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Buy “The Dollar Meltdown”!

nobody@vox.com(Paleo) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:45:32 -0800

Rep. Ron Paul: “In THE DOLLAR MELTDOWN, my friend Charles Goyette does a great job explaining why America faces a looming financial crisis and outlines common sense strategies for individuals to protect themselves and their families. This book truly is a must read.”

Is the financial crisis really over?

The mainstream media and the politicians say that its end is near.

Take a step back, though. Too much spending and borrowing, we are told, helped cause the crisis. And what has been the response? More spending and more borrowing has been the response by the power elite. It is not only that. They think that the answer to a bubble that has started to pop is to inflate it again. Instead of bad assets being liquidated, the Federal Reserve has basically become a giant hedge fund. What about the stability of banks? Every week, quietly behind the scenes, the FDIC takes over yet another failed bank or two and transfers their deposits to another bank.

Unemployment figures remain high, but they don't tell us the full story. A more accurate accounting of these figures reveals that the numbers are much higher than what politicians tell us. GDP figures are similarly distorted to even include such things as Cash For Clunkers. If President Obama started to build a Tower of Babel tomorrow for a trillion dollars, it would be positively added into the GDP. And who knows what the so-called Plunge Protection Team is doing to influence the stock market.

What about gold? Right now it is roughly $1,100 per ounce.

The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis with Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventiona

Charles Goyette

Mr. Charles Goyette, author of The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving The Impending Currency Crisis With Gold, Oil, And Other Unconventional Investments, says that the rising price of gold is "the canary in the coal mine." The assorted commodities are moving upward and the dollar is moving downward. The trend is clear.

Dollars are multiplied in quantity almost ad infinitum. Fed Chairmen Ben Bernanke, like his predecessor, is convinced that solving our problems can be done by creating more money and by attempting to price fix interest rates to levels lower than they otherwise would be at. Instead of interest rates being determined by the relationship between the supply of savings and the demand for them, men have been led to believe that this process can be, for all intents and purposes, socialized.

The supply of money has shot up to new heights. This (unhappily) canceled out, I believe, any kind of potential "deflation" from happening at the outset of the crisis. Bernanke, despite his double talk, has been aware that this monetary expansion would lead to a downward dive in money's purchasing power. Consequently, he started to pay banks not to loan new money. Taking, somehow, all or much of this new money out of the banks is virtually impossible. And Bernanke, to be sure, is still however worried about any kind of deflationary events in the future. Those in power will take "inflation" over deflation any day.

Government debt is out of control, to put it mildly, and is ultimately not payable. Its maintenance is akin to a Ponzi scheme. When such bills come in, government goes into even more debt by issuing more bonds to sell and often by simply creating more paper money. This can't last forever.

Leaders around the world see what is happening. They are not blind to the fact that dollars are not a good investment long-term. Rather than what were private whispers, there are public talks about moving away from the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. For example, India's central bank recently purchased 200 metric tons of gold. There is a clear shift in the world's view of both U.S. dollars and bonds.

This is not mere speculation, this is happening as we speak. The world will not support the U.S. Leviathan forever. It's only a matter of time, it seems to me. And Empires don't last forever; they go bankrupt.

In his book, Goyette shows---if you are not yet convinced that there's a problem---that the real figures to calculate U.S. debt are largely hidden. Added up, it is not $12 trillion but nearly $100 trillion. That's about $1.3 million for a family of four. Direct taxation undoubtedly has severe limits when it comes to these figures. Only repudiation and printing up money can solve this in the end. And if the Chinese backed away from buying more bonds tomorrow, U.S. authorities have no solution but (surprise!) repudiation and the printing press. That's it.

How did we get here? "America has become a piñata," answers Charles Goyette. Politicians, looking to get votes, pass the democratic stick around to various special interest groups so that they all can take a whack. Grabbing millions from this piñata are not enough. Even billions are too small. Now it's trillions. Next, I suppose, it will be quadrillions, then quintillions, and then sextillions. The piñata won't survive. We never think about that, says Goyette. We think of benefits, never costs.

He notes that the Iraq War alone, when you attempt to figure in all of the hidden costs, amounts to 4 or 5 trillion dollars according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes (which is even more than their conservatively titled book). Just think about the fear premium on the price of oil! Once again: We think about the supposed "benefits" of Empire, never the costs. China has it right: It is cheaper to buy oil than to steal it. Right now, like good capitalists, they are searching the globe to find it.

Courtesy of Big Government

For these and other reasons the author of The Dollar Meltdown argues that a future currency crisis is unavoidable. The supply of dollars keeps moving up, and this speed is even in a position to potentially accelerate even more than it has already, and its demand is on the edge of falling. If dollars from around the world start to come home, hyperinflation is the next stop. There is no "quick fix" to turn this around. Politicians are not going to go straight and the American public is not going to wake up until the crisis happens.

So what can we do? All we can do is protect ourselves and our families to the best of our abilities. The more that protect themselves, the better off all of us will be. We can even profit. But note, no one has a magic ball. How things play out will depend on many factors, of course, and the question of "when" is always difficult to answer, but the responsible thing for any man to do is to insulate his family from the possibility of a currency crisis, be it a relatively mild one or a severe one.

Section four of the book is where Goyette walks us through his recommendations. Gold as you can easily guess is one of them. So is silver. Oil and agriculture are also recommendations. All of these things are explained in a straightforward way. You don't have to become a day trader or anything like that.

He names specifics, explains exactly how to invest in them, and how each of these markets work.

Silver, for instance, has much potential. Much of its demand is purely for industrial use. This would change in a currency crisis and the speed of it shooting up in price could easily be faster than gold. This, shown in the book, has historical precedence.

Agriculture contains many profit opportunities. There is a growing world population and therefore more and more mouths need to be fed. "Jim Rogers," writes Goyette, "says that ten years from now instead of twenty-nine-year-old stockbrokers driving Maseratis, it will be twenty-nine-year-old farmers."

Charles Goyette's expertise and intellect is clearly seen in the book. Section three of it explains "what happens next." In addition to some of the things already mentioned, here for example he explains what the probable reactions would be by the government in a currency crisis. (Hint: All of their reactions would be bad and would make the problems worse. They would attack the symptoms.) The second section talks about "how we got here" and the first section explains "where we are."

He additionally shows the link between sound money, liberty, and the rise and fall of civilizations. To harden his analysis, he looks at ancient Athens, the Byzantine Empire, and the city of Florence. He turns to Britain and early America. For historical cases of massive inflation, he looks to France and Germany.

The Rise & Fall of Society by Frank Chodorov

Mr. Michael Nystorm, in his review of the book at The Daily Paul, remarks that it's "interesting that these lessons can be learned intuitively simply through the study of money."

Take a look, Goyette says at the end of the book, at America's earliest coins, which "portrayed Liberty," in comparison to today's coinage, which "celebrates the state." Look at today's symbols and its culture, and you'll understand where we are.

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Cassandras are Never Listened To

nobody@vox.com(Paleo) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:26:15 -0800

The following excerpt is from Dr. Guido Hülsmann's The Ethics of Money Production, pages 170 to 172 (all emphasis is untouched):

“The West is still at the beginning of its great experiment with paper money-----thirty years is not a long time for a monetary institution. But already the foregoing considerations find a ready confirmation in the economic statistics of the past thirty years, which witnessed an exponential growth of the money supply, as well as of debts private and public, in all major western countries.

“Evidence for moral hazard on a mass scale could be found in the last ten years or so in the stock-exchange mania, as well as in the real-estate boom in the United Kingdom and the U.S. Here the market participants have invariably displayed the same characteristic behavior. They have evaluated the assets without regard for the price-earnings ratio, speculating entirely on finding, at some point in the future, a buyer who is even more bullish than they are now, and who will therefore consent to pay an even higher price.

“Consider the current (2006) U.S. real-estate boom. Many Americans are utterly convinced that American real estate is the one sure bet in economic life. No matter what happens on the stock market or in other strata of the economy, real estate will rise. They believe themselves to have found a bonanza, and the historical figures confirm this. Of course this belief is an illusion, but the characteristic feature of a boom is precisely that people throw any critical considerations overboard. They do not realize that their money producer-----the Fed-----has possibly already entered the early stages of hyperinflation, and that the only reason why this has been largely invisible was that most of the new money has been exported outside of the U.S. Money prices have increased tremendously above the level they would have reached without the relentless production of greenbacks, but the absolute increase of the domestic price level (as measured by CPI figures) has been relatively moderate so far. However, as soon as foreigners slow down their purchases of U.S. dollars domestic prices will start soaring, and then hyperinflation looms around the corner.

“In the past, governments have tried to counter this trend through regulations. Moral hazard first became visible in the banking industry, and today this industry is indeed very strongly regulated. The banks must keep certain minimum amounts of equity and reserves, they must observe a great number of rules in granting credit, their executives must have certain qualifications, and so on. Yet these stipulations trim the branches without attacking the root. They seek to curb certain known excesses that spring from moral hazard, but they do not eradicate moral hazard itself. As we have seen, moral hazard is implied in the very existence of paper money. Because a paper-money producer can bail out virtually anybody, the citizens become reckless in their speculations; they count on him to bail them out, especially when many other people do the same thing. To fight such behavior effectively, one must abolish paper money. Regulations merely drive the reckless behavior into new channels.

“One might advocate the pragmatic stance of fighting moral hazard on an ad-hoc basis wherever it shows up. Thus one would regulate one industry after another, until the entire economy is caught up in a web of micro-regulations. This would of course provide some sort of order, but it would be the order of a cemetery. Nobody could make any (potentially reckless!) investment decisions anymore. Everything would have to follow rules set up by the legislature. In short, the only way to fight moral hazard without destroying its source, fiat inflation, is to subject the economy to a Soviet-style central plan.

“Central planning or hyperinflation (or some mix between the two)-----this is what the future holds for an economy under paper money. The only third way is to abolish paper money altogether and to return to a sound monetary order.”

Here are two excellent discussions with Hülsmann (mp3s):

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Market versus Power: Notes & Commentary

nobody@vox.com(Paleo) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:22:45 -0800

This entry has six mini-essays:

(1) “Intellectual Property” is not Property

(2) Private Property brings Order

(3) “But no man can own land!”

(4) Respecting Man’s Liberty = Peace, Prosperity, & Civility

(5) Not Respecting Man’s Liberty = Violence, Poverty, & Incivility

(6) “But without a State, we would have anarchy!”

I hope you find them somewhat useful.

“Intellectual Property” is not Property

I am against so-called "intellectual property" (e.g., patents and copyrights) because it results in the theft or the coercive control over the scarce and physical properties we have legitimately homesteaded or acquired via voluntary trade (e.g., our papers, computers, audio recordings, video recordings, even our physical bodies and brains, etc.).

Things that are scarce, physically controllable, and discernible we treat as private property because otherwise there would be---chaotic and irresoluble---conflict, and quite possibly violence and bloodshed, over who controls what: Do I own this computer or do you? Who has legitimate control over it?

But ideas are not scarce. They are infinite. I can sing a song, for example, again and again without disallowing anyone else from singing the same song. There is no chaotic conflict. To say that I "own" the song says that I can control you and your property. However a song is not property because rules of exclusivity do not need to exist and if they are present they are entirely, artificially imposed from the outside by the backing of the government. If I am the first man to say "hello," it makes no sense to say that I own it and that you need to get my permission to say the word.

Ideas (e.g., songs) are by their very nature nonphysical but with "intellectual property" are artificially treated as if they were indeed physical. Though ideas can of course be applied to property----and they always are----they are still per se detached from property. A man can transform via production the property he acquired through homesteading or exchange (e.g., clay) into what he perceives as a better state (e.g., pot). This transformation of his property, nonetheless, does not alter the nature of his ownership. The physical components are the same, what has changed is the arrangement of those owned components. In addition, because ideas are always applied to property, from a practical point of view it would be impossible to consistently and non-arbitrarily enforce such idea "ownership." The whole concept of this "property" is consequently spurious.

With the introduction of "intellectual property" the logical detachment between ideas and their relationship with the scarce, physical world is ignored, and involuntarily and unilaterally the private properties we have acquired are violently delimited in their use.

Private Property brings Order

The whole notion of exchange and contract between specific individuals work because acquiring property from nature happens at specific points in space and time by specific individuals.* Socialistic-nationalistic notions of property can only be artificially and aggressively imposed after the fact. Before a trade can take place between two men, there obviously must be something to trade. They, or specific men before them, must therefore have acquired something from nature beforehand in a non-socialistic way. And only then can a trade take place where the specific property of a specific man can be exchanged for the specific property of another specific man.

To have any real concept whatsoever of liberty, liberty must have an exclusive as opposed to an inclusive nature for men. Or else there would be no domain for man to have liberty to actually do something and control something, and to do so without running into conflict with another man and his abilities to control things and do things with these things. Here we find the only way for men to have---to possess---liberty. (In our day of course the focus of "liberty" is not exclusivity but inclusiveness. This idea is internally filled with contradictions and thus cannot be upheld consistently. [My blog post "Paradoxes of Liberalism" partly displays this erroneous view.]) Without exclusivity, liberty does not exist and is hence illusory: I have no liberty if my physical body did not exist as my private property. I have no liberty if I cannot own the fruits of my labor's homesteading and exchanging of property. Hence, the fountainhead of liberty is private property.

Restricting a man, for instance, from using a super-atomic bomb to kill every man on the planet is clearly not restricting his liberty. A man's liberty is to his private property, i.e., his physical body and the property he acquired through homesteading or through voluntary exchange from a previous (non-thief) owner. This implies that private property delineates borders between specific properties belonging to specific men. Man A's exclusive control over his private property prevents man B from taking it for himself and at the same time prevents man A from using his own property in a way that trespasses upon the private property borders of man B's. In addition, conflicts are eradicated from the get-go in the creation of property borders. The property borders of man C's land are created when he homesteads this land. Because he does this before any other man, there is no conflict and the borders that were created prevent conflict in the future. Insofar as man recognizes the borders of private property, conflict can be prevented and order can be pervasive across society.

Saint Thomas Aquinas was one scholar to recognize some of the basic principles spelled out here. Not only do men take care of what is theirs better, any kind of "common" ownership leads to confusion and tension (ST, II-II, q.66, a.2). The dominion of the earth was given to man by God (Genesis 1:28). To control and own private property is in our nature.

*(Hans-Hermann Hoppe's argumentation ethics presents the case that because property must be acquired in such a manner, it is impossible to argumentatively justify any ethical norm that contradicts such facts. "Otherwise," he writes, "it would be impossible for anyone to ever say anything at a definite point in time and space and for someone else to be able to reply. Simply saying, then, that the first-user-first-owner rule of the ethics of private property can be ignored or is unjustified, implies a performative contradiction, as one's being able to say so must presuppose one's existence as an independent decision-making unit at a given point in time and space." As those familiar with his work can see, my analysis here has been heavily influenced by Dr. Hoppe. On the other hand, one of the main differences here is my analysis does not use argumentation ethics as a starting point. While I am endlessly fascinated by it, I personally think it is somewhat a shaky and incomplete idea. But I do think his analysis is more powerful, especially in terms of highlighting prior-later distinctions, than Rothbard's analysis of disproving the alternatives to private ownership (e.g., collective ownership and master-slave ownership.)

“But no man can own land!”

OK. So, you don't mind if your neighbor dumps some garbage into "your" lawn?

Also, why stop at land? If man's homesteading of land does not make him the (legal and just) owner of it, why not say that his homesteading of any "external" thing does not make him the owner of it?

In such a case, man would only be a possessor. But then the only thing that would matter about property is who the possessor is. It would not matter who was the prior or later possessor. Theft would be non-existent, etc.

That would be a world of conflict and chaotic anarchy.

If land is to be used at all----and it must be if mankind is to survive----and if we are to avoid chaotic and irresoluble conflict, we must say that one can control land and therefore own land. The distinction of who the first possessor is in comparison to later possessors, who either have become possessors compatibly or not with the prior man's possessing ownership (which allows man to homestead and later trade without conflict), cannot be gotten rid of. And, to iterate, how can man own the fruits of his labor on land (and fruits which are derived from land) if he cannot own land? "Georgism" (Geoism) is incoherent.

Respecting Man’s Liberty = Peace, Prosperity, & Civility

For it is in the nature of things that when I eat my apple that I exclude all others to it. Any "common" ownership is impossible once these consumer goods are employed or used. To say that this is untrue is to talk nonsense. It is in the nature of all things to be privately owned. The original appropriation of property to be used as a consumer good or capital good is always and by necessity acquired in a private (Lockean-like) manner. Our physical bodies, too, are naturally, individually our own. We are the first and only user to (directly versus indirectly) control our physical body. Furthermore, just as man must have property prior to exchange, man must produce before he can consume. This logical chain cannot be broken. All that can happen is that it is artificially diverted afterwards into destructive and parasitical ends that are incongruent with this logical chain.

The appropriation or homesteading of a specific location of virgin land, before any other man, into a specific man's control and hence property ownership is beneficial, ex ante, to him and at the same time does not infringe upon, or trespass upon, the property of any other man. The voluntary trading of specific goods by specific men, correspondingly, are by their very nature, in the ex ante sense, mutually beneficial for all parties involved and at the same time do not violate any man's property.

Here we find the road, as Murray N. Rothbard wrote, to "multiply ... resources enormously in peaceful and harmonious production and exchange." Instead of fighting over the existence of scarcity, men cooperate with each other and recognize private ownership rights. They homestead, produce, and exchange private properties. Trading leads men, who are naturally different and unequal vis-à-vis each other, to specialize in the division of labor. To expand wealth upward and upward, men develop technologies so as to produce round-about methods of production. Profit and loss continuously moves the production of goods and services from those who produce less well to those who produce better. Men start to save, i.e., not to consume present consumer goods, and invest in capital goods with the aim of enlarging the amount of consumer goods in the future. Salaries begin to reflect this and, with salaries on the rise, young children and mothers can exit the labor market. Capitalism as a result becomes geared to stronger families. And so on.

Peace between men, and hence respect for private property, requires us to think about how we can better serve our neighbors, since a man must use the goals of others as economic means to achieve his own goals. It is therefore untrue, as many dullards claim, that the free market promotes egotistical selfishness. The diminution of the division of labor would help to accomplish that. The very rich man, in a free market, gets rich by making the masses rich. As men learn to gain wealth at no one's expense, hostility, violence, and war between men diminish and mutual respect, sympathy, and tranquility between men increase. Thus men become more invested in the rule of law. Moreover, private property makes men more interdependent, and hence reduces perverse forms of "radical individualism." This interdependency requires men to have trust, faith, confidence, and loyalty in others. Otherwise, no one would do business with another. And since socio-economic mobility is flexible, these positive values and feelings between men are promoted to all. On top of this, as wealth increases, there is more time for the arts, community, charity, spiritual development, etc. More material wealth produces a tendency for men to invest in non-material wealth. The latter's marginal utility increases and the former's decreases.

Practical wisdoms and common sense, what is more, spread. With more dependency, mobility, competition, and interactions, such things as politeness and punctuality increase (as far as humanly possible). Punctuality, for instance, makes interactions stronger and results in greater wealth (materially and non-materially). Similarly, education spreads. And very destructive practices and traditions that diminish civilization and men's interactions will tend to diminish in the common ethos. Virtues like charity increase. Without private property, after all, men could not practice it and there would hence be less cultivation of this virtue. (It is only through liberty that a man can individually cultivate virtues!) Thrift, prudence, fortitude, and conservative discipline increase as they are rewarded on the free market. Long-term thinking and planning (both linked to familial management as well) become more common as they are necessary in capital production.

Society becomes somewhat hierarchical. Entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists, natural authority figures, saints, etc. build society upward as they rise above the common man. Not everyone can be a manager or a captain of industry, for example. This further becomes reflected in family and community relationships. No man is a social or economic atom. Private property (which is inegalitarian, hierarchical, exclusive, undemocratic, etc.), outside of our physical body, is not a "given" to us as we are born into the world. We must earn it and therefore must work within the framework of families and authorities in civil society. Most interactions in civil society are communal or institutional and therefore "pure" autonomy, so to speak, of the individual is absent in this regards. Likewise, the shaping of ideas and cultural attitudes are social phenomena. Civilized society knows of no isolated, detached man. With greater peace, the union, the cooperation, between men is stronger.

Not Respecting Man’s Liberty = Violence, Poverty, & Incivility

Peaceful coexistence between men means accepting the principles of liberty. It depends on knowing that aggressing against your neighbors' properties destroys peace. Given that civilization and its advancement depend on the existence of the division of labor and the private ownership of the means of production, it thus depends on the recognition of self-ownership and the homesteading principle.

Society is not an end to itself; it is a means. Men come together to do things together. Peace must be in the heart and mind of men. True fraternity---brotherly love---is something that can only develop when peaceful cooperation is established. It is the fruit of peaceful cooperation. It is based on peace, not war. Peace, as Ludwig von Mises would say (contra Heraclitus), is the father of all things. War, theft, rape can never develop fraternity. Men under such an arrangement would see all other men as enemies. No feelings of friendship could develop under this arrangement, said Mises. Wealth and therefore prosperity can only come from peace, and peace can only come from respecting property.

But the State is institutionally configured to be a war making institution. "[I]f we look at the State naked, as it were," wrote Rothbard, "we see that it is universally allowed, and even encouraged, to commit all the acts which even non-libertarians concede are reprehensible crimes." It is a monopoly of violence that exploits and expropriates life and property. Without the consent of a specific property owner, the State can seize property from this specific owner in full or in part.

The State is not a real producer. It obtains its revenues parasitically from those who actually produce wealth and improve society. Private property is logically prior to government. Government is a parasite. And, given a legitimate owner can do what he wants with his property (because it is his) as long as he does not aggress against another's (because such property isn't his), any contract he makes with another is only a contract if it is voluntary. But, recall what has been said in these mini-essays, the government makes no legitimate contracts with anyone. Contracts are entered into by specific men and their specific property. Government is thus a criminal organization that (ironically) has monopolistic power to define what "criminal" is and is not. In addition it becomes a legalized channel for crimes, i.e., it institutionalizes crime, and is therefore the most dangerous institution and is hence more dangerous than any other criminal person, group, or institution. Historically, this is statistically confirmed. States have murdered the greatest number of men.

With the introduction of "political means" to obtain wealth, which is based on looting and exploiting men's private properties, men are ever less required to think about improving the well-being of their fellow men. Civility and respect become less important in life. Dependence on the "economic means" to obtain wealth, through peacefully respecting the private properties of others and by non-parasitically producing wealth, for men lowers and fraternity diminishes. Social interdependence is depressed and the costs of incivility and atomistic-individualistic action is socialized and therefore increased. Cultural degeneration is the result, and it snowballs when the political means become increasingly more attainable for men. As this happens a tragedy of the commons is produced and a "war of all against all" occurs.

The State that does X activity necessarily does it at the expense of other things. It is absolutely impossible to judge if alternative Y or Z or A or B, or a combination of them, is more or less wanted and needed by the public----a public that is heterogeneous. There is no way to tell if the resources that go into X activity turns those resources into something that is better than not doing so. The only way to tell, however, is if there is a profit, but this would require that X be done through peaceful, voluntary activity which respects private property. Being cost-efficient is hence impossible. Waste and loss is hence implied in all statist activity. Neither can a proper conservation of resources happen. Nor is a State directly dependent on changing consumer demands, since it can easily expropriate property. States, for these reasons, do not have to directly serve their constituents well in the things that they supposedly need to provide. In fact, even if they wanted to, they can't.

Officials in the State naturally have a basic interest in expanding their wealth like any other man, but they can expand their wealth by not serving voluntary consumers directly in the free market, which would prove that their services are serving them well versus competitive alternatives, but by expropriation and exploitation, which proves that State officials are in fact obstructing consumers by destroying their "sovereignty" and thereby destroying competitive alternatives.

The less private property is respected, the more poverty and incivility. Homesteading, producing, and exchanging decline. The structure of round-about capital production is temporally shortened. Thriftiness, self-restraint, prudence, and other conservative values decline. Men become atomistic and detached. And as they shift into becoming political animals to greater degrees, they become more antagonistic toward each other. In the context of this discussion, it should now be clear, peace (market) and violence (power) are the two fundamental poles that advance and hinder the division of labor, the overall wealth in society, and civilized life in general.

***

And if theft is wrong, then it is wrong. Taxation and the like doesn't make it right in some cases. Any kind of relative ethics destroys the very foundation of ethics. Relativistic notions destroy man's reason----and cannot be defended because these notions self-contradictorily intend that they per se are true in a non-relative sense. Even the use of violence to stop a man from doing something that is immoral is unethical and illegitimate if this man is not invading another's property. The ends don't justify the means and two wrongs don't make a right. Clearly, we cannot make all immoral personal acts illegal by State fiat. This is a recipe for tyranny.

There is a reason, by the way, why democratic-republican governments are not filled with hundreds of Ron Pauls. An institutional bias is present against a Ron Paul being able to govern in a high office. Now it is true that public opinion can theoretically make a democratic government be filled with hundreds of Ron Pauls, but this utopian scenario is institutionally unstable and would unlikely last for long. Democracy favors anti-Ron Pauls for the simple reason that it pays to be one. Those men who use the democratic apparatus to its fullest extent possible get further ahead than those who do not. Once the political means to obtain wealth exist, the incentive is to develop the characteristics that define a typical politician of today. No reforms are possible; those who value peace must "strike at the root."

Democracy is a powerful ideology. It cloaks slavery. "Republicanism permits," wrote Albert J. Nock, "the individual to persuade himself that the State is his creation, that State action is his action, that when it expresses itself it expresses him, and when it is glorified he is glorified." The masses play a Ping-Pong game in electoral democracy. This helps to furnish the obfuscatory idea that the masses rule themselves and gives the illusion that there is always an "opposition" party standing by. When things go wrong, there is always a particular party to blame and a particular party to take over. But the statist establishment itself is left intact, instead of it being looked at as the true villain.

“But without a State, we would have anarchy!”

In one sense, there will always be "anarchy." At the present there is international anarchy between the various nation-governments because there is no world government. More fundamentally, all nation-governments are in "internal" anarchy because there is no outside government making it anarchy free within itself. Obviously, such a task would be impossible to truly fulfill (unless, theoretically speaking, there is a dictator). Notwithstanding this internal anarchy present in the government, it is able to maintain law and order within itself. If anarchy were per se unstable, this would be impossible; hence, anarchy is feasible in terms of producing law and order.

And if one claims that peace cannot be had under anarchy, Murray Rothbard would point out that it seems to follow that it cannot be had with different nation-governments. So, if someone thinks there must be government, he must think there must be a world government. Accepting the idea that smaller governments could form and thereby break off from a world government, while additionally proclaiming this process would uphold moderately stable peace under such increasingly anarchistic international relationships, has no logical end point in terms of these new and smaller governments being similarly broken up, leading to the obliteration of all governments. Moreover, Hans Hoppe, echoing Rothbard, points out that the anarchistic relationships between governments holds for the anarchistic relationships between men of different governments. Not surprisingly, the latter anarchistic relationships are more peaceful, historically speaking, than the former.

(Plus the idea of a world government is the most dangerous of ideas! Briefly: The larger the territorial government, the more it can afford, and get away with, imposing lots of intrusive and anti-capitalist laws on its subjects without too much adverse consequences to it, itself, directly. Conversely, ceteris paribus, the smaller a government is territorially, the less this is true. When you think about this more and more, it should become more and more clear that greater anarchy, ceteris paribus, produces better conditions. Now put this in the context of the above paragraph.)

When disputes do happen between two men of different governments, these cases are generally resolved even though there is no world government. A sovereign is not required and this is why the free market can provide judicial functions. In addition, international trade is yet another example of anarchistic relationships. There are several examples of anarchistic trading partners using non-governmental means (e.g., privately created law and arbitration) to keep the trade as honest as possible.

Other questions come to mind: Who will protect us from our "protectors"? Who will protect the "protectors"? The next reasonable question is this: Why is there not "a war of all against all" between the "protectors" and the "protected"!? It seems to follow that if the theory is true about the need for a sovereign government to prevent chaos between men, the relationship here between these two "classes" would nevertheless be chaotic. Accordingly, anarchistic chaos does not exist not because of the State but despite it.

Some Blog Entries that Expand on These Topics: “You Want Justice? Don't Make Me Laugh;” “Debunking Deterrence and Rehabilitation Justice Theories;” “Reparations and Private Property;” “Some Analysis on the Logic of Private Property;” “Don’t Give the State Consent;” “Are ---We--- the Government?;” “Does Freedom Come From The State?;” “Power Destroys Civil Society;” “The Market for Liberty --- Privatize Everything;” “Aggression, Defense, and State.”

Quite a few essays that have been written by prominent libertarian thinkers can be recommended here, not only to acknowledge my very, very large intellectual debts, but perhaps more importantly to have those interested explore. But because most of the above blog posts have such links, I will not do so here.

My advice is to simply read the works of Spooner, Nock, Rothbard, Hoppe, Block, Kinsella, and others.

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Property, Freedom, and Society

nobody@vox.com(Paleo) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:20:53 -0700

I'm one of the many who has immensely profited from reading the English works of Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In honor of his upcoming 60th birthday, Dr. Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Mr. Stephan Kinsella, with the help of the Mises Institute, put together a 424 page festschrift. As such it gathers essays from a variety of scholars. I recently ordered it, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

It is perfectly correct to say that reading a book of Dr. Hoppe's is a life changing experience. They are filled with good erudition and, with their generally razor sharp analysis, present to you a powerful understanding of the nature of society, economically, politically, socially, and culturally. They will even likely change the way you look at society completely.

My personal congratulations to Dr. Hoppe.

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Paradoxes of Liberalism

nobody@vox.com(Paleo) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:08:56 -0700

Edmund Burke

“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice and madness, without tuition or restraint.”

-- Edmund Burke.

The Tyranny of Liberalism by James Kalb is a provocative and profound book on the paradoxical nature of liberalism. As a political philosophy, it claims to be based on such things as neutrality, tolerance, and individual freedom. The upshot of a society adopting this philosophy, however, is a sort of "soft tyranny."

Although a man might disagree with Mr. Kalb on, for example, the absolutely necessary continuity between all of classical liberal thought and modern day left-liberalism, his analysis is definitely worth study. More than that, I would call it essential reading if you want to understand the current regime. Mr. Kalb also defends the importance of society sticking with traditionalist values very well.

What I want to do here is to highlight some of the general themes of the book, and offer some reflections. Besides just reading the book, I encourage you all to visit the author's excellent website. It contains many useful resources.

Subjectivistic and Atomistic Liberalism

According to our articulate author, classical liberalism made freedom the highest principle of life. But this, he says, "makes no sense" as an "ultimate principle of social life." (p 102) A man who has the freedom to engage in actions is a man who aims at doing something with that freedom. His personal actions are therefore subordinated to something. A man does not live a life purely for freedom. This, argues Kalb, is what classical liberalism largely ignored. Being such a narrow philosophy, it avoided thinking about the nature of man and existence. Liberalism instead slowly exalted individual choice and preference as the supreme standard of man's existence. Choice and preference thus became purely subjective, detached from the authorities of traditional wisdom and knowledge. Objective judgments were claimed to be imaginary and irrational. Ideals, distinctions, and the transcendent were slowly lost.

It was these standards that influenced and were, partly, interwoven with the development of the (erroneous) doctrines of social contract theory. Consequently, under liberalism, a government "had to base itself on the will of the governed. In the name of God and natural order, the will of man became the source of all authority." (p 16)

The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Toleranc

James Kalb

As choice and preference became purely subjective, all choices and preferences then started to be viewed as equal, and hence interchangeable, vis-à-vis each other. Freedom started to be looked at as something opposed to civil society. The liberalism, one might say, of John Stuart Mill ideologically took over liberalism's thinking. Religion, especially, was seen as naturally "aggressive" to the individual---since it has a non-subjectivist outlook and classifies certain lifestyles and choices as superior and others as inferior---and thus needed to be extirpated away from public life as much as possible. Maximizing subjective individual choice, as the essence of liberalism, demanded all institutional and associational arrangements be made subordinated to this liberal goal. It became an end to itself. This is why, Kalb writes, "we are now called upon not only to tolerate but to celebrate diversity of lifestyle and culture." (p 38)

It is for the reason that the actions of individuals and groups of individuals in civil society bring about affects on other individuals that the liberal concept of "equal freedom" views such actions as potentially against "freedom" because they influence (viz., delimit, indirectly at least) the actions of these other individuals. This ideology is what sees "anything anyone does that affects others [as] presumptively an unwarranted imposition and so an act of aggression." (p 102) It is, accordingly, traditional values that are seen as the primary evil. (Note, too, that interactions in civil society are generally communal/institutional. In a manner of speaking, "pure" autonomy of the individual is absent in this regards.)

This particular, and unhappily popular, view of "individualism" is one of the sub-themes in Dr. Theodore Dalrymple's In Praise of Prejudice. With the Central State monopolistically regulating practically all of life, and hence with it acting as the monopoly of authority, men start to think that if "There is no law against it," it must be an OK activity to engage in (which, from my perspective, is a reason not to have "law socialism"). This is the result of a liberal environment where, Dalrymple writes, "there is no other source of collective authority." Such a non-monopolistic environment is contrary to liberalism, and this is why the Central State has developed into a Managerial-Technocratic one with the task of modifying social-cultural behavior. It is therefore that Dalrymple (correctly) reasons that "radical individualism is thus not only compatible with the radical centralization of authority, but is a product of it." Kalb concurs: "In the name of autonomy, [liberalism] makes the state control everything." (p 103) In consequence, freedom becomes to mean the freedom to engage in liberal practices. Everything else must be shunned from public. A quick glance at what is displayed on TV and what is allowed in political debate will verify this. (For another example: public property must rid all references to Christianity.) So, the instability of liberalism's view that man is the measure of all things, and its subjectivism, atomism, nihilism, and so-called neutralism, turns it around 180 degrees to tyranny. And this tyranny snowballs, as its open-ended demands are implemented to greater depths.

The Inescapability and Necessity of Tradition

In the same way that the redistributionist State financially survives parasitically on the productive (market) end of the economy, the current regime which promotes cultural leftism survives parasitically on the healthy (traditional) end of civil society. Indeed, "The [parasitical] consequences," of the liberal State, writes Kalb, "include suicidally low birthrates, children growing up without parental care, immigration and social policies that presume that culture does not matter," etc. (p 149) The end game of this affairs is destruction, and that destruction will take the liberal State with it.

In Defense of Tradition by Richard Weaver

Genuine tradition, Kalb explains in the book, is a "step-by-step process" which "starts with basic functional patterns that establish themselves because they work." (p 197) Men imitate other men's successful patterns. We as individuals learn via example. And we depend on tradition as acting and living beings because our ability to grasp the full complexity of the world is impossible. It additionally serves as a "mutually supporting system" (p 198) by not only giving all of us a guide to how to live, but by creating a framework or social fabric that allows interactions. Furthermore, this brings about civilizational development (which is social by nature) by its effect of fortifying and strengthening interactions. (Just as a market economy wonderfully promotes diversity it promotes forms of traditional uniformity as well.) In sum: "We need tradition because we are social." (p 257) It is self-contradictory to say we don't.

No individual man, to repeat, could really function without some tradition backing the public ethos. To quote de Tocqueville: "If everyone undertook to form all his own opinions and to seek for truth by isolated path struck out by himself alone, it would follow that no considerable number of men would ever unite in any common belief." As has been said, "the species" is wiser than the dumb and isolated individual. In addition, man depends on tradition and societal prejudices because rationalism has limits (as, in my judgment, does tradition, by the way). A man's daily life cannot be individually worked out in a Euclidean-like way, and certainly no scientist could possibly engineer society in a rational way.

The complexity of tradition cannot be replaced or replicated by the managerial State. Prejudices, habits, and good commonsense must develop naturally, and be "tested," through the decentralized inner workings of civil society. "Tradition" that is state-made is therefore entirely artificial: "In fact, advanced liberal society is reproducing the errors of socialism---the attempt to administer and radically alter things that are too complex to be known, grasped, and controlled---but on a far grander scale." (p 12)

(In N. Stephan Kinsella's interesting article "Legislation and The Discovery of Law in a Free Society," Mr. Kinsella argues somewhat similarly that legislation, i.e., state-made law, cannot be centrally planned in a rational way because of the Hayekian "information problem." In this sense, could we not say that good-tradition is anti-legislation in character [versus anti-law]?)

Civilization's existence and stability depends upon its traditional framework. The scientist works on the shoulders of giants and he tries to increase our knowledge of the natural world to greater heights on those shoulders. (On this point, we can further say that progressive development relies on elites, who rise above the common man. And so, a healthy ethos---which authoritatively promotes traditional values---is necessarily hierarchical because men are unequal in relationship to each other.) The to-be poet learns about poetry by studying its tradition. The artist, too, does the same. A "pure" creativity is hence a myth. All genuine innovation, therefore, works through tradition. In contrast, much of the uninspiring (and often perverse) art of modernity, says Kalb, is ever more based on "a cult of creativity resulting from loss of confidence in goods that transcend." (p 303)

"Human rationality," Kalb writes, "involves making sense of our thoughts and actions by relating them to an overall understanding of reality." (p 193) It is here that man looks for "ultimate principles." These principles, which are independent of man's will, are transcendent. This transcendence fills man with reason to live and gives him a sense of identity. It gives man something higher to reach for. Without it, man is lost. But this also depends on faith, Kalb argues.

As a matter of fact, an interesting point that Kalb touches on that many others miss is how this relates to the sciences. Western Civilization, after all, didn't develop in a cultural or religious void. The scientific method, strictly speaking, cannot be tested using the scientific method. In a way, it takes its methods as true a priori (as it does with, e.g., mathematics and temporal causality). (All genuine science, in my opinion, has some sort of rationalistic basis to it. Even theology does.) One of the things that sets this civilization apart from others was Christianity (especially Catholicism), which had faith in a world of intelligibility, order, and universal principles (laws). Thus the modern idea that science and religion do not mix really is an odd statement. No doubt, it would have been odd to someone like Sir Isaac Newton.

Russell Kirk

But, then, a man might ask: Is that which is based on tradition always "right"? Does Mr. Kalb really provide a guide to a moral society?

Interestingly enough, in reviewing Russell Kirk's Conservative Mind, Richard Weaver saw exactly this as a problem with Kirk's work. The title of his review reads: "Which Ancestors?" And, in it, he asks: Which Traditions? For Weaver, the answer was to rationally examine the various traditions, which can conflict, and "to isolate intellectually their elements of value and of truth." "Yet this is a process disrespectful of tradition," he wrote, "in the sense that it transcends tradition and looks for some higher goals." Hence, for Weaver (and for me too in this case) we have to look for principles that transcend.

Now our thoughtful author does not think that tradition is to be "worshiped" as infallible. From his perspective, though, a bad tradition is generally discovered as going against other traditions.

The Managerial State and Its Tyranny

What defines [this liberal-neoconservative] regime is the effort to manage and rationalize social life in order to bring it in line with comprehensive standards aimed at implementing equal freedom. The result is a pattern of governance intended to promote equality and individual gratification and marked by entitlement programs, sexual and expressive freedoms, blurred distinctions between the public and the private, and the disappearance of self-government. (pp 5-6)

Burke's "little platoons" of civil society, from the liberal perspective, are often viewed as inhibitions to the liberation of the "free" individual and therefore seen as something needed to be dismantled. Given that it's against equality, tradition must be done away with. Men possessing any genuine cultural attachments, too, must be destroyed, since they result in various forms of discrimination and exclusiveness.

This increase of "experts" managing more of society is followed by men becoming less able to manage themselves. It reduces the need for civil society ties. The abnormal lifestyle and habit is promoted at the expense of the normal, as the natural ties of civil society erode.

Take the family as a paradigm (an anarchistic institution, says G.K. Chesterton). Traditional ideals are what have maintained its existence. Planning and acting are involved in supporting the family. That's why it depends on a common public ethos of ideas for support. Its ideal further brings with it, Kalb explains in the book, "certain functions and obligations." (p 210) Order, continuity, and the continuation of human society are the result. As fathers (patriarchs), we know our natural roles. As mothers, ditto. As children, ditto. This is why identity (and stereotyping)* is important. The healthy development of the individual depends on the healthy family.

*(To take this to the extreme, imagine the ridding of stereotyping about the sexes. Wouldn't this demand that no one care about how we dress and present ourselves as a member of a distinct sex? Forgive me for being so bold, but logically consistent liberalism would turn the world into a hellhole.)

Thus the whole idea---based on the concept that everything is equal and interchangeable and that things operate in an atomistic-subjectivistic vacuum---of "gay marriage" makes no sense whatsoever. It, moreover, destroys the identity of family in the common public ethos. The result can only be the degenerating state of families, where functions and obligations slowly lose all value. "Family" becomes a disposable, no big deal thing. Today it is well-known what the current state of families is. And, paralleling this, traditional sexual restraint has been abandoned for animalistic "free love." Instant gratification, with (socialized) zero costs, is the raison d'être of modernity.

A Humane Economy by Wilhelm Röpke

The welfare state, in particular, is used as a means of social engineering. As it "frees" us from a traditional setting, a vacuum is created and the government fills the void. Men become less dependent on each other, and therefore, Kalb (so rightfully) reasons, less civil and less social. "The welfare state,

makes us useless to each other. It separates conduct from consequences and undermines personal responsibility. It weakens connections between the sexes and generations by insisting that dependence on particular persons is wrong. It deprives personal loyalty and integrity of their place and function by making us rely on the system as a whole rather than on ourselves and each other. (p 120)

And the "liberation of women and of sex has deprived women of masculine support, feminized poverty, and turned girls into sexual commodities." (p 123) Other examples of this engineering are to be found in government's involvement in sex education to its subsidization of childcare. With these changes, government---and its managerial business allies---has ever more become a thought police as well.

"Reeducation programs, sensitivity training, speech codes, and other forms of thought control become a permanent necessity," (p 67) with forced liberal diversity. (But, a man might ask, if liberalism's goal is "diversity," why does it break down and homogenize? It seems, on the contrary, that liberalism is actually against true diversity.) My review here, seeing that language itself has undergone political correction, would be judged (by nonjudgmental judgmentalism?) as filled with incorrect and sexist words.

Given all of this, it is not untrue to say that the liberal State leads to speech controls. In Europe this has already been done. Kalb's analysis shows that it can logically lead to it. For instance, free speech can say things that go against liberal principles of inclusiveness. Since this is viewed as "oppressive," it must be regulated away. "Even liberals who support free speech agree with their more advanced brethren that politically incorrect speech is morally illegitimate." (p 118)

Some Concluding Thoughts

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays

Contained in his wonderful book Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature, Murray Rothbard wrote an essay on why someone should be a libertarian. For him, the answer was a "passion for justice." Along these lines, and with a recognition of human nature, transcendence, etc., I have to disagree with Mr. Kalb in a major way. I think we can construct a libertarianism that escapes his dialectics. One can be a "fusionist." And, while I'm sure he would disagree with me, I don't see a breaking away from all government power as categorically against a respect or recognition for traditional values.* Why can't a private (polycentric) form of law develop among various family households and other intermediate institutions? To me at least, the State is against good ethics and morality. It crushes virtue, and has every reason and incentive to do so as a monopolist of law-making. A private order, on the other hand, can more easily be kept in-check to the demands of culturally conservative values.

Be this as it may, Mr. Kalb has written a book I recommend to all. He defends a traditional conservatism one can respect.

He believes a path to a moral society can be developed. It takes all of us as members of families and communities to do our best to lay the groundwork. "The next generation," our author writes,

must be brought up to respect tradition and the transcendent more than the commercial, hedonistic, and egalitarian standards now dominant. This will not be possible unless home, school, local community, and alternative media provide a refuge of sanity from which a declining public order can be judged and found wanting. A change in orientation that begins individually and is initially perhaps backed mostly by words and gestures must grow into something far more social and comprehensive. (pp 268-9)

*[Robert Nisbet, although not an anarchist, was an admirer of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin. Though, I suppose this would be very confusing to some so-termed "left-libertarians."]

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Race and Collectivism: Taboo Questions

nobody@vox.com(Paleo) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 15:14:40 -0700

At Taki's Magazine there has been some recent debate and conversation over the issue of race, "race realism," nationalism, and white nationalism. Like Dr. Paul Gottfried, I am not afraid to talk about these politically incorrect and hence untouchable issues intelligently with intelligent people. And, unlike Mr. Justin Raimondo, I have no direct reason to disassociate with someone like Mr. Jared Taylor, the editor of American Renaissance. If truth be told, once a week I generally scan the website's, typically thought provoking, links. Similarly, I do the same for the website VDare.com, which contains many themes that American Renaissance does.

My goal here is not to go through each and every point that has been made at TakiMag. Instead, among other things, I want to---extensively---show how cultural conservatism, properly speaking, can coexist with what is sometimes called "race realism" (as opposed to "pure white nationalism"), and why it makes sense to be a "realist" when it comes to race. I additionally want to show, more briefly, how cultural conservatism combined with race realism can peacefully live together with anti-state libertarianism, contrary to some of the discordant remarks made by Gottfried.

Some Relevant Articles: "Whiteout" by Jared Taylor; "The Limits of Race" by Paul Gottfried; "Nationalists Without a Nation" by Justin Raimondo; "What Do White Nationalists Want?" by Taylor; "Race, Christianity, and Anarcho-Capitalism" by Gottfried.

It is correct to say that I probably do not view race and racial-genetic inheritance as important, in degree, as Taylor does. The race of a man, or a given group of men, is most certainly not the whole of him, or them. Race is not even close to being "everything." At the same time, however, I would not go as far as Raimondo, who apparently thinks the individual is more or less unshaped, genetically speaking, by his racial makeup. He appears to view it as basically insignificant and null. To me, personally, this is a silly notion when you logically examine it. Albeit I am not an expert on the subject, nor do I desire to be one, the work of Drs. J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Michael Levin, Charles Murray, and others cannot just be dismissed as examples of "pseudo-science." That their work shows that you can make categorical and generalized statements about race is clear enough. One cannot, for example, deny the differences in average IQ rates or average crime rates. Neither, for example, can the documented statistics of serum testosterone levels being different among the races be denied. Or, for one more example, it cannot be denied that certain races are more or less susceptible to certain diseases. Why the differences appear is another question, of course. Why some men think that the differences are un-natural or a priori evil as against sameness, too, are separate questions.

Most men do not deny that one's family heredity is significant in shaping the individual. This shaping not only includes personal appearance but such things as intelligence as well. And this shaping is inborn, apart and separate from environmental factors. Understanding this gives explanation to why everyone cannot be a theoretical physicist or a mathematician. What is more, it explains that everyone cannot be a professional football player or basketball player. Now enter the topic of race into this paragraph's discussion. Race can be viewed, in some real sense, as a super-extended family. For this reason it seems improbable to say that race heredity does not, to some extent, have an influence on the individual.

At the time of the publication of The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Murray N. Rothbard (who, from what I am told, was "into" race realism), in an editorial called "Race! That Murray Book," wrote that "everyone, and I mean everyone [knows] in their hearts and in private" that there are "self-evident truths about race, intelligence, and heritability" [emphasis untouched]. This book, he said, allowed (at least for a time) the subject to become open and "mainstream," without too much childish and irrational name-calling or false non sequitur and ad hominem accusations.

There is no denying that environmental factors are significant vis-à-vis the individual, but the same appears to hold true for inborn factors of heredity, as the works of Rushton, Lynn, et al. show. To repeat, it seems foolish to say that changes in the environment can make any newborn individual develop into a Sir Isaac Newton or a Michael Jordan. The individual, with his free-will or volition, can no doubt enormously affect his possible intelligence, his array of knowledge, his athletic abilities, and many other things. To boot, the young individual is immensely influenced by his family upbringing. But there is also an inborn range that limits his endeavors. I can work day and night, but I will not be a Newton or Jordan.

It actually makes sense to be able to make racial-collective judgments. The classic example is a man who has two ways to walk to his destination. On one side the man sees a group of white men and on the other side he sees a group of black men. Which side should he walk on for safety concerns (with all other things being equal)? The answer is obvious. The man's knowledge is finite and hence incomplete. His choices in walking to his destination are finite. Therefore, he must economize in these kinds of situations. Having collectivistic judgments, even of a racial nature, is for that reason rational. The probability of greater safety on the side which has the white men might turn out to be incorrect, of course. After all, the man does not know the individuals in question. But it is for that reason that it is rational to use collective reasoning, which on average holds true. The man who is 100% "color-blind" will more likely get into trouble than the man who is not.

In the very same way, it makes rational sense to make collective judgments on sex. The above example can be changed so as to have women on one of the two sides. Or, we can think about the hiring of a private bodyguard. Would you hire from a company that employed all women or one that employed all men? I hope it is needless to say, sexual-collective judgments make sense for an infinite range of examples.

In After Liberalism, the brilliant scholar Paul Gottfried writes that left-liberals "are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious,"

that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals.

Now Raimondo is right when he writes that each individual has a soul and is unique. I definitely agree with him on this. (Nonetheless, this does not inescapably mean that the individual is racially empty.) Respect for individual life is paramount. Those that say otherwise are on a slippery slope to despotism and tyranny. Taylor's unfortunate statement on the importance of not placing "libertarianism before the preservation of race or heritage" can thus be viewed in this light. That is to say, the word "libertarianism" can be substituted with the words ethics or morality. He argues, loosely speaking, that to save libertarianism one must abandon it. That for man to obtain a more ethical society he must, or might need to, leave behind ethics and become un-ethical. This argumentative reasoning is contradictive from the libertarian point of view. And, to note here too, if Taylor's philosophy truly is "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," then he is surely mistaken.

In Raimondo's article, he refers to Mr. Patrick Buchanan. Unless I am in serious, serious error, Buchanan would certainly not say that the individual is but an atom detached from his race or racial mixture. Moreover, again, collectivism is not per se bad or per se wrong. The world would exist in chaos if man could not make categorical, group, or collectivistic statements about things, man as a being included. The very fact that insurance can exist proves, economically, that one can make collectivistic statements. And, because it can be potentially used in insuring groups of individuals and their risks, it shows that we can make statements of a collective nature about man. As Dr. Hans Hoppe has spoken about, insurance, in itself, cannot say anything about individual risks (because otherwise these individual risks would not be insurable), but it can say something systematic (because otherwise the complete random uncertainty would have relatively no correlation and would not be insurable) about the risks of the group (and that's why these risks are insurable).

Please allow me to go on a slight tangent. Language, for example, we can, in many ways, call a nationalistic-collectivistic concept. A "concept," furthermore, that is non-relativistic so as to have an objective identity to be usable. It is not something that is "given" in the nature of the physical world but a creation in the minds of men. Thus it is social and cultural forces that are the forces at work that shape, both in a progressive and retrogressive sense, language. Clearly enough, language is hence a highly "conservative" thing. Naturally, then, tradition and continuity are intimately related to a society's language. In addition, it is based on the usages of generalizations and even stereotypes. (Richard Weaver, who I will come to later in this essay, said that there are those that dislike this unbreakable truth about language because "it is felt that 'typing' anything that is real distorts the thing by presenting it in something less than its full individuality and concreteness." But these men do not understand: "For it is true that the word conveys something less than the fullness of the thing signified, it is also true that it conveys something more. A word in this role is a generalization. The value of a generalization is that while it leaves out the specific features that are of the individual or of the moment, it expresses features that are general to a class and may be lacking or imperfect in the single instance ... In order to make statements that will have applicability over a period of time or in the occurrence of many instances, we have to avail ourselves of these classifiers." [Source: In Defense of Tradition.]) Consequently, man cannot try to individualize and atomize language without destroying it. And, in turn, a large group of individual men cannot just "free" themselves from language by breaking their ties and roots with it. That would be suicidal for any healthy and productive society. That form of "individualism," or expression of individualism, is not something to be looked upon happily, to say the least.

This, and several other things, has an affect on the individual. There is no question about this. A man is not a blank slate. He grows up in some kind of social order. This social framework, to some undisputable degree, brings an order and structure to society (because otherwise no civilization would exist to speak of!). No individual reinvents the wheel. Defending a civilization, and wanting to enhance it, requires defending concepts that we can call "collectivistic" or "anti-individualistic." Many of these concepts are also generally built into what we can call "tradition." Defending a civilization means defending values and morals that are, in some fashion, "objective," "non-relativistic," and "non-nihilistic" (because, e.g., certain human actions lead to good results and some to bad!). Additionally, I would also add, this specific concept of collectivity does not necessarily deny methodological individualism (or libertarianism). This is because I am not saying that language, for instance, forms apart from the individuals that compose a society.

Now this tangential discussion is not as far off from the issue of race as you might prima facie think. What I briefly discussed was the importance of "cultural conservatism." At bottom, it is an understanding that there is a structure and order of society that is intelligible to man. It is an understanding that there are laws that govern nature, and that man has a nature himself. It is a seeing that there are "permanent things" or permanent truths about human existence. Conservatism is the recognition of the truth that society is not rootless. History, tradition, prejudice, authority, religion, and spirituality are all cornerstones to conservatism. Moreover, it is based on an understanding that, given that there is a structure and order of society and so forth, certain values that preserve and enhance a society must be defended. These specific things or values, that is, must be given "authority" in the associations, institutions, habits, beliefs, ideas, attitudes, etc. of men. They unite individuals into a vivacious society, with an enduring and transcendent moral order. (In contrast to this, it is, e.g., principles of relativism that destroy genuine culture. Principles, of which, that lead to the destruction of order and morality. They lead to indiscriminate thought and action, and thus the breakdown of society.)

If a discernible race can be viewed, in some sense, as a super-extended family which passes down certain genes, and if we grant that these genes actually have some meaningful impact on men (how couldn't they?), it then seems that it is not possible to defend a given civilization if one is to detach the specific people that make it up and have made it up in history.

Arguably, then, what has been called "race realism" is, or can be, perfectly consistent with cultural conservatism. An essential part of conservative values, incidentally, is the value of community. Since people live together in community, it is only to be expected that a community's characteristics would somewhat be defined by its ethnicity and race.

Is it so far-fetched to say that only the people of Western Civilization could have built Western Civilization (and likewise for other Civilizations)? And, if this is true, is it so far-fetched to say that the individuals of this grouping should think about defending this discernable collectivity of individuals (in terms of promoting good culture, trying to increase the low birthrate numbers, etc.)?

True, in today's world of political correctness it might be taboo to discuss differences between peoples, but intelligent men should not shun earnest discussion and research. As far as I can tell, this specific research is fully coherent (and is not in contradiction to methodological individualism or place man, necessarily, in a pure "materialistic" light, as Raimondo suggests). This research in point of fact helps to smash the ideas of egalitarianism, and other analogous left-liberal myths. The myopic idea to bring about a "utopia" of equality will, as this type of research shows, only result in the substitution of one form of hierarchy and distinctions with another. Because if it can be shown that intelligence is not entirely based on environmentalism, it can be said that leftist social policies will fail. This research can furthermore show that the culture of one peoples cannot just be transferred to another peoples. It is thus a blow to the dreams of Wilsonian imperialism.

According to the great Richard M. Weaver, a leading intellectual figure of traditional conservatism, the left-liberal view of man is of a "positivistic" nature. It is this that often leads to social engineering proposals. Since, if liberalism is correct about man, it does make some sense to say that the managerial state must relentlessly engineer civil society. As Weaver wrote in National Review:

The [left-liberal] attitude toward race stems from [liberalism]'s positivistic representation of man, which has always had one of its cardinal tenets the dogma that there are no real differences between people except economic differences. Remove the economic differences and all the others----racial, cultural, social, and moral----disappear. Thus the collectivizing of the economy can be depended on to obliterate the various differences... [Source: In Defense of Tradition.]

Studying racial differences should be just as much an acceptable thing as studying sex differences. Recently I read Dr. Steven Rhoads's excellent Taking Sex Differences Seriously. It presents an immense amount of scientific information that confirms a more "traditionalist" view of the sexes. (Though, how anyone could think that their differences are based on "social construction" is beyond me. The differences between men and women are mostly common sense.) So the sciences are on the side of the cultural conservative, and they should be treated accordingly.

Now, allow me to comment a bit on the issue of nationalism.

We have to remember that the world is no racial or ethnic monolith. Although "nationality" and "nation" does indeed exist in some organic and unifying sense, they are no monolith (and thank goodness). A Europe that became a stateless continent would still have "nations" in some fashion. France would still be France, in general, and they would still be speaking French, and equally for the other nations.

Sketchily and loosely speaking, we can define a nation this way: it is made up of a people sharing a geographical location that often is discernible by its features in some way; as a whole it is made up of a common people of a common race (the location of individuals of various ethnicities and races are not "randomly" located around the world, nor could they be); it has a sharing of temporal continuity of a people being at a given location with many customs and traditions; it contains a common language in widespread use; there exists a general self-awareness and patriotism among the people of being a part of a sort of distinct "nation" (even if there are no borders in the conventional sense of that term, as seen in certain secessionist-separatist movements).

To go over once more, this is not to say it is any monolith. Given the non-egalitarian nature of the world, different communities will be different from each other. However, I should point out, there is a difference between "multiethnic" societies and "multicultural" societies in our statist world, as Gottfried has defined these terms. The first term does not of necessity imply the second term:

Nothing could be more misleading to equate a multicultural society with a multiethnic one. . . At issue [in the Western world today] is not the coexistence of more or less tolerated ethnic minorities grouped together under an administrative unit or imperial jurisdiction but the celebration of state-sponsored "diversity." In the new multicultural as opposed to conventional multiethnic situation, the state glorifies differences from the way of life associated with the once majority population. It hands out rewards to those who personify the desired differences, while taking away cultural recognition and even political rights from those who do not. [Source: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt.]

Thus, for example, desiring to use the multicultural regime for a force of "good" is a self-destructive desire. Multiculturalism specifically is used as a political and ideological instrument for managerial control, both directly and indirectly, against the culturally conservative principles of which I am writing about here.

It goes without saying that I want nothing to do with "white supremacists." As far as the term "white nationalist," it confuses me because it seems to imply the desire to make America "white only" (making it in reality indistinguishable from the former term). Obviously, I am not for this either. Yes, I want all of the best for whites but the same is true for all other races. (How can a man be a Christian conservative and say otherwise?)

If, as a few surely claim, there needs to be racial homogeneity "nationally"----as embodied in a centrally powerful State?!,----then the question logically is: why not worldwide? The thing that one must understand is that no racial conflict [see this & this], in any consequential sense of the term conflict, exists in the division of labor or in free trade. Different communities---with no forced integration---can peacefully coexist with each other. Moreover, freely trading with "everyone," in a manner of speaking, and discriminatorily choosing who you live next door to do not contradict each other. That is, "inviting the whole world" to come to your front door does not follow from you trading with the whole world. Neither does it follow that from a free market condition that genetic pauperization, i.e., dysgenic deterioration in the population, will occur. Such negative interactions must be differentiated with positive economic trade. Conversely, it does follow, by subsidizing births of the lower end of intelligence at the expense of the higher, from welfare state conditions.

To Taylor's credit, though, and as far as I know, he has only advocated as public policy free association (i.e., the elimination of all compulsory civil rights) and immigration restrictions (which some anarcho-libertarians have argued for).

Today's massive and unrelenting immigration that is occurring I do not consider a good or desirable thing. The work of gentlemen like Lynn only boosts my reasons for this. Not to mention, most Americans are not so wanting of this amount of immigration either. This makes me believe much of it is artificially stimulated via statism. (That's why the solution to this problem is not the central state. Ideally, it should be to uphold private property rights to the max.) With private property rights fully restored, and all property privatized, all "immigrants" would have to be granted permission to enter. In distinct dissimilarity with today, men would have full control and freedom over who could and could not immigrate or travel into and onto their roads, private neighborhoods and towns. With that understanding, it seems fairly apparent that a total free-for-all of immigration would not be present in anarcho-capitalism. That can only be the outcome of the central government running public property and controlling private property owners' (and their voluntary associations') right to discriminate.

As far as Gottfried's critical remarks on anarcho-capitalism, Mr. Keith Preston has written an interesting essay on his blog, "Why You Conservatives Should Give Us Anarchists a Chance: A Reply to Paul Gottfried." I suggest you all read it.

It is funny how Gottfried, in his first main essay on this subject, says that most "white nationalists I have met are libertarians," but then suggests that Raimondo's libertarian views are naturally atomistic and against thinking about any kind of collectivity, racial or otherwise. Well, as my analysis reasons above (despite how weakly perhaps), I reject this as erroneous: (non-statist) cultural conservatism combined with race realism has no necessary incompatibility with libertarianism. Neither is libertarianism per se against authority. As important, libertarians are the ultimate manumitters vis-à-vis the managerial and multicultural regime.

A private property society would be more compliant with a bourgeois society, one can argue. Private roads and spaces, for instance, would not be detached from the values of the local community. They could justly enforce rules against prostitution or whatnot. Just because a private law society would do its best to outlaw all violence against the non-violent does not mean that various forms of social ostracism would not exist against immoral activity. It also does not mean that (voluntary) positivistic law would not exist (which would, in terms of specific forms of this kind of law having very wide-spread support, put high pressure on those who do not comply to comply). You could additionally see small proprietary communities develop, which could range from religious monasteries, to (yes) collectivist, left-liberal communes, to distributionist-based communities, to racially homogeneous communities. And instead of a top-down and socialist monopolist of law and order, you could see the rise of a very diverse assortment of "intermediate institutions" handling these kinds of things.

Nothing, as a whole, in this appears to be absolutely anti-authority, or anti-Christianity. Neither does it suggest a free-for-all society where everything that is non-violent is encouraged and promoted.

One of the main things that has been lacking in today's world is an objective and non-subjectivist view of ethics and morality. Libertarianism provides an objective view of ethics. This makes it not antagonistic to having a sort of objective or traditionalist view of personal morality.

The question of "anarchist" feasibility is yet another question. Preston gives reference to many historical examples, and I will not repeat that here. With these examples, I do not view it as written in stone, as Gottfried does, that the feasibility and probability is zero (despite how pessimistic I can be). States collapse when the public stops supporting them. "All it takes" is a change in vox populi.

To finally conclude this lengthy essay, let me add that differences are what make the world an interesting place. But it is only natural that a man of a given culture and a given people generally prefers his own to others (just as he generally prefers friends of a like-nature). Notwithstanding this, he can respect, or at the very least peacefully tolerate, the variety of cultures and peoples in existence (and the non-monolithic nature of his own).

A man should want the very best possible for all men, of whatever society, culture, religion, race, or ethnicity. Society has no need for men that hate, or for men who are unable to discriminate between things, including between collectives and within collectives, to see the individual worth of an individual.

As a matter of fact, the "collective good" and the "good for the individual" are not set against each other. This provides elucidation to why individuals can peacefully coexist and cooperate with each other in a market setting. An individual, by himself, is weak and un-wealthy. Cooperation in the division of labor propitiously changes this. (Language, to use an example from above, is another perfect illustration of this.) The individual becomes better off---regardless if his working capabilities are little or great---by this peaceful participation and the collective whole of individuals become better off as well. Thus, correspondingly, various collectives, so to speak, become better off through peaceful economic cooperation with each other. Protectionism, on the other hand, can be called "anti-life" or "anti-existence" because it leads to conflict. The more complex and diversified a division of labor is under a free market, the more peace is required, and the more economically dependent we are on one another. It helps facilitate peace and friendship. The so-called "ideals" of protectionism, socialism, and the like, on the other hand, help tend to lead to war and hate. It starves and isolates men.

It is only the egalitarian mindset which wishes to ignore the obvious and is bent on unnatural oneness and sameness that is a logical ally to statism and oppression. It is a mindset that tries to impose on reality and the laws of nature. Equality is made superior to justice and liberty, and that is just tyranny.

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End Monopoly Money

nobody@vox.com(Paleo) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:44:12 -0700

Visit Dr. Guido Hülsmann's Website.

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The Financial Crash is Good (Just Allow the Market to Work!)

nobody@vox.com(Paleo) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:16:12 -0700

(The Financial Boom was Bad [An Example of Not Allowing the Market to Work!])

The prophetic Mr. Peter Schiff, author of Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse (2007), talks at the Mises Institute's Austrian Scholars Conference.

Mises Institute

Listen to the MP3

"Why the Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One"

HERE.

I hope you have some gold under your mattress.

Oh, by the way, I wonder. Who has a better track record: Mr. Greenspan----or, maybe I should call him, Mr. Monopoly Man----or, say, the Austrian economists?

Hmm. What did Greenspan say in 2003 about housing and what did the Austrians say? Why, let's time travel back and read, how about, "Housing Bubble: Myth or Reality?" by Dr. Frank Shostak.

Or, even more generally, who has a better track record: The typical Keynesian economists you see on TV----who say they have the answer, even though they did not see this coming----or the Austrians?

***

Without Mr. Monopoly Man there would not have been any bubble in housing, as Dr. Thomas Woods says:

The housing bubble could not have arisen without the Federal Reserve. Had people started buying houses at unusually high rates, banks' loanable funds would have begun to deplete, interest rates would have shot up, and that would have been the end of it. That would have discouraged any additional speculation in real estate. But Alan Greenspan and the Fed could create money out of thin air, thus giving the banks more to lend and driving interest rates down, thereby perpetuating the destructive bubble in housing.

***

Despite the earnest intentions of those who call for a return to a "gold standard," perhaps they do not realize how severe this economic crisis is and is becoming (thanks to those in power who will not allow the market to rid itself of the various malinvestments that occurred in the artificial "boom"). Government with the gold standard abused it, more or less, from day one. Given its top-down and centralized nature, it was a system that was waiting to be abused. As a matter of fact, the prerequisite to have a gold standard is abuse, fraud, and anti-market interventionism! Because of this, nothing will suffice but the complete privatization of money production.

As Woods points out in his excellent book Meltdown, F. A. Hayek argued that this is exactly what needs to be done (read Hayek's "Toward a Free Market Monetary System"): "I am more convinced than ever that if we ever again are going to have a decent money, it will not come from government: it will be issued by private enterprise, because providing the public with good money which it can trust and use can not only be an extremely profitable business; it imposes on the issuer a discipline to which the government has never been and cannot be subject. It is a business which competing enterprise can maintain only if it gives the public as good a money as anybody else. . ."

(At the end of my blog essay "Money and Civilization" I give a quick outline on how this can be done.)

And, do I really need to type this? (OK. I guess I do, given what President ~~Bush on steroids~~ Obama is doing.) Economic progress comes from capital accumulation; not spending. Read Dr. George Reisman's brilliant essay on that here.

***

A Note on Deflation and Inflation.

We all have to be careful with the terms inflation and deflation because they are defined differently by different people. But the best definitions are, as is usually the case, the classical definitions: Inflation is nothing but an increase in the money supply via fiduciary media (put bluntly: counterfeiting). Deflation is nothing but the decrease in the money supply. In this very specific sense, therefore, deflation is practically always a statist phenomenon. A recession or depression often sees some fiduciary media extirpated. (This is not a bad thing, for both ethical and economic reasons.) On the other hand, deflation qua the overall fall in prices (we'll call it: "definition 2") is more generally and often a free market phenomenon. (Though, definition 2 often follows definition 1 in a recession or depression.) For instance, imagine that we have a robust economy with a free market money that is by and large gold as its medium of exchange, with no fiduciary media, and thus a banking system based on 100% reserves. Naturally, then, man would see overall deflation in this very specific sense. Gold would of course increase, but extremely slowly as compared to the increase in the amount of goods being produced. Hence, purchasing power would go up, prices would go down, and saving and investment would be encouraged. This would be a magnificent thing. Deflation is not evil. In contrast, inflation qua the overall increase in prices is, ultimately and generally, a statist phenomenon. It would not be something we would see in a free society.

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Meltdown [updated with some reflections]

nobody@vox.com(Paleo) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:39:41 -0800

Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government B

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Listen to Dr. Thomas Woods's Lecture on the Economy:

"Not Guilty as Charged: The Foolish Attempt to Blame the Free Market for the Economic Collapse" [mp3]

Listen to Woods's Lecture on What Government Should Do (Learning from History):

"Why You've Never Heard of the Great Depression of 1920" [mp3]

Some of his articles:

And visit his website.

***

Perhaps it was about ten months ago---although I am uncertain---that I turned my radio on to hear what Mr. Sean Hannity had to say. I could not take listening to his program for any longer than about five minutes. He was ranting on how the "fundamentals" of the economy are sound and then repudiated those who claimed that the economy was in a recession.

Of course today everyone will admit there is a recession. Statists like Mr. Hannity have been proven to be absolutely incorrect----whereas gentlemen like Dr. Ron Paul have been proven to be absolutely correct. (See, e.g., chapter six of The Revolution: A Manifesto.)

Unfortunately, I think one can say the exact same thing about the "d" word, depression. I.e., the establishment will be forced to admit that the "d" word is an accurate description of the situation. Things are going to be getting a lot worse, and we are just in the beginning of this.

Due to the State's monetary policies and due to the fascistic arrangement the banking industry and much of big business has with the State, many individuals and families have been living in a credit card illusion.

We live in a world of monetary socialism. It is with this arrangement, ever since the creation of the Federal Reserve System, that over 95 percent of the value of the dollar has been lost.

It's an arrangement that has encouraged debt, short-term thinking, and short-term planning. It's an arrangement that punishes thriftiness and other conservative work ethics. Thus I would call the Fed not only an anti-economic institution but an anti-social institution as well. (For a more extensive look into its anti-social nature, see "The Cultural and Spiritual Legacy of Fiat Inflation" in The Ethics of Money Production by Dr. Jörg Guido Hülsmann. Download PDF here.)

It's an arrangement that has also brought about various artificial bubbles, leading to unsustainable booms, which then lead to inevitable busts. This occurs when the Fed floods the banking system with credit, thereby lowering the interest rate.

But the only "natural"----versus artificial----way interest rates can lower is if man saves more. Briefly, this means that man has held off present consumption for the future; that he is saving and investing more in temporally lengthy projects. If the Fed, on the other hand, floods the market with credit (via the printing up of money from nothingness), this in turn artificially lowers the interest rate, despite the fact that man has not saved more. Temporal coordination of production in the economy is consequently distorted. Investments that receive the credit are made to seem profitable. In effect, such industries get subsidized as they are flooded with this new credit that was created from thin air. An artificial bubble develops (à la housing). But as this new money trickles through the market, the old consumption-saving proportions reassert themselves (which, to iterate, determine the "natural" interest rates) and those investments are then seen for what they really are; namely, hot air. They will no longer be profitable. Resources are not there to keep the "boom" going. People have not saved more. People, instead, wanted more present oriented things. And, furthermore, people were actually pushed into saving less (and hence consuming more) than they otherwise would be due to the lowering of the interest rate. But investors were being incompatibly pushed, by the artificial paper money stimulus, into future oriented things based on the illusion of freed up resources, with its large pool of savings, in the future. This is when a recession or depression occurs.

So, since today's artificial "boom" resulted in massive misallocations of resources into various temporally unsustainable lines of production (via credit expansion and hence an artificially depressed interest rate below what the market would have set it), it is only the bust that will get us on the correct course. More production projects were started up than could be completed. Thus technically speaking, the bust is not the problem; it was the "boom" generated by the Fed. Resources, capital, and labor must be able to move with the market---a market that is ridding itself of these government-generated bubbles.

It is accordingly imperative that the State not interfere with this adjustment process.

As Mr. Jim Rogers says, the unsound must fall and the sound must rise. And therefore, to repeat what has been said on this blog before, the government must allow the market's pricing system to rediscover what is truly sound and what is truly unsound, and allow men to act accordingly.

Politicians, no doubt, don't like to hear that.

Neither do they have a real incentive to listen. This is because a crisis is a great time for them to expand their power and wealth. Consequently, there is little reason to be optimistic concerning the future.

(But if they want to "do something," I do have some advice later in this blog entry.)

Moreover, these politicians propagate to the public false hopes that the State is savior. They act as if they can magically create something from nothing. This propaganda is truly sophomoric. The State has no wealth of its own which it does not coercively take from others in the productive economy. All it can do is redistribute wealth and override the market's free and voluntary interactions of men.

You can accordingly call the "stimulus" bill a wealth destruction bill.

If the politicians keep this up, they will be sending us into a deep and long depression.

***

We must keep in mind the big picture, always. Henry Hazlitt, one of the great Austrian school economists, was right. We must think about the seen and the unseen, the short-term and the long-term, individual groups and all groups. Only in this manner should we examine so-called government "solutions."

For example, the State can "create" jobs only by taking away jobs that would have been created in the market. You might see the government jobs and so forth, but you don't see that there has only been a diversion. Instead of those jobs employing resources and money to serve the direct needs of consumers, resources and money are being employed by these jobs through State dictate; independent of voluntarily paying consumers, independent of the market's profit-and-loss system, independent of the market's competitive milieu. Ordinary people are made that much poorer because they are forced to pay for these jobs, if they like it or not, and have that much less money to spend (or save) on what they want, employing who they want.

And what does it tell us that such "created" jobs are independent of voluntarily paying consumers? They must not be worth much to the needs of ordinary people. It must be wasteful. And, even if it is not, there is no way to tell, unless we subject such jobs to the market. Only then can we see if the costs are justified, i.e., if the costs of this labor are less than what this labor produces. In addition, only then can we determine if those jobs are serving the higher versus lower needs of people. The costs and expected profits can subsequently be compared and contrasted with other possible labor employments. This additional point is important, since we live in a world of changing conditions and uncertainty. Consumer demands are not static, after all. But State "created" jobs cannot engage in cost accounting and will be restrictive in movement as against a free market of labor. The maximization of wealth with a free market's labor mobility is non-existent and hence standards of living must be lower than they otherwise would be.

Such "created" jobs might even be completely destructive in every way, i.e., the costs might be greater than the output. (Even if they are not, there is no way to know if these jobs are serving the higher or lower needs of the public, as shown above.) Indeed, the State can "create" lots of jobs. It can have men build many bridges, if they lead to somewhere is beside the point. It can draft all young men into the military. [Hey, Mr. Obama, I thought we were getting out of Iraq?!] And so forth.

A free market, in contrast, allows rational calculation. It helps prevent labor (and resources in general) from being allocated to unwanted and uneconomic lines of production. This is because it is based on private property which allows for profit-and-loss calculations with a universal medium of exchange. What is more, activities in a free market are not only dependent on voluntary consumer demands, but are also in a milieu that is competitive. As a result, it helps divert labor away from their less wanted and less needed locations and into their more wanted and more needed locations. And, implied in this, the free market helps men cut down on waste and to economize to the conditions of what people demand and to the underlying reality of the finite supplies of goods and natural resources that are in existence.

However government has no such ability, by definition. Thus, government "created" jobs will be arbitrary in terms of real wants, needs, expenses, and resources. There will be general misallocation, and hence standards of living will be lower than they otherwise would be. Since such "created" jobs are not based on voluntary demand, their activities will be independent of the wants and needs of people. Thus, given such a non-market position, this labor's costs can be very high and its quality output can be very low. This will actually multiply due to the fact that such labor has no need to worry about competition. And, because the factors of production employed by such "created" jobs cannot be sold on the market, they will be independent of their capital value and hence there will be over and under utilization thereof.

The very same basic lesson of the seen and unseen applies to the wealth destruction bill in its multiplicity of schemes [see the link --- an essay by Dr. Woods]. All that it will do is override people's free choices and make people that much poorer. Dr. Woods calls it "tooth fairy economics." We all must remember: the State has no resources and it lacks the free market's ability to economize. If we are to come out of this economic downturn fast, we need the pricing system to sort out resources. All the State can do is distort that process and make this downturn that much longer and that much deeper.

***

Or, the State can try to inflate more as a "solution." Though all that would do is intensify bubbles and increase the pain at the end of the road. It would be an attempt to cure our problems by the very means that caused our problems (as I wrote about above). It would result in the unsound increasing and the sound decreasing. More than that, a redistribution of wealth would occur from the poor and middle classes to those special interests who received the new money first.

And, we should all be aware, it is perfectly clear that wealth is expanded by enlarging the amounts of goods (not money). Wealth, for society at large, is not increased by growing money on trees. Just as important, it is about increasing capital. That means saving is a good thing------despite what the mainstream media might say. Even at an intuitive level, it should be crazy to anyone when a talking head suggests that an individual, a family, a community, a society in financially difficult times should go on a spending spree.

And, to repeat again on this blog, men saving would actually make the recovery faster. Time preferences would have gone down and, hence, would put man closer to the artificially low interest rates. Less adjustment would be needed because "real" rates would be closer to the "fake" rates, so to speak. (See Rothbard on this.)

***

Though I am pessimistic, the only way that we all can avoid a long and deep depression is if government stops doing anything more than it has already done. Yes, there will be some major pain. But at least it would be over (comparatively) quickly.

Even better: it can cut its budget. And while this is a radical statement, I suppose, it is a much needed statement: money and banking must be uncut from the government; namely, it must be left to the private market. We need private money (which would most likely be gold and silver): private minting, private coining, etc. without a central bank, legal tender laws, fractional reserve banking, etc.

Furthermore, we all need to see the State as it really is. It's essentially a parasitic institution, and should be treated as such.

If a given activity is by definition theft and if it is unethical, then it is not possible to deny that this unethicalness of theft applies consistently without throwing out the first starting principles. An act of theft/murder/slavery/etc. does not become right because a man of the State is doing it. Socialism in all of its forms must be rejected.

***

I'll conclude this entry by saying that modernity has brought a de-civilizational decline in cultural and social life. Modernity might also, ultimately, do the same with material wealth. There has been, what you can almost call, financial stagnation and soon we may have a financial depression. The credit card illusion will be ending. On top of this, statism has become so powerful with its welfare-warfare apparatus that it will ultimately bankrupt itself (unless the market creates some huge innovation to keep it going longer, e.g., a new energy source).

Now I'm sure some would criticize me as a "naïve youngster." Though, all a man has to do is glance back at how the culture was, say, 60 years ago (even though he must take into account the problems of those years as well). Performing such a glance is not that difficult. Just look at the differences between the television shows back then and those of today.

An underlying error of my make-believe critic is to subconsciously accept a Whig theory of history and to be so orientated to what exists at present-------as if the present is detached from the past; detached from what it carves out for the future; and is King.

This overall attitude explains, I think, why so many men will not accept a statement like this: "The U.S. Empire will not last forever." It explains why many men think an economic depression "could never happen again."

It additionally explains why it is too difficult for many men to think about the future Death of the West. Today's ethos makes this thought about the future too shocking to be thought of as true: "Dying civilization?" "It can't happen here. ... That only occurred in the irrelevant and detached past. ... Open your eyes and see what is around you. The present is totality."

Man's present orientation, high time preference, and subconscious acceptance of the Whig theory of history, makes him go with a leftist and statist flow, and being part of that flow makes it hard for him to discern right from wrong. It makes him unable to see, for example, that the culture is in a major crisis, and that the West is dying. And, for example, it makes him unable to see that the current monetary system, with its high fragility, cannot last forever.

***

Some Previous Entries on The Paleo Blog:

"Money and Civilization" (If you only read one, please read this one.)
"Prolonging and Deepening the Recession"
"Hazlitt: 'Saving the X Industry'"
"Subsidizing Badness"

[Hmm ... I retired this blog? Oh, well... This subject is too important.]

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A "Montage" of Links & Commentary

nobody@vox.com(Paleo) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:21:16 -0800

Happy New Year!

Thanks for Reading The Paleo Blog
- 1/1/2009

Classic Article on A Christmas Carol: Read Butler Shaffer's "The Case for Ebeneezer" at LRC.

VDare.com is having their annual War Against Christmas Competition. See Tom Piatak's report.

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, from the Pilgrims to the Present

Thomas Dilorenzo

The Bubble Economy.

Read "Evidence that the Fed Caused the Housing Boom" by Robert Murphy.

In February look for a book on this economic depression by Thomas Woods. I am happy to report that a mainstream publisher, Regnery, is publishing it. This will increase the book's exposure to people who are unfamiliar with Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Listen to the 1992 Mises Institute conference on Money and the Federal Reserve.

Read Peter Schiff at Taki's Magazine.

Hear the great Jim Rogers on The Lew Rockwell Show.

"Barack Obama," Chris Brown writes, "plans to initiate public-private partnerships."

"Obama's 'New Deal'" by Jeffery Kuhner.

"Garet Garrett knew where FDR's policies—and Bush's—would lead," says Justin Raimondo in The American Conservative.

George Smith writes about the evil Alexander Hamilton, founding father of crony capitalism.

The Fascist Market: Timothy Carney, author of The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money, is interviewed in The University Bookman.

In my view, this deep alliance is a topic that too often gets overlooked, even by those who claim to be supporters of the free market. It can drive one mad how so many men frame arguments around the premise that today's economy is "free," or around the premise that the regulatory state was primarily created to "protect" consumers or small upstart businesses.

One gentleman, it is said, that explodes these myths is Gabriel Kolko. In Murray Rothbard's writings you will sometimes find references to his works, even though Dr. Kolko is a Marxist------By the way, read the new article, which mentions Kolko, by Dylan Hales called "Left Turn Ahead."

For example, in "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty" Rothbard wrote:

In The Triumph of Conservatism, Kolko traces the origins of political capitalism in the "reforms" of the Progressive Era. Orthodox historians have always treated the Progressive period (roughly 1900–1916) as a time when free-market capitalism was becoming increasingly "monopolistic"; in reaction to this reign of monopoly and big business, so the story runs, altruistic intellectuals and far-seeing politicians turned to intervention by the government to reform and to regulate these evils. Kolko's great work demonstrates that the reality was almost precisely the opposite of this myth. Despite the wave of mergers and trusts formed around the turn of the century, Kolko reveals, the forces of competition on the free market rapidly vitiated and dissolved these attempts at stabilizing and perpetuating the economic power of big business interests. It was precisely in reaction to their impending defeat at the hands of the competitive storms of the market that big business turned, increasingly after the 1900s, to the federal government for aid and protection. In short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations of smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market.

When a man says we "must" have this or that regulation against laissez-faire capitalism, I often wonder: Who will regulate the regulator?

Mencken

H.L. Mencken Club.

In late November they had their very first annual meeting.

Addresses Online:

“Hear No Genes, See No Genes, Speak No Genes--the Jargon of ‘Culturalism’” by John Derbyshire. (The text of Mr. Derbyshire's speech is just excellent. I am not sure how he writes for National Review.)
“The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right” by Paul Gottfried.
“Greek to Us: The Death of Classical Education and Its Consequences” by E. Christian Kopff.
“The Old Right and the Antichrist” by Richard Spencer.

Secular Right.

Even though I am not an atheist, I'm okay with cooperating with those who are (in a non-militant sense). It is independent of being opposed to fascism and socialism. There were, of course, plenty of nonreligious gentlemen in the Old Right. (Rothbard, one of my heroes, was an agnostic.) However I agree with paleoconservatives when they say that traditional conservatism----in a cultural sense----cannot be atheistic. If it is to conserve the natural, the good, the transcendent, and the normal, then a conservatism that defends Western Civilization cannot leave behind its religious roots. That should be obvious.

Take a look at Joe Sobran's 1999 article "Christianity and History."

James Bovard: "Are Democrats Better on Privacy and Surveillance?" Ha-ha.

"Police Have Killed 400 With Tasers Since 2001."

"Obama Finds Favor with Neoconservatives," writes Paul Gottfried.

"Blagojevich, Obama, And The Diversity–Fueled 'Chicago Way'" by Steve Sailer-----And see his new book America's Half-Blood Prince.

"In Praise of McCarthyism" by Justin Raimondo.

Ron Paul is interviewed at Huffington Post.

In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas

Theodore Dalrymple

Patrick Keeney writes about Theodore Dalrymple's new book, The Politics and Culture of Decline. He is additionally the author of In Praise of Prejudice.

See Clyde Wilson's "Nathaniel Macon and The Way Things Should Be" at Chronicles.

Stateless Proprietary Communities: I was going to type up a separate larger entry on this but decided not to. Instead, please allow me to leave you all with a few articles by anthropologist Spencer Health MacCallum on this subject...

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