If you can get enough people to buy into stupid ideas, especially people in influential positions, you can undermine a nation. From James Rickards at dailyreckoning.com:
My focus is on economics and capital markets. In theory, politics shouldn’t factor much in my analysis.
But in reality, politics has become a major influence on markets, and I can’t afford to neglect the political dimension. I might not like it, but I can’t ignore it.
Sure, politics has always influenced markets to some extent. But today, it’s taken on whole new dimensions.
It’s not the 1990s anymore. The key issues are no longer whether the top marginal tax rate should be 36% or 39%, or if there’s too much government regulation of whatever industry. Today’s key issues are much more fundamental.
Today, many politicians can’t even agree upon what a man is or what a woman is. That would have been inconceivable until just a few years ago. Any such debate would have been a skit on Saturday Night Live as a topic so ridiculous it would never occur in real life. But today, those debates exist.
Ultimately, it comes down to culture.
As the late Andrew Breitbart said, “Politics is downstream from culture.” In other words, politics follows culture. That means that in some sense, markets ultimately follow culture.
What cultural influences are presently dominant, and where did they originate? That’s what I want to discuss today.
A World Turned Upside Down
Many investors and everyday Americans have a sense of a world turned upside down. Investment funds are organized around ESG scores (environment, social and governance) rather than performance. Admissions to schools and promotion in jobs are no longer based on merit but are based on factors such as race and ethnicity.
The administrative state (also known as the deep state) issues orders that are not supported by law and defy common sense. Government spending goes for subsidies to dead-end technologies such as electric vehicles and windmills.
Remember the Gillette the best a maam can get and someone speaking of a Fundamental Transformation?
Was that the start of the hysteria? (wink)
The Gramsci/Marcuse plan of applying Marxist materialism to culture has produced the stinking of the west (h/t-Willi Munzenberg-Franfurt School) and burning it all down that (almost) everyone cheered for with a…yes we can, si se puede!
Comrade Kommissar Danilov: Man will always be man, there is no new man. We tried so hard to create a society that’s equal where there will be nothing to envy your neighbor. But there’s always something to envy.
A smile, a friendship, something you don’t have and want to appropriate. In this world, even a Soviet one, there will always be rich and poor.
Rich in gifts, poor in gifts, rich in love, poor in love.
Enemy At the Gates, 2001