Depression, Wealth and Moral Depravity

Posted by James Bowery on Friday, 19 September 2008 21:01.

Depression is caused by concentration of wealth to the point that family formation becomes unaffordable.

Concentration of wealth is reflected in the skyrocketing credit market debt to GDP ratio.

We have been in a managed depression for decades but we are now entering an unmanaged depression:

The only way to stabilize the system is unacceptable to our rulers:

Replace taxes on economic activity and virtually all government expenditures with a citizens’ dividend funded from a use fee for the net, in-place liquidation value of property rights beyond those that an individual would successfully defend in the absence of government (home and tools/weapons) —a use-fee equal to the risk free interest rate on said in-place liquidation value.

This stops depression by stopping centralization—centralization via private sector rent-seeking and centralization via public sector rent-seeking. The closest we are likely to come to stability is if Obama is elected and imposes a net asset tax. But this will merely trade private sector rent-seeking for public sector rent-seeking as there is no way Obama will let working whites have any of their patrimony back without walking hat-in-hand into their local government offices and/or precinct political meetings to genuflect appropriately. Even then it will be very grudging and selectively doled out only to the most obsequious and “non threatening” of whites—which immediately disqualifies almost all working whites who don’t have biracial children.

As I wrote in 1992, prior to either this refinement of my net asset tax proposal or to becoming aware of the nature of Jewish virulence:

When the incentives for productivity become negative due to capital welfare in excess of the economic growth rate, wealth is structurally centralized at the expense of others in the economy. The absolute level of net assets owned by the general population actually decreases so as to increase the net assets of the wealthy. This not only removes all incentives for production and entrepreneurial investment from the economy, but consumer demand collapses as credit is liquidated to pay for necessities. Depression ensues. It is under these circumstances that demands for socialist intervention in the economy via “public investment” take on an air of urgent legitimacy.

In such a desperate environment, Marx’s arguments in “Das Kapital” appear as rational and appealing as any made by Schumpeter, Laffer or even Adam Smith. It is therefore critical to understand to what extent socialist criticisms of capitalism are valid so we can credibly argue against their fallacies—particularly when they are promoted during obvious manifestations of capitalism’s flaws.

The real reason the sole route to stability is unacceptable to our rulers is explained by a simple analogy:

Such pathological concentration of wealth is to civilization as opiate addiction is to neurophysiology. Jewish virulence is to such concentration of wealth as pushers are to opiate addiction: Such susceptibilities will occasionally manifest in the absence of their promoters but much more often with said promotion. However, the last time in Western Civilization that Jews arguably did not play an important role was when Julius Ceasar crossed the Rubicon to “correct” the tensions between Patricians and Plebeians. Even in this instance their importance in the slave trade may have acted as their current importance in immigration—contributing decisively to wage depression hence wealth centralization.

One may say this much of such “correction by kingship”: At least kings—through taxation of wealth—occasionally keep the baronage from too much decadence, as did Henry the VII—by collecting to the royal coffers the economic rents of the realm into the hands of a family that represents the pinnacle of the genetic interests of the populace. Although this hoard of wealth does, itself, lay the foundation for court toadies to eventually corrupt the royal court’s blood and morals.

Unfortunately, it apparently does not go without saying that “bailing out the creditors” rather than distributing wealth to the people is only going to increase the debt loading on the people and will only exacerbate, via moral hazard, the tendency to prop up demand with ever-worsening credit scores. But the addict is facing cold turkey and is in no mood to recognize larger realities.

This already insufferable situation is made worse when those who are supposed to be on “our side”, like Martin Hutchison, don’t recognize economic collapse is due to the decreasing affordability of family formation.

The real cost of reproduction has risen by a factor of 4 since so-called “Greatest Generation” was siring the Baby Boom, but instead of drawing attention to the fact that this helped cause demographic collapse of whites, he participates in laying down a moralistic smoke-screen in statements (all of which are true but unrepresentative of the pressures against family formation visited upon the historically critical demography of the Baby Boomers) like:

# There was the mortgage salesman who bought several rental properties, on the assumption that his income was assured and negative cash flow from the properties didn’t matter in an environment of rising real estate prices.

# There was the yuppie anxious to impress his friends and attract the opposite sex, who bought a flashy and mechanically=2 0unreliable a car on a long-term automobile loan.

# There was the two-income professional couple, who thought that by buying a McMansion the size of Chatsworth, their social status would turn into that of the Duke of Devonshire.

# There was the laid-off manufacturing worker, who thought it didn’t matter that he could find no job paying more than half his old union pay scale, because credit cards would allow his family to live the good life.

# There was the low-skill immigrant, legal or illegal, who found the wages he could earn were totally insufficient to fulfill his dreams of life in the bountiful United States, but thought that through liberal use of credit cards and maybe a subprime mortgage, affluence might be forthcoming.

# There was the corporate CEO, who understood that buying back stock in his unexciting company and financing the purchase by junk bonds would increase the value of his stock options, but failed to realize that it made long term corporate survival unlikely to impossible.

# Finally, there was the President of the United States, who thought he could pursue an expensive if unsuccessful foreign policy, allow his Congressional colleagues to be thoroughly sloppy on public spending and introduce new social programs that pleased his wife, all without raising taxes.

Hell, even Warren Buffet isn’t this depraved. Despite his statement on CNBC of Mon. Dec. 4 2006 that:

I tell the kids coming out of school, they live better than John D. Rockefeller - cool in the summer, hot in the winter.

Here he is, calling attention to the dainty little things of civilization while ignoring the gut-wrenching destruction of job and family stability in the face of exploding real estate prices. But even Warren “my son had 5 kids why can’t you?” Buffett, in November 26, 2006 had enough decency to touch the real issues facing his Midwestern employees:

Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Of course, no mention is made of wealth—net assets—property rights—the protection of which is the primary government service—a service for which there is no use fee or tax.

And, of course, it was immediately after he made this statement to one of the less virulent neocon Jews, Ben Stein, that the all-too-typical Jewish media moguls threw a buxom red-headed Jewess into a room with Buffett where he made his Hutchison-esque comment about young people living like Rockefeller.

Giving the devil his due: Clearly there has been a moral corruption as mass media has displaced the church, which itself displaced the father as the moral authority of his household and clearly this moral corruption has taken its toll on heterosexual white men as more and more indulge in sexual predation which places pressures on white women to become more independent.

But equally clear is that young women are immensely powerful in their influence on young men and that for all we hear about how irresponsible and immoral white male youth have become—especially from “conservative” elders—we hear almost nothing about the moral depravity of those elders in failing to recognize that turning over moral indoctrination of their children, sons and daughters, to mass media, “educators” and even their own pastors of their own churches was an abrogation of the most sacred aspect of the relationship between forefathers and sons and daughters. Moreover when those elders indulge in such after-the-fact moralizing as a smoke screen for their having participated in the extraction of wealth from their sons and grandsons via preemptive real estate speculation—and all-too-often—sexual exploitation of younger economically strapped and morally corrupted females—it is a monstrous moral depravity of those elders that must be subjected to just as much exposure as was Tom Brokaw’s opiate of the dying GI’s: “The Greatest Generation”.

Can we then, having put things in a little more perspective, stop this idiocy of intergenerational warfare and point instead to our common enemy that is dividing father against son: the elites that have fallen victim to their human weaknesses within the centralizing temptations of civilization, seduced by their Jewish “advisers”?

And can we recognize the historic pattern here is leading us to another crossing of the Rubicon: watchful not only for Ceasar’s moral depravity in failing to promptly distribute land to his men and repatriate the slave population to restore the Republic, but watchful also for the Patrician-serving Brutus who would pretend to take the Republic’s part against the tyrant?

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Comments:

Posted by Z on Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:39 | #

The graph which you included with this post is quite unsettling, but the following one is even more so: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BOGNONBR

Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:56 | #

Thanks, Z. I’ve updated the article with that graph.

Posted by zuwr on Sat, 20 Sep 2008 01:57 | #

“Of course, no mention is made of wealth—net assets—property rights—the protection of which is the primary government service—a service for which there is no use fee or tax.”

The inheritance tax is a step towards being a net asset tax. One problem is that legal loopholes such as trusts are set up to avoid paying the tax.

One concern I have is the government will collect more money than it needs to operate with the tax rate set at the risk free rate. Of course, this excess is redistributed equally among the citizens. But is there not the temptation for the government to expand its expenditures and reduce the people’s dividend? An analogy would be how corporate officers increase their own pay at the expense of the shareholders, the owners of the corporation.

What do you think would happen to the risk free interest rate in a society which had net asset taxation? My guess is that the disincentive for wealth accumulation would increase the demand for government debt, thereby driving the rate down. The spread between government debt and corporate debt would increase. But I don’t know.

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 20 Sep 2008 05:56 | #

zuwr writes: What do you think would happen to the risk free interest rate in a society which had net asset taxation?

According to a statistical mechanics scholar who applies his theories to prediction markets (such as the Foresight Exchange), the adoption of such a system may have the following impacts (private correspondence):

An extremely low risk-free rate of return and greatly increased longevity shifts the investment advantage to investments with long term payouts. FWIW, I think something similar happened with my Foresight Exchange account. I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about this before, but I’m seeing considerable improvement in investments that I made two to five years ago.

Second, it seems to encourage being risk tolerant. My guess is that as risk-free investments decline, more capital will be invested in riskier assets.

The thing that mixes this all up though is that there will be a collective shift in value from low productivity assets to high productivity assets. It may well be that the risk-free rate of return increases in the long term once unproductive assets have fallen to the new equilibrium.

If you take the formulas derived in “Capital Gains Tax and the Capital Asset Pricing Model” and, by setting the capital gains tax and income tax parameters to 0 and then subtracting out, as a use fee, the risk free interest rate of the remaining capital asset pricing model formula, you might rationally compare the behavior of the capital markets under the NAT vs the current system (sans its penchant for decadence born of a capital welfare queen mentality).

Something else that is critical to model here is the fact that no one pays any use fees for their property rights until they have some threshold of net in place liquidation value which corresponds to subsistence—home and tools of one’s trade (capitalization of one’s own job). The consequence is that there is no need for anything like FDIC as virtually all government debt would be held by small savers since the risk free interest rate is essentially that of short term government debt so all large savers would enjoy little positive rate of return from investing in government paper.

Posted by Robert Reis on Sat, 20 Sep 2008 12:24 | #

The Real Owners of America
“The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t.

“You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear.

“They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

“But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 years ago.

“You know what they want? Obedient workers people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

“Now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.

“This country is finished.”

-George Carlin (1937 - 2008)

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 20 Sep 2008 14:33 | #

GC’s a day late and a dollar short. (What does “NAM” stand for, by the way? “Non-assigned meat” or something?)

Posted by j on Sat, 20 Sep 2008 14:59 | #

NAM = Non Asian Minorities

GC says that the future of America is Brasil with the favelas but no Carnaval. That scenario is most optimist: Brasil has waged no wars in the last 150 years, has no social or racial conflicts and its people are happy, friendly and relaxed. It is paradise.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:01 | #

What’s keeping you from moving to paradise, J? Your preference for living elsewhere tells me maybe you don’t really think it’s paradise.

Let’s start being honest with one another, shall we, J? Cut the crap. All of it.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:06 | #

Thanks for the meaning of NAM, J. By the way, won’t whites qualify as NAMs pretty soon? That only highlights the need to stop talking in euphemisms for race. If “Negroes” is meant don’t say “minorities,” “African Americans,” “Inner city,” or what-have-you. Say “Negroes.” What’s the harm? Is “Negroes” a dirty word? No. But the left and the Jews think it is, otherswise they wouldn’t have invented all this PC-speak and shoved it down our throats.

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:06 | #

I think this is a good example of Sailer’s critical faculties breaking down at the critical moment.

The attribution of the failure to attribute economic problems to NAMs is, itself, not specific enough:

The Jews did it: The Jews created the situation in which it is impossible to talk about racial demographics in academia and media for the simple reason that they don’t want to be put under a fair and balanced empirical scrutiny.

Once again the “Jewish advisors”—the court toadies of the elites—mislead the populous whose interests the elites themselves self-deceptively thought they were fairly representing while they were, in fact, selling them out for an opiate experience of concentrated wealth serving little more than the evolved virulence of the Jewish group.

Posted by Dave Johns on Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:25 | #

j wrote: “Brasil [ ... ] has no social or racial conflicts and its people are happy, friendly and relaxed. It is paradise.”

Laughable! Let’s examine some facts, shall we?:-

CRIME: Crime throughout Brazil has reached very high levels. The Brazilian police and the Brazilian press report that the rate of crime continues to rise, especially in the major urban centers – though it is also spreading in rural areas. Brazil’s murder rate is more than four times higher than that of the U.S. Rates for other crimes are similarly high. The majority of crimes are not solved. There were several reported rapes against American citizens in 2006….

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1072.html

Facts are a stubborn thing; aren’t they, j?

Posted by silver on Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:58 | #

Thanks for the meaning of NAM, J. By the way, won’t whites qualify as NAMs pretty soon? That only highlights the need to stop talking in euphemisms for race. If “Negroes” is meant don’t say “minorities,” “African Americans,” “Inner city,” or what-have-you. Say “Negroes.” What’s the harm? Is “Negroes” a dirty word? No. But the left and the Jews think it is, otherswise they wouldn’t have invented all this PC-speak and shoved it down our throats.

It’s not an euphemism. It’s sociological shorthand for all minorities excluding asians.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 20 Sep 2008 22:07 | #

Inclusion of the word “minorities” makes it a euphemism, Silver. They won’t say the race(s) they mean. “Minority” doesn’t designate a race. By using it they’re trying to avoid designating any race by name.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 20 Sep 2008 22:47 | #

Odds and Ends

Remember this? Yeah, importing even more non-white Third Worlders and setting them all up with even more home mortgages really would’ve solved the mortgage crisis; just what doctor ordered. Good old Dr. Jack Kervorkian — looks like that rascal’s been ordering some of this stuff (from his jail cell apparently) (Oh did he get out? All right, that explains it right there.)
______

About J’s Brazil infatuation in his comment — guys with Jewish-sounding names have been known to do that, from Ashley Montagu to this guy Mangan nails (see all the way at the end of the linked post).
______

Got an e-mail from someone trying to defend The Monitor, asking me, “Now he’s cancer, before he was just an asshole. Which is it?”

It’s both. You never heard of rectal cancer?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sun, 21 Sep 2008 01:47 | #

A few of Joe Guzzardi’s personal reminiscences about working at Merrill Lynch. (When I was a boy they were known as Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, & Smith. I think they were more honest when they had the longer name.)

Posted by zuwr on Sun, 21 Sep 2008 02:48 | #

james thanks for the reply. Two questions:

1. What are the ways in which people will try to avoid paying NAT?

2. Since NAT replaces tariffs, are there any barriers to trade? What is trade policy?

Slightly off topic: I came across this article today. It may be a case of fraudulent conveyance. I imagine there will be more instances like it in the future.

Lehman Moved Cash Fast
Some $8 Billion Went From London Before Bankruptcy
By CARRICK MOLLENKAMP and JEFFREY MCCRACKEN

Clients and accountants are probing how Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. moved billions of dollars from its London operations to New York just ahead of its bankruptcy filing this past week.

At issue: whether transferring $8 billion to New York was an effort to shore up the unit there so it could be sold at the expense of the London office, a person familiar with the matter said.

On Friday, in federal bankruptcy court in New York, Lehman sought approval to sell off much of its North American operations to Barclays PLC of the United Kingdom.

The money transfer to New York is raising questions about the speed and haste of Lehman’s efforts to file for bankruptcy and complete a sale to Barclays.

Lawyers for Lehman argued in court Friday there was no time to wait for the bankruptcy filing.

They argued that the firm’s broker-dealer customers and its employees, mostly in its investment bank, are in danger of disappearing with each passing day.

Lehman’s holding company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday, but the firm’s U.S. broker-dealer stayed in business long enough for Barclays to arrange the purchase of assets including Lehman’s brand name, technology, 10,000 employees, midtown Manhattan offices and two New Jersey sites.

As the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history, the Lehman case is marked by an unusual rush and lack of public disclosure about what specifically was being sold to Barclays. Lawyers representing the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. Trustee’s office all stood up in court to urge the judge to authorize the sale, arguing the global financial markets would be harmed by a delay.

On Friday, angry creditors pushed and shoved to get into Judge James M. Peck’s court. On several occasions a security guard yelled at the crowd. Harvey Miller, lead counsel for Lehman on the bankruptcy filing, needed someone to clear a path for him to get in the room and to the front of the court.

Lehman sought court approval for the sale to Barclays, despite objections raised in court documents by companies such as Verizon Communications Inc., Occidental Energy Marketing Inc. and hedge-fund firm Harbinger Capital Partners. One creditor made a motion to the court pleading for a delay. “Here there has been hardly a moment to breathe,” the court filing said.
Terms of Sale

On Friday, there were a number of changes to the terms of the sale to Barclays. The originally agreed total sale price of $1.75 billion could be lowered by $100 million to $200 million. The British bank will take on $47.4 billion in assets and $45.5 billion in liabilities, instead of $72 billion in assets and $68 billion in liabilities. The drop in the assets reflects the decline in the value of Lehman securities during the past week.

The purchase price was lowered because of lower appraisals of real estate in New Jersey. Barclays will get a license on Lehman’s name for two years, instead of permanently. Barclays will now keep any profits from the sale of any assets; previously, Barclays was to give Lehman’s estate the first $500 million in any profits and split the profits on the next $500 million in sales.

Meanwhile, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, the insolvency administrator for Lehman’s London-based units, sent a letter recently to Lehman in the U.S. requesting that $8 billion be paid back, a person familiar with the matter said. PricewaterhouseCoopers has said it is reviewing all transactions.

Lehman’s lawyers said at Friday’s hearing that Barclays also has agreed to purchase Lehman’s private-investment-management business, a brokerage unit within the firm’s asset-management arm. Private-equity firms Bain Capital LLC and Hellman & Friedman LLC are expected to reach an agreement in the coming days to acquire other parts of Lehman’s asset-management business, including money manager Neuberger Berman.

A New York investment fund and Lehman client, Amber Capital Investment Management, made a filing Friday afternoon raising concerns that some $8 billion was “misappropriated” from Lehman Brothers International (Europe) to Lehman in the U.S. just before the filing. Amber asked the judge to set aside the proceeds from the Barclays sale while the $8 billion transfer is investigated.
Cash Sweep

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers and Lehman executives, monies residing in Lehman units based in Europe or Asia typically were swept up each day and transferred to Lehman’s group treasury in New York. The money was later dispatched back out to the units. Spokesmen for Barclays and Lehman declined to comment.

Tony Lomas, a PricewaterhouseCoopers partner working on the Lehman insolvency in London, said this past week during a London news conference, “Every subsidiary, here and elsewhere in the world, was dependent upon the flow of cash back from New York each morning to meet its obligations.”

But when Mr. Lomas arrived at Lehman in a skyscraper in London’s Canary Wharf on Monday, “Quite bluntly, there was no cash,” he said Monday. Employees’ paychecks have been delayed, vending machines are running dry, and many of the firm’s London employees are looking for new jobs. The London office took out a loan to pay employees, a person familiar with the matter said.

“Any time you are on the eve of bankruptcy and have big transfer of money like that, it will be the subject of review or some sort of investigation,” said Don Workman, head of the bankruptcy and restructuring practice at the law firm of Baker Hostetler in Washington, D.C., whose firm is following the case for clients who did derivatives trading with Lehman. “The British may say, ‘That’s our $8 billion.’”
—Peter Lattman contributed to this article.

Write to Carrick Mollenkamp at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and Jeffrey McCracken at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Posted by Desmond Jones on Sun, 21 Sep 2008 04:08 | #

Brazil’s Elites Fly Above Their Fears

Sao Paulo—a city of 18 million, populated by the fantastically wealthy and the severely poor with little in between—is, by some accounts, a vision of future urban life in the developing world. As homicide and kidnapping rates have soared to record levels, civilian helicopter traffic here has become what industry executives describe as the busiest on Earth. Helicopter companies estimate that liftoffs average 100 per hour. The city boasts 240 helipads, compared with 10 in New York City, allowing the rich to whisk to and from their well-guarded homes to work, business meetings, afternoons of shopping, even church.

It is, sociologists here say, a sign of the way urban society in Latin American’s largest nation is changing. Amid rising crime and overpopulation, the rich are retrenching into hyper-insulated lives.

In this sprawling nation of 170 million, sociologists call it the price of social inequity. Brazil has one of the most marked disparities of wealth in the world, with the richest 10 percent of the population controlling more than 50 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 10 percent control less than 1 percent. The disparity is particularly visible in Sao Paulo, a financial and commercial capital where many of Brazil’s richest people live and work.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Sun, 21 Sep 2008 04:27 | #

...serving little more than the evolved virulence of the Jewish group.

This assertion needs further examination, IMO. It also appears very much adaptive for white elites. The demographics of Al Gore’s community of Bell Meade are interesting.

Belle Meade is in Davidson County. The county seat is Nashville.

Major ancestry groups reported by Belle Meade residents include:

· English - 25%
· German - 12%
· Irish - 8%
· French (except Basque) - 8%
· Scottish - 7%
· Scotch-Irish - 4%
· European - 3%
· Polish - 2%
· Dutch - 1%
· Welsh - 1%
· Italian - 1%
· Swedish - 1%
· Czech - 1%
· Hungarian - 1%

Median household income

Local$144,720
National$41,994

Source: 2000 census, U.S. Census Bureau

Crime: The number of violent crimes recorded by the FBI in 2003 was 0. The number of murders and homicides was 0. The violent crime rate was 0 per 1,000 people.

Census 2000 highlights: Ranked as the fifth richest community in America, with a per capita income of $104,908

Quotes:

The swells of Nashville live in Belle Meade, a suburb of enormous houses beneath lofty shade trees on even more enormous lawns. Guardians of garden-club gentility, politically conservative, they do not mix much with the denim-clad country crowd…

—Apple’s America
R.W. Apple Jr.

Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 21 Sep 2008 04:45 | #

zuwr asks: 1. What are the ways in which people will try to avoid paying NAT?

Since human capital is not taxed, there will be a huge shift toward investments in human capital.

Since subsistence assets are treated as an extension of human capital (hence untaxed), people will tend to liquidate their retirement resources and transfer ownership to their younger relatives with whom they will work very very hard to maintain good relationships so that they are well cared for in old age. Similar arrangements will tend to arise between those who achieve success at a younger age and close relatives of their cohort—reconstituting clan structures to a great degree.

Some individuals will choose to move their assets off-shore to places where the population is still enslaved to protect those assets (as it is here in the US now), doing so in the guise of “economic development”. But, as we see here in the US, such regimes aren’t really stable.

Some people will attempt to lower their net by inflating the value of their debts by shifting their ownership to relatives who hold few assets, and have those relatives create the impression that the credit of the NAT-avoiding relative is better than it really is—hence the in place liquidation value of the debt instrument is higher than it really is.

He further asks: 2. Since NAT replaces tariffs, are there any barriers to trade? What is trade policy?

Trade policy is replaced by national security policy. Limits on imports of critical items will naturally turn into higher prices for those items—and to the extent that there are indigenous sources of those items enjoying the position of statutory monopoly over them, they will have a larger in place liquidation value hence higher assessment for NAT purposes. Ownership of such statutory monopoly assets will tend to become owned by corporations whose shares are primarily owned by young people who are starting out in life and the middle class for the same reason FDIC will be replaced by small savers buying up government debt under their subsistence exemptions.

Moreover, there will be a very different way of treating intellectual property since it will become very obvious that it is governments explicit job to protect property rights:

Military actions against foreign manufacturers who rip off US inventors will be taken. Their factories destroyed.

Posted by j on Sun, 21 Sep 2008 05:37 | #

GC, in his comment, said that America´s future is something like Brasil. That is an optimist scenario. The pessimist scenario is South Africa.

Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 21 Sep 2008 05:55 | #

“GC, in his comment, said that America´s future is something like Brasil. That is an optimist scenario. The pessimist scenario is South Africa.” - j

America will balkanize as a result. Areas where Whites enjoy demographic strength will secede. But what then?

North America once belonged to the White man, lock, stock, and barrel. It should once again. We should reconquer it once our hand is strong enough. Only effeminate cowardice can keep us from the prize.

Posted by silver on Sun, 21 Sep 2008 10:00 | #

Inclusion of the word “minorities” makes it a euphemism, Silver. They won’t say the race(s) they mean. “Minority” doesn’t designate a race. By using it they’re trying to avoid designating any race by name.

It can be used as an euphemism but it wasn’t designed as one.

It’s useful shorthand for referring to the non-white group consisting of blacks, hispanics, am-indians, indians, pacific islanders, arabs etc excepting asians.

Posted by silver on Sun, 21 Sep 2008 10:24 | #

North America once belonged to the White man, lock, stock, and barrel.

If that’s what you believe, then by your implicit measure it still belongs to the White man today.

It should once again. We should reconquer it once our hand is strong enough. Only effeminate cowardice can keep us from the prize.

A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.

Posted by Othelma_Jr on Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:15 | #

The only thing that has stopped Balkanization has been the pressure relief valve of White Flight.

With the economic down-turn this will literally not be an option for Whites anymore and there will soon be a revitalization of some sort of populist para-military wing soon (Klan, Militias…) as Whites Organize to defend themselves and stay afloat from the Rising Tide of Color…

Posted by The Monitor on Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:00 | #

CC:
Areas where Whites enjoy demographic strength will secede.

Do many Americans know secession is an option?

Silver
If that’s what you believe, then by your implicit measure [North America] still belongs to the White man today.

Bingo. Whites still hold the keys to power and, if they/we wanted to they could re-assert themselves. Yet they don’t want to This is one reason to doubt the “parasitic non-white genetic interests attacking the host” hypothesis,

Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 21 Sep 2008 14:57 | #

The Monitor writes: Whites still hold the keys to power and, if they/we wanted to they could re-assert themselves. Yet they don’t want to This is one reason to doubt the “parasitic non-white genetic interests attacking the host” hypothesis

And the cricket in this video clearly voluntarily commits suicide so as to let the worm within him escape into its natural habitat. We may therefore doubt the “hypothesis” that the relationship was parasitic.

Posted by Robert Reis on Mon, 22 Sep 2008 06:54 | #

“The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t.

You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear.

They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking.

They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 years ago.

This country is finished.”
The late George Carlin

Posted by dw on Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:58 | #

Simple problems demand simple solutions.

EXACTLY.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:26 | #

I posted this link in the “Banking Crisis” thread but it also belongs here. In the linked Vdare.com article this man Takuan Seiyo apportions blame, as he sees things, for the whole rotten sub-prime mortgage swindle, a gargantuan crime for which no one will pay except we tax-payers while all the men who became millionaires and billionaires through this swindle will get off scot-free with their ill-gotten lucre intact.

Takuan Seiyo writes for BrusselsJournal.com. But looking at his last two articles, this one and the one posted at MR.com under the title “Life in the Kwa,” as well as the brief exchange he had with GW over in the BrusselsJournal.com threads, it’s pretty clear he’s one of us: this man writes for the race-avoiding Brussels Journal but in spirit he’s an MR.com’er.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:26 | #

“Inclusion of the word ‘minorities’ makes it a euphemism, Silver. They won’t say the race(s) they mean. ‘Minority’ doesn’t designate a race. By using it they’re trying to avoid designating any race by name.” (—my comment above)

Here’s Takuan Seiyo (today):

” ‘Minorities’ is a euphemism that has nothing to do with population percentages but everything to do with ‘disappearing’ the inconvenient truth of mean racial group differences that handicap the ‘minorities,’ but not the majority, in education and wealth acquisition.”

http://www.vdare.com/misc/080922_seiyo.htm

Posted by John on Wed, 24 Sep 2008 09:28 | #

Speaking of the income tax, here’s a movement http://slaveuprising.com/forum/ started by Ron Paul supporters http://www.ronpaulforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=279 that might have some potential.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:16 | #

Sean Gabb disagrees with government bail-outs of the banks:

Governments can stand back and let weak institutions fail. This will bring on the worst financial collapse since 1931 and be followed by a nasty recession. Or they can spray vast amounts of our tax money into the financial markets, which might briefly delay the worst financial collapse since 1931 and a nasty recession to follow.

The only real beneficiaries of this rescue will be those working in the financial markets. They have spent the past decade stuffing our savings up their noses while telling us they were invested. Now their friends in government have come up with a scheme to use our tax money to pay next year’s bonuses.

The Libertarian Alliance denounces this proposed rescue and predicts bad times for years to come: No bail out of the British financial system. Let failed banks fail.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3578

Posted by Guest on Mon, 20 Oct 2008 19:42 | #

Buffet, who had his pals in the ADL get him admitted into a Jewish Country Club, has bankrolled, along with several Jews, the anti-effort to stop Nebraska’s referendum which would end Affirmative Action in that state. Buffet, like Soros, et al. is a swine.

It is really time to face reality.

‘If wanting to preserve White, Western, Christian society makes us Nazis, then by George let’s be Nazis!’
- George Lincoln Rockwell

Posted by James Bowery on Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:23 | #

Buffet’s support of “the bailout” is sufficient evidence of his depravity, but I would like to see a write-up on Buffet’s oppression of the the people of Nebraska. If true, it would raise the stakes in his case. Links?

Posted by Guest on Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:44 | #

James this is merely one in a long line of anti-White efforts by Buffet he is perhaps a more avuncular appearing anti-White elite than the equally reptilian Bill Gates.

In Nebraska, the measure made the ballot despite activist groups funded by four heavy hitters, including Warren Buffett, ad-exec Richard Holland, attorney Dianne Lozier and financier Wallace Weitz

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122445872052148477.html

Posted by Guest on Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:51 | #

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/depression_wealth_and_moral_depravity/#c62319

btw James, Sailer did not permit my post on that particular blog entry of his, I named MacDonald and that was too much for him. Sailer is part Jewish so maybe that is why.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:50 | #

Ian Jobling a few days ago:

Banks in Majority-White Midwest Doing Fine

I just came across this post at Brett Steenbarger’s stock trading blog, Traderfeed. Steenbarger recently looked up bank ratings and found that there were some banks in America doing perfectly well.

“There’s a story that the financial media is missing entirely, and it’s about the segment of the banking system that is working just fine. These are not the largest banks, and — for the most part — don’t operate in the largest markets. Rather, they tend to be located in small towns that have seen neither boom nor bust in real estate markets. They did not involve themselves in subprime lending and they did not make large real-estate construction and development loans. They have never involved themselves in trading in derivatives; they take in deposits, make prudent loans, and stick to what they know best: the needs of their communities.”

The places he’s talking about are in Illinois, and I think we know the racial demographics of small mid-Western towns.

“There’s an America that doesn’t live by credit cards, that is grounded in community, that treats banking as a stewardship, and that makes decisions prudently and conservatively. We don’t hear about that America very much in recent media reports [Scroob note: except when the Jews derisively refer to it as “fly-over country,” spit on it, and let us know how much they absolutely loathe it, the people in it (goys), and every (goyische) thing about it], but it may just hold the keys to unlock many of our current dilemmas.”

It’s a terribly sad reminder of what the old America was and what it could have gone on being had we not ruined it through massive non-white immigration. [Scroob note: yes Ian, and whose fault is that massive non-white immigration, exactly?] It’s the new America, composed of the “improvident races,” that is at the root of this crisis. Of course, the new America now has grown so large and troublesome that we barely remember the old America exists.

And the newer generations, who have no memory of it, will never know it existed. Unless our generation does its job and restores it!

Posted by Guest on Tue, 21 Oct 2008 02:31 | #

Fred your last comment reminded me of something from Tolkien:

Much that once was is lost. For none now live who remember it.

Posted by Dave Johns on Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:23 | #

“Buffet’s support of “the bailout” is sufficient evidence of his depravity, but I would like to see a write-up on Buffet’s oppression of the the people of Nebraska.”

James, just in in case you aren’t already aware, he’s also backing Obama for president.

Buffet: “But he [McCain] has too many ideas that are different than I do, particular in terms of what I would call social justice.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/heres-why-warren-buffett_b_102471.html

Posted by Al Ross on Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:21 | #

Buffett’s implausible plea for higher taxes for the “super rich” is at variance with his perpetual tax avoidance. For example, his listed investment vehicle, Berkshire Hathaway, has never paid a dividend so billions of untaxed dollars appear in its reserves. Also, any estate taxes normally due upon Buffett’s demise will be avoided as his will states that his multi-billion dollar personal holding in BH goes to the Bill & Melinda Gates “No Scholarships for Whites” Foundation, a charitable trust which wastes billions in African and other Third World aid.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:54 | #

http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_102208.htm

A Texas Reader Says Sub-Prime Lending Boom Got Bush Elected

Re: Steve Sailer’s Column: America’s Mortgage Meltdown/Diversity Recession: The Smoking Gun?

Sailer missed the most salient aspect of the sub-prime lending boom and subsequent diversity recession: they got George Bush re-elected. Read the piece by well-known author and highly regarded money manager John Mauldin of Dallas, and you’ll understand why. [Go to original text to click on embedded links.]

What’s noteworthy about Mauldin is that he had actually been a delegate to the Republican convention.

“Without US homeowners using their homes as an ATM, the economy would have been very sluggish indeed, averaging much less than 1 percent for the six years of the Bush presidency. Indeed, as a side observation, without home equity withdrawals the economy would have been so bad it would have been almost impossible for Bush to have won a second term.” [—John Mauldin: The Economic Blue Screen of Death]

Not only did sub-prime get Bush re-elected, it allowed Mexican illegal aliens to continue to strip mine America. Ditto for the corrupt oligarchs who run Mexico. They’ve masterfully exported more than 10 percent of Mexico’s population to the US. Republican fat cats and Texas plutocrats were rewarded as well.

Paul Craig Roberts might believe that Bush stole the election. But there’s no need to don a tinfoil hat and believe in conspiracies when the harsh, blunt truth is that looting the public purse for private gain got Bush re-elected.

Posted by stock options on Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:56 | #

The only reason Buffett supports the bailout is because he has so much invested in America and he’d loose a great deal if it didn’t pass.

Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:34 | #

I don’t think I would equate investing in “America” with investing in “the financial system dominating America”.

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