Tag Archives: Socialism

Deplorables Versus the Ruling Class: A Global Struggle, by Chet Richards

Posted on December 27, 2019 | Leave a comment

People around the world just keep moving into the Deplorable camp. From Chet Richards at americanthinker.com:

Consider the age of monarchs.  Squabbling barons select a supreme ruler – a king or an emperor — to suppress the squabbling.  Peace and prosperity return to the land.  The king makes policy but he can’t do everything.  His minions take care of the details.

Minions mean bureaucracy.   The bureaucracy grows.  The king grows old and dies.  The dynasty continues.  The bureaucracy continues – always continues, and always grows.  The bureaucracy becomes an establishment kingdom unto itself.  The bureaucracy grows in power and serves its own interests.  The king diminishes in power.  The land grows restless under the increasing regulatory tyranny and taxes.  Legitimacy –what the Chinese called the “mandate of heaven” —  is lost and so is the dynasty.

Change the names and we are at the end of a similar cycle – a cycle that began with the guillotine.  This time it is a world-wide cycle.  The modern king is a modern tyrant – Stalin, Hitler, Mao were the worst.Soc

The socialist idea had been kicking around since the 18th century.  This seemingly plausible notion shaped the various Marxist evils of the 20thcentury.  The Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Nazism, Fascism, and today’s imperious European Union, are all socialist tyrannies of one degree or another.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Cronyism, Governments, Insurrection, Law, Media, Politics, Society

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Fiat’s failings, gold and blockchains, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on December 7, 2019 | Leave a comment

Alasdair Macleod is the best writer on monetary economics on the Internet. From Macleod at goldmoney.com:

The world stands on the edge of a cyclical downturn, exacerbated by trade tariffs initiated by America. We know what will happen: the major central banks will attempt to inflate their way out of the consequences. And those of us with an elementary grasp of economics should know why the policy will fail.

In addition to the monetary and debt inflation since the Lehman crisis, it is highly likely the major international currencies will suffer a catastrophic loss of purchasing power from a new round of monetary expansion, calling for a replacement of today’s fiat currency system with something more stable. The ultimate solution, unlikely to be adopted, is to reinstate gold as circulating money, and how gold works as money is outlined in this article.

Instead, central banks will struggle for fiat-based solutions, which are bound to face a similar fate with or without the blockchain technology being actively considered. The Asian and BRICS blocs have an opportunity to do something with gold. But will they take it?

Introduction

Central banks around the world are praying that there won’t be a recession, and if there is that a further monetary stimulus will ensure economic recovery. Their problem is Keynesian theory says it will work, but last time it didn’t. In fact, it has never worked beyond a temporary basis. The big surprise this time was the lack of officially recorded price inflation. But this is due to the system gaming the numbers, making it appear there has been some moderate growth when a proper deflator would confirm most Western economies have been contracting in real terms for the last ten years.

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Posted in banking, Business, Capitalism, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Governments, Money

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History Was Supposed to End. What Happened? by Jeffrey Tucker

Posted on December 4, 2019 | Leave a comment

Is liberty the next stop in human political evolution? Let’s hope so. From Jeffrey Tucker at aier.org:

Anyone paying close attention at the turn of the 21st century could foresee the impending failure of the social-democratic consensus throughout the developed world.

The exalted experts who rose to power in the postwar period built gigantic state-based systems of social management and control and took over vast swaths of private society, imposing planning schemes across many sectors of economic life. They imagined themselves to be permanent fixtures of the socio-economic system. After all, this approach won the war (so they said), so why couldn’t it win the peace?

But there was a problem: over time nothing worked as it was supposed to. There were massive internal contradictions within the model, as Amity Shlaes shows in her new book on the Great Society. The new systems relied on bureaucratic command, not market signals. There was another problem: they were hugely imposing on people’s lives and property, and people don’t like that. Or rather: they will put up with it so long as they perceive that the benefits exceed or at least match the costs.

Building that apparatus – the efforts really began about a century ago, extended through the New Deal, but became a full model of social control in the postwar period – depended fundamentally on its successful sales pitch: these were programs built by workers for the sake of social justice, for the poor, for the marginalized, against plutocratic elites.

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Posted in Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Governments, History, Insurrection, Morality, Politics

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Thanksgiving and the Birth of American Free Enterprise, by Richard Mr. Ebeling

Posted on November 29, 2019 | Leave a comment

The Pilgrims didn’t have a Thanksgiving until after they discovered capitalism, and for which, as Governor Bradford noted, they were deservedly thankful. From Richard M. Ebeling at aier.org:

Once more it’s that time of the year when most Americans gather with family and friends to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. The turkey is carved, the stuffing and sweet potatoes are passed around, and many slices of pumpkin pie are happily consumed. But how many of us know or appreciate that Thanksgiving really celebrates the failure of socialism and the birth of free enterprise in America?

With all the calls for a “democratic” socialism to be established in the United States, it is worth remembering the first attempt to put in place a form of economic collectivism in that early period of American history, and the disastrous consequences it brought for the Pilgrim Fathers after they settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

The English Puritans, who left Great Britain and sailed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620, were not only escaping from religious persecution in their homeland. They also wanted to turn their back on what they viewed as the materialistic and greedy corruption of the Old World.

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Posted in Business, History, Labor, Law, Morality, Philosophy

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The Hidden Link Between Fiat Money and the Increasing Appeal of Socialism, from Patrick Barron

Posted on November 28, 2019 | 5 comments

Alan Greenspan wrote a good essay on monetary gold back when he was friends with Ayn Rand. Among many pertinent points, he argued that gold as money made welfare states impossible. Fiat money has made a lot of bad ideas possible. From Patrick Barron at mises.org:

What causes the seemingly unfounded confidence in socialism we encounter more and more in the news media and among political activists? In the Extinction Rebellion movement, for example, activists are quite certain they have learned that there is an alternative to markets as the means to economic prosperity. It’s a means that does not involve meeting the legitimate needs of one’s fellow men in the marketplace.

It is likely not a coincidence that most people living today have lived most of their lives in a world dominated by fiat money. It has now been nearly fifty years since the United States broke all ties between the dollar and gold. It’s been even longer since other major currencies were tied to gold at all. Consequently we now live in a world where the creation of wealth is seen by many as requiring little more than the creation of more money.

In this kind of world, why not have socialism? If we run out of money, we can always print more.

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Posted in Capitalism, Currencies, Debt, Governments, Politics

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The five scary new rules of upside-down capitalism, by Simon Black

Posted on November 21, 2019 | Leave a comment

Businesses are now expected to do all sorts of thing, including toeing the line on today’s politically correct bromides, but they’re no longer expected to make money. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:

Roughly 23,000 years ago in modern-day Israel, a small tribe of ex-cave dwellers built a tiny village near the Sea of Galilee that may have been one of the earliest agrarian societies in human history.

Archaeologists discovered the site more than thirty years ago.

And they found tens of thousands of well-preserved seeds and agricultural tools, suggesting that the people who lived there planted a great deal of food in the fertile lands nearby.

As historian Will Durant once wrote, “the first culture is agriculture.” And he was right. Civilization as we know it has its foundations in agriculture.

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Posted in Business, Capitalism, Debt, Financial markets, Government, Morality

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Resolving creeping communism, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on November 16, 2019 | 1 comment

Alasdair Macleod explains why socialism can’t work, particularly the socialization of money. From Macleod at goldmoney.com:

The thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain coincides with a popular resurgence of communism and a drift into more socialism. A collective amnesia sees a return of the Soviet Union’s failed policies in a Marxist Labour party in Britain. Increasing socialism is expressed by US Democrats contending for the primaries.

This article explains the basic economic fallacies common to both. It clarifies why state ownership of the means of production does not resolve the problem of economic calculation in a socialist economy. It also explains the errors in socialistic condemnation of free markets.

And finally, it points out that very few of us realise we are more socialist than we think when we endorse government control of possibly our most important common commodity, which is our everyday money. But there is a simple solution: stop accommodating crony capitalists.

Introduction

This week saw the thirtieth anniversary of the breeching of the Berlin Wall. The elapse of time means most people younger than their mid-forties fail to understand what it was all about. Indeed, many folk older than that will have forgotten that the reason the Berlin Wall fell was because the communist states in eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union were no longer able to suppress their people. And the people were suppressed because suppression of personal freedom is central to communism, the creed that says people must make sacrifices for the common good. Besides the passage of time, the uncomfortable part which makes people want to forget its horrors is that communism is the both the basis and the final destination of modern socialism.

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Posted in Capitalism, Government, Money, Philosophy, Politics

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