> "This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."
It's kind of fitting. The nation that spawned the internet is the nation that's killing the internet biz on its own turf.
What we see in America is an increasing merger between industry and government. Finance is the most regulated sector; hence "too big to fail" and all the exploits pulled by big banks. Telecom is almost completely government controlled (through the graning of regulatory monopolies). The government spies on everyone all the time now. This is the fulfillment of Progressivism: regular people are ignorant, but we can fix all social ills through government control. It is also, literally, the fascist model. I sound like an immature teenager for saying that, but I mean it in the full, intellectual sense.
tl;dr the American Progressive movement occurred in parallel, but to a must greater extent, in Weimar Germany. American Neo-conservativism is Progressivism in a right-wing flavor. The modern USA is Weimar Germany all over again.
As the USA's societal ills continue to accelerate (because we're taking anti-corrective action instead of corrective action at every step), the USA will increasingly resemble a command-and-control system like Nazi Germany.
That's not true. The Congress almost defunded the NSA recently. It was a far closer thing than anyone in the establishment suspects. In the end, we are a country that values it's privacy, values small government, and we'll assert that sooner or later. It may be later. But hey, it took a long time for us to figure out slavery, women's rights, civil rights, gay rights, and drug rights. But in the end we did the right thing, and we'll do the right thing on this.
Patience.
But yes, the USA is the only nation founded on the principles of individual freedom, and many people remember that, so there is a chance.
George Carlin sums it up here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMqJvhmD5Yg
As far as I know, Otto von Bismarck started modern education so that he could indoctrinate the German youth, but I'm less certain on the details of that.
The problem with finance is that we didn't have the right regulations in place because big banks lobbied to get them taken off the books. Canada's financial industry is heavily regulated and they haven't had a banking crisis in 150 years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a21n_VzHI_o
"American Progressive movement occurred in parallel, but to a must greater extent, in Weimar Germany. American Neo-conservativism is Progressivism in a right-wing flavor. The modern USA is Weimar Germany all over again."
This just reeks of ignorance. Progressivism and fascism are on the opposite sides of the political spectrum. In fact, fascists tried to overthrow widely celebrated progressive Franklin Roosevelt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
Just because progressives think that we shouldn't have laissez-faire capitalism, doesn't mean they support a surveillance state.
But they have lobbied to keep all kinds of regulations that they benefit from. A half-regulated industry is likely to be worse than either a fully public or fully private one (especially if we take American insurance/healthcare as an example).
A good example is Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, which were implicitly guaranteeing financially irresponsible mortgages, and various home ownership encouragement policies pushed by the US federal government for decades.
> Progressivism and fascism are on the opposite sides of the political spectrum
They're both fundamentally moved by the idea that we need big government to get to some kind of "better" society, which is anathema to freedom and individual rights. They just disagree about the specifics of that "better" society.
Technically, you're right to call me out, because I shouldn't call the entire thing "Progressive," as that's just a a part of it. The whole intellectual trend actually comes from the anti-Englightenment German philosophers who taught that individuals are unimportant, and only society and duty matter.
hattip: Moldbug