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Forget Thucydides; Think "Rigidity Trap"
All the best people are nodding wisely about President Xi’s wise warning to President Trump about “The Thucydides Trap.” That’s the idea that established powers often get dumped by a rising power. E.g., the US is an established power and China is a rising power.
A word to President Xi: If only that were true, old chap. Experts agree that you can’t be a rising power with a fertility rate of 1.0 children per woman.
I wonder what would persuade Chinese women to have more children so that their boys could be sacrificed to the CCP gods in a war to squeeze the US in a Thucydides Trap.
But I am here to tell President Xi and his experts that the big problem is not Thucydides but the Rigidity Trap.
What do I mean by the Rigidity Trap?
Simply this.
The natural instinct of every political regime is to bleed the economy and spend the money on its supporters.
But the more you milk the economy with taxes and regulations, the more you reduce the ability of your people and the economy to adapt to change in markets and create new technologies and opportunities.
Every political regimes tends to make the economy rigid.
Obviously, the extreme case is the Soviet Union where the entire economy was rigidified into bureaucratically administered Five Year Plans. When you rigidify the economy like that and subject it to the expertise of the Planners, you kill opportunity and growth.
(I’d say that Mao’s Great Leap Forward was not rigidity but just economic madness.)
The next step down from the Five Year Plan economy is the “Curley Effect” economy of the large corrupt city that I discussed yesterday. The natural arc of a large city is to start as a rapidly expanding center of economic growth and then mature into a spoils system where the politicians fund their supporters and drive out their opponents.
Then we come to the modern administrative state economy. Decade after decade, the administrative state comes up with new programs to entice voters with free stuff. Typically, everything government does rigidifies the economy and prevents it from adapting and growing. Thus:
Pension programs typically substitute administrative rules for simple savings programs where you retire when you have saved up enough money. But the rigid rules for taxation and benefits means that the system can’t adapt.
Health care programs mandate free care for some people and regulated care for everyone else. The system cannot adapt because of government regulation.
Education programs impose the rulers’ notion of education on everyone. It follows elite fashion rather than educational improvement.
Regulation prevents change and adaption and ends up favoring special interests.
Urban zoning licenses NIMBYism.
Environmental protection ends up as a Save the Planet Green New Deal.
Each of these efforts are inflexible and rigid and prevent people from implementing new ideas and fixing problems and adapting to changing conditions: the Rigidity Trap.
In the context of a great power, it gets into the Rigidity Trap as it matures. It usually starts as an expanding empire that has wiped away all the corrupt rigidities of the old regime. But as time passes it mobilizes the people to fight real and imagined enemies and milks the economy to fund its supporters, whether existing or new. It rigidifies the economy, because that is what governments do.
And so, an established empire tends to fail not because it is challenged by a rising empire but because it has rigidified itself into economic bankruptcy. It has fallen into the Rigidity Trap.
| Thu, 21 May 2026 22:29:11 GMT |
Blue Cities/States and the Curley Effect
If you wonder what in the world that your average DSA (or CIA educated) politician is doing by ramping up taxes on the rich and driving them out of town, look no further. A good Irish machine politician figured it out a century ago. His name was James Michael Curley, Mayor of Boston for discontinuous terms from 1918-1950. Also US Representative. Also Governor of Massachusetts. Grok:
Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer coined the term [Curley Effect] to describe a political strategy where an incumbent politician uses distortionary, wealth-reducing policies—such as wasteful redistribution to a core supporter base combined with rhetoric or policies that encourage opponents (often higher-income or opposing ethnic/class groups) to leave the jurisdiction. This reshapes the electorate in the politician’s favor, helping them stay in power even if it harms overall economic growth.
Gov. Kathy Hochul? Check.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani? Check.
Mayor Karen Bass? Check.
Mayor Katie Wilson? Bye.
Gov. Gavin Newsom? Check.
USW
When you think about it, it all connects with The Science.
Genghis Khan: Drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentation of their women.
Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt: the political is the distinction between friend and enemy.
Far right Curtis Yarvin: there is no politics without an enemy.
Racist-sexist-homophobe Christopher Chantrill: there is no politics without a handout.
Note that the important economic thing is the handout, not the overall prosperity of society.
Why is that? It is because, for a ruling class, the prosperity of the ruled is not that important. The rulers can grab all the loot for themselves. See Cuba, Iran, USSR, China.
The impoverishment of the people has nothing to do with the case.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio just laid out to the Cuban people how the system works in Cuba.
Thirty years ago, Raúl Castro founded a company called GAESA. This company is owned and operated by the Armed Forces, and has revenues three times greater than your current government’s budget. Today, while you suffer, these businessmen have $18 billion dollars in assets and control 70% of Cuba’s economy.
Nice work if you can get it. (You mean to say, Marco, that the rulers of Cuba are capitalists?)
Why do the people put up with it? Partly, I think, it is that the ideology of every ruling class is that we, the rulers, are saving you from a fate worse than death, and everyone must rally to the flag to save our community from the enemy. If the rulers dominate the media and censor opposition then people only hear the regime propaganda against the enemy. They believe.
LHGrey, in a characteristic rage, connects this to The Science. There’s an outfit called “The Dangerous Speech Project” From the home page:
This is a time of fear in the world: wars, disease, climate crisis, and more, amplified by lies. Building on that, many leaders use a special kind of rhetoric to convince their supporters to perceive other groups of people as monstrous threats.
Yes, but that’s always the case. That is what politicians do: inflame the people against the existential enemy.
And that is why it is essential that government should be limited, and politics kept to a dull roar in the background. Because politics is about, and only about, the fight against the enemy. There is no politics without an enemy.
But 97% of human life is person-to-person cooperation and influencing. And if you invoke Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s other distinctions, you understand why:
The moral: about praising good and stigmatising evil.
The economic: about doing useful things, not harmful things.
The aesthetic: about appreciating beauty and minimizing ugly.
Do you see the point? In the world of the other distinctions force is not necessary. And that’s a good thing because force, the fight against the enemy, consumes everything, as in Iran, Cuba, etc.
Our mission, if we accept it, is to stigmatize the Curley Effect, shame our Democratic friends out of it, and support Spencer Pratts as far as the eye can see.
| Wed, 20 May 2026 22:23:21 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Politics for men: I will fight for you! Politics for women: I will protect you!
Politics Never Solves Anything.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Communism: An Analysis
