That Paul. Always so shy about telling us what he really thinks.

Imagine the flak he’s going to catch for that prediction.

I have to admit, sitting out here in my New Mexico aerie, watching the jerry-built machinery of the Glorious High-tech Information Age Millennium grind slowly to a halt, I can see his point.

Only the most blindered laissez-faire guys can at this point not recognize the systemic danger posed to the social order by decades of more or less unregulated, unrestrained greed.

But the various economic collapses (Long-term Capital Investment, NASDAQ, Enron, Kmart, and whoever’s next) are, together, only a symptom. And 9-11 itself is also only a different symptom.

The turning point will come when we recognize, and do something about, the disease that produced those symptoms.

To wit:

Social, group behavior is only an externalization on a large scale of internal, individual reality. Hierarchical structures of government that emerged around the world as language developed and what we call history started way back when were only outwardly realized images of the hierarchical structure of emerging consciousness:

boss/king ego at the top, riding herd over
rambunctious, trouble-making id at the bottom, all overseen by either
an implied or explicit superego (a god or some kind of a constitution).

We had to try many combinations of the three elements until we finally got to a very rough balance-of-power arrangement that to a significant degree took into account the strengths, the weaknesses, and the needs of all three elements.

Initially, a tyrant ego (me king, you not) arrangement—itself a very accurate reflection of internal reality—was universally tried. If a group lucked into a smart king, short-term stability resulted and everybody got on with their lives. Before long, the smart king died and was replaced either by a stupid king or by a bunch of greedy would-be kings fighting over the spoils.

As the Greeks were first to realize, it was a messy, haphazard, dangerous arrangement. From the first clumsy Greek attempts at shared power, it took 2,500 years to develop a workable system of shared greed.

Now, though, we are faced with a possibly fatal flaw: Unprecedented wealth, which leads to unprecedented greed.

Because of the cumulative economic effect of the rapidly expanding global market, the amount of money to be made and thus the amount of power to be acquired by an individual or a group has in the last 50 years made a quantum leap.

Those with access to economic control—corporate heads, kings and dictators in small countries blessed with great natural resources—have found themselves rich beyond the wildest dreams of legend and myth.

So we get Bill Gates. The countries of OPEC. Japan (for a time). The United States. Plus cancerously expanding merged meta-mega-corporations ("transnationals," as they modestly refer to themselves).

The economic prizes have become so enormous that they have thrown the previously flawed but workable balance of power dangerously out of whack.

Oppressed masses under the control of religious fanatics with access to one of these prizes can unleash transnational violence on a scale we’ve never seen. Al-Qaeda.

Clever economic tyrants can accumulate private wealth on a scale we’ve never seen. Microsoft. OPEC.

The violent protests by various anti-globalization forces are a kind of puzzled, gut-level reaction to this unrestrained, unprecedented greed.

The immediate result, where we are now, has been to elevate the old tyrant model to the planetary level: As has been becoming more and more obvious since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States, because of its accumulated economic (and thus military and political) power has become the global policeman.

What everyone fails to notice—or maybe it’s just that we’re reluctant to acknowledge reality—is that the president of the United States has become the de facto King of the Earth. And lo, we are back where we were 5,000 years with the first primitive kings with unbridled power.

Think about it. Who elected George W. Bush? Roughly ONE PERCENT of the world's population did, that's who. Like a privy council in days of old, they handed power to one person who acts as king over not just that one percent but over the other 99 percent as well.

To be sure, before the new King of the Earth acts, he "consults" with other governments, but this is largely cosmetic consultation. Who, for example, was going to stop the United States from going into Afghanistan after 9-11?

The Earth King could’ve acted unilaterally because no one had the power to stop him. But his clever advisors saw that other lesser kings around the world were equally threatened by the de-stabilizing effects of massive terrorism and thus went around getting public commitments of support.

Clearly something had to be done, so the Earth King did it.

Once the terrorist threat is either eliminated are minimized, we are back to where we were before—and this of course is the point that Paul Krugman was making: We are back in a world of unregulated, unrestrained greed characterized by an increasingly inequitable distribution of wealth, all on a scale never experienced before.

The economic system has shuddered several times already. The collapse of Long-term Capital Investment produced global repercussions. As did the trading malfeasance that brought down Barclay. The effects of the bursting of the dot-com bubble are still being played out.

Enron is the only the latest and clearest outward and visible sign of the deep-seated, unaddressed problem.

Krugman spots the difference. In the earlier situations, people lost a lot of money because they were foolish. With Enron, people lost a lot of money because they were foolish—and deceived.

Now, victorious over Evil, the Earth King, together with all the lesser kings, reigns securely again… proclaiming the virtues of a system of law supporting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately, and very very dangerously, that system itself, because of the massive mal-distribution of huge global wealth, has now itself become a massive deception.