Category Archives: Political Economy

In Venezuela, There Is No Disagreement About SOCIALISM

Democracy, Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, Political Economy, Socialism

This may come as news to the doctrinaire democrats (lower case “d”) who doggedly conflate the will of the people with liberty:

The Venezuelan mobs fighting against the forces of Nicolás Maduro are not fighting for “freedom,” as we classical liberals think of it; they are not fighting against socialism.

In Juan Guaidó, Venezuelans are simply looking for a better, kinder socialist.

Guaidó is a member of the Socialist International. Guaidó is a member of the Voluntad Popular (Popular Will) party, which has been an official member of the Socialist International since 2014.

MORE.

You mean you didn’t know that the Guaidó the US wants to go to war for is a socialist?

AGAIN: The masses as a rule, in the US and abroad, want more stuff, not less of it. If we quit the Disneyfied view of the world’s quarrels; perhaps we Americans will be less inclined to intervene in battles not our own.

One can only hope.

Global Support For Globalism As Opposed To Populism

Democracy, Globalism, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Political Economy, The West, UN

The Economist has cause to celebrate:

“Majority of World Population Supports Globalism, Survey Finds.”

It would appear that, “The global public favors cooperation between nations, thinks immigration is a good thing and believes climate scientists, according to a poll of 10,000 people in every region of the world.”

The key likely lies in the term “global public.”

These policies mentioned benefit the world’s poor and the poor are in a majority of billions.

Democratic governments are meant to advance the welfare of their citizens, chiefly, but they don’t.

Created by democratic governments, globalist organizations give billions of poor a lien on the assets (including the patrimony) of their citizens. These globalist orgs do so through unrepresentative global organizations-–UN, EU, WTO, IMF, WB, OECD, UN-Habitat, on and on.

In democracies (and their international offshoots), everything is up for grabs. In exchange for power, wealth is forcibly distributed by taking from one and giving to the other—from rich to poor; from North to South.

Democracy is when everything is up for grabs without constitutional limits. Globalism is an extension of that—what can we smart citizens of the world do with your funds and patrimony, little peon. Globalism is democracy on a global scale.

Trashing Populism: Dim-Bulb Academic Vs. Deplorables

IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Populism

The NEW COLUMN, “Trashing Populism: Dim-Bulb Academic Vs. Deplorables,” exposes populism-bashing elites like Kevin D. Williamson, formerly of National Review, who said this about about Deplorables: “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die”:

An excerpt:

To say that academic elites don’t like ordinary folks is to state the obvious.

To them, Lanford, Illinois—the fictional, archetypal, working-class town, made famous by Roseanne and Dan Conner—is not to be listened to, but tamed.

A well-functioning democracy depends on it.

Taming Fishtown—Charles Murray’s version of Landford—is the thread that seems to run through a new book, “The People vs. Democracy,” by one Yascha Mounk.

You guessed it. Mr. Mounk is not an American from the prairies; he’s a German academic, ensconced at Harvard, and sitting in judgment of American and European populism.

If only he were capable of advancing a decent argument.

“The number of countries that can plausibly be described as democracies is shrinking,” laments Mounk (“Populism and the Elites,” The Economist, March 17, 2018):

“Strongmen are in power in several countries that once looked as if they were democratizing … The United States—the engine room of democratization for most of the post-war period—has a president who taunted his opponent with chants of ‘lock her up’ and refused to say if he would accept the result of the election if it went against him.”

Elites ensconced in the academy are likely selected into these mummified institutions for a certain kind of ignorance about political theory or philosophy.

Plainly put, a chant, “lock her up,” is speech, nothing more. This Trump-rally chant might be impolite and impolitic, but on the facts, it’s not evidence of a “strongman.”

Notice how, deconstructed, nearly every utterance emitted by the technocratic and academic elites turns out to be empty assertion?

Even the subtitle of the book under discussion is sloppy political theory: “Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It” implies that democracy is the be-all and end-all of liberty. Quite the opposite.

America’s Constitution-makers did everything in their power (except, sadly, heed the Anti-Federalists) to thwart a dispensation wherein everything is up for grabs by government, in the name of the people. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN IS “Trashing Populism: Dim-Bulb Academic Vs. Deplorables.” It’s available also on WND.com, Constitution.com, the Unz Review, and others.

1 Reason The State Department Turned On #RexTillerson: He Tried Trimming Budgets & Getting Rid Of Deadwood

Business, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Free Markets, Government, Political Economy, Taxation, The State

The Economist notes that Rex Tillerson was a poor secretary of state—but not for the reasons I would advance.

One reason for their opinion is that, “Disastrously for morale, he declined to defend his own department when the White House proposed cutting its budget by 25% or more … Mr Tillerson squandered goodwill with a corporate restructuring that felt to many staff like an invitation to resign. At one point, outside consultants sent round a questionnaire asking: “To optimally support the future mission of the Department, what one or two things should your work unit totally stop doing or providing?” (“Trump Unbound: In foreign affairs, America just moved closer to one-man rule,” March 17, 2018.)

TILLESRSON TRIED TO CUT GOVERNMENT! Defending your employees, The Economist here equates with increasing or maintaining the budget for the department, it diplomats, envoys and other career and or deadwood staff.

State institutions are self-reinforcing and not amenable to reform; they grow through failure.

So while it would be nice if state institutions were able to reform, because of the structure of incentives, the state cannot be corrected. The incentive structure underlying state institutions is antithetical to reform.

To correct processes that may be killing people—affirmative action, when the subject of special privileges isn’t qualified—you have to cut budgets in the billions. This likely will never happen, in state institutions, because they don’t abide by the profit motive. So to express belief in this is to express belief in the possibility of the state fixing itself.

The libertarian grasps that the state grows through inefficiency. The more it bungles—the greater its budget will be. Economically, the state’s incentives are inverted. A private company, on the other hand, grows through economic and performative efficiencies; by singles the customer. The state is the opposite. As a monopoly, it need please nobody. For example, the education system is a giant failure. Will it be scrapped? Of course not. The system will reward itself with MORE, not less, funds to fix the problem.

This is a structural fact of the state.

Why can the state grow and prosper through inefficiency? Because it has access to the funds of an indentured third party, taxpayers, and has the promiscuous use of the printing press.

A private institution can come back from the abyss, because, economically, it will go bust if it doesn’t start pleasing customers. However, if, like the Florida bridge collapse, a private enterprise is working in tandem with the state, then taxpayers bail it out.

Profit is privatized, loss is socialized.

Most people no longer read or understand the economics of the state. Ten years ago, I had readers who had at least read Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.