Canada's evolution to a two party state

Canada's political left should unite if they want electoral success.

The NDP may manage to split left leaning Liberals, but I think they are more likely to court and win over the Greens, as their actual philosophies are much more closely aligned. The Greens must be frustrated in both the total lack of electoral success and the antics of Liberal Senate wannabe Elizabeth May, so I think they will be receptive to overtures.

However, the big turning point will happen post 2014, when new seats are created in the House and it becomes possible for any party to win a majority without seats in Quebec. This will marginalize the BQ, and Quebec voters will abandon the BQ in droves to keep a “seat at the table” in Canada's Parliament. Since the NDP is a Social Democratic party and the BQ is a National Socialist party, the BQ voters will move to the NDP as the national party with the closest political philosophy.

Will everyone on the political Left want to join or merge with the NDP? of course not. Given that 51% of the Greens reject it, there are still 49% of Green voters on the table (and I think the 51% is the older, more libertarian “Greens” from the founding days). After all, not 100% of the Reformers or PC party moved over to the CPC when it was founded, and stranded remnants of the Greens, BQ and LPC will probably wash up on the beach between now and 2014 depending on how smart the NDP are and how fast they work should they decide to read this post and act on it! (Anyone want to forward this to Jack Layton? Heh).

The core philosophies or ideologies of the NDP will appeal more to the Greens and BQ than anyone else, and only the NDP has the critical mass of operatives, money and political experience to actually do this. Certainly if the Progressives want to finally gain political power, this combination makes the most sense, uniting similar groups into a single national party rather than several marginal and regional parties.

This also makes the choice very clear to all Canadians on election day, a clear decision between the Classical Liberal philosophies of the CPC (however much they honour them in the breach) and the Progressive philosophies of the new Socialist Alliance Party. The post 2014 landscape will be much clearer for all.

“Unite the Left” will certainly take a while, how long did it take to go from Reform vs PC to Alliance vs PC to merger?

The BQ have no real incentive to merge today, but their voter base will see the changes in the wind after 2014, that should start the process of an NDP/BQ merger, or an NDP takover as former BQ voters move to the NDP to keep a seat at the table.

The Greens will probably come to the NDP if asked nicely (i.e. offered some real incentives), and a large fraction of their voter base will follow since the NDP offers pretty much the same ideology. This is probably something the NDP will have to initiate and manage to completion, and yes, it is something of a wild card as to how and when this can happen. Left leaning Liberals might start flocking to the Socialist Alliance Party in a sort of reversal of the former NDP players shifting to the Liberals since they will follow political power, and a rapidly growing Socialist Party will certainly be an attractive force compared to the constant bickering and searches for a new “Dear Leader” that the Liberals have been reduced to. After all, who will have a better chance at getting the keys to the treasury?

Will this happen tomorrow? No, of course not. Many Liberals are clinging to the idea that the Young Dauphin will be their “Dear Leader” who takes them back to power (and the ones who don’t are probably gathering around the Bob Rae/Power Corp faction). This fight will take some time to play out. There are five years to go before seat reapportion becomes mandatory (and the Prime Minister can upset the entire timeline by bringing in legislation creating the new seats any time between now and 2014), which I see as the trigger. Jack Layton could start the process sooner by reaching out to the Greens, and maybe to disaffected left Liberals, but the big shift won’t come until Quebec voters see that it is really possible to have a Parliamentry majority without having seats in Quebec.
Two notes here:


1. The rush from the BQ might take place right after the 2014 period, or they might need to be “convinced” of their irrelevance in one post 2014 sitting of Parliament, but the Quebec voters will indeed move.

2. “National Socialist” in its correctly political meaning: this is a Socialist party which divides the spoils on the basis of “ethnicity” rather than “class”, “gender”, “victim hood” or other non racial group identifiers.

Canada's transformation into a Republic

An American Republic at that.

Canada will probably become a Republic sometime in the mid century through a combination of demographic and economic forces.

Short version of the argument: while Canada erodes with a very sub replacement birthrate (aprox 1.4 children per couple), the United States is continuing to expand, with the population expected to be between 500 and 550 million. At the same time, Canada will be suffering acute labour shortages due to the demographic "bust" of the 2020's.

Large numbers of Americans can be expected to immigrate to Canada seeking the higher pay employers will be forced to offer to get workers, and they will also import their values. As they become more numerous and politically active, they will become the driving force behind many social and institutional changes in Canada.

Remember too that it is the "Red State" Americans who have large families, not "Blue State" Americans, and the generations leading up to 2040 will have seen Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid go bankrupt (along with many US municipalities and even some States like California, Michigan and New York). Come to think of it, most Canadians will be around to see American entitlement programs go bust (some estimates put the entitlement programs into net deficit as soon as 2016), so there will be at least two generations of Americans who will not be disposed towards unsustainable entitlements, and certainly will work hard to see these things do not happen in their new home.

Canadians will also have witnessed their own social programs like "Public Health Care", CPP and OAS go bust as well in the late 2020's as Boomers drawing on taxpayer funded benefits begin to outnumber and overwhelm the actual number of taxpayers. A large segment of Canadian voters will also have become adverse to socialist ideology, given they were put through severe hardship to pay for these Ponzi schemes, combined with a generation of young, politically active American immigrants with similar life experience should provide a large voter base to carry out political change.

This should be a topic that everyone should consider regardless of political orientation; how will you prepare yourself and your family and loved ones for the coming demographic changes, and what will you do to ensure the change is positive and peaceful for most Canadians?

Getting away from it all: more about sea steading, micronations and finding a physical Galt's Gulch

The discussion on Libertarian seasteads, space colonies and micronations is opening up again on the blog "Next Big Future" This link is to only one of the articles, others exist here and here.

The basic argument is how could freedom loving people escape from the current mess of redistributive politics? Simply up and leaving civilization isn't much of an option, every piece of the land area of Earth has been claimed by one State entity or another, and even the open oceans are patrolled by navies eager to exert the sovereign power of the State wherever resources and trade routes exist that can benefit the State.

While it is possible to find some very out of the way area that has essentially been abandoned by central State control, there are probably good reasons for this, including relative inaccessibility, lack of resources and the presence of competing non state actors attempting to create their own areas of control. The determined freedom seeker would have to be extremely tough, resourceful and willing to battle it out with FARC, the Taliban or similar groups, as well as doing without hot and cold running water.

I suspect only the very smallest minority of readers fall into this category, so joining the John Galt strike and making provisions to disconnect yourself from the grid through some form of urban homesteading is probably the most realistic path open to the majority of readers.

There is the delicious irony of turning the various memes of the Progressives against them while becoming a successful citizen of  the distributed or virtual "Galt's Gulch". Generating your own energy and home schooling your children to "reduce your carbon footprint", growing your own produce to "only eat food from within 100 km" and other activities that increase your standard of living while reducing your tax contributions to the State; now we are starting not only to join John Galt, but also his confederate Ragnar Danneskjöld, who recovers wealth from the looters.

For people determined to build real as opposed to virtual or distributed Galt's Gulches, there are a few possible options left. A billionaire or corporation with libertarian inclinations might choose to "buy" a small city or create the physical infrastructure of a self contained city within a city (something along the lines of the classical Arcology concept). Encouraging migration of like minded people to single geographic areas might also work to build a voting block which could swing elections, and this moment in history could make it possible, considering the collapse of housing values in many parts of the United States. (The downside is most of the collapse is in the Democrat controlled "Blue States", so even fully libertarian municipalities would be held hostage by intrusive State governments).

The timeline to create a Galt's Gulch is very tight, with an apocalyptic financial crisis looming in the relatively near future. US Medicare is projected to go bankrupt in 2016, and Social Security soon after. The increase of the annual deficits by the Obama administration to almost 2 trillion a year means the United States itself could exhaust the accumulated stock of American wealth in under 25 years, much sooner once the unfunded liabilites are factored in. Certainly the surviving institutions of the State will take extreme measures to maintain their hold on power as the economy crumbles under them, and we need to get ready not only to survive and repel the agents of the State desperate to seize our wealth for their own survival, but also the chaos that will follow the collapse.

Charter cities in the desert, sea steads, urban homesteads and other nodes of civilization need to be prepared, and more importantly, people need to be prepared and educated to survive the new realities. Every attempt to meld anti-politics (i.e. the John Galt Strike combined with creating the best Galt's gulch that is physically possible) with local political action to reduce the power and effects of the State from intruding into your lives will serve to soften the blow when it does come.

Freedom is a self help project!

The New World Order... Same as The Old World Order

Ten year plans...

helping humanity to move from its often selfish, self-centered adolescence to a more globally responsible adulthood...

create and implement global strategies to improve the prospects for humanity...

coordination for effective and adequate action...

Is it just me or does this sound a lot like something that was already tried.



More government, more government programs and more government control are not going to get us out of the problems that have been created by more government, more government programs and more government control.

Ten year plan? Really? You show me a government that is able to stick to a 1 year plan and I'll show you a dictatorship.

More Liberty Tools to build a virtual Galt's Gulch

Fighting tyrants is hard, as the anyone watching the news after the Iranian elections should know. Soft tyranny is even harder to fight, how do you storm the CHRC or effectively circumvent the "Fairness Doctrine"?

A new tool is in the works which might help; a browser based "darknet", which might as well be christened the "John Galt" net. Now freedom loving individuals can meet and speak without Big Brother breathing down their necks; a virtual Galt's Gulch so to speak:

http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/06/16/205232/Researchers-Build-a-Browser-Based-Darknet

"At Black Hat USA next month, researchers will demonstrate a way to use modern browsers to more easily build darknets — underground private Internet communities where users can share content and ideas securely and anonymously. HP's Billy Hoffman and Matt Wood have created Veiled, a proof-of-concept darknet that only requires participants have an HTML 5-based browser to join. No special software or configuration is necessary, unlike with darknets such as Tor. Veiled is basically a 'zero footprint' network, in which groups can rapidly form and disappear without a trace. The researchers admit darknets are attractive to bad guys, too, but they say they think these more easily set-up and dismantled nets will be more popular for mainstream (and legit) users."In somewhat related news, reader cheesethegreat informs us that version 0.7.5 of FreeNet has hit the tubes.

The American debt road trip

Driving down the road at 174 MPH?

Where is Galt's gulch?

This blogger has some interesting thoughts about getting away from it all, although the more I think about it the more convinced I am that setting up "Galt's Gulch" in any physical location will be very difficult to impossible to do in any practical manner, at least not if you like living in a high energy civilization with hot and cold running water....http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/05/04/libertarian-democraphobia/

I still haven't quite figured out the details, but I can see a combination of survivalist mentality (being physically secure and self sufficient to whatever extent possible, ranging from living in the back 40 to building an urban greenhouse in your balcony), secure VPN and anonymizer software to communicate without the busybodies finding you easily, and some sort of virtual economy where you can interact and trade value with other people in the "Distributed Republic". Your virtual currency would be based on and backed by "free banking" (i.e. only the issuer can control the supply of credit, but anyone can set up a bank and issue currency), although how this money would interact with the real world is less clear (you can pay real money to to other gamers to buy virtual stuff on "World of Warcraft", for example, but how do you use your "World of John Galt" money to buy real groceries or machine tools?).

Like real pioneers hacking a new society out of an uncompromising wilderness, virtual pioneers will have to experiment with a large number of ideas, and be prepared to defend them against hostile people and elements determined to close off the frontiers to settlement and exploitation by determined and free people who refuse to remain as serfs.

The roughneck was watching them from above, listening with curiosity. She glanced up at him, he looked like a truck driver, so she asked, "What were you outside? A professor of comparative philology, I suppose?"

"No, ma’am," he answered. "I was a truck driver."

He added, "But that’s not what I wanted to remain."

Belt tightening, Obama style

The Obama administration does some belt tightening.....yeah:

If You're Happy And You Know It...

Clank your chains...

Yesterday, all across the US regular people from all walks of life, and all sorts of political stripes gathered together to protest the unprecedented waste of their money, the undeniable infringement upon their liberty and the unqualified attempt to stifle their right to live their own lives.

These "Tea Parties" have taken on a viral quality in the US as this map shows though sadly, it isn't an election year in the US and all this will likely be forgotten by the next Senatorial elections in 2010. But at least it was done.

Some vainglorious and ignorant Canadians deride our American cousins for wearing their patriotism on their sleeves, but what have we done?

We Canadians are being ripped off just as badly as our compatriots to the south (proportionally), our individual rights are in worse shape than the Americans, just ask Ezra Levant, Mark Stein and others. But instead of doing something we shrug our shoulders, adjust our manacles issue a barely audible "Meh" and carry on.

Meanwhile our government talks about paying other peoples bills, is spending our money like a drunken sailor and narry a peep... Silence from the herd. Hell, we Canadians collectively make more noise and fuss over the $%#@ hockey playoffs than we do issues that confound, limit and erode basic freedoms.

If I could choose two words to describe the prevalent Canadian attitude to individual rights they would be ignorance and ambivalence.

No, I don't think some demagogue is going to enslave us... (just yet) and we're a long way from living in tyranny and dictatorship. Besides, we're not going to go that way.

The apathy will destroy us first...

A sign for our times

Standing up to the Gods of Olympos

Atlas, the central motif of "Atlas Shrugged", was one of the Titans, beings who ruled the universe before the Gods of Olympos challenged their power and overthrew them. Most of the Titans were exiled , but Atlas was condemned to support Ouranos (the Sky) forever.

The new Olympians in Washington, D.C. (along with many of the old Olympians in capitals everywhere) have decided to unleash the thunderbolts of State power on the economy, and pile on unprecedented amounts of spending and regulations to enforce their will (and control is really what this theater is all about). While there is a recognition that this is a terrible long term disaster for the people and institutions of the United States (and thus the world), grass roots opposition has yet to gain any organization or momentum sufficient to stop or derail the efforts of the current government. Rather than a race of Titans bestriding the Universe, the American people are still fragmented and reeling from the rather abrupt changes happening all around.

From our side of the border, we are looking at something resembling the event horizon of a black hole. The projected American deficit for this year will be 1.75 trillion. Canada's GDP is only 1.3 trillion in USD. In other words, the USA deficit for just 2009 will be greater than Canada’s GDP. (HT to Celestial Junk for these figures).

Canadians will have to start making plans now on how to deal with the import of inflation as the Obama Administration frantically devalues American currency to deal with these massive debts. Given 82% of our exports go to the United States, our customers will be paying us in script or worse, and also purchasing our energy and other resources with devalued currency as well.

We will also have to look at the eventuality of the United States defaulting on their obligations. I believe the trigger will be a wave of bankruptcies sweeping civic governments which are overextended in terms of their public service wage and benefit packages. Several States will be next (California, followed by New York), and this will trigger a chain reaction of public service and union pension defaults as the rest of the financial system is subjected to an even greater shock than the sub prime crisis. Depending on how this times out, the paradox may be the destruction of trillions of dollars of paper wealth in chain reaction defaults just "might" cancel out the inflationary impulses of the stimulus package and US budget. Any "soft landing" scenario relies on an improbable coincidence of timing and scale (i.e the amount of wealth destroyed equals the amount of paper the Treasury is pumping out).

Of course there are still more time bombs ahead, as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (along with any presumptive nationalized American health care system) are revealed to be the Ponzi schemes they are, and trillions of dollars of "entitlements" cannot be honoured and vanish from the economy. None of these scenarios even begin to take into account any sort of taxpayer revolt, where Atlas finally shakes off the burdens that the Olympians have piled upon him.

At any rate there will be tough sledding ahead.

Our one potential Canadian trump card, should the government be able to play it, is to make massive cuts to spending and taxes and create a North American tax haven. With the promise of a safe and secure haven and reward for hard work and effort, millions of skilled workers and members of the American investor class can be tempted to come to Canada. The same incentives will also apply to native born Canadians, who can take advantage of them to revitalize our economy and institutions. The influx of human and capital resources will energize the Canadian economy, and of course incoming American's, with their relatively large families, will also reset our demographics and prevent Canada from following Europe in the demographic meltdown predicted by Mark Styen.

How we can make this happen is the question that we all need to ask. Most readers of this blog will recognize there is a very large and vocal segment in our society which will follow the O-bots off the cliff willingly, and a powerful political class willing to pander to these voters. If Atlas is to stand up in Canada and shake off the imposed burdens of our own intrusive political looter class; our own self styled "Olympians", we need to work to make it happen.

I don't have the answer of how to make this happen, but together we might come up with one.

Freedom is a self help project

After the fall

Raphael Alexander has suggested that perhaps the best and only way to free the nation from parasitical public service unions and their unsustainable wage and benefit demands is to allow the process to go to the bitter end; let the economy collapse and rebuild on a new foundation.

While in some sense I agree (after all, this is in fact how the Strikers plan to rebuild the world at the end of "Atlas Shrugged"), history suggests that this is a huge reach of the imagination. After all, the end of the Res Publica Roma was marked by a massive civil war and the Imperium ended in a dark age that lasted centuries. Being the strongest warlord in the valley *might* ensure your survival and standard of living after the collapse, but is hardly the nucleus of a future Libertarian paradise. Warlords need to focus on the acquisition and maintenance of power; even the cultured and civilized lords of Renaissance Italian city states were still warlords, or they did not remain lords for long.

How civilization reached the Enlightenment is a subject historians still continue to debate, so unless there is a powerful nucleus of learning and culture like "Galt's Gulch" to rebuild, there are no garantees that ideals like Freedom of Speech, Property rights or the Rule of Law would ever regain their primacy in the world.

Deflation or Inflation? The choice is ours

An interesting symposium on NRO discusses the economy in the next two to four years. Deflation seems to be the watchword right now (and a general decline in prices is probably a good thing for a stressed economy and consumers who may be out of a job).

The big problem is that governments are trying to reinflate the economy by running the presses, "stimulating" the economy with politically motivated bailouts and perhaps the ultimate weapon; running deficits again. The danger here is this excess of cash and credit has the power to jump start inflation, particularly if the economy starts moving again while the flood on money is released. As one participant pointed out:

What’s the worst-case scenario? That suddenly, and mysteriously, the pipe may unclog, sending all of the money and credit the Fed has created into the economy, vastly amplifying it, too. Suddenly, the economy would have more money and credit that it knows what to do with. At the same time, the stuff to buy with that money and credit would have become more scarce, because of all of the missed farm-growing seasons, factory closures, and layoffs we’re hearing about today.

We have a certain amount of power to affect these scenarios in Canada. We need to keep reminding our elected representatives and each other that a "fiscal stimulus" package would wreak havoc on the Canadian economy, transferring wealth from the taxpayer and destroying it by using the wealth to pay for political support and favors rather than productive investment. If you don't believe me, remember the $1.6 billion that Chrysler Canada is demanding for retaining 8000 jobs is the resources to create 32,000 full time jobs; a net loss of 24,000 full time jobs in the Canadian economy for that one bailout alone.

The underlying cause of the financial crisis is the unbalance between wealth and debt. Any steps that increase our personal wealth (savings through purchasing lower priced goods and services, tax reductions) are steps that will ultimatly end the crisis, while supporting or sitting aside while our wealth is taken from us through tax increases or inflation due to "stimulus" packages will prolong the crisis.

The choice is ours.

What if the Libertarian revolution already happened?

Readers of this blog will know that the two of us are followers of the philosophy of Objectivism, which translates in most jurisdictions to Libertarianism as a political philosophy or party. The Freedom Party is, to my knowledge, the only political party explicitly based on Objectivist philosophy.

While Objectivists and Libertarians may feel frustrated by the tiny amount of electoral support they receive at election time and the scant amount of coverage they get when trying to present their ideas to a larger audience, it may well be that the time and effort has paid off after all, only in ways we may not have been expecting.

Reason Online has an excellent article "The Libertarian Moment" by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They argue that although "Progressiveism" may still be exerting its iron grip on the political culture, in the larger context, we the people have started to slip away in ever increasing numbers. Economic choice, the ability to voice ideas and find people of similar opinions, freedom to choose your lifestyle and the mobility of your labour and capital far exceed anything that was imagined even in the 1970's. The world is generally more peaceful and prosperous than at any other time in human history, and the State takes up a smaller proportion of the overall GDP than at almost any time in the past.

All this is in an almost equal part due to government action in the 1980's (particularly the Thatcher and Reagan Revolutions, but Canada's contribution was the Free Trade Agreement and later NAFTA), and the introduction of computers and high bandwidth personal communications (the Internet Revolution). Rolling back taxes and regulations unleashed the creative energies of the people, while high bandwidth communications allowed collaberation and interactions to a degree that was never seen before. It seems to me that each part was complimentary: free people without the ability to communicate widely would be limited to the human and economic resources that were close at hand, while unfettered communications would be useless without something to say. One could imagine the State using such a communications channel to spread propaganda and indoctrination, but experience has shown that people would rather talk about the things that interest them. In the West, the number of "Facebook" and "Myspace" users vastly outnumber the readers of ordinary blogs, while repressive regimes like the former USSR or modern China try to severely restrict access to the Internet (either directly by limiting access to personal computers as in the USSR, or through technology and intervention, like the co-opting of Google and the establishment of the "Great Firewall of China" in today's Middle Kingdom).

Although the State can still attempt to intervene, free people have far more tools and options today than ever to fight back. Canada's "Human Rights" Star Chambers were able to operate with impunity for decades until they were overwhelmed by swarms of bloggers, even attempts to crush bloggers activity through SLAPP lawsuits is being countered through the ease which bloggers can raise funds through the Internet using Paypal to hire lawyers, and physical protection can be achieved by moving the server to foreign jurisdictions beyond the reach of State censors (Free Dominion may have pioneered this by moving to a host site in Panama).

I will let the authors finish with two paragraphs from the article:

We are in fact living at the cusp of what should be called the Libertarian Moment, the dawning not of some fabled, clichéd, and loosey-goosey Age of Aquarius but a time of increasingly hyper-individualized, hyper-expanded choice over every aspect of our lives, from 401(k)s to hot and cold running coffee drinks, from life-saving pharmaceuticals to online dating services. This is now a world where it’s more possible than ever to live your life on your own terms; it’s an early rough draft version of the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick’s glimmering “utopia of utopias.” Due to exponential advances in technology, broad-based increases in wealth, the ongoing networking of the world via trade and culture, and the decline of both state and private institutions of repression, never before has it been easier for more individuals to chart their own course and steer their lives by the stars as they see the sky. If you don’t believe it, ask your gay friends, or simply look who’s running for the White House in 2008.

and

The generation raised on the Internet has essentially been raised libertarian, even if they’ve never even heard of the word. Native netizens now entering college exhibit a kind of broad-based tolerance toward every manner of ethnic, religious, and sexual-orientation grouping in a way that would have seemed like science fiction just a generation ago. The products and activities they enjoy and co-opt most, from filesharing to flying discount airlines to facebooking, are excrescences of the free-market ideas of deregulation and decontrol. Generations X, Y, and those even younger swim in markets—that is, in choices among competing alternatives—the way those of us who grew up in the ’70s frolicked on Slip ’n Slides.

Friedrich A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises pronounce judgement on the Obama Administration

Should we really prolong the death struggle for those countries, whose ruling intellectual caste is dependent on the resources that the capitalist west provides for its socialist experiments?
Friedrich A. Hayek

That which generates war is the economic philosophy of nationalism: embargoes, trade -- and currency control, devaluing, etc. The philosophy of protectionism is the philosophy of war.
Ludwig von Mises

We will live in interesting times

A Short History of the Future

Not SF, but a series of predictions based on what I am seeing today:

Regardless of who is elected President, the United States will undergo internal turbulence which will cause them to take their eyes off the ball. If Senator Obama wins, expect a "tax whiplash" and a real economic meltdown, while if Senator McCain wins, expect paralysis as an obdurate Congress to obstruct him every step of the way. The looming financial difficulties faced by the United States (particularly Social Security and the runaway growth of "entitlements") cannot be addressed by the platforms advocated by either candidate.

Russia and China will move rapidly to fill the power vacuum. Expect them to use a combination of economic muscle and diplomatic hijacking of international fora like the UN and WTO to impose rules to their liking. (Imagine them coming to collect the bill for "Carbon Credits" from Kyoto, for example). Plundering Western treasuries through the guise of "cost sharing measures" for "International projects" is another possibility. They may also cooperate to a greater or lesser degree against the growth of Radical Islam in Central Asia, although their goals will diverge to a certain extent. The EU may well throw in with Russia in order to secure energy supplies and also to deal with unassimilated Islamic populations within Europe (i.e. by providing diplomatic cover and military muscle while the Europeans throw the immigrants out). China will work to secure energy supplies and resources from Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. Russia and China will have no qualms about imposing a "Roman" peace if that suits their aims.

Longer term, China will have demographic difficulties due to the one child policy (probably starting @ 2020) as large numbers of single men become the biggest demographic. The Chinese are notorious racists, so the idea of Han men intermarrying with other ethnic groups (even non Han Chinese) could be a big issue internally. Mark Styen points out one possible solution; "China could become the first gay superpower since Sparta". More likely a great deal of social and economic turbulance will occur.

Beyond that, Russia will cease to be a "Great Power" in the 2030's, as their demographic crash cuts the population of ethnic Russians in half. The EU will be suffering from the same problem (and so will Canada and Japan, but these are second and third tier powers in the big picture)

So look for a decade of artificially imposed stability by the "Big Two" (or possibly "Big Three" if the EU gets a Mussolini in charge; the set up is a jumbo sized version of the "Fascist Corporate State" and a little ruthless organization might actually make the trains run on time...), followed by turmoil as the demographic rugs get pulled out from under them.

What is less clear is how the United States will fare during this period. It is quite clear they will pull in their horns for part of the time, and the Big Two/Three will certainly see international relations and organizations are tilted to the disadvantage of the Americans. On the other hand, the Americans are very clever and resiliant (from a cultural perspective. The DC Beltway seems to mark a cultural boundary line inside of which the opposite applies), and no doubt the appeal of America will continue as a destination for the clever and ambitious people of the world. As well, the United States does not have either of the demographic issues their competitors have. They also have the unique strength of being an Oceanic power, capable of projecting trade and force on a global scale, something that the other powers lack. India is a potential Oceanic power in the Indian Ocean basin, linkage with the United States should be encouraged and exploited in all areas.

This is hardly the future envisioned by Fukyama in "The End of History", nor the "Road Warrior" future Robert Kaplan portrayed in "The Coming Anarchy".....

I'm not liking this future........