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We had a laboratory example of just that same set of parallel experiments, in the division between East Germany and West Germany. Both started off at the same level, bombed-out shells of a once beautiful country and culture, that had gone to blight and total destruction. One side was structured, with all the social "safety nets" in place right away, and a static economy to provide for the workers. The other was put on a "sink or swim" basis, founded on idealism, with open opportunities for anyone willing to take even a moderate degree of risk, and an economy that rewarded those risks.

For a few years, the West bloomed, one of the great stories of recovery and the generation of wealth, while the East languished, seemingly locked in a time warp, reliving 1945 over and over. The divide was so striking, the East Germans and their overseers, the Soviet Union, had to build a fence to keep their entire population from decamping and rushing to the West. The Wall stood for for 28 years, but the cracks had begin appearing much earlier. Some of the former "East" people began longing for the economic security and structured life they once knew, but rather than risk going back to the East, they tried to recreate the same economics and integrate it with the much greater wealth of the West. Thus we had a growth, within West Germany, of a social system mirroring what had been in place in East Germany, but better funded. When the Wall came down, the social impact was not all that great by then, but Germany as a whole underwent a negative growth as the decades of neglect in the East were cleaned up, and Germany has still not fully recovered from that economic disaster resulting from incorporating the eastern provinces.

AS a result of reintegrating the two parts of Germany, we have a clumsy and blundering nation, no longer sure of its place in the world, and subject to assault by foreign ideologies, as well as unresolved conflicts within its own culture.

If the experiment is going to be tried in America, there cannot be allowed the drift out of the "Blue Zone" into the "Red Zone" as there was out of East Germany to West Germany. The trickle of refugees carries in its core the disease that destroyed the economic strength of the collapsing state from which it came, without the inspiration that made the prospering state what it was.

True, some would find themselves, by accident or adverse circumstances, stranded on the wrong side of the divide, and there should be some mechanism for repatriation to the more agreeable side. I cannot conceive of how this arrangement between the two parallel countries could be constituted or kept in force. The poverty side would always be looking for ways to extract the wealth from the prosperous side, or failing that, attempting raids over the boundary.

Situation inherently at a state of eternal instability.