Confucian Cycle

A. Taylor William

Description

2,500 years ago, the Chinese sage, Confucius, observed that all governments follow a cycle: from unity, through prosperity to stagnation, then to collapse and anarchy. He taught that when government officials sought personal power or wealth instead of taking care of the people, society lost the "Mandate of Heaven" and fell apart. By "Mandate of Heaven," Confucius meant that God Himself had directed how society should work. Chinese history shows 15 or 20 collapses when government lost virtue and the country broke apart in civil war, but whenever the Chinese followed Confucius' rules, Chinese society worked well. From his day to ours, civilizations all over the world have followed the same cycle Confucius observed. Today's United States is well into the "stagnation" phase and many observers predict a collapse. But America has an advantage Confucius never imagined. Unlike the Chinese, America's voters have the power to replace their rulers and reform their government without armed revolution. The Taylors' wide-ranging tour through history, culture, and modern news sheds new light on how the past both predicts the future and can be used to alter it for the better.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• América del Norte
• Central government
• Trade pact
• International relations
• North America
• History of the Americas
• History of Asia
• États-Unis
• China

Informations

• Publié par: First Edition Design Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781622879632
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Confucian Cycle :
China’s Sage and
America’s Decline

By
William A. Taylor
Kenneth R. Taylor
The Confucian Cycle:
China’s Sage and America’s Decline
Copyright ©2015 William A. Taylor and Kenneth R. Taylor

ISBN 978-1622-879-61-8 HC
ISBN 978-1622-879-62-5 PBK
ISBN 978-1622-879-63-2 EBOOK

LCCN 2015946115

September 2015

Published and Distributed by
First Edition Design Publishing, Inc. in conjunction with Father’s Press, LLC.
P.O. Box 20217, Sarasota, FL 34276-3217
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com


ALL R I G H T S R E S E R V E D. No p a r t o f t h i s b oo k pub li ca t i o n m a y b e r e p r o du ce d, s t o r e d i n a r e t r i e v a l s y s t e m , o r t r a n s mit t e d i n a ny f o r m o r by a ny m e a ns ─ e l e c t r o n i c , m e c h a n i c a l , p h o t o - c o p y , r ec o r d i n g, or a ny o t h e r ─ e x ce pt b r i e f qu ot a t i o n i n r e v i e w s , w i t h o ut t h e p r i o r p e r mi ss i on o f t h e a u t h o r or publisher .
The comments, opinions and viewpoints presented here are solely those of the authors as derived from their personal experiences and research.

Cover art by Jonathan Simpson and Mike Tyree.
Cover photographs used by permission. All rights reserved.
The Confucian Cycle
2,500 years ago, the Chinese sage, Confucius, observed that all governments follow a cycle: from unity, through prosperity to stagnation, then to collapse and anarchy.
He taught that when government officials sought personal power or wealth instead of taking care of the people, society lost the “Mandate of Heaven” and fell apart.
By “Mandate of Heaven,” Confucius meant that God Himself had directed how society should work. Chinese history shows 15 or 20 collapses when government lost virtue and the country broke apart in civil war, but whenever the Chinese followed Confucius’ rules, Chinese society worked well.
From his day to ours, civilizations all over the world have followed the same cycle Confucius observed. Today’s United States is well into the “stagnation” phase and many observers predict a collapse.
But America has an advantage Confucius never imagined. Unlike the Chinese, America’s voters have the power to replace their rulers and reform their government without armed revolution.
The Taylors’ wide-ranging tour through history, culture, and modern news sheds new light on how the past both predicts the future and can be used to alter it for the better.
Dedication
We would like to dedicate this book to our mothers, both of whom were unimpressed by “the real me” of their sons, because “the real me” was a lazy bum. They took stern action to eliminate unacceptable childish behavior and replace it with acceptable adult behavior as rapidly as possible. Their efforts ultimately led to this book.
Acknowledgements

This book would never have been begun, much less completed, without the assistance and encouragement of Paul Waldschmidt. From its origins in articles published on Scragged.com, through years of revisions, rewrite, and editing, Paul’s “third set of eyes” throughout has led to a vastly better work than it could have been otherwise.
John E. Taylor also provided extremely valuable editing review.
As one would expect, any errors or omissions are the fault of the authors, not the editors.
Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 – The Burden of Bureaucracy 7
The Good Side of Government 8
The Washington Monument Strategy 10
The Emperor and Culture Clash 12
Confucius Explained Bureaucracy 15

2 – A Tale of Two Bureaucracies 19
Tim Horton Firing 20
Government-Sponsored Child Abuse 22
Leo Was Abused by Our Government 23
Where Are the Protests? 26
Confucius Explained Why 29
The Confucian Cycle 34

3 – The Confucian Cycle in America 39
The Problem of Controlling Government 39
Government and Economic Growth 42
Government Growth and Societal Collapse 45
Regulating the Economy Drains Resources 48
Regulation Drives Corruption 57
The Housing Bubble Grows, and Pops 64

4 – Our Invincible Bureaucracy 68
The Revival of Confucianism 70
The Untouchables 73
The Buck Stops Here Occasionally 77
Back to the Confucian Path 82

5 – Bridges to Nowhere 85
From Profit to Loss 87
Uneconomic Infrastructure Fiascos 89
Not Politics, Opportunity! 96

6 – Who Eats the Pie? 99
Factories and Energy Consumption 101
The Spread of Knowledge 102
The Business Cycle and Loss of Virtue 107
The Power of Communication 108

7 – Automobiles and the Middle Class 111
The Creation of the Middle Class 114
Clouds on the Horizon 115
The End of the Glory Years 117

8 – Labor Unions and International Trade 119
Benefits of Manufacturing 121
Manufacturing Lives On 126
The Light Dawns 127
The Tradeoffs 129

9 – Labor Unions Sow Disunity 131
Union Attitudes, Up Close and Personal 132
Unions Battling TV Imports 137
Limits on Automobile Imports 138
Bottom Line 143

10 – Our Government-Sponsored Food Fight 146
It Started with Farming 148
The Big Food and Drug Fight 149
The Food Fight Widens 150
Fighting Over Food And Vitamins 152
Genetic Differences Complicate Nutrition 158
And The Fight Plays On 161
A Proposal to License Desperation 163
Lack of Virtue 165

11 – The United States Department of Injustice 166
Finding Virtuous Judges 167
Choosing Chinese Judges 168
How Many Sets of Rules? 174
The Khans and the Necessity of Law 176
Injustice Has Become Normal 183
A Multitude of New Offices 186
Back to the Confucian Path of Virtue 191

12 – Bureaucratic Evil in the Guise of Liberalism 194
The Soft Approach to Family Matters 195
Child Protection and Coercive Intervention 196
Follow the Money 202
What CPS Insiders Say 207
CPS Agencies Do Evil 211
Abusing Fewer Children 212

13 – Our Farewell to Duty 214
Our Duty-Bound Past 216
Our Farewell to Duty 219
Confucian Parenting 220
Churches Turn Duty to Delight 223
Back to the Confucian Path 230
By Bible or By Bayonet 235
Bad Leaders and Collapse 238

14 – Other Thinkers 240
The Dustbins of History 241
The Mandate of Heaven 242
Duties of Children 243
Duties of Parents 245
Duties of Husbands 247
The Wisdom of Wives 249
Duties of Leaders to Their Followers 252
Duties of Citizens to Government 254
Duties of Citizens to Each Other 263

15 - Turning Back From the Abyss 265
Jungle Primaries 266
Gerrymandering 268
Spread Out the Electoral College Vote 270
A New Dawn in America 271
Introduction
The true cause of national collapse seems to be elusive. Is it war? Nations which have collapsed had won wars in the past. Is it famine? There have always been famines, and a civilization of any strength survives them. Disease? Natural disaster? Political turmoil? All these catastrophes have been blamed for destroying once-great cultures; but catastrophes happen regularly, and usually don’t do any permanent harm.
No, the underlying explanation for the collapse of great civilizations is rooted in something profoundly human, a phenomenon which we call the Pleasure-Pain Principle .

· All human beings seek to maximize their own personal comfort and pleasure
· All human beings seek to minimize discomfort and avoid pain

While people differ in their personal tastes with respect to what constitutes pleasure and what they regard as pain, some desires are pretty universal. In 1943, Abraham Maslow published A Theory of Human Motivation which proposed a hierarchy of human needs. Maslow pointed out that if a person is so thirsty that his body chemistry becomes unbalanced, all his energies turn toward finding water; other desires and needs are subordinated to the overriding need for water. [1]
Maslow argued that once our need for food, warmth, shelter, sex, water, and other bodily needs are satisfied, we become concerned with “higher” needs such as the need to be respected and to have self-esteem. The two basic mechanisms by which people gain self-esteem are by amassing wealth or by amassing power.
By historical standards, nobody in America is really poor, particularly not government employees. There’ve probably been no deaths truly caused by starvation in the United States since the depths of the Great Depression, if then. With their basic needs satisfied, bureaucrats, like everybody else, turn to seeking pleasure by amassing money and power and minimizing pain by making sure that nobody can tell them what to do.
The same is true in the business world – business people are motivated to operate their businesses to gain wealth. As we hear every day, though, there is often a conflict between the needs of society and the greed of business people. In 1776, the same year Edward Gibbon produced the first volume of his masterwork The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations which explained how businessmen seek to fulfill their “higher needs” and benefit the entire society as a more-or-less accidental side effect of benefiting themselves.
Smith’s book has been so influential that he’s regarded by many as the founder of economics as an academic discipline. Although he's become the patron saint of free-market capitalism, he didn’t believe that the best form of capitalism would be where businesses are allowed to operate entirely free from rules. He knew that whenever businessmen got together, greed would drive them to try to figure out how to raise prices to make more money without giving any societal benefits.

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." [2]

The thought that business leaders might be greedy is an idea which most people find credible. To address this problem, Smith pointed out that the government's job is to write rules so that it's difficult to become ri