Another Neoclassical Lie: Neoliberal Economics is the Best Way To Help the Poor

Also, the poor are poor for a reason. If you follow your liberation theology and gather resources for the poor through redistribution you’re shrinking the area of the pie from which everyone draws resources. Capitalists lose, some of the poor who become powerful in the new redistribution (i.e. community organizers and feminists) gain power, the majority of the masses lose as well because they aren’t smart enough to create jobs for themselves or make their own way without someone providing a job and capital for them to work with. You want egalitarianism, but that comes at the expense of quality of life. So that everyone is equal you are willing to accept that everyone is equally poor. This becomes an epistemological battle in that we are pitting the idea of socialism or social democracy against a relatively free economic model. People can choose for themselves what they want, and it seems that they usually choose economic freedom over egalitarianism.

In many social democracies, people are certainly not equally poor, and most Communist countries wiped out poverty, even if they only were able to provide a relatively low standard of living and the model bogs down and collapses over a period of some decades. Surveys the world over show that most people want some kind of socialism. There are few exceptions, though the US may be one of them. Socialist, populist, progressive or Left parties rule almost the entire globe. Rightwing parties are in the minority or out of power in most places. The few places where they have power (the US, Chile, Colombia, Philippines, Thailand, the Baltics) they are busy destroying the country, just like they always do. That’s one of your neoclassical lies. I just showed earlier how 12 of the 13 richest countries on Earth are all social democracies. Also many wealthy countries have low to very low Gini coefficients. Go to a place like Sweden, and you will be amazed at how many small businesses there are. Literally one on every corner. The masses don’t lose. When you redistribute wealth, as long as you do not do so too radically, the masses gain tremendously in wealth, power, resources, benefits and rights. All neoclassical economics ever does is shift wealth from the bottom 70-8 The economies that are really kicking ass now are heavily socialist economies like Russia and China (state capitalist, corporatist or mixed economies). The economies that weathered the latest Capitalist Depression best used stimulus spending to come out of it and had heavy state intervention in the banking system. The ones that got fucked worst of all had followed neoclassical economics in their banks to the greatest extent (Iceland) or following neoclassical economics, used austerity instead of stimulus to deal with the slump (Baltics and Ireland) got fucked worst of all. Laissez faire is refuted. Neoclassical economics doesn’t work. It causes wild booms and busts and leads to regular economic recessions and depressions. It’s only good for rich people because the purpose of it is class war and wealth transfer.

Vote Republican? Rather Die

Shawn encourages me to vote against illegal immigration.

I encourage you, Robert, and all others to vote for the candidate opposing illegal immigration (and ideally massive immigration in general). This should be your issue because it is itself economics and a pro-poor vote. Yes, this means you could find yourself voting Republican. I just did!Disclaimer: I have voted for the D’s, R’s, and I’s in the past. Find me an anti-immigration D and I will vote for her.

Never! I will never vote for a Republican. I’m a progressive person. The only way I would ever vote for a Republican is if the Republican was more progressive than the Democrat. I don’t like illegals, but the rest of the Republican agenda is worthless. I’m a liberal like my late father. He never voted Republican in his life. I’m the same way. I’d rather die than vote Republican even one time. I agree with the Republican candidates on illegal immigration, but here in California, even the Republicans are typically pro-illegal. I disagree with Democrats in general on illegals, but that’s not enough to make me switch parties. Sorry. Illegal immigration is one of the few things that I am rightwing on. Opposing illegals will be the only way that these Republicans are for the poor. The whole rest of their project will harm the poor. My politics is the same as that of Liberation Theologists – advancing the interests of the poor, low income and middle class in the US. For that, it’s always necessary to vote Democrat and against Republicans, because Democrats are always more for the poor, low income and middle class than Republicans are. If I can’t stand the Democrat and I know he’s going to win anyway, I will throw my vote away and vote Peace and Freedom or Green. I’ve been told that as a radical, I should never vote Democrat. Instead I should throw my vote away on some stupid Left 3rd party or sect. Sorry, homey don’t play that. The Tea Partiers are right in a way. Most Left radicals in the US – socialists, Communists, etc – vote Democrat. Many are even active in Democratic Party politics in a wing of the party called the left wing of the Democratic Party. However, most Democrats are not actually radicals. But I think quite a few Democrats would actually support social democracy, so many to most of them are may well be socialists in that sense. But the deep structure of the party – the DNC wing that actually elects candidate, Obama, Clinton and the rest – are even opposed to social democracy, so it’s not right to call them socialists.

The Polls Are All Wrong

First of all, AP is a hard rightwing organization run by millionaire fundamentalist Christian Texans, some of whom are Christian Reconstructionists, with deep ties to corporate America. AP has a deep Republican bias, and based on their articles, especially by Liz Sidotti, they are pulling out all the stops for the Republicans with their biased reporting. Much is being made of a New York Times – CBS TV poll on October 27. It showed Republicans with a 6 point lead in the generic Congress race. Other recent polls come up with similar numbers. However, as I noted earlier, all of these polls leave out “cell phone only” voters. Many of these are young people. So far, the two polls that included cell phone only voters gave Democrats a 6 point lead in the generic Congress poll. That means that the recent NYT-CBS poll is wrong by a margin of 12 points. I’d like some more information on the cell phone only voters polls. Did they poll registered voters or likely voters? All projections of huge Republican gains in the House and Senate are based on these flawed polls, which are off by a full 12 points. Now, it’s possible that even with a 6 point lead in the generic poll, Democrats will lose the House. I don’t understand the polling well enough to comment on that. But they won’t lose the Senate. At the very least, I am quite certain this is not going to be the wipeout everyone says it will be. Many races are very close: Democrat Barbara Boxer is beating Republican zillionaire Carly Fiorina by 5 points. Boxer will win in a close race. Democrat Harry Reid is tied with Republican Sharron Angle. Toss up! Democrat Joe Sestak and Republican Pat Toomey are tied in Pennsylvania. Toomey should have been walking away with this one. Toss up! Democrat Patty Murphy is up by 2 points over Republican Dino Rossi in Washington. She’s going to win, but it will be very close. In early voting, more Democrats have voted than Republicans in North Carolina! This means super-nut Republican Richard Burr may lose to Democrat Elaine Marshall! Republican Ron Johnson is up by 2 points over Democrat Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. He may well win a cliffhanger race. Democrat Scott McAdams is now leading the crazy 3-way race in Alaska with Republican Joe Miller and Libertarian Lisa Murkowski! The Democrat may win, but it will be close and crazy! Republican Rob Portman will probably defeat Democrat Lee Fisher in Ohio but it will be a close race. In a 3-way race in crazy Florida, Republican mental patient Marco Rubio will defeat both closet gay Independent Charlie Christ and Democrat Kendrick Meek. Republican Mike Lee will surely defeat Democrat Sam Granato in Utah. Republican Don Hoeven faces Democrat Tracy Potter in North Dakota. I haven’t the faintest idea who will win. Team Crazy Republican Ken Buck ought to be walking away with the race in Colorado. Instead, he’s tied with Democrat Micheal Bennet! Republican lunatic Cristine O’Donnell will lose badly to Democrat Chris Coons in Delaware. Democrat Ron Wyden will easily defeat Republican Jim Huffman in Oregon. Democrat Barbara Mikulski will easily defeat zillionarie Republican Eric Wargotz in Maryland. Republican Tom Coburn will handily beat Democrat Jim Rogers in Oklahoma. Democrats Kristin Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer will destroy the Republicans in New York. Democrat Daniel Inouye will destroy Republican Cam Cavasso in Hawaii. Republican Johnny Isakson will defeat Democrat Mike Thurmond in Georgia. Democrat Pat Leahy will easily defeat Republican Len Britton in Vermont. Republican Jim DeMint, lunatic, will handily defeat Democrat Alvin Greene in South Carolina. Republican Jerry Moran will easily beat Democrat Lisa Johnston in Kansas. Republican nut Rand Paul is tied with Democrat Jack Conway in Kentucky. Toss-up! Democrat Richard Blumenthal will beat wrestling mogul Republican Linda McMahon in Connecticut. Republican kook Roy Blunt will defeat Democrat Robin Carnahan in Missouri, but it will be a close race. Democrat Blanche Lincoln will lose to Republican John Boozman in Arkansas in a close race. Republican Mike Crapo will easily defeat Democrat Tom Sullivan in Idaho. Republican Chuck Grassley will defeat Democrat Roxanne Conlin in Iowa. Democrat Alexi Giannoulias is beating Republican Mark Kirk in Illinois. He will win, but it will be close. Republican Kelly Ayotte will defeat Democrat Paul Hode in New Hampshire in a close race. Democrat Joe Manchin is starting to pull away from Republican John Raese in West Virginia. Republican Dan Coats will easily defeat Democrat Brad Ellsworth in Indiana. Republican John McCain will easily defeat Democrat Rodney Glassman in Arizona. Republican David Vitter will defeat Democrat Charlie Melancon in Louisiana, but incredibly enough, it will be very close.

Ireland and Latvia

Uncle Milton engages in his usual sophistry as he shills for neoliberalism again. He’s been shilling for neoliberalism since almost the very day he showed up on this site, but he always denies it. Whatever.

…It was US government directed policy and willful neglect of fraud which help create the property bubble…As the Soviet Union and Latvia…why did they shift away from command economies in the first place…? Here you call Ireland a social welfare state: but now you blame their property bubble and implosion on neoclassical economics…?

Ireland was affected by the global financial crisis set off by neoliberalism in the US. UM continues to deny the obvious fact that neoliberalism caused the financial crisis, when it’s clear that it did. Anyway, the neglect of “fraud” as you put it is part and parcel of the neoliberal project. Yet it’s unclear whether the sale of mortgages to unqualified buyers and then repackaging the toxic loans to suckers as mortgage based derivatives was even illegal. Apparently it was completely legal! So there was no fraud at all, though there should have been. There was fraud in the foreclosing of homes after the crisis hit, but this is not what caused the crisis. It now appears that up to 7 Neoliberals always shill for fraudulent businesses, because businesses love to commit fraud. Fraud is pretty much what business eats for breakfast every day. Did you know the Chamber of Commerce opposes every attempt to write new business fraud laws and go after fraudulent businesses? Clearly the CoC loves fraud. Did you know that District Attorneys who aggressively pursue business fraud are almost always liberals and that rightwing district attorneys typically let businesses get away with murder? Did you know that in the US, rightwing administrations typically have by far the worst instances of fraud and corruption? The Reagan and Bush Administrations set new records for corruption and fraud in the Executive Branch. Yes, Ireland is a social democracy. However, Ireland instituted neoliberal economics in order to deal with their deficit problems after the crash. Yes, social democracies are practicing neoliberalism. Sad, no? The problem with Latvia was not merely “shifting away from command economies;” all of the Baltic states went totally overboard and embraced radical neoliberalism, possibly as a reaction to Communism. After the financial crisis hit Europe, many countries reacted with stimulus spending to cushion the blow (Keynesianism). All of these countries did well. However, the Baltics and Ireland followed neoclassical economics and engaged in massive austerity cuts in the face of a major recession. They were rewarded with recessions and depressions, wage losses of up to 3 It doesn’t work. Neoclassical economics is the philosophy of economic destruction.

Some Recent Failures of Neoclassical Economics

Have you noticed that practically all these neoclassical types do is lie? There’s a reason for that. Their theory is good for the rich and the upper middle class only, and it’s crap for everyone else. They can’t come out and say that, so they have to lie to the 8 This is similar to the modus operandi of conservatism. As conservatism is always and everywhere a philosophy of the plutocrats that benefits them and some upper middle class folks and hurts everyone else, they can’t very well be honest about the nature of their class war project. This is why conservatives, everywhere and Earth and all down through the past, have always lied. Conservatism is dishonest because it must be. A philosophy that benefits the top 2 Analyses of neoliberalism in the past few decades around the world showed that it tended to benefit about the top 2 Even major ruling class organs like Time Magazine admitted that decades of neoliberalism in recent years in Latin America had largely failed. Neoclassical economics killed 15 million people in Russia alone in the 1990’s. Neoclassical economics has failed to lift people out of poverty. Peru and India have implemented neoliberal policies in recent years. After years of high growth in Peru, the poverty rate remained flat at 5 The neoclassicals caused the recent financial crisis that took out the US economy and nearly took down the world’s economy with it. Neoclassical economics destroyed Latvia, leading to a 2 Hoover’s neoclassical economics only deepened and worsened the Great Depression in the US. Neoclassical economics caused a depression in Ireland with 1 The top neoclassical economists, including Hayek and Friedman, went down to Chile and advised Pinochet on how to run his economy. They implemented the most radical experiment in neoclassical economics that has ever been tried. The result was one of the worst economic depressions in modern history. However, at the end of Pinochet’s term, workers had lost 1/3 of their wages, and there was a massive wealth transfer from the bottom 2/3 to the top 1/3. Hayek and Friedman both said that neoclassical economics was so bad for workers and ordinary people that the only way to put it in was via a dictatorship. This is why both Hayek and Friedman were huge cheerleaders for the murderous Pinochet. The countries that got creamed worst in the financial crisis were those that had followed neoclassical theories in their financial system. Iceland underwent possibly one of the most radical experiments in neoclassical restructuring of its financial sector. The result was that when Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Americas, Asia, Capitalism, Chile, Conservatism, Economics, Education, Eurasia, Europe, Health, History, India, Ireland, Latin America, Modern, Neoliberalism, North America, Peru, Political Science, Public Health, Regional, Russia, South America, South Asia, The Americas, US, USALeave a comment on Some Recent Failures of Neoclassical Economics

Tea Party Assholes

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyOTADrCFc] The usual crap. This isn’t a very good video about their assholery, since it’s made by liberal idiots (Color of Change), but it’s OK. Barack Obama does not hate White people, White culture, White America or any of that. He’s as White as a Black man gets. This is the language of White nationalism that Beck is using. When Fat Man Rush calls Obama a “magic Negro,” this is racist language. Among White racists, the phrase “magic nigger” is common. What it means is that most niggers are at worst evil and at best useless. However, they agree that there are a few niggers who are pretty much like White people, but they are so rare, it’s ridiculous. Maybe Oh yeah. I would like to say one more thing about Rush Limbaugh. He’s fat. LOL! I can’t believe this Jew John Stossel is arguing for getting rid of anti-discrimination laws. I hope he gets his wish and half the stores he tries to walk into throw him out for being a slimy kike, which frankly he is anyway. This guy’s really gone insane. Remember back when he was one of the most famous talking heads on US TV on 48 Hours. He was always shilling for corporations back then. Now he’s come out as a full-blown Libertarian radical. Wow. All this shit about Obama being a Muslim and not being an American is racist too. Blacks  aren’t really Americans according to White nationalism. WN says that only Whites can be Americans. Not Amerindians? WTF. And to be a real American, you have to be not only White but also Christian. Saying that Obama is a Muslim from Kenya is just another way of saying that niggers are not Americans and can never be Americans. It’s the language of White nationalism.

The Failure of Neoclassical Economics in Latin America

Chuck the Libertarian continues:

For all your railing against capitalism and in favor of socialism/Communism, the best controlled experiment we’ve had for that is East versus West Germany. Remember, it was the East German government who had to build a wall to keep their people from spilling out of the country. The only difference was the communist totalitarian regime and the lack of economic and personal freedom that entails.

That Berlin Wall was put up due to brain drain. The East Germans were fleeing a Communist East Germany for a socialist West Germany. It was mostly the smartest who were leaving, mostly to make more money. People like money. And many West German Leftists moved to East Germany in the early days. I’m not so big on Communism. It’s got a ton of problems, but it was able to do some things well. For instance, in Latin America, Cuba has provided electricity, plumbing, decent housing, access to transportation, good clothing, plenty of food, work for everyone. Cuban medical care is better than the medical care in capitalist Latin America. Cubans live longer and have lower infant mortality rates than other Latin Americans. The health care is so great that the rich of Latin America, usually very rightwing people, fly to Cuba from all over the continent to have specialty work done that’s not available in their country. Cuban education beats education in the rest of Latin America. With Capitalism in Latin America in general has utterly failed to do any of these things. They have not been able to:

  1. Provide electricity for all of their people. Even Argentina has not wired up the whole country. The Indian areas of the northeast lack electricity.
  2. Provide plumbing and sewage treatment for all their people. Even Mexico does not provide it for 2
  3. Provide decent housing for all their people. Horrible shantytowns are everywhere.
  4. Provide access to transportation for everyone. For many, the only transportation is on foot.
  5. Provide good clothing for their people. Many people are barefoot or practically dressed in rags. In videos of Cuba, one thing you notice is that everyone is dressed in nice, modern clothing.
  6. Provide food for all their people. Cuba has a malnutrition rate of
  7. Provide jobs for everyone. Cuba has full employment. Mass unemployment is typical in Latin America.

If neoclassical economics works so great, why can’t it provide food, jobs, electricity, plumbing, decent clothing and housing and transportation for the people of this land? Why has neoclassical economics failed so badly compared to Cuba in terms of health care and education? If you go to the rural areas of Cuba, you will see an interesting thing. Everywhere you go, you will see happy, healthy, well-fed, well-clothed children. In general, you will not see this in the rural areas of most other Latin American countries. Why can’t neoclassical economics provide for children the way the Cubans do? In Latin America, it looks like neoliberalism is nothing but a massive fail.

Government Intrusion, That Nasty Little Thing

We have some commenters railing against “government intrusion.” I’m actually a libertarian on most of the social stuff, so I’m sympathetic about complaints about cops out of control. But I don’t consider a government safety inspector to be a cop. Anyway, your average anti-Big Government type railing against government intrusion into our lives is not complaining about cops. Was Reagan complaining about cops when he said he was here to get Big Government off the backs of the American people? Of course not. The guy was an authoritarian bastard who ran the Drug War and declared jihad on whisteblowers. When the Tea Party rails against government intrusion and Big Government, are they complaining about cops? Don’t think so. The local Tea Party chapter urges a No vote on Proposition 19, the Marijuana Initiative. George Bush was the most authoritarian President in recent memory. From the Net:

  1. Safety laws are government intrusion.
  2. Pollution laws are government intrusion.
  3. The law against slavery is government intrusion.
  4. The law against murder is government intrusion.
  5. The speed limit is government intrusion.
  6. Taxing people to pay your salary is government intrusion.

Austerity = Economic Destruction

Neoclassical economics is senseless. It’s the philosophy of the rentier classes who have been waging war on the Enlightenment for 300 years now. If you’re down with neoclassical economics, Libertarianism, austerity, balanced budgets and whatnot, you’re in bed for the forces of the Counter-Enlightenment beginning with Smith and Ricardo 200 years ago. Recall that these are the folks who consider themselves the “natural rulers of mankind.” The Enlightenment was a move towards democracy and popular rule, and the rentier class has been furious ever since. What do the rich want? The rich do not just want to pay few to no taxes. This is a falsehood. They want much more than that. In my opinion, the rich actually want to be paid tribute! Notice that the war on Obama really picked up when he said some nasty things about rich people? That’s when the media war on him really opened up. It’s to be expected, as all of the media is owned by the rich. They don’t take kindly to insults. They’re still furious over the gunning down of the Romanovs 90 years ago. This was an insult that must be paid back in spades for as long as memory allows. Want to fix the economy? The change needs to come from the private sector, not government. And if the private sector is frozen up and the banks are not making loans so the private credit market is dead, what then? When the private sector is saving and not spending, there is a lack of demand and the private credit market is dead, then the state must step in. There’s a lack of money in the private sector, so the state must rectify that unbalance with deficit spending, stimulus, etc, in order to keep the economy moving, lower the rate of unemployment, take care of the currently unemployed, create jobs, etc. This deficit spending and stimulus must continue for as long as the private credit market is frozen and dead in the water. Neoclassical economics is a joke. Neoclassical economics is what created the financial disaster that blew up the US economy, took down much of the world economy with it, and left us in the mess we are in. Neoclassicals would have us engage in mass deficit cuts in the middle of a downturn. This is not economic salvation; it’s economic destruction. Look at the lesson from Ireland: Ireland began cutting back deficit spending in 2008, when its banking crisis began to spread and its budget deficit as a percentage of GDP was 7.3 per cent. The economy promptly contracted by 10 per cent and, surprise, surprise, the deficit exploded to 14.3 per cent of GDP. This is what will happen in every country that engages in deficit reduction austerity. The more you cut the deficit, the more it grows! Latvia is the poster child for the neoclassicals. They want all of Europe, especially Greece, to follow the wonderful example of Latvia. Latvia undertook massive deficit reduction austerity cuts and the economy contracted a full 2 This stuff isn’t even economics, or rather, it’s bad economics. More accurate, it’s politically driven economics. What’s the game here. Apparently a project by the rentier classes (neoclassical economics is the economics of the rentier classes) to roll back 300 years of the Enlightenment. The lie is that the austerity is supposed to be produce “confidence” in the private sector. This is nonsense. Instead the agenda is political. To roll back social security, pensions, health, education and other spending on human needs, and especially to increase unemployment so much that it drives down the wages – the Latvian central banker was explicit on this. This is a logic of self-destruction. Austerity will lead to depressions, decreasing tax revenue and actually paradoxically increasing deficits. In Latvia, it has resulted in mass brain drain and capital flight as skilled workers and capital have fled the nation. Clearly, the European nations are not pursuing the interests of the majority of citizens nor even of their industry. This again contradicts an essential axiom of neoclassical economics – that humans will always act in their own self-interest. What logic is there in the philosophy of economic destruction? The reason is that neither politicians nor citizens are calling the shots anymore. Instead, as in the US, the bankers are. It’s as if we have an International Dictatorship of Bankers. Finance capital has gotten itself into a horrible mess by their own devices. In order to keep their game going, they operate the economy to benefit the banks instead of the logical alternative, running the banks to benefit the economy. So the austerity measures are to rescue the financial sector. The only way to rescue the financial sector is through hammering social security, health care, education and workers and also selling off government property via privatization. The financial sector needs huge bailouts from the state to deal with the mountains of toxic assets that they are loaded up with. The state can’t loan the money. So the bad debts of the bankers must be passed on to workers and industry. This will be hard to sell to people, so the bankers sell it to us by saying that our poverty today will result in our prosperity tomorrow. Lots of people are buying it, as you can see in the comments section. For 50 years now, the IMF has been imposing austerity plans on 3rd World countries. The results are dismal. It’s not a road to prosperity at all. It’s been 50 years of failure of the worst kind. It hasn’t benefited those countries one bit. Who has it benefited? Who knows? The 1st World, who bought up public assets in those nations for 10 cents on the dollar? If it didn’t work in the 3rd World, it won’t work here. 50 years of failure is enough evidence. What more do you need?

Libertarian Nonsense About the Minimum Wage

In the comments section, Libertarian Robert Taylor continues to humor us with fact-free tidbits from the Libertarian faith-based community, this time about the Libertarians’ favorite bogeyman and font of evil, the minimum wage:

Robert, don’t you see who it is you are actually benefiting?? If you raise the minimum wage, you only hurt poor people and small businesses! Why do you think companies like Walmart in the US back the hiking of minimum wage? Because they can handle the hike, but they know that their small mom and pop competitors can’t. You ultimately favor big business that’s in bed with the government. As for your claims that hiking minimum wage creates inflation, you are wrong. While it may raise demand of goods in the short term, raising prices, it ultimately results in job losses in the long term. Inflation can only occur under the power of a central bank/federal reserve that can print money.

I’m amazed that Walmart backs the hiking of the minimum wage. Hey, if Walmart pays people better than Mom and Pop Ripoff Mart, all the power to em. Unfortunately, there is no correlation whatsoever between rises in the minimum wage and the destruction of small businesses in favor of large businesses, the formation of monopolies, or consolidation in industries. These are normal trends in capitalism. And the monopolists and large firms tend to pay their workers worse and treat them worse than small businesses. Many very small businesses treat their workers very well for some reason. I think it is because they are part of the community – you know, the corner store – and everyone goes there, and they want to be on good terms with the community, so they treat workers quite well. There are a lot of very small businesses around here, and my observation was that they tended to treat their workers quite well. As businesses get larger, my observation is that they don’t treat workers so great anymore. I guess they don’t have to? Europe has high minimum wages, and there are small businesses swarming all over the continent. Even in Sweden. Go to Sweden sometime. So many small business it would make your socks fall off. The 3rd World is full of small businesses, and there is no minimum wage there. There doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the number of small businesses and the presence of absence of a minimum wage, nor its height within reason. Rising wages don’t cause inflation? This is some Libertarian revisionism, right? I thought that this is a pretty clear trend in Economics, and there’s a good, solid theory to back it up, too. As unemployment drops, the labor market tightens up, and workers start getting more choosy about jobs. They refuse to work at crap jobs with lousy pay and terrible conditions. Firms start raising pay and bettering conditions to attract workers, increasing the costs of business. In addition, workers at firms start getting bolder, demanding raises and better working conditions on threat of strike or leaving. The reserve army of labor that keeps labor meek and mild is gone, and the working man is standing up. Firms start to raise wages and better conditions in response to strikes and workers threatening to take off, raising the costs of doing business. Firms pass on rising costs to consumers in the form of higher prices. It’s simply incredible that neoclassical idiots don’t believe in this most basic of economic concepts. Appealing to small businesses is a great way to tug at your heartstrings, but Libertarians like Taylor are promoting the philosophy of the Rich and Big Capital, not the philosophy of small business. Every time big business goes up against small businesses, Libertarians, neoliberals and the Republican Party always back big business versus small business. This is a philosophy of the rentier classes, not Mom and Pop’s Struggling Whatevermart. So when Libertarians, the enemies of small business, try to sell their ideas to us by appealing to the interests of small business, we need to listen hard. Why would the enemies of small business promote a theory supposedly to better small business? They would not. Taylor also tries to stand up for the poor here. The Libertarians and neoliberals hate the poor. There’s probably no one they hate more than poor people, except maybe Leftwingers. Libertarian theory is a theory of the rentier classes whose ancestors were the landed gentry and monarchists of Europe. These are the “natural rulers of mankind.” They’ve been pissed off at progress since the Enlightenment, and Libertarianism is their way of fighting back. Why would the enemies of the poor try to sell us their theory on the grounds that it benefits the poor? Surely they would not. A commenter earlier quoted an article on LewRockwell.com, an extremely racist anti-Black website associated with Ron Paul, saying that if we got rid of the minimum wage, we could put all these unemployed inner city Blacks to work at $4-5/hour. Hell, why not $1/hour? So much more “efficient.” Interesting argument that seems to make intuitive sense, however, inner city Blacks won’t work for $4-5/hour. Neither will I. Neither will just about anyone. They will tell the owner to fuck off and walk away. Who will work that low? Illegal aliens, maybe? The minimum wage is great for poor people, as long as you don’t raise it too high. If you raise it too high, it’s true that you can cause some job loss. It puts a lot more money in the hands of the poorest working people, and they spend every nickel of it and then some.

Libertarian Nonsense on the Minimum Wage

John Stossel and other libertarians would argue that if a minimum wage is good for workers, why not raise it even more? why not 20, 50, or $100 per hour?

That POS Jew is officially a Libertarian now? He was the favorite journalist on ABC’s 48 Hours for many years. First of all, neither John Stossel, nor any Libertarian alive, cares what is good for workers, so why should he even talk. Libertarians are the enemies of all the workers of the world, why are they talking to us about what is good for workers and what is not? There is a limit to how high you can raise the minimum wage. I’m sure these Libertarian assholes know that. If you raise it too high, firms just won’t hire more workers. They will figure out other ways to deal with the problem instead. You can only raise the minimum wage so high. Plus you run into inflationary risks. This is Economics 101. The nonsense these guys spout is so silly that you think that either they must know they are lying and they don’t care, or else they’re so brainwashed, they actually believe this BS. There are crappy countries all over the 3rd World with no minimum wage. They not only have shit wages, contrary to Libertarian theory that no minimum wage is worker paradise, but they also often have very high rates of unemployment, contrary again to Libertarian crap that no minimum wage gets rid of unemployment (As if they care about unemployment!). We really need to be careful when the enemies of the workers (the Libertarians and other shills for the capitalists) tell the workers that they know what’s good and what’s bad for them. I mean, your enemy is telling you what to do and what not to do. Forget that! My enemies would probably give me some poisoned food and tell me it’s caviar. If I was offered a job making $100K/yr, they would try to convince me not to take it. Libertarians, as the agents of the capitalists, are trying to convince workers that what is good for workers is actually bad for them, and what is bad for workers is actually good for them. I generally feel the minimum wage should be at a level equivalent to the wage in 1968. Or it should be a given percentage of the average wage (usually 5

More Neoliberal Insanity

Another rightwing Libertarian who also happens to be part of the race realist and PUA/men’s rights communities (Who would have guessed?) has ventured into our comments section pushing insane neoliberal snake oil:

By the way, I’m in agreement with your argument as posed to Robert Lindsay. There is no concept of “evil capitalist” because if they were evil they would become uncompetitive as less evil capitalists took their productive workers from them. In short, the free market would beat the evil right out of these employers.Eventually, as economist Gary Becker has pointed out, these inefficient employers will shoot themselves in the foot. Tangentially, that’s the reason this legislation for the Paycheck Fairness Act – which hopes to eradicate discrimination against women by closing the mythical 23 cent pay gap between men and women – is illogical. Businesses and ultimately consumers don’t care who has jobs and makes goods and adds value. If a woman of equal education and equal ability made 77 cents to a man’s $1, a smart firm would come along and pay that woman 78 cents. This would continue until that gap was effectively closed.

More neoclassical insanity. This stuff works in theory, but not in the real world. In fact, I am amazed that you guys act like you actually believe this nonsense. You’re lying, right? You know this is all crap, right, and you’re saying it to sell the proles a good line that works great for the rich and screws everyone else? Because if you actually believe this nonsense, you are deluded. The real world simply does not work this way. With mass unemployment, firms do not compete for workers by offering higher wages. They don’t do this in the 3rd World either. They hardly do this anywhere. The general trend is for capitalists to pay less for labor. The capitalist always try to pay the least for his labor as he can possibly get away with. Let’s look at the construction industry. This used to be a high-paying industry with good jobs paying what would now be $33-40/hour. The work was all unionized. The capitalists, in order to pay less, broke all the unions, at least here in California. They went through the sectors breaking the unions one by one. Then the capitalists flooded the US with illegal alien labor. The capitalists started using the illegal alien labor to outcompete each other. This is still going on in California as I speak. Eventually, most of the unions were broken, the wages had fallen from $37 to ~$10/hour, and the field was flooded with cheap labor, legal and illegal. There are still some places around that pay good wages. There are painters paying $25/hour, but they are always in danger of being taken out by the illegals making $10/hour. My friends work for local White construction companies who treat their workers like shit and are always threatening to replace them with “Mexicans” = illegal aliens. I believe that construction workers are generally treated much more poorly here in California now than they were in the era of unionized construction work. There are zero, I mean zero, construction firms here in California in the past 20 years who are competing with other firms to pay workers more or treat them better in order to drive all the others out of business. It doesn’t happen. Let’s look at the meatpacking industry. These used to be high-paying jobs that paid around $17-25/hour. It was mostly working class Whites working at them. The unions were all broken and the jobs were filled with illegal aliens working minimum wage. Working conditions crashed and workers are seriously treated like shit. Not one meatpacking firm has opened up to pay workers and treat them better to outcompete the other firms. Let us look at the IT industry. This used to be a place where you could make a good wage. However, the industry was mad about workers being paid so well, so they started importing Hindu 1-B guest workers from overseas to drive down wages in order to maximize their profits. This crashed wages in the field to the point where no sane White American would go into this field. I’m not sure about working conditions, but I am told that many workers now work in Hindu IT “sweatshops,” for their Hindu scum bosses who treat them abysmally in the time-honored Indian way that the working man has always been treated in that blighted land. So apparently working conditions have taken a dive too. One would think that some enterprising firms would have sprung up to pay workers well and hire all the workers away from the firms hiring the Hindu 1-B invader-thieves, but this has not occurred. Why not? Taxi driver used to be a good job. For some reason, it’s not anymore. The field has been taken over by fly by night firms, mostly run by shady immigrants, who hire downtrodden immigrants to work very long hours for terrible pay, sometimes possibly below the minimum wage. The field has been nuked, worker-wise. Not one taxi company has sprung up to pay workers better and drive all the other firms out of business. Not one. Short-haul truck driver (not big rigs) used to be a great job. My working class White friends used to work in these jobs. The field is gone. It’s all Mexicans, mostly illegals. The firms are all run by criminals. The workers lease out the trucks, but they make so little (really below minimum wage) that they can’t keep the trucks up, so the trucks are always falling apart. This damages our roads and is a safety problem. The workers are overworked, downtrodden and poorly paid. Not one trucking firm has stepped in to drive the others out of business by offering the workers better wages or working conditions. Not one. All over the US, firms head to US South, where wages are lower and unions are scarce. Many states have anti-union right to work laws. Suppose I am in Ohio. I wish to compete with firms who moved to the South in search of non-union cheap labor. I open up my firm and say everyone come work for me as I will pay you and treat you better. How many workers are going to leave South Carolina to come up to Georgia and work for me? None. So this doesn’t happen. Firms don’t compete with firms who moved to the South by offering better wages. If companies competed on wages to hire workers, they would be happier with unions. Unions only want the best for their workers in terms of wages and working conditions. Most reasonable unions are not trying to drive the firm out of business in a suicidal gesture. Yet firms hate unions and do anything to keep them out because the union will try to force the firm to raise wages and improve working conditions. In the 3rd World, unionists are regularly murdered, to the cheers of the capitalist world, its media and its militaries. In fact, one of the main strategies of US imperialism in the 3rd World has been to encourage a “kill the unionists” campaign. US imperialism teaches this philosophy via its imperialist military, CIA and their institutions such as police and military training programs and the School of the Americas in Georgia. If firms were happy to compete on wages, they would embrace unions rather than kill their members. Most of the 3rd World is characterized by crap wages far below what the capitalists could easily afford to pay and abysmal working conditions. One would think that firms in the 3rd World would be competing by raising wages and bettering working conditions to drive each other out of business. Yet it simply does not occur. Why not? Nowadays, things have moved away from the field of the nation to the supranational playing field. So firms in the US compete by closing US plants and moving them overseas where labor is cheaper. Now suppose I have a firm in the US. I want to compete with these firms moving jobs overseas in search of cheap labor. I set up a plant here in the US to be the good guy and tell all the workers to come work for me because I have the best wages and whatnot. I will still be driven out of business because the worker pool I am competing with is physically overseas! The workers can’t exactly leave China to come work in my New York firm, now can they? In Europe, in the US, in the Developed World in general, what we see is firms competing by trying to drive wages and working conditions down as low as they can get them. In the US, unions and strikes are broken, illegals and Hindu 1-B and other guest worker job thieves are imported from overseas and hired, jobs are moved overseas and workers are always told to take pay and benefit cuts. One would think that some firms could open up to hire only American workers and refuse to hire illegals, and to pay workers and treat them better to outcompete the other firms. Yet this is not occurring. Why not? I am thinking of my town here. I can’t think of any firms in this town who are competing for workers with other firms by trying to pay them better or treat them better to drive the competition out of business. If anyone knows of any, could you please let me know? It’s really amazing how this nonsense has taken over the world of Economics. The truth is that if you want a job in Economics nowadays, all jobs (or 9 As you can see from the nonsense and insanity that the resident Libertarians in our comments section regularly, spout, neoclassical, Austrian or Libertarian economics is mostly a bunch of nonsense. It’s  more of a religion than anything else. Unfortunately, most economic schools are religions, because in general, economics only works on a small scale (microeconomics) and tends to fall apart when it moves towards a larger view (macroeconomics). Most of them just publish a bunch of crap that their audience or school wants to hear, and this is how the school builds itself on and on. Based on the blatherings of our neoclassical friends in the comments, we can see there’s little empirical basis for most of it. Adam Smith wrote some fine texts, but most of it seems to be nonsense. He was correct in one way in that he was writing against the Mercantile School of Economics. Most nations ran Mercantile economics, where most of the trade was run by the state – sort of a state capitalism. It doesn’t work very well, but it worked well enough for a long time. Mercantilism is monopoly economics. The state runs everything. It regulates the prices of the capitalists, etc., because the state is competing against other nations. When England is competing with France, it needs its capitalists to be in line with its competitive strategy vis a vis the French, not secretly working with the French against England. You can’t allow French firms to come in to England and set up shop and run all of the British producers of some industry out of business. However, Smith was writing in opposition to Mercantilism in favor of a free market. So Smith was anti-monopoly. Now all neoclassical economists are in favor of monopolies, although they usually don’t come right out and say so. This is because monopoly is the natural end result of capitalism. David Ricardo is the king of the neoclassical scholars. He was some Jew who didn’t even have much of an education. He went into the family business and got stinking rich, and then wrote up a great economic theory that told the rich everything they wanted to hear. It’s mostly a bunch of nonsense and crap, but it’s still taking the world by storm, because it’s what the elites want to hear, and in capitalist society, as Gramsci notes, elites make culture – the dominant culture or bourgeois culture is that of the rich. In other words, under capitalism, everyone, the rich and the upper middle class (who need no schooling), the middle class, the working class and the poor all adopt the ways of thinking of the rich. The rich replicate their culture across all of society. There used to be how many Mom and Pop stores in the US? Now there’s Walmart. There’s how many OS and major software makers? One, Microsoft. There used to be countless firms. There used to be countless media firms across the US. Now there are only a few. Less than 10 media firms, all rightwing, control almost all US newspaper, newsmagazine and TV news. There are how many firms making microprocessors? Intel and who else? There are how many car firms in the US? And how many in the world? As you can see, capitalism tends more and more towards monopoly. It’s a natural tendency in a free market, and it’s only arrested via government intervention. In a monopoloy market, most of the silly economic notions of the neoclassicals go out the window. There’s no competition, so firms charge the highest price they can, abuse their workers the most and make the crappiest products that they can possibly get away with. Sure, there’s no law forcing them to do so, the neoclassicals would say, I suppose. Sure you could have a monopolist that charged low prices, made great products, and treated their workers great. But it never works that way, and anyway, nowadays, any monopolist who tried to do that would be fired by his stockholders. Over the past 100 years, we have built up a huge amount of evidence that shows that monopolies are bad for consumers, workers and the industry itself. They treat workers poorly, abuse consumers, charge high prices, and make crappy products. They harm the industry by retarding its development. This scholarship is excellent and is beyond challenge. In the 1970’s, the late Jewish economist Milton Friedman developed his theory of neoliberal economics around an eager group of acolytes at the University of Chicago. He has since become a demigod in the field (most economists now are Friedmanites) and the mass media adores him. His school spent many years writing a cavalcade of books, journal articles, etc. overturning 100 years of scholarship on monopolies that proved all of what we discussed in the last paragraph. The Friedmanites “proved” via long tomes, complex mathematical models and a sea of “evidence” that monopolies to do not raise prices, abuse consumers and workers or produce crap products. In fact, they don’t even hinder competition. All laws against monopolies must therefore be overthrown. Exactly what the capitalists wanted to hear. It’s all crazy, and it’s a pack of lies as high as the day is long; there’s no truth in any of it. But his theories (LOL) about monopolies have since gained huge currency not only in the Republican Party (Oh really?) but in large sectors of the Democratic Party, including liberals (huh?). It’s very popular with journalists, including many liberal journalists. And it’s about as reasonable as believing in a flat Earth. Gary Becker is quoted by the Libertarian commenter above saying some nonsense about firms that try to lower wage costs as being “inefficient” (LOL). Gary Becker is an idiot who has somehow been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics (LOL) for his stupid crap. He’s a Friedmanite, and much of what he writes is nonsense and crap, like all of them. But this guy won the Nobel Prize in Economics and is considered to be one of the world’s top economics scholars (LOL). That shows you what a joke this field is. Yet most economists nowadays are Beckerians. So are most capitalists (duh). More frightening, most journalists all over the world are Beckerians, as are the politicians running most of the countries on Earth. The world has gone insane.

Rightwing Agenda in the UK Makes No Sense

The party in power in the UK right now is called the Condems. It’s a cross between the Conservatives or Tories and the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems have the support of about 1 The Tories ran on a platform renouncing the extremely unpopular policy of  Thatcherism. Note that Thatcher was not able to push through much of her agenda. The wildest thing she tried to do was the poll tax, basically a regressive tax on the poor and working class, and the protests against that nearly caused a street revolution in the country. She’s probably the most hated British politician of the past 100 years, although she does have some supporters. I’ve always felt she had more supporters among conservatives here in the US than she did in the UK. Since the end of Thatcher, the Tories have been backtracking on Thatcherism and saying that they want to moderate their line. The Lib Dems are some of kind new age, pro-environment, pro-gay rights, SWPL type party that’s also more to the Right of Labor on economic stuff, though not nearly as much as the Tories. Their main claim to fame was opposition to the war in Iraq. Their supporters are these hip yuppie types who make good money but don’t want to be associated with Tory assholiness. The Lib Dems basically hate the Tories, so this is a marriage made in Hell. Nevertheless, they are going along with the worst cuts to the British welfare state that the UK has ever seen. I’m not sure what the rationale is for these devastating spending cuts in the middle of an economic downturn. Maybe someone more versed in British politics can enlighten me. Spending cuts in the middle of a downturn is always a bad idea. All it does is make the downturn worse, and far from reducing the deficit, it often grows the deficit because the spending cuts harm the economy so much that tax revenues crash. Hence what we have seen in Ireland and Greece, the idiot countries who have tried to cut their way out of a deficit problems. Both countries made devastating cuts to their budgets, but the more they cut, the more the deficit grew! This is because, as I noted, the spending cuts wreck the economy, causing tax revenues to collapse, paradoxically worsening the deficit! Anyway, for whatever crazy reason they have cooked up, the Condems are determined to go ahead with these cuts. But their rationale for doing them is truly insane. According to the Condems, by making massive cuts British state spending, they will somehow stimulate the private sector, and hence begin to grow their way out of the downturn. I’m not aware of any valid economic theory on Earth in which huge cuts to the state “stimulates the private sector.” Why would it? Unless it’s some whack Libertarian theory that doesn’t even make sense on paper. Anyway, that’s the official rationale. As I noted, it makes no sense at all. Hence, it’s a lie. Thence, we wonder why they are cutting government. They must be cutting the state for some sort of ideological reasons, or perhaps they have a deficit reduction agenda. Anyway, it looks like not only a bad, but an unnecessary idea. And they dressed it up in crazy clothes to sell it to the gullible masses.

Rand Paul Supporters Head Stomp a Moveon.org Supporter at a Debate

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoDHgSAqBEY&feature=player_embedded] Note: New information in bold below. Pretty incredible video here. There are other Youtube videos out there, but this one has better audio. Listen carefully and you can hear the “crunch” sound as the Rand Paul campaign official head stomps the woman. That’s the sound of his boot stomping on her head. Rightwingers have a few rejoinders to this video: 1. Either the woman or the man were some sort of plants used to set up Rand Paul in this incident. False. The woman is a Rand Paul supporter, and the man who head stomps her is Ron Profitt, a Rand Paul campaign coordinator for a county in Kentucky. Profitt has been photographed at Paul rallies carrying signs that seem to issue violent threats against the government. One of the men who held down Valle is another prominent Paul supporter. He was recently photographed at a Paul rally for people who were committed to appearing in public wearing their licensed firearms. He was photographed at the rally with two guns holstered onto his belt. 2. The man stomps on her shoulder, not her head. False. He stomps on both her shoulder and her head at the same time. You can do that with a boot. Try it sometime. The crunch sound appears to be coming from her head. 3. The woman in question is actually a man. False, she is a female, albeit a rather androgynous looking one. First the Rand Paul team rips off her blond wig, then they throw her to the ground. The woman, Lauren Valle, was trying to present Rand Paul with a plaque from a fake organization called Republicorp, Inc. that Move On set up.  The incident is confusing. Apparently the Paul team noted that she planned to give Paul the plaque, and were determined to stop keep her from doing so. They chased her around a car to keep her from getting in a photo with Paul. The Paul supporters have other versions of the event which make them look better, but the veracity of their claims seems dubious. We are still trying to figure out exactly why the Paul team reacted this way. So far there have been no arrests in the case, although today a Kentucky county court filed charges against Ron Profitt. Lauren Valle suffered a concussion, which is obvious from the cracking sound you can hear when his boot stomps her head. She was hospitalized overnite, was released, and is now pressing charges. This incident is getting a huge media blackout from the “liberal media,” because, um, er, they’re not really liberal after all? I strongly support Moveon.org and have for a long time now. All these liberals bitching about Jewish influence in the US ought to note that Moveon was set up and is run mostly by a bunch of Jews.

Do Latinos Hate Being Called White?

AJ gives the typical White nationalist type line about how Mexicans hate Whites, want to be thought of as Brown, and how White is a liability here in America.

The thing is, Mexicans hate being called white. Have you ever told a Mexican they’re white? They get so upset! Its like an insult to them! Also, I forgot what HBD blogger wrote about this, STDV, Whiskey, or Mangan, Jessica Alba thinks shes a “Latina” and not White. She was quoted saying something about wanting “to have a brown baby”. On her DNA test on George Lopez Tonight, it turns out shes like 8 I mean c’mon, look at her, shes white, not “brown”. She plays white characters on TV. When the DNA results were announced, she was *extremely* disappointed, and even tried to argue that Spain doesn’t count as Europe! WTF! Spain sure as hell ain’t in Africa or Asia LOL. I think Latinos want to be “brown” even when they’re not. Nobody wants to be white in America, its a liability now! 100 years ago there was “passing as white”, now people want desperately to pass as NON-white. Whats so good about being white in America? Nothing! Everybody hates you, no affirmative action, no special interest groups, no white pride at all! You’re all a bunch of racist, sexist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, colonizing, raping, oppressing, privileged people with no authentic culture! I think the rise of brown privilege coincides with the slow decline of America. This whole thing is just the new racial pecking order in America. Think about it. Whens the last time (not on the internet) you heard someone say anything positive about Whites? Now, think about all the times you hear something positive about blacks, or Asians or any other non-white group. The American people have decided that white people suck! Get used to it!

This is what is so nonsensical about the White nationalist types. They are so divorced from reality. I live right smack in the middle of the Diversity here, and let me tell you, it’s no liability at all to be White. In fact, many Latinos highly desire White features in themselves and others. This is especially true in females and those with deep ties to Mexico. Whites are not hated at all in Mexico – it’s the opposite – White skin is a potentially a huge privelege, especially for women. Latinas here often seek out light-skinned or White males as potential partners or mates. They gain status in society that way, and many want to have a light-skinned or White baby. Getting a White guy is moving up in the world. Among males, it doesn’t matter quite so much, but still, White skin is not negative at all. You hear the Jessica Alba type stuff from some bourgeois liberal Latinos who are developing a “Brown pride” thing that seeks to separate itself from Whiteness and create some bullshit “Latino identity.” This is an American thing that comes from liberal PC American society, and it’s not as popular as you think. These people are basically activists. Latinos respond in several ways if you tell them they are White: 1. Strong approval. “Thank you very much, sir!” This is especially true with many who retain deep roots to Mexico. More than a few have beamed at me and said, “Yes, I am White. That’s because we are from Spain.” One fellow, though born in Mexico, refused to identify as Mexican. He was a Spaniard, dammit! For people with deep roots in Mexico, ties with Spain or ancestors from Spain is a huge plus and a source of pride. You often get the impression that these types think they are better than Mestizos. 2. Neutral, confused, embarrassed, nervous. This is more typical as they get more assimilated. It’s not PC to talk about race here in the US, so they don’t know how to react to someone saying something like that. Also, this subject (the Whiteness or not of various Latinos) is somewhat taboo, and you’re breaking the taboo by bringing it up. Some will say, “Oh, I know. Everyone says that. Everyone thinks I’m White.” Then they might go on to point out to you that they are not Mexicans – they are Cuban, Colombian or whatever. A lot of non-Mexican Latinos look down on Mexicans as inferior. 3. Resistance, various forms of hostility. Among those with deep ties with Mexico, this will take the form of, “I’m not White, I’m Mexican,” or, “I just see myself as Mexican.” Some of these folks have European-Mexican roots, and while they will deny being White, they might say instead, “I’m French. French from Mexico.” So it’s ok to say you’re French, but not ok to say you’re White. Mexicans are supposed to deny race, since the theory of mestizaje says that they are all mestizos. It’s a total lie, but it’s the lie that Mexico dreamed up to try to overcome its racial issues. We’re all mestizos! See all those White people on your TV screen? Just ignore them, OK? They’re mestizos too, just like you, brown brother! Among the assimilated gangbanger-drug dealer types, you also get White denial. Sometimes you will get hostile silence if you point out they are White. This is more retardation than anything else, because these dipshits think Latino and White are two different things; since they are the former, they can’t possibly be the latter. It’s really the way you go about noting that they are White. If you say it in a very sensitive way, it tends to go over well. I don’t agree at all that Whites are persecuted in today’s America, even in Latino towns. As in Latin America, White skin and features are still highly valued, as one might suspect. A lot of Black and Asian women here also think that a White man is hot property and may even preferentially select them. You see a fair amount of this in this town. The White man is the hot ticket and the way to move up in the world. As Whites decline, I figure the future will be like Latin America. Whites will continue to dominate as an elite, and Whites will increasingly be desired as “hot property” especially by non-White females eager to move up in the world, or for other reasons.

Making Shit Wages? Blame the Government!

Robert Taylor, resident anarchocapitalist again, on why workers are paid poorly. It’s all the state’s fault. Get the state out of the way, and we will all be making “good high wages” the same way that in Lake Wobegon, everyone is above average:

It’s pretty clear to me why an evil capitalist can’t just step in a pay a dollar more an hour to steal the labor force from a competitor: Not because of Capitalism, but The State and it’s regulations.  The same rules you want to impose to supposedly protect your workers actually end up hurting them in the long run, Robert. Regulations do a vast number of things including stifling innovation, stifling entrance into the market to compete etc. And then you blame Capitalism. No sir, this is not Capitalism. This is Mercantilism turning into Socialism. Capitalism involves free exchange. A voluntary trade. Once a voluntary exchange between two individuals is stopped it ceases to be Capitalism. If we could just get our terms correct it would be much easier to know when to invoke Capitalism and when not to.

First of all, the capitalist has no interest whatsoever in paying his workers well. That’s actually a bad idea. The less you pay your workers, the better, since your profits are higher that way. It’s true that an interesting and progressive trend did develop in capitalism in the 1930’s under the great Henry Ford. Henry Ford thought it was ridiculous that he should pay his workers so poorly that they could not even afford to buy the very cars that they are making. So he resolved to pay his workers well enough that they could afford to at least buy the cheapest cars that they were building on the line. A chicken in every pot, and a Ford in every garage. This progressive trend in capitalism was called Fordism. Fordism, the notion that if you paid your workers well enough, they could afford to buy your stuff, was a popular philosophy with progressive capitalists for some time. However, it has been on the wane for some time now. One issue has been the increasing inequality of the US. At the moment, the top 1 But honestly, Fordism is a long-term philosophy, and as Matt notes in the comments, capitalism nowadays is all about short-term gains. The sane people have noted that the economic downturn is due to poor consumer demand since the capitalists have been squeezing workers through mass immigration, union-busting, outsourcing and general wage reduction for some time now. Hence, capitalists ought to be Fordists. Yet they are not. Your average small businessman is voting Tea Party. So is your average corporate capitalist. The Tea Party’s project is the continuing decimation of the middle class. In the Third World, where the middle class has been decimated, often for centuries, as part of an elite project, the business class simply goes along with this goal. There is no Fordism in the much of the 3rd World. Fordism only develops in high income, typically White or Asian countries. Taylor’s theory founders on a couple of shoals. Workers are paid best in those countries where regulations on business are the greatest. This shows right away that the theory is wrong. Why put regulations on business? Regulations are generally put on business to protect workers, consumers, the public and society. When regulations are loosened, workers, consumers, the public and society are harmed. When regulations are increased, workers, consumers, the public and society are benefitted. If there is no benefit to workers, consumers or society, there is no reason to impose any regulation on business. Regulations on business are necessary because business has utterly failed at the task of volunarity regulating itself. Would that business could regulate itself! It would save us a lot of money regulating them! Business refuses to regulate itself because doing so is harmful to profits. The nations that have the least regulations typically have the worst wages. The nations with the most regulations have the best wages. Give a capitalist more money. Ok. Now what? He’s going to hire more workers, even if they unnecessary, just to be a nice guy? LOL, sure. He’s going to give everyone a raise, just because he has a bigger stash in the bank? LOL, right. This is supply-side thinking. This theory, enticing on text, utterly fails in real life. It’s been proven over and over. It’s based on the theory that humans, capitalist humans in particular, are basically nice people who voluntarily choose to lose money just to be nice. Humans, particularly capitalist humans, just don’t think that way. The era of public ownership has made nice guyism even more difficult for the capitalist. Most capitalist firms are now publically owned. That means that the management answers to stockholders. Stockholders want one thing and one thing only, the maximization of profits in the short term. If you try to be a nice guy and give your workers are raise just because you’re feeling generous or you don’t want to be a dick, your stockholders will fire you. That’s all there is to it. So Taylor’s theory fails again because stockholders will reject any capitalist who tries to implement it. Why should any worker believe, “If you regulate my boss less, he will pay me more” (LOL)? Even if this were true, and in praxis it is not, most regulations are there to benefit the worker, the consumer or society. Getting rid of regulations that protect workers will hurt workers. As workers are very much consumers, getting rid of regulations to protect consumers will hit workers very hard. As workers are often very sensitive members of fully-lived society in all its Technicolor good, bad and ugly (as opposed to penthouse and Lear Jet existence which is so divorced from actually lived existence of the masses as to be almost the same as living on another planet), regulations that protect and improve society will improve lived existence for workers outside of work. Taylor’s theories are the ultimate in pie in the sky, ivory tower empty theory. They make babbling university Marxists look like streetwise social Oscar Award winners. This sort of theory looks really great on paper and appeals to “common sense.” But when tested in the real world, it completely fails on all levels, other than benefiting the well to do and the capitalists and screwing everyone else, which is all it’s ever meant to do anyway.

Why Don't Capitalists Compete with Each Other by Paying Higher Wages Than the Competition?

Robert Taylor, resident anarchocapitalist in the comments section, asks a fascinating question: Why don’t capitalists compete with each to attract workers by raising wages? Good question! I don’t know why they don’t. But they don’t. Generally.

Robert, you’re talking about evil people here. You say that if they have their way, they would lower wages to the subsistence level. Meaning that they could afford to pay higher wages, but choose not to.My question is: what’s stops an EVEN MORE evil capitalist from paying just a little more to take the business away from the current controlling Capitalist? If he pays just a little more, clearly the labor force will go to him, and without labor, the subsistence-level capitalist has nothing, no matter how low he can drive prices.

We shall take this apart bit by bit here. Robert, you’re talking about evil people here. Yes, I am talking about capitalists, correct. You say that if they have their way, they would lower wages to the subsistence level. There really is no wage level that is too low for the capitalist to pay. If you don’t believe that, check out how many US corporations shut down their US operations and head to whatever place is currently paying the lowest possible wage. If that place lowers its wage, they move to someplace even lower. How many US corporations have moved to places where they pay ~14 cents an hour? Lots. In fact, many US corporations and of course businesses overseas deliberately pay people at wages that are not only at subsistence but are often below subsistence. I’m pretty sure they could afford to pay those folks more than subsistence or below subsistence wages, correct? Then why don’t they do so? If slavery was legal, capitalists would take it up in a New York minute. Child labor is great for business too. Slavery and child labor are epidemic forms of exploitation by capitalists in the 3rd World, in particular in South Asia – in Pakistan, India, Nepal, etc. After all, Austrian economics is all about efficiencies. Wages being one of the biggest inefficiencies of all, of course. Surely slavery and child labor must be much more efficient than wage labor? What is scary is that this “efficiency talk” has now taken over world economics. Just about every country on Earth now is talking in terms of economic “efficiency.” Yet I just showed how slavery and child labor are incredibly efficient. I think it’s time we trashed this efficiency fetish once and for all. My question is: what’s stops an EVEN MORE evil capitalist from paying just a little more to take the business away from the current controlling Capitalist? Interesting argument. How come it never works that way then? I guess I will just throw that question right back at the anarchocapitalists then, since they are the ones who says that anarchocapitalism is the best way thing since sliced bread for workers, consumers, society, and, oh yeah, as an afterthought, business. So…How come it never happens? The labor market is deliberately tight. There are way too many workers than there are jobs. So workers don’t have a lot of mobility. Sure workers might leave Capitalist A paying $8/hour to go work for Capitalist B paying $10/hour. A few might. Maybe. But probably Capitalist B would just fill up all his positions with new folks. His costs would be so high that he would soon be driven out of business by Capitalist A. Believe me, I would be overjoyed if capitalists competed like this. But they just don’t. I’ll leave it to the anarchocapitalists to explicate this thorny matter for us. In some industries, labor is very highly valued, and companies actually do compete for labor. Putting aside for a moment Hindu 1-B job thieves, IT is a good example of this. IT companies sometimes actually compete with each other by trying to offer higher wages and better benefits in order to get scarce talented labor to work for them instead of the competition. But this is rare. There is a hint of truth to Taylor’s comment, but it has to do with people  Libertarians hate worse than any other humans – labor union members. If one company in an industry is unionized, then the higher wages and bennies in that company will often fan out from that company to its competitors somehow. But this is increasingly rare now that unions are as rare as four leaf clovers, thanks to guys like Mr. Taylor.

A Good Alternative to the Economics "Doomsday Crash" Blogs

La Fleur is one of my favorite commenters, and she actually has a coherent politics, unlike a lot of my younger commenters. Unfortunately, she has been reading what I call the Doomsday Crash sites. These sites are very scary, but they are all coming from a freemarketeer, neoliberal, Rightwing populist POV. All that aside, I happen to think that they are wrong on their diagnosis as well as their cure. These people, like most rightwing populists, rail against “elites,” but either have a funny view of who these elites are (Nancy Pelosi, Big Government, Fannie Mae, Barack Obama) or they propose solutions that would make the elites themselves jump for joy. In general, their diagnosis of the problems as well as solutions to the economic mess are the same as what the elites themselves peddle. Yet rightwing populists bash these elites while promoting their agenda. Whatever. Obviously, intelligent folks might wish to know about some good progressive alternatives. Ian Walsh is one. Doug Henwood’s Left Business Observer is another. On Counterpunch, check out Mike Whitney, Micheal Hudson, Mark Weisbrot, Dean Baker, Dave Lindorff and Paul Craig Roberts at the very least. Walsh is particularly good these days.

Why Libertarianism Will Always Fail the Consumer

Anarchocapitalist Robert Taylor insists that capitalists can be trusted to keep our food, and I guess everything else, safe for the health and safety of consumers:

So an entrepreneur has it in his best interest to serve safe food as opposed to unsafe food, because if people find out his food is toxic, he will lose profit.

They’ve certainly been doing a crap job of it, haven’t they? Micro to macro once again. The rational actor, me, the economic man, cannot be extrapolated to the masses or to large organizations. Anyway, it is in the interest of large corporations to do a poor job of regulating the safety of their food. This is why the record of food safety is so horrible in the 3rd World. This is why the record here in the US was so terrible a century ago before we established the FDA. Business simply will not regulate itself well in the interests of this or that, in this case, serving safe food to their customers. They’d rather take chances, slack off, do crappy inspections, cross their fingers and hope everything turns out OK, and save money. Guess what? If business did such an incredible job of consumer protection, there would be no need for government regulation in the first place, now would there? But the capitalists have always fucked up and always will. I can’t foresee any possible society where the capitalists regulate themselves with consumer interest in mind. It’s simply not possible. Hence, in many places on Earth, the state has stepped in to do the job that the capitalists will never do, regulate business for the health and safety of the consumer. In many other places, notably the 3rd World (actually existing Libertarianism) there is no state regulation, and consumers are horribly abused health and safety wise by capitalists with little or no recourse. Nowhere on Earth do capitalists successfully regulate themselves in the interest of the health and safety of consumers, nor will they ever. It goes against the laws of economics, shall we say. It’s simply not profitable to do so. This Austrian shit sounds great in theory. Oh yeah! Nice corporations will get lots of business! Asshole corporations will get punished by consumers and go out of business! But it never works that way, and it never will either.

Jews Shut Up and Sit Down! (Redux)

And that’s an order, dammit! Screw the MMPI. One of the tests of sanity ought to be whether or not Jews annoy you. If Jews don’t annoy you, you’re either a typical Jew or you’re disgustingly Judeophobic. In either case, you’re nuts. If Jews annoy you at least, you’re got to be at least partly sane. After that winnowing process, we can go on to more sophisticated tests. Ok, Jews, you did it again. You annoyed me! So much I wrote a post about it. Why did you annoy me? Did you try to exterminate me and my race? Hardly. Did you try to control my media? I hardly care if you did. It was a much lesser charge. The Jews, which means Organized Jewry, which means their organizations and their media, which by the way automatically includes millions of Jews who back up these entities in the flesh, are waging a propaganda campaign to try to deny a Lifetime Performance Oscar Nomination to Jean-Luc Godard, the magnificent French movie director. Godard’s movies include avant-garde flicks like Breathless(1960), My Life to Live (1962) and Contempt (1963). I’ve never seen any of his movies, but they are supposed to be great. Obviously he deserves a lifetime achievement award. The problem, as the Jews see it, is that Godard is an anti-Semite. The evidence for his anti-Semitism is somewhat controversial. But he’s clearly an anti-Zionist, and a passionate one at that. A supporter of suicide bombings and the PLO’s raid on Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972, Godard takes a pretty hard line. Looking over the record of Godard’s statements, it seems his anti-Semitism came first, then his anti-Zionist. Or the latter grew out of the former, as it does with so many “anti-Zionists.” He was already making nasty anti-Semitic remarks as far back as the early 1960’s, and he included some gnarly anti-Semitic dialogue in his early movies. Jewish friends in the French film industry broke off their friendship with him over his anti-Semitism. The record of both his anti-Semitism and his anti-Zionism can be seen here. You are encouraged to look it over and decide for yourself. Reviewing the record, a good analysis is that Godard is not only an anti-Zionist but also an anti-Semite. He also seems to be a Leftwinger. That may seem a little strange, but leftwing anti-Semites are not uncommon in continental Europe. At the very least, his anti-Semitism does not seem to be the Nazi variety. He’s not a Holocaust Denier like so many anti-Semites. Now the question is whether or not his anti-Semitism should be used to deny him an Oscar. The Jews say yes. I say no. I would say that his art trumps his negative personal qualities. The more reasonable aspect of the Jews’ argument would be that to give an award to Godard is to give the rubber stamp to his anti-Semitism. In doing so, we could be giving anti-Semitism a shot in the arm. The consequences of that might be increased anti-Semitism in the world, which could have a real downside for Jews. On the other hand, considering how ignorant humanity is about the world in general and avant-garde film in particular, I doubt if the award would register on the Global Anti-Semitism Richter Scale. One way around this would be for the Academy to give him the award, but at the same time to condemn his anti-Semitism. In this case, Godard may have his pride hurt and refuse to pick up the prize. Or they could give him the prize and then issue a statement afterwards praising his movies but condemning his anti-Semitism. In any case, it pisses me off that the Jews are sticking their nose into this mess. But it’s also surprising that Jewish Hollywood is going to give an award to an anti-Semite. While we are on the subject of anti-Semitic film directors, how about an Oscar for Leni Riefenstahl? She was a great director, but she was also a horrible anti-Semite. She was much worse of one than Godard; she made films for the Nazis, and she was an unrepentant Nazi after the war until her death seven years ago. Should she get a posthumous Oscar or not?

The Bottom Line on Austrian Economics

You are right about most of these economic doomsayers being right wing populists. Have you ever visited LewRockwell.com? They’re pretty much the epitome of this kind of thinking, predicting apocalypse every other Tuesday or so. Im still waiting for the dollar to collapse. BTW, what do you think of Austrian Economics in general? That school of thought is popular on Stormfront and libertarian and Paleoconservative circles. It seems to have gained ground in recent years, especially since Peter Schiff successfully predicted the housing bubble collapse. Search Youtube for “Peter Schiff was right!”. He says it with a stone face, even as the host and guests burst out laughing at him. This is what got me interested in Lew Rockwell’s philosophy, I used to be a libertarian. If Austrian Economics is wrong or flawed, then how was one its main champions correct on the housing bubble, which nobody else predicted?

Being able to predict that a bad idea will fail at some point does not mean that one has a program that will work to accomplish anything, much less prevent the bad idea from failing. It merely means you have good skills of prediction. Good powers of prediction does not indicate a program for success. Think about it. Just means you’re good with a crystal ball. I’m not an expert on the Austrians, but let me try here. Problem is that it was Austrian economics, in a moderated form, that failed in the latest economic collapse. The countries that imposed the most “Austrian” type economics, moderated however, were the ones that were most destroyed in the latest economic crash. Check out Latvia and Iceland. Those that kept strong state controls over banking like Africa and China got off the easiest. The 3rd World is run on a moderated version of Austrian economics. Guess what? It doesn’t work. Those who say that it’s not the real Austrian deal, fine. The anarcho-capitalists are the real pure Austrians. Their favorite societies are the Old West, especially during the Gold Rush, and modern day Somalia. The Gold Rush! Somalia! Yeah! Anarcho-capitalism works great, huh? Austrian economics is bad for White workers, bottom line. White workers should not support an economics that is out to screw them. That said, Austrian economics doesn’t even make sense. It’s microeconomics. That means it is based on what actions you and I will take as a rational actor economically. But you can’t extrapolate microeconomics to macroeconomics, because masses of people do not behave in an economically rational way. The Austrians want to get rid of all regulation and let the market do whatever it wants. What happens then is you have regular blowups like the recent economic crash. Or witness the economics of the late 1800’s, wild booms and busts all the time. It’s just insane. Little to no government, no worker or consumer protections, no environmental or societal protections, business just runs amok. It’s like the 3rd World. It’s not compatible with a civilized society. Besides, it says nonsense. Austrians say that government caused the last economic crash. Government ruins the environment, not business. Government harms consumers, not business. Government hurts workers, not business. Government health care hurts sick people, not capitalist health care. Government schools create idiots, not expensive private schools so costly 8 Land reform doesn’t work and starves peasants; landless peasants are happy, healthy and have full bellies. Stimulus spending and deficit spending don’t work for getting a country out of a depression/recession; what works is gutting government spending. All government spending will eventually destroy economies that engage in mass state spending, that is, social democracy will destroy every economy given enough time. It’s all bunch of nonsense!

What Has the Latin American New Left Accomplished?

Tulio wonders what good the Latin American Left has done down there. How bout we shoot the question back at him and ask what good the Latin American Right did for 190 years for the majorities? Answer: Zero.

But what have the results been? Has there been any meaningful progress that’s happened because of the rise of the left in Latin America that can be solely attributed to leftist economics and politics? I’m not here to attack the Latin left per se. I don’t mind them much so long as they aren’t on this hate America tip and blaming the United States for all their home grown problems e.g. Chavez. I’ve never heard any anti-American hate speech from Brazil, Argentina or Chile under Bachelet.The bottom line though is what have these left wing leaders actually done? Everything is still horribly corrupt, there’s still massive inequality, still no universal health coverage, millions still live in favelas, there’s still lots of crime in a place like Venezuela. So what is so great about these left-wing leaders? Great, so we will live in a country like Cuba where there’s socialism yet everyone is still poor. Whoopie do. And that’s the best latin socialism has to offer.

Not really. Chile and Costa Rica both have socialism (social democracy) and they have some pretty good figures on life expectancy, infant mortality and whatnot. Comparable to the US or even better, with much lower per capita income too. All Latin America has national health care last time I checked. Public hospitals are free, assuming they exist. There’s a lack of hospitals, doctors, medicine, etc, but in some places like Chile, Costa Rica or Trinidad and Tobago, public health care is pretty good. I doubt there is one country in Latin America that lacks free public health care. The US is pretty bizarre on world scale in lacking this. As far as favelas, I know Chavez has been on massive spree building public housing and renovating other housing, fixing streets, wiring up areas for electricity and running plumbing lines. And he’s done a lot of land reforms, breaking up large estates and giving them to small farmers and co-ops. He has opened a tremendous number of new hospitals and clinics, often staffed with Cuban doctors. He’s opened up new state markets where the poor can buy subsidized food for affordable prices instead of practically starving like they were 20 years ago, when 8 Crime is a long-term problem in Venezuela and the region, and it’s not Chavez’ fault. Corruption is a long-term problem in the region, due to Latino culture, and it will be there no matter what kind of regime is in. Chavez has reduced income inequality and poverty more than anyone else in the region. It’s great what Chavez is doing down there! Incredible! We don’t need Cuban socialism. Canadian socialism would be fine. Correa in Ecuador has done well, but he’s hampered by the oligarchy in what he can do. He threw the US out of the their Manta Military Base, he wrote a new Constitution and doubled health care spending. Ortega just got in, and he’s not pushing a strong program, plus the oligarchy is against him. Honduras had a coup. The FMLN just got in in El Salvador and is unfortunately pursuing a moderate agenda. However, the Civil War Accords already broke up the big land estates and distributed land to small farmers and co-ops, similar to the Mexican Revolution. Whatever other problems you have down there, at least you can grow enough food to eat. Brazil’s Lula reduced poverty dramatically there. Morales has done some good things for Bolivia, for one thing nationalizing the gas and oil reserves. He also wrote a new Constitution. Kirchener did a good job in Argentina. She blew off the debt. Her efforts at further reform have been hampered by the oligarchy. Lately, she’s been trying to break up the media oligopoly, but she’s running into a lot of static on that. Bachelet in Chile did not do much. She was not pushing a very Left agenda. The guy in Uruguay just got in and he’s a moderate. Lugos in in Paraguay is new too, and he’s pushing a moderate line. People pushing a moderate line are not likely to get much done, and in most cases, really good reforms to benefit the people have been hampered by the oligarchs. But these are the best changes your average person in Latin America has ever seen. What’s failed has been more or less 180 years of rightwing authoritarian oligarchic rule in the vast majority of Latin America. That’s what in general has never done the slightest damned thing for the people from Day One. People have had it with it, so they are starting to vote in some pro-people governments, in many places for the first time in history.

How Does the Republican Party REALLY Feel About Immigration?

I don’t know…It was the Democrats and Left that passed the 1965 Immigration Act. That’s just the facts. The Right were racist elitists, but it seems they’d rather have lived in a White country than plot to destroy the middle class—back then. But by the time Regan came around the Right picked up illegal immigration, too, and were using it for their machinations. Then years going back and forth, both Left and Right supporting or ignoring it.

The plot to destroy the middle class began in the 1970’s, really got under way with Reagan and dramatically accelerated under Bush. Keep in mind that this is just a theory mine – I can’t prove that such a plot was actually concocted. The Right was silent about the 1965 Immigration Act. Immigration, legal and illegal, really ramped up under Reagan. In 1979, it was only 400,000/yr or so. The Right in the US has never opposed legal immigration as far as I can tell. The Republican Party has always been 10 Obama has deported vastly more illegals than Bush did. Remember, Bush tried to legalize all of them. And illegal immigration exploded under Reagan. The Right are complete assholes, just like they are about most everything. They want to have it both ways. First of all, they love these illegals for the purposes of smashing down wages, and really that’s all the Right, which is the political arm of Business, cares about. However, the Right’s base screams about the illegals, so the Right, while encouraging the illegals to come and doing nothing to get rid of them while they are here, feeds their base with anti-illegal rhetoric which is just that. Even Proposition 187 in 1994 under Governor Pete Wilson was not intended to stop illegals. We know this because Wilson fought any and all efforts to crack down on businesses hiring illegals. The Right just pushes anti-illegal rhetoric to get votes from non-elite and working class Whites who in their right minds would not be voting them. It’s a double game, like most crap the Right does. Obama has deported illegals at a higher rate than any administration in history. The bottom line for the Right is always money, capitalism and business. As long as Capital demands that these illegals be here, the Right won’t get rid of them. End of story. There have been interesting moves at the state level. In Arizona, a rightwing Republican governor passed a very harsh anti-illegal measure that was surely opposed by her business constituents. Granted, that’s an interesting dynamic. Bush and McCain tried a very sneaky double game. They tried to legalize the 12 million illegals so they could be used as cheap labor, but at the same time would make it almost impossible for them to become citizens, at which point, they may well vote Democrat. The law would have converted illegals into citizens at the earliest in 17 years, and only after making them jump lots of hurdles. Only the Buchananite wing of the Republican Party has said anything at all about immigration. The main wing of the Republican Party, capital, business, money interests, loves immigration. Recall that capitalism needs constant growth in order to function. Capitalists love growing populations because it means more consumers, more houses, more this, more that = growing economy. The Left has always supported the illegals, true, but at least they are consistent and have a solid ideological position. Obama plays a bit of a double game on the illegals. He tells the Hispanics he’s going to legalize them in order to get their votes, then he never does it! He never does it because he knows it’s political suicide. So both sides are sort of feeding the bases phony lines that they are not willing to follow through on. But back in the 1970’s, super liberal California governor Jerry Brown used to regularly cheer on raids against illegals. It wasn’t a very controversial issue back then – most everyone was against them, but it was seen as kind of a joke, because it was like bailing out the ocean.

Why Non-Whites Are the Only Hope for the Left

Dirty Bull says:

The USA is a very unequal society in terms of income distribution – in fact it verges on Latin American levels of inequality.Just look whats happened to California – has mass immigration made it a better and more equitable place over the years, or Brazil-lite with gated communities, violent gangs and murders and horrible inequality, or was California thrown off the path it was pursuing in the ’50s, namely, a Sweden with warm weather, intelligent, educated people, low crime, good schools, good civic values etc? The undeniable pattern is that mass 3rd world immigration produces horrible inequality.

3rd World immigration is here to stay. The future at best is some sort of Venezuela or Bolivia type state in the US, with the non-Whites and some Whites rallying around some sort of Chavezismo, Moralesismo or Bolivarianism and the Whites digging in their heels, becoming more radical, more militant and probably more violent. We may even see White factions trying to pull off military coups in the US in the future. They are already openly stealing US Presidential elections, which is pretty outrageous right there. The future is increasing polarization, but there is no alternative. Keep in mind that US Whites were never socialists. They rallied around Barry Goldwater in 1964. The John Birch Society, the society of White America, peaked in the 1960’s. The closest US Whites came to socialism was in the 1970’s. I think there was a concerted effort in the 1970’s to wage war on the Left. This is what I think happened: Rich Americans and heads of big corporations met in the 1970’s and said we have to do something right now otherwise we will end up with a European social democracy. One of the problems was that we had a huge middle class. Huge middle classes are hated by elites because large middle classes usually start demanding some kind of socialism or social democracy. So a plot was hatched to destroy the US middle class and hence ward off the threat of social democracy. One of the ways this way done was to dramatically ramp up immigration. Immigrants were imported from all over the world. Most of them were elite types – rich Latin Americans, people fleeing Left regimes, high-caste South Asians, etc. These people are all elite types or think like them, and they all have a burning hatred for equality, socialism and social democracy. Along with that, Reagan deliberately allowed mass importation of illegals from Mexico. The purpose of this was to destroy the part of the middle class that was working class based, because by this time, many working class White had worked their way to the middle class with union jobs. At the same time, the all-out ideological war on unions was ramped up. You will not find one single major newspaper, newsmagazine, radio channel or TV station that supports the organizations of the working class – unions. All of the US media is deadset against unions. Also, many intellectual stink tanks were set up, like the Hoover Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Foundation, etc. These have since grown to a massive size. At the same time, the Left has no media presence and their think tanks are poorly funded. Another part of the plan was to keep on redefining the Left. What was once Center was now Left, then what was once Right was now Left. So the goalposts for what was Left or liberal were continuously moved as the Center moved further and further to the Right. All of this was carefully plotted out by US plutocrats. At this point, sure, income inequality is at its worst level since the 1920’s. Apparently most White Americans think this is fantastic, since they support the party doing this. Huge numbers of White Americans hate unions. This includes many working class Americans. Tens of millions of White Americans hate the Left and liberals as their supposed enemies. It’s worked very well. There are various strategies for the Left here. One is to try to sell US Whites on some kind of socialism or social democracy. This has been a hopeless endeavor for 30 years, and it gets more hopeless with each passing year as US Whites move further to the Right. Take note of the Tea Parties. US Whites are now like Goldwaterites or John Birchers. They’re more rightwing than at any time in in the last 45 years. But at this point, White people are totally hopeless. This project has failed and needs to be hung up to dry. There’s no chance that immigration will slow down. As non-Whites increase and Whites decline, the populace will logically move further and further to the Left. Hispanics are a very left and liberal leaning group. Present polls have them about 7

Demographics Augurs Well For US Socialism

Repost from the old site. In the comments section, Mort Goldman notes that Scandinavian socialism can never happen in the US because US Whites will oppose being taxed to pay for non-Whites. That’s pretty much been the history of the US for the last 28 years or so. But I argue that as Whites decline, and as they become a minority, we can move more towards a Scandinavian model. Uncle Milton, another commenter, says:

“I think that when Whites get to be a minority, we can have more of a Scandinavian-style socialist society.”Why do you believe the US would have a Scandinavian style socialist society when Whites become a minority in the US..? Why wouldn’t it be more like Brazil or Mexico..?

Here is my response to this very interesting question posed by Unc: Good question Milton. Minorities here in the US are pretty politically savvy and leftwing. Our society is already much more socialist than Brazil or Mexico and our ruling class is not as White as theirs is, nor is it as horrible, venal and ruthless. Brazil has death squads that roam around the land murdering uppity peasants. Any politician who goes after them is going to feel their wrath, possibly with bullets. Also, the press down there is quite a bit more reactionary even than the US press. Under the Republicans in the last 14 years, US Whites have been trying to move towards a Mexico-Brazil type capitalism, but it hasn’t been all that successful. These efforts have culminated under Bush, who has also started to actually steal elections, harass dissidents and move towards authoritarian rule, in line with the US Banana Republic model. Those ruling classes down there in Mexico and Brazil will not budge an inch. The rest of the people, though they are getting royally screwed, are not politically savvy like the Venezuelans, Haitians or Bolivians. In other words, the system is already incredibly more rightwing down there than it is up here. It’s hard to make changes in those hardcore reactionary societies without taking up guns or getting lucky like Chavez or Morales. Since our society is already pretty socialist and the only people feverishly working to make it less so are a rapidly declining, desperate and increasingly unsuccessful White demographic, the future augurs well for socialism in the US. Blacks and Hispanics in the US are much more sophisticated politically than Mexicans and Brazilians, and it’s much easier to add more socialism to an already quite-socialist society.

Some Comments on Race and Racism

Repost from the old site. In the comments section, Alan Lewis comments. My text is in quotes:

1. “It is irrelevant whether these differences are due to genetics or culture, since both intertwine anyway.”  Obviously it makes a great deal of difference, whether or not they “intertwine”. Human genes cannot (at least absent new technology) be altered; culture can be. 2. “…insane, decades- to centuries-long, never-to-be won wars against racism, sexism, homophobia and whatnot. These things will probably always be with us. The insanity of the Left is the folly that they dream they can eradicate these aspects of human nature.” Pardon me?! The Left’s largely SUCCESSFUL war against racism and whatnot, including the abolition of slavery and numerous other notable victories along the way, is “insane and unwinnable”? And since when is racism an “aspect of human nature”? What IS “human nature”, anyway? And what basis is there for saying that either racism is an aspect of it? (Is there more basis for saying that than for saying that anti-racism is an “aspect of human nature”?)

To which I respond: The facts are that there are differences in intelligence and other variables among the races. I wish to avoid the whole discussion of whether this is due to culture or genes, because it never ends. Also, the racists have taken over the genes debates as far as I can tell. 9 Why continue on and on with this stupid debate? What’s the point? Blacks do have a 15 point or so differential with Whites on intelligence. Surely, that difference is not due to racism. They also have a crime rate that is fully 8 times higher than Whites, and Hispanics have a crime rate that is 3.3 times higher than Whites. Surely these differences are not due to racism. That’s just madness. The problem with the Left and its lunatic anti-racism is that any and all differentials between races have to be chalked up to racism! What crap! In truth, that 15 point differential in IQ between Blacks and Whites alone could explain all sorts of differentials between those two races. For instance, in Why Black People Can’t Be Racist , Dr. Andrew Austin argues that Blacks have worse and lower paying jobs, worse educational outcomes, higher rates of unemployment, shorter lives, more diseases and illnesses, higher rates of infant mortality, higher rates of poverty, higher rates of incarceration, less home ownership, worse homes and so forth, and all of these discrepancies are empirically rooted in institution discrimination by Whites against Blacks. The key word here is empirically. I do not think that it has been empirically proven that all of these differentials are rooted solely and exclusively in institutional discrimination. If these cannot be explained by IQ, they can possibly be explained by other cultural variables or other biological variables. Other cultural variables may include things like Blacks creating a culture of failure in the Black Underclass or in general that leads to negative outcomes. It is also possible that some of these differences may be partly or wholly explained by racism and discrimination. There are quite a few average significant biological differences between the races. You can see some of them in this perfectly horrible online book. Fuerle’s book is not horrible because it’s wrong; it’s horrible because it’s unpleasant and most decent people don’t wish to discuss such things. Even Jared Taylor has noted that his Southern ancestors would have been offended by a discussion of such difference and would have described such a discussion as rude and poor manners, and he says that the debate has been forced on White nationalists by anti-racists continuously invoking White racism as the reason for these differences. As Alan notes, there have been some notable successes in the war against racism in the US. Ending slavery was one of them. It’s true that the movement has been fairly successful. My point is that it is insane of the Left to wage war to end racism, sexism and homophobia. The idiot feminists extend this to a war to end rape violence against women. Rape and violence against women will never end. Racism will surely never end. I will not see the end of sexism and homophobia in my lifetime. Alan says that I am implying that these things are in our genome. Perhaps they are. As I noted above, I’m sitting out the whole genes versus culture debate as a rhetorical dead end and waste of time. What has this debate accomplished one way or the other since its inception? On the one hand, you have liberal and leftwing idiots arguing that nothing is genetic and everything is cultural. On the other hand, you have a group of mostly Northern Europeans, with a few high-caste South Asians, overseas Chinese and other such elites tossed in, arguing that everything is genetic and nothing is cultural. Both sides usually preface their discussion by making a meaningless bow to the God of fairness. The environmentalists say that of course some stuff is genetic, then go on to argue that nothing is. The hereditarians argue that it’s a mix of environment and genes, and then proceed to attack all environmental explanations. The point here is mostly preaching to the respective choirs and a lot of people who like to get involved in insoluble and interminable nasty dust-ups. Saying that these things will be with us as long as I am alive is not the same as saying that racism is genetic, though I suspect it may have such elements. Anti-racism and affiliation with outside groups may also be genetic. You can postulate all sorts of genetic theories for both. Kevin MacDonald suggests that males may naturally pursue outgroup females in order to improve group fitness by adding new genes to the group. I would add that it also weakens outgroups by stealing their women. At the same time, he argues that that males naturally try to keep outgroups away from their own women. Allowing outgroups access to your women could lead to the usurpation of all of the ingroup’s females and the extinction of the outgroup. Further, males would be blocked from perpetuating their lines within their ingroup. We can see through human history that humans have great tendencies towards altruism within group and extreme cruelty to outgroups. Ingroups and outgroups can also get along quite well for varying periods of time. Periods of relative hostility are sprinkled with outliers who cooperate with the opposing group. Periods of relative peace are dotted with incidents of group competition and even hostility. There seems to be a lot of evidence that the racists are wrong in that all humans are naturally and normally racist as a condition of their genetics. The millions or hundreds of millions of people embracing relative anti-racism in the West and other parts of the world would argue against that. If we were naturally racist, anti-racist individuals would be rare and anti-racist campaigns would be ludicrously ineffective. On the other hand, the continuing existence of racism all around the world despite a major decades-long project to wipe it out implies that unfortunately, like murder, rape and wife-beating, it may be something that we are stuck with to one degree or another. No one wages wars to end crime, homicide, suicide, domestic violence, etc. It’s widely acknowledged that such unpleasantness is an aspect of the human condition. These conditions can be either ameliorated or exacerbated. They cannot be eradicated. The folly of the Left is that it wages wars of eradication, not wars of amelioration, on things that are permanent aspects of our existence. The folly and cynicism of the Right is that negative aspects of our condition cannot be ameliorated through cultural change, and that some are permanent, and even laudatory aspects of our existence.

Hereditarian Delusions

Repost from the old site. In the comments section, Rob comments. Rob’s comments are in italics followed by my responses. If White Nationalist predictions end up being more accurate than liberal and conservative predictions, will there be a large-scale correction? RL: Nope. They already have come true, and I don’t think anyone cares. White racism has reduced dramatically in tandem with some very extreme rightwing US White politics in the past twenty years and in tandem with increasing evidence for hereditarian views in hard areas like intelligence. White people really do not give a flying fuck about this stuff. If they have money, they run and run to get away from Blacks and Hispanics, and even when they get overwhelmed, they just say, “Oh well,” go wigger, and make friends with Blacks and Hispanics. The town I am living in now is basically part of Mexico. The Hispanics own this place. The Whites used to, but now they are overwhelmed. Young Whites cannot walk the streets late at night because the Hispanics will kick their ass for the sole reason that they are White. These same Whites typically have a Hispanic girlfriend or wife and deny racist feelings. White nationalists tell me that the Whites here should be the most furiously racist of all, but I have found that the opposite is true. The Whites here are some of the least racist Whites I’ve ever met. I keep looking for White racism here, and I can’t seem to find it. The Whites almost all hang out with and are friends with Blacks and Hispanics, even though a lot of these Whites are real “redneck” types with tattoos. A lot of them have just flat-out gone wigger. When they are in the majority, Whites stay put in a White town, or run if it starts turning. When they are overwhelmed, they go anti-racist and wigger and just figure that’s the way it is. And why should there not be? RL: Because most Whites just basically don’t care. It may be very hard for the mainstream politicians and intellectuals to say either, “Yeah, but we were lying last time, we understood the consequences of our policies. Keep us in charge”. Or would they say, “We broke the US, so we’re the only ones who can fix it”? Getting large numbers of people to give them a second chance will be even harder. RL: We’ve already passed that point, and Whites still don’t care. Many of the Whites around here in California even take insane positions on illegal immigration. I think there may be something to the White nationalist notion that Whites are suicidally altruistic in some ways, at least nowadays in the PC Era. Also, California Whites really, really, really are terrified of being called racists. When the blank slate dies and the fact that genetic variation underlies a large fraction of correlated physical, behavioral and cognitive functional differences between both populations and individuals, wouldn’t it be wise for both progressives and the mainstream right to prepare for the possibility? RL: This is the big hereditarian delusion. I’ve talked to a lot of White people about this, and most of them are not PC at all. First of all, the whole conversation is unpleasant, because California Whites now do not wish to discuss anything that even smacks of racism in even the tiniest sense. Second, most Whites here just don’t give a damn. I’ve told them about B-W IQ disparities and that I feel that this means that Blacks (at the moment) are less intelligent than Whites, and they just say, “Really? Yeah, well, haha. But so what? I always figured they weren’t as smart. Big deal.” And then they shrug their shoulders and change the subject. Further, the only people who even comprehend this whole subject have usually gone to college. If they haven’t, they just don’t even understand the whole genes-environment debate, so it makes no sense to them. I think most Whites think there are differences between the races that go beyond skin color, but they just don’t give a flying fuck about it. This whole thing is really a delusion by a bunch of White rightwing, mostly racist, intellectuals with a college education who understand this stuff. They dream that “society is going to catch on one day” and then some kind of White Revolution or Libertarian Society or an era of low taxes and an end to all social programs (transfers from Whites to Blacks and Browns) or whatever is going to ensue. They don’t understand that your average White American idiocrat doesn’t even understand the nature of the debate, and if he does, he could care less.

White Nationalism: An Ignorant and Hopeless Movement

Repost from the old site. I would add ineffectual and doomed to the title, but I only have a bit of space to write a usable headline. White nationalism is an interesting movement. At the very least, it appeals Whites, formerly the vast majority of this people in this nation, and to their sense that they are being replaced and displaced in this, their homeland, mostly by mass immigration and illegal immigration. A recent survey said that 7 That’s an interesting figure, but what’s even more interesting is that anyone who says that in public will be labeled racist, Nazi, White power, White supremacist, skinhead, KKK, etc. So, according to our lunatic society, 7 Of course it’s not true. They aren’t even racists. They’re just normal ethnocentric, nationalistic, patriotic people who love their culture and people and think it ought to survive. Just like almost every ethnic group all over the world. The problem with White nationalism is that they ought to be appealing to this 7 As most White Americans are not a bunch of racist assholes (anymore – they used to be), this project is doomed. Furthermore, like all ethnic nationalist movements, it attracts vast numbers of fools spouting the silly theories planted in pride typical of these movements. Where to begin? Ainus are and Kennewick Man was White. China used to be White. Southern Europeans, Armenians, Turks, Lebanese, people of the Caucasus, Bulgarians and Lapps are non-Whites. Whites never stole this land from Indians. The South was right in the Civil War. Blacks in Africa never had agriculture or metalworking or any kind of civilization before Whites showed up. Vietnamese IQ is low. There’s such thing as pure races and mongrel races. Primitive people speak primitive languages. MLK was a Communist who beat up prostitutes. Communists run the civil rights movement. They aren’t any native Whites in the Middle East, South Asia or North Africa. Whites got to America before Indians, so it’s our land. All Hispanics hate Blacks. There are no intelligent Blacks or Black Africans. All accomplished Blacks and Africans are recipients of affirmative action and frauds. If Obama gets in, he will import 30 million Africa immigrants and Blacks will declare race war on Whites. Dumb, huh? Jesus, if the racism didn’t turn this 7 All valid movements should have solutions that they propose to policy questions. Otherwise, there is no point to them. How about the solutions of the White nationalists? They have no workable solutions. Even if this movement appealed to me, and it does not, I’d never be a part of such a depressing movement. White nationalism is reactionary, hopeless, dead-pessimistic about our fellow humans and offers absolutely nothing to be happy about. Many of the people in it are nasty, ugly, mean, rude and just objectionable, as you might expect a bunch of rightwing racists to be. It’s just one endless Wretched-fest starring lots of really horrible humans. This has to be one of the most miserable movements on Earth. Here are some of the fanciful follies and delusions called “solutions” offered by White nationalists, none of which, I believe, will ever occur. We can ship all the Blacks back to Africa. We can ship all the non-Whites out of the US. We can have a military coup and put in a pro-White regime. We can set up a White separatist state in Idaho or wherever. We can get Whites to have 18 kids like they used to. A race war is coming and we’re going to win, and then afterwards, we can deport all the non-Whites. We can get rid of all civil rights and anti-discrimination laws. We can reduce legal immigration to zero. Although there is a slight chance that some of the above is possible but not likely (they may be able to whittle away at civil rights law), but in general, none of this stuff is going to happen. I’ve talked to White people about all of this stuff and they usually either start laughing and look at me like I’m from Mars. “They actually believe this?” they ask with incredulous eyes. “Yeah, they do,” I say. Then they shake their heads, laugh and say, “What’s wrong with these people? So move to Idaho or Iceland.”

California Truth

Repost from the old site. There is something to be said for deep, hard and cold honesty and realism, like this great article, My Negro Problem – And Ours , from Norman Podhoretz in 1963, back when he was still a liberal and Commentary was still a Jewish liberal magazine, before the Henry Jackson – Patrick Moynihan-fueled transformation into neoconservatives in the 1970’s. Read it! More along the same lines, from the comments page of American Renaissance, commenting on an article about illegal immigration:

Look at Los Angeles in the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s. Blue sky, snow-covered mountains, beaches, orange groves. Streets and highways that were uncrowded. Modest middle-class White Americans with full employment in American industries and whose only direct connection with crime was watching a Hollywood gangster movie with George Raft, or Bogart. Look at Los Angeles now. A third world jungle. Air filthy, orange groves long gone, graffiti and gang slogans everywhere, infrastructure collapsing. The middle class replaced by super-rich behind gated communities and the teeming hordes of the permanently poor. Jobs gone replaced by minimum wage service industries, schools worse than useless. Whites replaced by illiterate mestizos. The Golden State destroyed in one generation. That’s quite an achievement.

The “illiterate Mestizos” in the text above are illegal aliens and in many cases, their horrific spawn. I would add I don’t want to get into race reality or any of that, but this is a perfect description of my state and my city, my home. I will never go back to my home as long as I live, or at least I pray I will not. It’s not my home anymore. It’s like it’s been taken over by body snatchers or aliens. And it’s not necessarily about race either. Growing up in the Los Angeles area in the 1960’s and 70’s, there were Blacks around, but only some, and in the circles I ran in, all college-going and middle-class. There were assimilated Hispanics too, like my best friend since 4th grade, but they were just like everybody else other than having some quirky ancestry, and they were definitely a minority anyway. There were scattered Asians here and there – Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, all assimilated Americans. That was the thing – everyone was an American. I didn’t know any immigrants except the Bolivian exchange student at my high school. There was no such thing as people who didn’t speak English – everyone did. There weren’t any signs in foreign languages, unless you went to Chinatown or Olvera Street. If you wanted to see Chinese people and eat Chinese food, you went to Chinatown. If you wanted to see Mexicans and listen to mariachis, you went to Olvera Street. On a recent trip back to Orange County, the nature of this catastrophe really hit home for me. Orange County is now a 3rd World country. There’s a group of very well-off rich and upper middle class people of various races living lavish and ultra-lavish lives, and then another vast, usually darker-skinned group, that looks like the teeming masses of the Third World, and they are often right in proximity to each other. There’s a White working class that looks broken, in debt and exhausted. I’m sure the rich and upper middle class love it this way, as studies show that they have made out like bandits since 1980 while most everyone else has gotten creamed, and this transformation neatly corresponded with Reaganism and the Republican free market revolution of the past 30 years. It also corresponded with California liberalism. Our very own Jerry Brown liberals from the 1970’s got together with the Reaganites and ruined my city and my state. It doesn’t make sense. Looking at the 3rd World country that Orange County has become, with it’s Latin American gaps between an opulent, venal and indifferent upper class (At what point will they become an “oligarchy”?) and hordes of teeming 3rd World-like impoverished and overworked masses (At what point will they become revolutionary?), the rich with their gated communities and their security guards and the poor shoveled 30 to a dwelling, how could any progressive person not despair? What’s next? Biweekly riots by the Right, the Left or just college kids? Violent, striking teachers in the streets, broken up with tear gas and clubs? A military coup? The army in the streets? Armed leftwing revolutionaries? Right-wing death squads? If not, why not? If there’s a monument to the failure of mass illegal immigration and even mass immigration, it’s Los Angeles and the surrounding area. When you go to downtown LA, you are in shock. Most parts of the world that look like that need a passport to get to them. Yet this is purportedly part of our country. I’d like to point something out. How would Japan like it if we flooded 40 million East Indians or Mestizos into their country? How would India like it if we flooded 300 million Chinese into their country? How would fucking Mexico like it if we flooded 35 million Koreans, East Indians or Africans into their country? No sane, decent or self-respecting country or people puts up with this shit. Every country has an ethnic group that makes up the majority, and a culture that goes along with it. Along with that, a language or languages. We can sit back and bitch about India or Mexico, but those are their countries and their cultures. If you’re an Indian or a Mexican, you want to speak your native language, be around mostly folks who look like you, and be a part of your national culture. Mexicans don’t want 35 million Japanese flooding into Mexico, speaking Japanese everywhere, putting up signs in Japanese, playing Japanese music, eating Japanese food and turning Mexico into the Mexipan. Yet this is what we have done here in California. We, the native peoples of this state (not including the Amerindians, who are nearly extinct), have sat back and allowed a bunch of foreigners to displace us and replace us in our homeland. Hardly any other decent or self-respecting people on Earth would allow that. Why? Because it’s normal to resist being displaced and replaced in your homeland. It’s not rightwing or conservative or reactionary or racist or Nazi or anything like that. It’s just…normal. For feeling alienated by this, we are not skinheads or KKK members. We are normal human beings, reacting the same way any normal human would in the circumstances. Much as I dislike White nationalists for the blatant racism of the overwhelming majority of them, it seems that it is only they who give voice to these most plaintive feelings that any rational native Californian must harbor. Almost no one in the media can tell our story. The media is full of the glories of diversity – the diversity that is our de facto displacement and replacement. Anyone giving voice to these feelings, which so many of us must feel, is accused of racism. But how can merely being normal and human be conflated with racism?

Scientology, Inc.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD9bCdHqU3s] Wow, I don’t know what to say. The more you learn about these people, the worse it looks. Should organizations like this be declared illegal? This reminds me of the Bagwan Cult up in Oregon. I knew a guy who joined that cult. I went to a rock concert, and there were all of these Bagwan idiots there. Every one of them had a button with the Bagwan’s picture on it. And they all had the weirdest, creepiest smiles. Scientology is clearly a cult, but I’m not even sure what that means. Was Werner Erhardt’s EST a cult? Is White nationalism a cult? What about Sendero Luminoso? How about the modern US conservative movement?

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