right to keep and bear arms.” States assaulting freedom restrict that freedom.

I wonder how many decent, law-abiding, taxpaying citizens have left California, or soon will, because it restricts Gun Rights. Even if you have one of the scarce jobs not destroyed here by high taxes and regulations, what good is it if it’s increasingly difficult to defend your family against marauding robbers, rapists and murderers?

By John Seiler

Why do young nerds angling to be the next Steve Jobs still flock to Silicon Valley? That’s where Mark Zuckerberg transplanted Facebook, which he started in his Harvard dorm room. Facebook’s IPO this week pegs its value at around $100 billion.

But the Facebook owners are being gouged by the bankrupt state of California for $2 billion. If they had moved instead to Austin, Tex., or Seattle, Wash., they would have paid no state income or capital gains taxes. If they had moved to the Cayman Islands, Singapore or another tax haven and renounced their citizenship — as co-founder Eduardo Saverin has done — they could have avoided even most of the 35 percent U.S. income tax and 15 percent capital gains tax.

California also has numerous preposterous laws people and companies must follow, from banning the use of cell phones in cars to banning smoking almost everywhere. Well, I suppose the young gearheads don’t smoke — cigarattes, anyway.

My theory is that Silicon Valley is like Star City was in the old Soviet Union. If you were a budding young cosmonaut aspirant in the Soviet bloc, that was the place to be. According to Wikipedia,

“Cosmonauts of the Russian Federal Space Agency, and the Soviet space program before it, have lived and trained in Star City since the 1960s. In the Soviet era the location was a highly secret and guarded military installation, access to which was severely restricted.”

There was no question of defecting to the West. Sure, you maybe could escape across the border and be given asylum in the United States. The FBI would debrief you about your knowledge of the Soviet space program. You’d be given a new identity as Ivan Smithsky in Dubuque. You’d be a free person. But no way they’d let you become an American astronaut.

So you were stuck in Star City. The amenities there made it worthwhile. Unlike the subsistence living scraped out by most Soviets in the workers’ paradise, you would be given the best food and drink, a decent apartment or house, culture and entertainment, even access to banned literature the Soviet bosses winked at. They knew you weren’t going anywhere. You also had to put up with pervasive secrecy and being spied on.

The weather? Much better in Silicon Valley, of course. No Russian winters. But if you were a Russian wanting to be a cosmonaut, you grew up with the winters. And if you stuck with the program, retirement would be in the Crimea, with California-style weather and great local wines.

People will do almost anything to get what they want. They’ll put up with socialism, whether the Soviet or California kind.

That’s why Silicon Valley will continue attracting high-IQ future Jobses and Zuckerbergs. For as long as anyone reading this is alive.

For most of the rest of us, it’s Moscow circa 1970, Jerry Brown as Leonid Brezhnev, but with great weather.

By John Seiler

California increasingly resembles the Soviet Union in the 1930s but with better weather. The economy is socialist; the leader is megalomaniac; and dissidents are purged.

The latest victim is Dr. La Donna Porter, M.D. Her “crime”: advocating policies different from those of the Dear Leader, Gov. Jerry Brown:

 “Under pressure from health advocates, Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday removed a controversial physician from a state health board after she appeared in an industry-funded ad against a tobacco tax hike on the June ballot.”

That’s Proposition 29, which would massively punish dissidents who smoke tobacco by imposing on them a $1 per pack increase in the price of cigarettes — a commodity already massively taxed. Ironically, by sucking another $735 million from the productive economy, Prop. 29 would reduce the tax base from which Brown needs revenue to close a budget deficit that just keeps growing — even before Prop. 29 hits the polls.

Kalifornia science and economics makes no more sense than Soviet science and economics.

As Dr. Porter points out, correctly, in the video, a lot of the money stolen from smokers by Prop. 29 would be sent out of state. That would kill jobs here. Unemployed people in Kalifornia don’t pay many taxes, but do take much in social services and unemployment benefits.

It’s like how, in the 1930s, Stalin used concentration camps to steal the slave laborers’ production, then used the money to fund lavish living for himself and the socialist elite.

Here’s Dr. Porter’s ThoughtCrime:

By John Seiler

I salute the rising generation! Although they are subjected to P.C. brainwashing from preschool through graduate or professional school, may are rebelling.

In the following video, a smart girl bids her “farewell to college.” And it’s from the University of Utah, supposedly one of the more “conservative” schools around, because it’s in Utah. But it’s really just as P.C. as other schools.

The girl says she’s in the theatre department, but mostly learns about how great socialism and Marxism are. Yet the Marxist Soviet Union collapsed more than 20 years ago! After murdering 62 million people, according to demographer R.J. Rummel. And we’re now 34 years past when China dumped Marxism, which murdered 39 million people there.

Why are our tax dollars funding the proponents of the ideology of mass murder?

It’s a “complete racket” from primary school through to college, she says, “a factory that turns out statists by the millions.”

What an inspiration.

She says the way to learn something is to learn it as a trade. After all, in her field, Shakespeare and Sophocles never suffered through a university “theatre” department Marxism brainwashing session.