Is America’s Collapse Inevitable?

June 05, 2023

by Andrea Widburg American Thinker

Usually, I write to bring news to your attention or to analyze a specific issue. It’s relatively rare for me to write a post telling you to read someone else’s post. However, Harold Robertson’s post about the “competence crisis” is so important that I want to encourage as many people as possible to read it. (Hat tip: William Duncan.)

The full title of Robertson’s article, which is published at Palladium (Governance Futurism), is “Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis.” The first few paragraphs spell out the scope of this problem:

At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack.