I'm a 38-year-old expat originally from New Orleans and currently living on the north coast of Sicily with my fiancee of 5 years and our 11-month-old daughter. My degree is in Economics (Austrian School via Loyola, New Orleans) but I also focused on Philosophy, Classics, and History. I was on ODA 2044 (18e/18c) in 20th Special Forces Group from 1991-1997 and I am a veteran of Gulf War I when I served with the Mechanized Infantry in 2/5 Cav. I am currently employed as a consultant to a family trust here in Sicily; prior to that I served as "Crisis Manager" for Intercosmos Media Group, Inc. We live-blogged Hurricane Katrina from ground zero as described by Wired Magazine (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/posts.html?pg=2) and my blog was voted Best of the Web in 2005 (http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/009559.html).
If my last name is familiar it's because there must be 200 Barnetts in the libertarian movement -- my father is Professor of Economics and Chase Distinguished Professor of International Business William Barnett II and is one of the greatest living macro-economists and an anarcho-capitalist. My brother and I are both anarcho-capitalists.
It's my contention that America is doomed. Between Obama's Keynesian stimulus plan
and Bernanke's Keynesian monetary policy, you can be assured of one thing: oblivion. This, in addition to the already more than $2 Trillion expansion of the Fed's balance sheet and the massive "stimulus" already "injected", is going to give the economy a one-two combination knockout blow which, given the epic size of the bubble economy, is going to be unparalleled in all of history.
Be assured that America is not the only country going down. Iceland already collapsed, economy and government both. The UK banking system was within three hours of total collapse and its demise has been temporarily forestalled, but remains imminent and inevitable. The US military has warned that Mexico is in danger of a "sudden collapse". Dubai is collapsing. This is global, people.
The problem for America is that Americans have become accustomed to a standard of living which few people around the globe can relate to. That standard of living is going to change, drastically. Additionally, unlike, say, Japan, the US has several negative long term social trends weighing against it, including: a failed public "school" system which produces masses of illiterate, innumerate partially-trainable monkeys incapable of doing anything requiring critical thinking; a massive underclass dependent entirely on government assistance; the emergence of the police state and the crumbling of the Bill-of-Rights; all kinds of cultural breakdowns beginning with the destruction of the two-parent family -- drugs, latch-keyism consequent first to working parents and then to divorce, and the cultural pressure on children to be slatterns and dope-dealers (see Fred Reed on this); the staggering debt most Americans are buckling underneath and the lack of any savings whatsoever, resulting in paycheck to paycheck living, even for what's left of the middle class; an enormous prison population -- the world's largest in real and per capita terms, massive violate crime rates; etc. The proliferation of firearms means that anger and hopelessness have an outlet. We're already seeing murders and murder-suicides related to the first stages of the collapse.
I wish you all well.
My fiancee and me:
Our daughter at 6 weeks:
Famiglia:
