Posted by The Pithy Dirty Bull on Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:23 | #

OT

Some kid was jailed for making ‘racist tweets’ about that black footballer who had a heart attack on the pitch.
Good Lord, things really have come to a sorry pass, when mere words are criminalized.

Just as long as the God of MR, namely GW himself allows me tp pepper the odd pithy pos with opprobrious racial epithets with no fear of a Gestapo knock on my front door at 3 in the morning.

Posted by Ludwig Von Minces on Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:50 | #

Sir Desmond:  It took me thirty years to understand Keynes’ economics. And when I just caught on, everyone started getting hooked
on these monetarist ideas. You know, ‘I Want To Be Free’ by Milton Shillman.

Sir Humphrey:  Milton Friedman?

Sir Desmond:  Why are they all called Milton? Anyway, I only got as far as Milton Keynes.

Sir Humphrey:  Maynard Keynes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgUemV4brDU

This is an appeal for a sophisticated approach to economics based on national sovereignty

Based on what is best at all times, for the people of that sovereign nation, and the people only. Watertight economic theory, updated with the latest advancements in game/chaos theory etc, safeguarded against cycles of boom and bust, with tight regulation of all markets. No one entity able to dictate policy through becoming too big to fail. And completely and utterly and comprehensively and systematically and unswervingly and unapologetically Jew proof.

 

 

Posted by Dan Dare on Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:49 | #

GW - the most recent (March 2012) UK budget calls for public sector spending of £682 billion and total revenues of £592 billion, for a deficit of £90 billion - about 15% of revenues.

Leaving aside the question of ongoing debt and interest payments (around £46 billion in FY2013), it wouldn’t seem beyond the ken of man to devise some combination of revenue increase and expense reduction that would eliminate the 15% shortfall.

A good place to be begin would be the £8 billion budgeted for overseas development aid, and a close look could also be given to the £29 billion budgeted for dealing with ‘social exclusion’. There are an abundance of sacred cows that are ready for slaughter.

Once the current account is settled, and the drip feed no longer needed, a closer look might be given to the source of the debt mountain. Foreign debt, it seems to me, could be eliminated at a stroke, domestic debt (e.g. gilts held by domestic pension funds) might be more problematic.

It all seems very doable.

Posted by The Thrifty Dirty Bull on Tue, 27 Mar 2012 18:51 | #

......and also Britain’s enormous net contribution to the EU.

Posted by The Anxious Dirty Bull on Tue, 27 Mar 2012 18:55 | #

“Sacred cows for the slaughter” ???

For gawd’s sake please keep the pole-axe (or in Tony Blair’s case Pollacks), out of sight of dear old Dirty Bull, and in reverse Hindu tradition save the bovine male!
Hoofs trembling in fear.

Posted by Dan Dare on Tue, 27 Mar 2012 19:21 | #

Other juicy, low-hanging fruit:

- £33 billion in transfer payments to Scotland (plus similar pro-rata amounts to Wales and NI)
- £1 billion (or more) expended on ‘Diversity and Equality’ matters
- £2 billion spent on ‘conflict resolution’ incl. UN subs, various FCO initiatives, the British Council, BBC World Service etc

And the biggie - the unknown amount, but probably in the region of £50 billion or more, in benefits of various sorts made over to post-war immigrants and their families, of which income support, housing benefit and the cost of educating their children loom largest. This does not account for the the cost of infrastructure that has had to be created to accommodate them.

If they could all be somehow magically trans-levitated to their ancestral homelands it is likely that the public sector deficit would disappear practically overnight. It’s a RoI that ‘international bankers’ would give their right arms for.

Posted by uKn_Leo on Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:23 | #

Legalise, regulate and tax the illegal narcotics industry;

Big hit to the international bankster/gangsters, hundreds of billions (trillions over the decades) in drug money sloshing (laundering) around the global banking system.

Legalising hemp/cannabis opens up some potentially huge new revenue streams as hemp has an almost unlimited number of uses. These uses bite deeply into the current vested interests of money power. This is largely why they are so keen to keep marijuana growth illegal, and were the driving force behind the initial criminalisation of cannabis. Hemp is truly a miracle plant, it’s fibres stronger than steel, worth more than its weight in gold. Trillions in revenue up for grabs, hundreds of thousands of potential new jobs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0xHCkOnn-A&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfKPDHq4fTQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-5SV48epIs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0jRhHvgGis

Drugs markets, criminally controlled, largely by non white groups and individuals, sell, at staggering profit levels, a corrupted, poisonous product with many legal yet highly dangerous added ingredients. This is nothing less than an another assault by non whites on whites and needs to be stopped.

Can we stop white people consuming narcotics?. History suggests no, not a chance, never. White advocates need a sensible, realistic narcotics policy, which in turn is part of a more sophisticated economic policy. Our current financial ‘crisis’ could be turned around overnight with the legalisation, regulation and taxation of the narcotics industry.

If sold correctly, this could also be a big vote winner (especially amongst the young. Countless young white lives have been permanently ruined by the policy of criminalisation).

Posted by Off topic but on Tue, 27 Mar 2012 23:34 | #

I want to alert all to this article. Opening for comment @ 9am GMT 28/03/12:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/27/far-right-philozionism-racism

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:57 | #

Dan,

You are talking about a different matter there.  The issue I am interested in is this:

Given that sovereignty over money supply must be a core policy of a nationalist economics, the question is how the state uses the power of money generation.  Since the state is not a banker, it can simply give or loan the money it creates to banks to expand ninefold by fractional means.  In other words, it’s QE as now and nothing really changes in the money economy after the creation of the money itself. I don’t like that.  The banks have to be brought to heel, and the surest way to do that is to amend the fractional system, for the purposes of which there are some quite creative possibilities.

So if the state is going to bypass the banks, it has to invest the money it creates directly in the economy.  There are two ways of doing this.  The first, a broad-based investment strategy bringing the government directly into conflict with the commercial banks, would be dangerously inflationary unless the money was pulled out of the economy again through general taxation.  The more interesting challenge is to leave the money in the economy but invest it in a highly targeted way (for example, in single-sale items such as medicines, roads, military hardware and ammunition, etc) to reduce its subsequent impact.

Now, the first thing to say here is that in an economy running a substantial trade deficit where capital outflow is a continual drain on the national wealth - we import 40% of our food, for example, and 40% of our gas (costing £100 billion a year) - there is a very large deflationary pressure acting on the economy.  It simply isn’t very inflationary to leave the odd £100 billion out there.  Part of it will leak abroad anyway, and if it is carefully enough targeted in inflation-neutral purchases the inflationary effect of the rest should be no more than that of bank interest.

Of course, there is a limit to how much can be done, and £100 billion is likely quite close to it.  It is interesting that just yesterday, Mervyn King had to deny that the £325 billion created so far under QE is having a negative effect on annuities.

Posted by uKn_Leo on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 03:24 | #

How are the avoidable expenditures DD mentions, along with new revenue streams/industries, not relevant to the issue of a nationalist economic policy of restoring money supply/generation to government and how/where to spend this income most wisely?.

It sounds emminently sensible to use nationalist government generated money supply to cover non-inflationary one-off payments with minimal/non-existent negative impact on the wider economy.

But also equally sensible, and intrinsically linked, that such a government endeavors to do everything possible to raise, in this case (for example), Englands revenue, lower wasteful, unproductive expenditure, thereby reducing the amount of said government generated money required for these one-off payments (possibly even to zero).

May I add that both measures singularly, let alone combined (with all the positive, much desired outcomes they would encompass), may be enough to sweep a political movement to prominence overnight in todays desperate climate.

Posted by The Crafty Dirty Bull on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 07:30 | #

Just think of the absolutely enormous one-off gain in the housing market (the root of Britain’s economic distress) to be made if, in thorough malthusian fashion, the housing stock occupied by post 1945 invaders was freed-up.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:17 | #

Yes, DB - and Leo - when you look at the kind of economic appeal nationalism could make ... a staggering appeal amounting to giving England and all its built environment and public services to the English people ... one has to ask why the BNP offers bloody distributism (basically, Catholic social policy).

What working-class Brits wouldn’t prick up an ear if they were told to watch the listings of properties falling vacant through repatriation/relocating of the colonisers, and apply to the local authority (who would be the recipient of these properties) for whatever took their fancy!

Of course, there is the presentational problem that the BNP is required by equality law to promote the interests of the invaders.  But that’s not difficult to circumvent, in my view.

Posted by Leon Haller on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:41 | #

GW@12

What kind of economic policy is that? It’s just return of stolen goods, or plain theft, depending on one’s POV. Obviously, if we steal Jewish department stores and give the proceeds to das Volk, the latter will be better off.

And of course the economic benefits of alien removal should constitute an additional source of ethnonationalism’s appeal. So should the public safety benefits of alien removal; the national security benefits of Islamist removal; the environmental benefits of excess population removal ... but they don’t.

Rather begging the question, aren’t we? 

GW@9

Why do you assume that the State, rather than the market, must be the progenitor of money? Please read Mises or the simpler Rothbard on the matter. Money should be considered and treated as any other consumer good, produced by the market in accordance with consumer demand. This is the optimum path. State is only needed to prevent fraud, which would include fractional reserve activity.

Posted by uKn_Leo on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 11:02 | #

when you look at the kind of economic appeal nationalism could make ... a staggering appeal amounting to giving England and all its built environment and public services to the English people ... one has to ask why the BNP offers bloody distributism ...

What working-class Brits wouldn’t prick up an ear if they were told to watch the listings of properties falling vacant

A BNP/ENP with intelligent, subtle poicies designed to attract attention and win win win doesn’t seem to exist (does anyone here know otherwise btw?). They could have won the last election, or ended up in the position of the Lib Dems vis a vis coalition. This is not pie in the sky. Tens of millions have had enough.

I will bloody well do it myself in a minute. I would hate to think that all along it was just that easy but I never found out because I never tried. Nick Griffin can’t do it because folks think he is a wierd looking tosser, but uKn_Leo however, is extremely aesthetically pleasing and accepts nothing less than victory in his endeavours!.

Posted by uKn_Leo on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 11:06 | #

Why do you assume that the State, rather than the market, must be the progenitor of money?

Golden rule economic policy number 1: Economic policy must be Jew proofed. Overrides all other considerations.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:24 | #

Leon,

Your faith in the Jewish-Austrian ideology is perfectly naive.  There is no market.  There is globalism.  Before globalism there was American industrial and cultural imperialism.  Ever since Marshall there has been one form or another of systemic distortion (leading ineluctably to corruption) in the global economy, and the “free market” is merely an enabling mechanism.  Power prostitutes “freedom”.  Nationalism is in large measure the opposition of that.

But it is also opposition to the Jewish prescription of the gentile “individual”.  Late Rothbard had something to be said for it, I seem to recall.  But von Mises, no.  He was profoundly wrong about human action because his view was Jewish ... the view that the gentile must be pressed into Olam Ha-ba ... the view that only Jews have ethnicity, and the path to supremacy is the path of the deracination of the gentile.

Accordingly, his modus of individualism is the usual Jewish attack on our ethnicity and social and sociobiological norms.  It pressages individualism (atomisation) upon us as the medium for the emergence of a new oligarchy (in fact, the oligarchy of a banking and dateline capitalist elite in which Jews can predominate).

It is a point I have made with “Austrians” before, most recently here:

http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/more-thoughts-on-emma-west/

We are not “individuals”. We are men. We have a trait of individualism, but it is merely a part of us. It can never be more. Further, we are not ordinarily conscious actors – that is, our ordinary waking consciousness is a state of absence characterised by mechanicity. Consciousness, when generated (by attention) does not, in fact, refer to human action at all. This is von Mises great error. Consciousness refers to human being.

In short, a nationalist economics, to be worthy of the name, must be an economics of and for the very being of the European native peoples.

Posted by Leon Haller on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:38 | #

FOR YOUR EDIFICATION:

Mises on the Basics of Money

Mises Daily: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 by Daniel James Sanchez

Is money not absurd? Daily we give up perfectly useful goods and services for the sake of little green pieces of paper.

But it is not just the fiat paper money we are familiar with that can seem strange in this regard. Even commodity money can seem weird when you think about it.

Why would people give up goods and services for little disks of silver and gold that they never actually use? Such disks are passed around via innumerable exchanges, perhaps never ultimately providing any ornamental or industrial services. What a bizarre custom!

One does not need to be an economist to see the social benefit of such an arrangement. And once everybody is already using money, each individual in accepting money would expect to benefit, confident that others too will accept the money.

But how did it start? This is a question I asked myself even as a child. At the beginning of it all, it would seem that the first person who accepted money would have no such confidence in its future purchasing power. So why would he do it? It would seem necessarily to involve a private sacrifice for the sake of public gain.

To a certain stripe of thinker, compelling such sacrifices is the raison d’être of the state. So to them, it is natural to think that the state must have first instituted money. Thus, the etatist theory of the origin of money was dominant through most of the history of economic thought.

The etatists were wrong. But that was just one of the many problems with the sorry state of monetary theory up through the mid-19th century. The whole field was a hodgepodge of disjointed insights. Nobody knew how to integrate those insights into a system, much less how to integrate monetary theory with the rest of economics.

Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School of economics, started to unravel the mystery of money in the late 19th century. One hundred years ago, this June, Ludwig von Mises finally cut the Gordian knot with his first magnum opus, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), arguably the most important single advance in monetary theory in the history of economic thought.

In that treatise, Mises erected a theory of money of astounding originality that was complete and internally integrated — as well as externally integrated with modern, subjectivist economics in general. With this book, Mises completed the victory of the “marginal revolution” by extending its conquest to the monetary realm. In doing so, Mises finally made economics whole.

The following discussion of the basics of money will largely be based on chapter 1 of that epochal work.

Money: Its Definition and Realm of Use

Money is defined by Mises in Theory of Money and Credit as a “universally employed” medium of exchange.[1] This differs from how Mises would define money in his 1949 treatise, Human Action: as a “commonly used” medium of exchange.[2]

Mises delimits the realm of money by indicating in which economic situations money would have a function, and in which economic situations money would not have a function.

First, there is no need for money in autarky. In autarky there is no division of labor among household units. Each household consumes only what it produces and only produces for its own consumption. In such conditions there is no exchange and therefore no use for money.

Secondly, there is no need for money in socialism. In socialism there is a division of labor (however unrealizable that division may be). However, because there is no private property, that also precludes the possibility of exchange, thereby eliminating any use for any medium of exchange.

In his 1922 book Socialism, Mises changes his mind on this matter. He states that in socialism, while money would have no role with regard to the means of production, it could still have a function with regard to consumers’ goods.[3]

Thus money, according to Mises in 1912, is only useful under capitalism: the state of affairs in which means of production are privately owned. In capitalism, the function of money is to facilitate exchange by making indirect exchange possible.

The Origin of Money

As Mises explains how money comes to be, the development occurs through three steps.

Step 1: From Commodity to Medium of Exchange

Direct exchange requires a double-coincidence of wants. For the shoemaker to get the dozen eggs that he wants in exchange for a pair of shoes, it is not enough that he prefer the eggs to the shoes. The chicken farmer must also happen to prefer the shoes to the eggs.

A big problem is that such a “double-coincidence of wants” is rare; it would be quite a stroke of luck for the egg-craving shoemaker to come across a barefoot chicken farmer.

However, the individual can solve that problem by resorting to indirect exchange. For example, the shoemaker may notice that the chicken farmer needs candlesticks, and the candlestick maker needs shoes. He can then trade his pair of shoes for some candlesticks, and then trade those candlesticks for the dozen eggs.

But the solution of ad hoc indirect exchange is a very limited one. It would still take an enormous degree of luck for the shoemaker to be able to find someone who is offering something the chicken farmer wants and who also wants shoes.

Chances are that the best series of exchanges that would get the shoemaker his eggs would be a lot longer. Perhaps he would need to trade shoes for rope, and then rope for timber, and then timber for fish, and then fish for candlesticks, and then candlesticks for eggs. And what about all the other goods the shoemaker wants? Many of those very well may each involve the same logistical nightmare.

Mises notes that “indirect exchange becomes more necessary as division of labor increases and wants become more refined.” The more people specialize, the less likely it is that any individual can acquire the various things he wants in exchange for the niche product that he brings to market.

Step 2: From Medium of Exchange to Common Medium of Exchange

After thus explaining how a commodity becomes a medium of exchange, Mises then explains how a medium of exchange becomes a common medium of exchange.

Whether a good arises as a common medium of exchange hinges on its marketability (or, in mainstream argot, “liquidity”). For “marketability” Menger uses the term “saleability,” which he defines as the

facility with which [a good] can be disposed of at a market at any convenient time at current purchasing prices, or with less or more diminution of the same.[4]
Menger uses the example of grain as a good with high marketability and an astronomical instrument as a good with low marketability.

In his article “The Origin of Money and Its Value,” Austrian economist Robert P. Murphy explains the example very clearly:

For example, someone selling wheat is in a much stronger position than someone selling astronomical instruments. The former commodity is more saleable than the latter.

Notice that Menger is not claiming that the owner of a telescope will be unable to sell it. If the seller sets his asking price (in terms of other goods) low enough, someone will buy it. The point is that the seller of a telescope will only be able to receive its true “economic price” if he devotes a long time to searching for buyers. The seller of wheat, in contrast, would not have to look very hard to find the best deal that he is likely to get for his wares.…

We might find that one telescope trades against 1,000 units of wheat. But Menger’s insight is that this fact does not really mean that someone going to market with a telescope can instantly walk away with 1,000 units of wheat.

Moreover, it is simply not the case that the owner of a telescope is in the same position as the owner of 1,000 units of wheat when each enters the market. Because the telescope is much less saleable, its owner will be at a disadvantage when trying to acquire his desired goods from other sellers.

Due to recognition of this disadvantage, vendors of less-marketable (saleable) goods will generally trade for more-marketable goods before they enter the market for the things they want to use themselves.

Since marketability, according to Mises, is a function of how “general and constant” is the demand for the good, this sets off an upward spiral of marketability for some goods.

Their high marketability draws more demand, which increases their marketability, which draws forth still more demand, and so on. This continues until a few goods are selected as “common media of exchange.”

Step 3: From Common Medium of Exchange to Money

Yet the selection process does not stop there. Naturally, individuals will want to trade their goods for the most marketable of these common media of exchange. As consensus grows as to which common medium is the most marketable, the upward spiral of marketability will tend to benefit only that medium, at the expense of others. Thus do inferior common media of exchange tend to drop out of the market entirely, and a single medium becomes generally used: in other words, becomes money.

According to Mises, through the process of what is now called “globalization,” moneys tend to die out as markets merge and competition begins anew among the moneys of the various markets. This process leads toward the establishment of a single money for the whole world.

The “Secondary Functions” of Money

According to Mises, the “secondary functions” of money, which many theorists write about, are really just instances of its primary and sole function: to facilitate exchange by making indirect exchange possible.

For example, the facilitation of credit transactions is not a separate function, as is often supposed, because credit transactions are simply exchanges of present goods for future goods.

Let us say a would-be lender who has produced present goods and services would like to acquire a claim to a greater amount of future goods and services. However, borrowers on the market are not likely to be interested in the specific goods and services he has produced. So the lender facilitates future exchange by exchanging his goods and services for present money, which borrowers on the market will likely desire.

The transmission of value across space is not a separate function either. Exchanging “a good here” for money, in order to exchange money for “a good there” is, again, simply another instance of acquiring a good via indirect exchange that would have been impossible to acquire via direct exchange.

Conclusion

No state enforcement is required to institute money by compelling private sacrifice for a public gain. The emergence of money need not involve such selflessness in the first place. As Mises tells the story of the origin of money, the economic actor benefits at each step of the way: when he first resorts to indirect exchange, when he first uses a common medium of exchange, and when he first accepts money for his wares.

The “market-process” theory of the origin of money is often characterized as a “spontaneous order,” as against the “deliberate order” of the etatist theory. But that should never obscure the fact that each step of the way in the market process origin of money is, as in all economic phenomena, a deliberate action undertaken by an individual to improve his state of affairs.

[1] Mises, Theory of Money and Credit, Chapter 1.
[2] Mises, Human Action, Chapter 17, Section 1.
[3] “In the socialist commonwealth, exchange itself has a much narrower significance, since it is confined to consumers’ goods only.” Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Part 2, Chapter 7.
[4] Carl Menger, The Origins of Money.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:00 | #

I don’t read junk.  I don’t gulp down Jewish thought.  As soon as I identify it I am on the look-out for the usual “perfecting” mechanisms.  Evidently, you have not understood what Jewish thought is.

Hyper-individualism, the free market, anti-statism are all strategies to deprive Europeans of their very being and also their freedom - something you have no comprehension of whatsoever.  It works like this.  Freedom is the freedom to be, not the freedom to “choose” (ie, to fetishize commodities).  The deracinated gentile chooses his commercial gew-gaw freely, but loses his being.  But European Man is, and his economic life should be both an expression of that, including an expression of the individualism which belongs to him, and an affirmation of it.

Please follow the logic.  Show me that you have the intellectual equipment to do that.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:29 | #

GW - you seem on good form again.

I would recommend Michael Sandel’s latest work on the ‘market society’ - of which he strongly disapproves - in contrast to say Phillip Bobbitt on the death of the nation-state and the rise of the ‘market society’ as fait accompli.

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets - Sandel - http://www.amazon.com/What-Money-Cant-Buy-Markets/dp/0374203032/

versus

The Shield of Achilles - Bobbitt - http://www.amazon.com/Shield-Achilles-Philip-Bobbitt/dp/0385721382/

And on what money is try - The Construction of Social Reality - John Searle - http://www.amazon.com/Construction-Social-Reality-John-Searle/dp/0684831791/

Not bad as a starting point. Personally I prefer Bhaskar’s ontological approach to social phenomena.

If the market society under a maximally understood ‘free-market’ ideology is the ‘answer’ then what is the question? Certainly not maintaining any form of communal intra and inter-generational ‘moral economy’ it would seem. Stick together or hang separately - white flight and gated communities are not a solution - you can run for a while but you can’t ultimately hide from the destruction of liberal pathologies.

Why is the Dansk Folkeparti a success in Denmark? I don’t think promoting a cultural, societal or market derived ‘free for all’ is part of it.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:36 | #

GW good slogan - the English want the simple right ‘to be’ (themselves in their own home). And of course ‘liberal freedom’, really the right to buy iPhones etc., is not worth a flying fuck. Let alone can it be foundational to a social order - contra the free-marketers.

Posted by Dan Dare on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:36 | #

I’m not really as of yet fully convinced that fractional banking is in and of itself such an evil that it necessarily has to be replaced by state creation of the valuta, as opposed to the strict application of a coherent monetary policy by the state.

It seems to me that the system has only gone haywire in quite recent times, with the mania for ‘de-regulation’ which has in turn led to casino-style banking and the manufacture of spurious financial ‘products’. Prior to that, the commercial banks in most western countries were an effective and essential part of the economic system, especially where their activities were ‘guided’ into productive areas such as capital investment in strategic industries and infrastructure.

I have in mind the type of policy pursued by the Deutsches Bundesbank for the first fifty years or so of the Federal Republic, which resulted in high growth, low inflation and the second strongest global currency after the Swiss franc. The DB co-existed with the regular banks and there were none of the financial shenanigans as we have seen in last ten years or so. The problems arising from fractional banking would seem to be more a function of the laissez faire approach taken to financial oversight rather than any inherent flaw within the system itself.

I’m open to persuasion though, as long as the mystery men behind the curtain do not assume a prominent role in the disccussion.

Posted by These on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 01:53 | #

are no mystery men behind the curtain. The curtain long since got ripped away:

http://www.doeda.com/jewishbankers.html

http://thezog.wordpress.com/who-controls-the-treasury-department/

http://overlordsofchaos.com/html/jewish_conspiracy_43.html

http://theoccidentalobserver.net/tooblog/?p=961

http://sites.google.com/site/911newworldorderfiles/quotesonzionism

http://www.realzionistnews.com/?cat=321

http://blogs.jta.org/philanthropy/article/2009/10/05/1008323/at-least-139-of-the-forbes-400-are-jewish

The question is how to design a nationalist economics wherein these mystery men have been thrown out the window, with the window boarded up and sealed, never to be reopened.

Posted by Leon Haller on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 02:06 | #

I’m rather amazed at the relentless closed-mindedness here. As I’ve stated repeatedly, nationalists first need to understand basic economics before they can proceed to ‘tweak’ the political economy so as best to serve white EGI.

Honestly, I can’t see why this should be even controversial, let alone objectionable. What is"Jewish” about truth? That sounds awfully Third Reichish.

Posted by Leon Haller on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 02:39 | #

GW@18

You’re discussing money, abstractly considered. Then you switch to undefined boilerplate. What is money in your view? What is its purpose, if something other than a medium of exchange? Do you propose to overthrow the whole edifice of classical monetary theory? I posted something just put online today over at the Mises Institute which at least provides a foundation for understanding ‘money basics’. If you disagree with any or all of those basics, then you ought to spell out where, why, and what your alternative is.

It’s quite easy to offer something lacking in legal specificity, like this:

But European Man is, and his economic life should be both an expression of that, including an expression of the individualism which belongs to him, and an affirmation of it. (GW)

Well, OK, but I still want to know, at least in bare outline, what your vision of a nationalist economy actually would look like (I’ve asked for the same concreteness from Dr. Lister at times past, too).

I can tell you mine. I want an arena of maximal individual choice, in terms of both employment options and consumer goods, one rooted in ultra-strong private property rights, which would only be violated to the extent that such violations are necessary to protect legitimate higher goods, which I define narrowly as those necessary to the perpetuity of the system itself. I would include within such goods immigration restrictions, anti-miscegenation laws, environmental protectionist legislation, epidemiological regulations, some economic protectionism directed towards militarily necessary industries, taxation to support defense and secret intelligence work, maybe some ‘morals’ legislation, considered on a case by case basis (are gay bathhouses a threat to the social order, apart from public health concerns? is pornography?), perhaps public subsidies to Big Science (though I ultimately classify these under national security spending). Maybe I’ve overlooked a few other areas.

But beyond these exceptions, PEOPLE SHOULD BE LEFT FREE AND ALONE TO PUSUE THEIR OWN DESTINIES AS THEY SEE FIT (provided, to repeat, that their freely chosen actions do not constitute a threat against the social/national order itself). This includes the money realm. Rothbard has written simply and definitively on this issue - the total lack of any need for State involvement in money creation or exchange, beyond normal laws against fraud (under which he would include fractionalism). All State money tampering involves theft of labor (money is commodified labor, labor translated into something tangible and quantifiable), redistribution of wealth from some to others (often creditors to debtors, and more broadly, manufacturers and laborers to financiers), especially, from the private economy to the State itself. I oppose all this, on both ethical and economic (national wealth maximization) grounds. 

Liberty is a great achievement of the Anglo-Saxon West. I hate to see it treated so cavalierly, if not dismissively.

Posted by A nurses message on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 04:53 | #

lifted from the Guardian 28/03/12 regarding the passing of the recent NHS (National Health Service) Bill by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government in the UK, signed by Royal Assent.

This bill was forced through parliament although the individuals that created it had no mandate to do so. The bill was opposed vehemently by doctors, nurses, midwives, surgeons, general practitioners, effectively all health care professionals and their respective governing bodies and unions. As such, they were then excluded from the debate.

The bill was also opoosed vehemently by the general public. This opposition and outright anger was not reflected accurately in any way by the mainstream media or the politicians that are supposed to represent their views and best interest.

The bill in question will open up large sections of the NHS to commercial healthcare corporations. Vested corrupt greed and private interest carried the bill through parliament, aided by bought and paid for politicians and advisors, many of whom represent the very corporations that expect to benefit greatly from the new access to English (only, of course) healthcare provision.

There are safeguards in place. But nevertheless this is a move taking England down the route of the full US style unfettered market controlled abominations in healthcare pricing and exclusion we see today. There is an element of everything in this story. It is, of course, for the reader to determine their thoughts on the balance between state and market control in all things, and the potential for abuse therein.

This is one nurses opinion:

28 March 2012 4:48PM   Yes, let’s do something. I have done everything in the run up, contacted my MP, attended the NHS rally, adopted a Lord, (I now have a house full of the buggers), then did it all over again at every request from 38 degrees and TUC requests. Me and my MP are now on first name terms. He’s a tory so not much change from him. I have rallied other nurses at work, total apathy from them. The majority of nurses are not political but i think the doctors combined with the public will hopefully save OUR NHS. The onconlogy doctor who spoke at the rally said he was ‘bloody angry’ and has been running up and down the country in protest. Lord Owen did his bit at the rally, he looked totally drained. The midwives shouted ‘strike’ from the balcony. I have never seen a reform move so fast in 25 years of nursing. Staff have been redeployed to my unit from ward closures, new managers brought in, old managers, matrons given a MARS payment to get gone, can’t remeber what it stands for. We’ve all been told we’re ‘lucky’ to have jobs. I have reduced my hours from full time to 30hrs and my manager said ‘that’ll save us some money’,( ha, ha, oh how we laughed at that joke). We have 5 beds ear marked for private dementia patients, block or spot purchase.When a bed manager phoned my ward to ask how many beds have you got and i said 15 NHS and 5 block/spot purchase she asked me what i meant and i said ‘i don’t know’. None of us know what’s going on apart from the new management that has been sent it to take us over as part funded, part private. Midwives said at the rally that they have to attend private patients first regardless of clinical need. So perhaps a request for a cup of tea outweighs an NHS patient dying. Sad, sad, scary times.

 

 

Posted by The Alarmed Dirty Bull on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 07:26 | #

Read in the paper the other day that the consumption of food and non-alcoholic beverages has collapsed by something like 10% since the current financial shit-storm (which the politicoes and hose ‘smart’ economists can’t see a way out of) started way back in 2008 - and that doesn’t even take iinto account the big population growth (ie immigration), that has taken place since then.
  Also read somewhere that the electrical wattage generated by this a nation has also collapsed by 10% since 2008. No, it is very reasonable to assume that the wattage of electricity consumed is a good proxy for national GDP, so basically our GDP has collapsed by 10%, a massive, massive collapse, far worse than the government lets on to, and a damned sight worse than 1929 - probably worse than anything in recorded British economic history.
  As for the collapse in food consumption, as we all know and is stark, staringly obvious, food is the very last thing anyone cuts down on.

Posted by Leon Haller on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:51 | #

I would be most interested to hear from GW, Dr. Lister, Dan Dare and others of their sympathies re what, exactly, they would criticize about the Canadian economic approach (other than immigration, though even there, Canada’s policy is superior to those of the US or the UK) as described in this short article:

O Canada!

Ike Brannon and Logan Albright

March 28, 2012 3:15 PM

Americans tend to think of Canada as a friendly, clean bastion of European-style socialism, replete with cradle to grave entitlements and a perpetually tepid economy. However, over the last few years Canada has set a pace for economic growth that clearly demonstrates that our current economic malaise is escapable.

A paper released Wednesday by the Aspen Institute documents the extent of Canada’s economic strength, noting that Canada managed to bounce back almost entirely from the economic morass of the Great Recession in just two years while the United States continues to struggle with high unemployment, slow economic growth and now the portents of inflation.

The study suggests that Canada’s economic resilience owes a lot to the country’s move towards deregulation and fiscal responsibility, policies that stand in sharp contrast to those advocated by our own president.

Our neighbors didn’t just luck into their current era of economic prosperity—it is the consequence of a series of sensible policy decisions made over the previous two decades, beginning with its determination to deal forthrightly with its own deficit crisis in the 1990s. Its liberal government came into power and decided that the apparently unending succession of deficits in excess of 10 percent of GDP simply couldn’t persist and responded by cutting spending dramatically across the board, with $7 in spending cuts for every dollar of revenue increases. As a result Canada achieved a balanced budget by the end of the 1990s but unlike the United States it managed to stay there, running a budget surplus for seven of the last ten years.

In contrast, the Obama administration has refused to even talk about significant spending cuts, especially in entitlements, preferring instead to demagogue Republican proposals—such as the recently announced Paul Ryan budget which calls for over $5 trillion in spending cuts—in an effort to score political points. As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said of the Ryan budget proposal: “We don’t have a definitive solution . . . we just don’t like yours.”

In recent years Canada has done even more to improve its competitive standing in the world, cutting its corporate tax rate in half to put its rate near the lower end of OECD countries. President Obama’s tax proposal lowers the U.S. corporate tax rate from the highest in the world to the third highest while continuing to tax U.S. companies on profits made from their overseas operations, in contrast with every other developed nation. Few suppose that such tax code tinkering will make any substantial difference in America’s ability to compete abroad.

Canada recognizes the value of drilling for oil within its borders, providing its citizens both with energy independence and a valuable source of exports. On the other hand, President Obama has routinely adopted policies that reduce our domestic oil supply, such as his refusal to back the Keystone XL Pipeline and the moratorium placed on offshore drilling after the BP oil spill. The result of these policies is not only higher prices, but a continued reliance on oil producing countries in the Middle East, many of which are actively anti-American.

Canada has an immigration policy that encourages the acquisition of human capital in the form of highly skilled workers who can add substantial value to the Canadian economy. Our federal government, on the other hand, has refused to address the issue of millions of unskilled workers pouring illegally across our borders. At the same time, the immigration process for those who wish to become citizens legally remains inefficient, costly, and time consuming. Because of this, our nation is deprived of many talented doctors, scientists, and engineers from around the world.

Canada has shown an impressive ability to learn from its history and to make unpopular short-term decisions that have created substantial long-term benefits for its citizenry.  Its Liberal party in particular deserves special attention for the alacrity with which it managed to recognize the inherent failures of its statist economy of the 1970s and 1980s and engineer a more efficient and competitive country in an increasingly globalized economy. It is high time United States learned the same lesson.

Posted by Leon Needs a Haircut on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:37 | #

Mr. “Free Market” dissimulates on the topic but ultimately rejects the idea of a free market in money, where buyers and sellers alone decide whose privately issued money they use based on whatever criteria are important to them.

Posted by Leon Needs a Haircut on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:46 | #

Such a free market if implemented would revolutionise politics, as it would enable one truly to “vote with one’s money”. I imagine Mr. Haller’s true objections center around facilitating Kievsky-style “collectivising” and difficulty large corporations would have functioning in such an environment.

Posted by White Hot Technologist Dirty Bull on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:47 | #

Latest news is that the German owned power companies have abandoned plans to build new nuclear generating capacity in Britain. The import of this move cannot be exaggerated.
But that’s waht happens if you hand over your vital national infrastructure to a load of foreigners who couldn’t give a damn about your country, in exchange for a cheap buck a’ la Maggie Thatcher.

Posted by Fake Imposter Dirty Bull on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:32 | #

Daily Cultural Enrichment Update:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2121911/6-000-young-girls-time-risk-rape-gangs.html

EU Euro genocide enforcers show who is the boss:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/29/migrant-boat-disaster-legal-action

Posted by Leon Haller on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:29 | #

Mr. “Free Market” dissimulates on the topic but ultimately rejects the idea of a free market in money, where buyers and sellers alone decide whose privately issued money they use based on whatever criteria are important to them. (Leon needs a haircut)

Such a free market if implemented would revolutionise politics, as it would enable one truly to “vote with one’s money”. I imagine Mr. Haller’s true objections center around facilitating Kievsky-style “collectivising” and difficulty large corporations would have functioning in such an environment.

Are you stupid? Of course I support a free market in money. Where do I oppose that? In having fractional reserve classified as fraudulent? Do you understand the concept of “fraud”? Perhaps you support a “free market” in cars, in which buyers may advertise and sell “BMWs” which contain Hyundai engines?

Posted by Nationalist Economic Policy on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:31 | #

Our neighbors didn’t just luck into their current era of economic prosperity—it is the consequence of a series of sensible policy decisions made over the previous two decades

By a government that presumably, to a certain extent, has the best interests of its citizens at heart.

It is debatable whether the same can be said for the UK/EU/US whose incumbent political classes would appear to be working towards other agenda, that are certainly not in their own citizens best interests.

The first and foremost of those agenda is undeniably the deracianation, impoverishment and ultimate destruction of world Europoid citizenry. By any means, fair or foul.

The desire is clearly not for the social or economic enrichment, nor longevity of their Europoid populations.

Maximally free market globalisation has worked in practice to the huge detriment of Caucasians in their entirety. This was the intention, so in that regard it has been highly successful.

A nationalist government would still be part of the wider global economic system. Wise, effective and efficient stewardship of the economy would allow it to compete internationally, and in many ways in superior fashion to the current model where every conceivable tactic is employed to supress the advancement of Caucasian society, giving maximal advantage to our rivals.

Nationalist government would unleash the economic potential of its population rather than holding it unnaturally restrained or in decline.

The core tenet, that the peoples best interests are paramount in all decision making and undertakings, may indeed necessitate a certain degree of state intervention and regulation to enable social prosperity and advancement. Rather than just economic considerations of profit making and exploitation of the many for the gain of the few.

A true nationalist government as such would hold control of essential services such as water supply and medical provision as well as components of transportation networks and energy production/delivery. Well run nationalist government would maintain these services in efficiency as their decision making would be based on short, medium and long term considerations parallel to the core tenet previously mentioned.

The balance of free market versus statism would necessarily be permanently in flux such as the prevailing circumstances demand, again, always with the core tenet as the ultimate guiding doctrine. Extreme uncontrolled free markets have failed the core tenet. Extreme control and statism have failed the core tenet.

We enter a new era.

 

 

 

Posted by Are you better than Ezra? on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:47 | #

Leon needs to read Ezra Pound and explain how his favorite Jew’s understanding of money is superior to Pound’s.

Posted by Leon Needs a Haircut on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 18:10 | #

Leon: “Are you stupid? Of course I support a free market in money.”

So I’m stupid if I think the government requiring a gold standard is a free market in money. Okay.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:35 | #

@Leon H

Well deregulation can no doubt provide a short term boost to economic activity as intially easy profits are extracted from previously ‘unexplored’ economic phase space – the question is what are the long term economic, social and cultural results arising from extreme ‘free-market’ ideology? And indeed it’s a fairly basic emprical question as to the efficacy of supply-side reforms upon the long-term trend rate of economic growth – I think the results in reality are not very impressive and only ultimately help those at the very top to gain even more wealth - which is hardly the same as the overall health of society now is it? For example look at the distribution of wealth in the USA since the 1980s and median incomes – not the most happy story for Mr. & Mrs. Average – in contrast the mega-rich of the USA over this period have nothing whatsoever to whinge about and indeed much to be blissfully thankful for.

I would suggest that right-wing liberalism is not very much better in any fundamental way from left-facing liberalism – both embrace radical fungibility as a key value - something no nationalist can ever embrace at the ‘ontological’ level (plus in any forms of liberalism both economic and cultural lots of ‘me’ attitudes and little time for ‘we’ considerations – see Sandel on the ‘market society’ for more on the ‘hollowing out’ effects of market thinking as foundational).

I’d put forward Denmark as my socio-economic model – but even if on average people were slightly poorer but enjoyed a more robust ‘collectivist outlook’ in both social and nationalist terms, then so be it – it’s a good trade-off. I don’t think such a trade-off is all that profound (Norway or Denmark are hardly ‘poor’) and indeed the Nordic nations suggest it is not the case that such a negative trade-off exists – the highest levels of quality or life and top of the index of human welfare and development suggest they are doing lots of things well. If one is an empiricist - looking at a societal level of ‘what works’  - why would anyone not look at the Nordic nations?

I can only think that ideological blinkers (such as Charles Murray’s ‘blank incomprehension’ at Danish happiness) distort American perspectives on such matters -  yes Denmark is a ‘socialist hell-hole’ - Sarah Palin told me so etc. But any form of nationalism is -  foundationally - a communitarian and collectivist form of politics. I don’t know why this is so difficult to comprehend.

Posted by Dan Dare on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:47 | #

Perhaps you support a “free market” in cars, in which buyers may advertise and sell “BMWs” which contain Hyundai engines?

Doesn’t the free market already do that? GM marketed cars made in Mexico and Japan as ‘Saabs’, and most ‘Chevrolets’ sold by GM in Europe are made by Daewoo. The Volvo XC90 has an engine manufactured by Yamaha, etc etc.

But to turn to Canada, its conservative fiscal policy is of course to be applauded, but its ‘drilling for oil’ is not. Perhaps you are unaware of the environmental damage that is being wreaked in Alberta as a result of sand and tar oil extraction, if not the documentary Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands is worth seeking out. Canada is, like Australia, transforming itself into a mining colony and granary for Chinese consumers, as well as the key life support for Americans who cannot be weened from their 15 mpg Straßenkreuzer.

As for immigration, it was Canada whose government announced several years ago that defined, as a matter of state policy, an immigration target in the amount of 1% of the population. This has since been quietly dropped, but with immigration currently running at a around a quarter of a million, the inflow is still almost three times that of the US, on a percapita basis. And like the US, going on for 90% of the intake is from the third world, with a growing proportion arriving through the so-called ‘family’ channel.

In Canada’s example I don’t see a great deal that could be usefully emulated by nationalist governments elsewhere.

Posted by The Real Dirty Bull on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:51 | #

Dan,
      It’s well worth remembering that Britain, which unlike Canada is vastly over-crowded (especially in London and the south-east), a big food and natural resource importer and has very little empty space, imports immigrants at a higher per capita rate than Canada.

Posted by Old Grey Bearded Prophet Dirty Bull on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:57 | #

Mark my words:
Canada will be a freezing cold shit-hole Brazil mark two in 50 years time.

Dirty Bull hath spoken.

Posted by Dan Dare on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:58 | #

Dirty Bull @39

On an apples-to-apples comparison - that is the number of new (legal) permanent residents (aka grants of settlement in the UK) - the UK takes in slightly more than the US on a per capita basis (3.8 vs 3.4 pro mille) while Canada admits 7.4. Australia is almost as badly off at 7.1 pro mille, although in their case the picture is mitigated somewhat by the fact that around a third of immigrants are European by ancestry. Figures from 2010.

Of course it is criminal lunacy on the part of our so-called leaders for the UK, particularly, to be admitting so many, but we’ve been saying that for a while now.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:21 | #

An interesting lecture on Karl Polanyi

Including ideas on the nature of money, the environment, mass migration, population growth etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvwWJt9MkIw

Posted by John Maynard Beans on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:34 | #

Woodrow Wilson:

“A great industrial nation is controlled by it’s system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the world, no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men”.

James Madison:

“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and it’s issuance”.

John Maynard Keynes:

“Should government refrain from regulation (taxation), the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud can no longer be concealed”.

Sir Josiah Stamp:

“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits”.

Henry Ford:

“It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning”.

 

 

 

Posted by Majority Rights Central Banking Inc on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:44 | #

As of March 29th, 2012 gross US debt was $15.589 trillion. Unfunded debt $62 trillion.

Decrease in the purchasing power of the US dollar since 1900 = 96-97%

 

Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:49 | #

Q&A session here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie4YZHX4BkI

Posted by Desmond Jones on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 06:06 | #

It appears Mr. Harper is shifting the immigration goal posts to take advantage of the huge pool of European unemployed. A bounty of immigrants from southern Europe and the Oyrish…salvation is at hand. LOL

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2012/03/28/f-vp-stewart-immigration.html?cmp=rss

P.S. Do you really believe what Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are saying about the oil sands?

Posted by Precient Prophecy on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:25 | #

Benjamin Franklin (1787):

If you do not exclude them from these United States, in their Constitution, in less than 200 years they will have swarmed here in such great numbers that they will dominate and devour the land and change our form of government, for which we Americans have shed our blood, given our lives our substance and jeopardized our liberty.
If you do not exclude them, in less than 200 years our descendants will be working in the fields to furnish them substance, while they will be in the counting houses rubbing their hands. I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude Jews for all time, your children will curse you in your graves.

 

Posted by The Contentious Dirty Bull on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:52 | #

Dan,
      Actually I was thinking more on the lines of the 500,000 odd gross imigration into the UK that happens year in year out.As we all know, once their in, they stay in for good plus the import granny (to live off the taxpayer), the missus and shitloads of cousins PDQ.
Also all that guff about ‘exceptional leav to remain’.

I don’t know what ‘pro mille’ means, but 500,000 is roughly 1/120 th of the UK population.
I’m not sure what Canada’s population is these days, if they’ve breached 30 million or not. Ayhow 250,000 for half Britain’s population is roughly the same rate.
And f course illegal immigration into Britain is massive and unquantified.

Posted by The Illiterate Dirty Bull on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:57 | #

DB paologises for the glaring spelling errors in the last post, which was rushed off at a rate of knots, and unchecked.

Posted by John on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 08:51 | #

Question to Haller:

“Should there in your opinion be a free market in money where no buyer and seller is required to accept any particular currency but instead, competing currencies circulate and buyers and sellers use, don’t use, accept or reject them according to how well they hold their value, how liquid they are and the transaction costs associated with them.”

His real answer (after dissimulating “agreement in principle”)

“My solution is to require a gold standard, at least for some period of time (there could be a “sunset” provision).

Posted by Spellchecking Imposter Dirty Bull on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 08:53 | #

http://oxforddictionaries.com/

Posted by Enrichment Index Update. on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:12 | #

In news that has not surprised the markets, it has been announced today that the Enrindex has fallen by a further three points, hitting a new all time low.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2122187/Asylum-seeker-raped-woman-park-released-awaiting-deportation.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/30/france-raids-terror-suspects-toulouse

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2122166/Iraqi-terror-suspect-stripped-British-nationality-public-good-succeeds-court-battle-win-passport.html

An expert analyst, when asked if we could expect any positive movement in the Enrindex anytime soon stated.“Not bloody likely “.

 

Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 12:06 | #

Interesting little book

Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Libertys-Exiles-American-Loyalists-Revolutionary/dp/1400075475/

Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 12:52 | #

From the ‘Festival of Dangerous Ideas’ Tariq Ali on “What we can learn from Terrorists”.

Part 1/5 here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKp0tOczmgg

Posted by uKn_Leo on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:16 | #

[G_L it is extremely kind of you you to keep highlighting these books. I, for one, intend purchasing them all asap and look forward to the day when I can show you this new knowledge in my posting. I don’t use credit and do not have a credit/debit card so it will take some extra time to acquire them but I wanted to express my gratitude in the meantime.]

Posted by Solid Gold on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:11 | #

Gold is not money. Gold is a store of value. Money is simply a facilatator of exchange and should be plentiful and move they a healthy economy at extremely high velocity.

Gold is a lesser god for kikes and their lesser Anglo-Judean cousins like Haller.

The outlawing of usury (compound interest) is the sine qua non of a truly nationalist economy.

Posted by Interest Slavery on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:21 | #

Whoever wins the Mega Millions jackpot tonight could afford to pay .125% of the *interest service* for one year on the National Debt.

Nationalist economics = Debt Jubilee + Interest Free Fiat Currency + Outlawing Compound Interest

No jewishness = just right

Posted by Dan Dare on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:21 | #

DB @ 47

For the purposes of UK immigration statistics around half or more of those admitted as ‘immigrants’ are students and others admitted for a period longer than 12 months. The Canadian and US figures do not include students and only account for new permanent residents, for which the UK term is ‘grant of settlement’.

Pro mille = per thousand.

Posted by Dan Dare on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:36 | #

P.S. Do you really believe what Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are saying about the oil sands? - Desmond

You can watch Petropolis with the sound off if the narrative disturbs you but, yes, what they are describing is a national scandal. And for what purpose? It almost ally goes to the US anyway, why would Canuckistanis want to wreck their environment just so Americans can keep their SUVs? And now the Chinese are getting in on the act.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 23:57 | #

Greenpeace and the Sierra Club lie like a rug. The tar sands encompass an area of vast wilderness, about the size of England, which is barely a blip on the Canadian landscape. Open pit mining is probably 2% of that total and is reclaimable. If they were really concerned about the environment they would call for a moratorium on immigration, but they don’t and why not? Some guy with a load of dough whose grandfather came to America as a victim fleeing some evil pogrom made it so. LOL

What interest do these Jews have in funding Greenpeace and the Sierra Club?

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2010/10/14/u-s-foundations-against-the-oil-sands/

Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 02:55 | #

[G_L it is extremely kind of you you to keep highlighting these books. I, for one, intend purchasing them all asap and look forward to the day when I can show you this new knowledge in my posting. I don’t use credit and do not have a credit/debit card so it will take some extra time to acquire them but I wanted to express my gratitude in the meantime.] uknleo

Tell me what subjects you are interested in, and I can help start you on your way to becoming a deeply knowledgeable nationalist without getting mired in a bunch of ignorant and/or leftist crap. I don’t mean to suggest that all leftist (let alone, merely non-rightist) books are without value; far from it. Nor would I wish to be seen as arguing that anything written by a rightist is, eo ipso, valuable; very far from it. But in order to profit from leftist tomes one needs to have built up a base of correct thinking.

At the very least, I’ve gone through a lot of materials over the years, and I can build up a newcomer’s general fund of humane learning more rapidly than it originally took me, for long years desultorily wandering over the intellectual ‘wilds’...

Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 03:03 | #

Gold is not money. Gold is a store of value. Money is simply a facilatator of exchange and should be plentiful and move they a healthy economy at extremely high velocity.

Gold is a lesser god for kikes and their lesser Anglo-Judean cousins like Haller.

The outlawing of usury (compound interest) is the sine qua non of a truly nationalist economy. (Solid Gold)

What a stupid comment!

The levels of ignorance this reveals are not worth delving into. Seriously. Every statement is wrong (except wrt the first one, in the technical legal sense that gold is indeed not money as a function not of its economic potential, but the legal tender laws).

Gold was the traditional money of the West since before the Jewish Diaspora, you asshole!

And the sine qua non of any nationalist economy is that it exists to serve the nation or race first (but not “first and last”; nationalism is about national and racial preservation, not orgies of collectivistic nonsense, which are always only fictional anyway: some person or elite inevitably rules). Grow up.

Stop hiding behind monikers. Show yourself, or at least stick with a single identifier.

 

 

Posted by uKn_Leo on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 03:18 | #

Thank you Leon_H!. A confession, posts 2/22/25/33/42/43/46 in this thread were mine, disguised largely to hide from you. With that in mind Leon, i’ll take whatever you’ve got, on any subject you think worthwhile. I am in a desperate rush to learn quickly having wasted a full two decades or more partying. However I know you are extremely busy and would not want you to spend undue time on me. I’ll leave it at that Leon, and thank you for your exceptional, kind offer.

Posted by uKn_Leo on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 03:23 | #

(Re 62- The other hidden moniker guy is NOT me!)

Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 03:45 | #

Dan Dare @37

I posted the article about Canada in a larger attempt to ‘concretize’ what anti-capitalist nationalists object to. They are always so willfully vague (in this aping other, non-rightist anti-capitalists). I want to hear their specifics of a nationalist economy. I have, in a general way, provided mine (ie, radical free market, with nation/race-protecting exceptions) in comment #24.

As to the environmental impact of tar sands drilling, I leave that to the ecologists and petroleum experts. I would point out that the US hardly ‘forces’ Canadians to drill, and that there would be plenty of buyers for their heavy crude even without the US. Their businessmen would see to that, I quite assure you.

As for their immigration policy, obviously I never said I supported it, merely that if immigration must occur, better that it be grounded in skills-based, economically ‘value-added’ criteria, than the horrible family reunification criteria that my benighted country uses in making decisions in this most important of all policy areas.

More broadly, social-democratic ethnocommunitarians fail to note or refute the following set of propositions:

1. Capitalist economies out-compete non-capitalist ones, and not only at the extremes: ceteris paribus (and they often aren’t, for biological, cultural, historical, and environmental reasons - which is precisely why theory is needed to understand economics: it is otherwise often impossible to disentangle the precise economic contribution to any economic effect from all other non-economic contributors), economies that move towards or away from capitalism will perform proportionately better or worse.

2. Wealthier economies can afford better militaries (even if they sometimes choose to forego them).

3. Nationalists, if successful politically and serious about nonwhite repatriation, may face the world’s wrath (eg, see apartheid South Africa), and thus will have to oversee their lands’ development of great military power. No European nation will be ‘allowed’ to elect and keep a nationalist government which actually proceeds with repatriation (the sole possible exception being Russia, which is already powerful, albeit growing annually weaker, and whose economy is primarily based on needed resource exports). Thus, any nationalist government that finally does attain power will have to proceed judiciously and piecemeal, starting with ending nonwhite immigration and expelling illegal aliens, while concurrently restoring capitalist economic growth (both as a societal ‘bribe’ or ‘lubricant’, and to generate the wealth necessary to pay for vastly increased military spending), and building up advanced military power.

In sum, how will any newly inaugurated European ethnostate defend itself without crash military spending, and how will it pay for that defense spending without either stirring up indigenous popular revolt, if forced to cut popular parasite-programs in order to free up funds for defense, or restoring radical capitalism?     

Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 04:35 | #

UKnleo,

Re the wasted partying, you and me both, pal! I have nothing over you there.

Let me ask you a few questions. These are not ‘leading’ questions. Are you smart? What kind of education did you have? And, how many books do you reasonably think you could read in a year, based on your normal schedule of work, family or other responsibilities? I only ask because this woudl help me to narrow down what might work best for you.

Believe it or not, I have a friend whom I am similarly ‘educating’ in this way. He’s a fellow conservative with whom I and others are working on a new political project. My friend is fairly (but not especially) intelligent, but hitherto unbelievably unintellectual. He has excellent nationalist instincts, but beyond reading columns by Pat Buchanan and the late Joe Sobran (and the more late Sam Francis), and occasionally reading something from American Renaissance that I’ve emailed him, he just hasn’t read much of anything. He has a busy work and family life, but he’s also mentally lazy.

Of late, he has realized how deficient his knowledge is, even for what he’s doing on the project, which is obviously not on the intellectual side. So he’s asked me for some book recs, though only in conservative/nationalist political areas (he’s totally uninterested in the deep historical or philosophical background of modern nationalist understanding). I pretty much just started with Buchanan: Death of the West, State of Emergency, Where the Right Went Wrong, and his new Suicide of a Superpower (which I have not read, though I’ve read literally all his other books, so I know his style, and I have read several reviews of this new book). The latter books are all US-specific, but have you read Death of the West? If not, you really should. If you have, did you find the intellectual level about right to hold your interest, or was it too simplistic? That information would help me a lot.

More broadly, do you just want a good overview of the human world? If so, I would start with history. I think a good background in history is more important for political understanding than one in philosophy. Why not read the three great narrative histories of your late countryman, the master narrative historian J. M Roberts?

The New Penguin History of the World

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0141030429/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1/179-1398231-1079312?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_r=1NWR9CADTXEZ2MNZ0R5F&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_i=0195219279

The Penguin History of Europe

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/roberts?store=book&ttl=penguin history of europe&usri=penguin history of europe

The Penguin History of the Twentieth Century

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140276319/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0670884561&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=00S1QEDNDMNCK0BP8KHQ

Merely reading these three massive, yet highly readable works will likely put you light years ahead of most of your ‘mates’ in general erudition, as well as preparing the ground for your being able properly to appreciate more specific nationalist studies.

Seriously, I have many, many other recommendations, from broad overviews to highly specialized works in nationalist areas of interest. The problem with looking at the latter, without having ‘prepared the ground’ by studying the former, is that you would lack the context properly to assimilate and optimally use what you’re learning. Take a really extreme case, like GW’s musings about Heidegger. I have to admit that I’m not qualified to make sense of them, and not only because I haven’t (yet) read Heidegger. My exposure to non-political philosophy is so pitiful that I’m not even qualified to read Heidegger, let alone analyze comments about him or building on him. Reading Heidegger would be an exercise in futility and incomprehension for me at this stage; that is, before I’ve studied Continental philosophy more broadly. There is an orderly progression in humane learning, just as there is in scientific study. You can’t just open the Critique of Pure Reason or Being and Time and expect to read with profit. And while those may be ‘outlier’ cases, I think the general principle holds across and within all disciplines. 

Read systematically, not just randomly.

 

Posted by uKn_Leo on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 06:16 | #

I am a product of the era in which I was born.

Single parent household from the age of two. Straight A student until the age of 13 (top performer in year group in all subjects through junior school [junior high] and first year of high school). Disastrous family move to a new city (from a smaller town) and new comprehensive school. Educated then on in a disruptive class of delinquents, rate of learning held to the lowest common denominator. Rebellious streak kicks in, disillusionment, frustration, effects of poverty (difficult to study when hungry). Struggle through to exams at 16. Limp through to exams at 18. No direction, no university, no family back up, no inspiration to achieve.

Into the job market as such. Heavily involved in raving/clubbing sub cultures, exposure to organised crime/narcotics. Looking to a different form of ‘success’, achievement in the university of life/experience. Passed with Honours, at the cost of several billion obliterated brain cells and wasted years.

Always a patriotic nationalist. Never signed up to liberal values, racially aware, seeking knowledge in my own, non traditional way then sharing that knowledge with all around that would listen (many converts to the cause, army on standby).

Chosen, at the moment not to pursue family (very sad, would have made a great father) due to fear/concerns over UK post 2020ish and the prospects for my offspring, (also this:am hot. Attract hot girls. Hot, bitchy, self centred, feminist modernist girls. I am a nice guy and this is not a good combination. Hence, thus far failed to meet Mrs right. No family plan may rapidly go out the window should Mrs right show up.) those fears becoming more realised by the day. Property ownership an unrealistic pipe dream (South West England average property price 10 X average wage). Currently completely out of the system, on tax strike. Restored family relations (been working on a family project for income-mum married a well off guy-helped them renovate then sell property, then build a luxury Dutch barge). Much free time to devote to study. Book reading potential, one per week, dependent on length.

Have not read Buchanans work but will get on the case, along with your other recommendations. Will report back in due time.

Advice on systematic reading received and understood. THANKS LEON_H!!!.

Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 09:01 | #

Interesting and honest bio, Ukn-Leo. Different from mine, I do admit. Given my decidedly more privileged background, I am almost certainly the underachiever here (at least from the nationalist perspective) - but I’m working on that!

Being from Southern California, I can certainly identify with complaints of rapid racial change, as well as steep home prices.

This is none of my business, but have you considered returning to university for a degree? Is this technically possible at an advanced age? I have no idea how these things work in England. Might that not be better than independent study while living hand-to-mouth?

Also, is there the ability to get involved in nationalist activism, if one is not a professional? In the US, one can always do volunteer work, but that kind of work only rarely leads to any sort of eventual salaried position (unless one happens to latch on to a winning candidate), and that even more rarely within nationalist circles, I’d imagine. I wonder if an intelligent single man with time on his hands and patriotism in his soul couldn’t volunteer for a nationalist outfit in partial hopes of that eventually resulting in getting ‘noticed’ by someone of influence, which in turn could lead to gainful employment advancing The Cause. From what I hear at MR re the buffoonery surrounding British Nationalism, serious and committed men of talent seem to be needed.

Anyway, if serious on the intellectual front, start with Death of the West (which you can probably find for a few pounds on some book remainder site online), and tell me what you think. I suspect you’ll find it too simplistic, too journalistic, and will be looking for weightier material. If so, I have much to recommend. The problem, however, and I’m sure others here will second me on this, is that there just isn’t very much written from either a nationalist or even sociobiologically realist perspective. Most books are written from either a tendentiously leftist perspective, or, at best, from a rigorously, ideologically neutral one.

I recommend the Roberts books not only because of their author’s impeccable professional standing (a true British historian of the grand ‘Old School’), and their general excellence as overviews, as well as readability, so important in historical works of great length, but also because I have a very difficult time discerning any political or professional bias (though if I had to hazard a guess, I suspect his sympathies were Tory). Here is the first line from one of his obituaries, this itself from a leading contemporary British historian:

Jeremy Black
The Guardian, Friday 6 June 2003 03.48 EDT

For his ability to grasp and communicate the full sweep of the past, John Roberts, who has died aged 75, must rank as the leading historical mind of his generation.

 
 
Not a bad place to start a course of self-study, I should think.

Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 10:05 | #

One other point, ukn-leo.

Have you read through the back online archives of the recently deceased publication American Renaissance?

I strongly recommend doing so. Yes, its focus is American, but it has published innumerable articles in its 255 issues on general racial topics. That’s an excellent place to begin one’s racialist education.

Posted by Who could possibly take issue? (A Kike) on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 11:26 | #

Outlaw compound interest

Plentiful, interest free fiat money

Debt Jubilee

It is irrelevant that gold was at one point used as currency by a few rich Europeans. Most of us used barter thru most of human history. Is that an argument for a barter standard?

Who takes issue with these these things and why?

Posted by Which side are you on? on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 11:33 | #

Anglo-Judeans - the weaker, more effeminate, more European jew - like Leon have made it obvious which side they are on. Do you middle class folks at MR have eyes to see? The only thing Catholic about Leon is his despite to Catholicize gold standard slavery. What’s next? Debtor’s prison?

all that glitters…. Don’t let the fork tongued mischling confuse you.

Posted by Free Market = Plentiful Money on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 12:33 | #

Bankers, kikes and Yankee-Judeans worship scarcity of coinage! Deflation and scarce gold (gold which bankers, kikes, chinks and Indians own) is just another deity in the pantheon of the USURER and MAMMONITE!

A free market in money, a truly free market, would make currency cheap, plentiful, deprecating and interest free.

Beware of the Hallerite judaizers! Even Guessedworker the Grey has warned you MR! They will have your possessions for small fragments of JEWelry during deflation and speculate the price of commodities to the heavens during periods of inflation!

Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 12:39 | #

Another asshole.

Yes, there most certainly should be, not debtor’s prison (useless because the point is to recover what one’s owed, and incarceration hardly accomplishes that), but some method by which debtors are forced to pay their debts. This is called justice. Its opposition is called theft, aka, modern bankruptcy law.

I have a very old friend who is a wealthy Jewish bankruptcy attorney (for creditors, God bless his work!). The thefts which legally occur (from creditors, I have to mention for the economically illiterate populists swimming in nationalist circles) are beyond outrageous, not to mention the macro-destructive transfer of capital resources they represent from the efficient and productive to the inefficient and unproductive.

Bourgeois civilization was the highest point achieved by Western Man. That civilization is under direct assault by multiracialism - mass immigration + coercive racial integration. I am here because the multikult must be opposed before it destroys the West.

But I’ll be damned if I’m signing on to some fascist/populist/leftist bullshit. I have to say, it’s the American WNs, especially in the paleoconservative mold - Sam Francis, Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow - who seem to have gotten things right. Though Enoch Powell also got it right.

A lot of you have regressed. Your movement has regressed. Enoch was ‘ahead’ decades ago of where you are now.

Taylor has an excellent review of another dipshit Left-WN:

http://amren.com/features/2012/03/a-radical-left-plan-for-racial-survival/

He does an effective job exposing Left-nationalism’s errors. I posted a comment there, too, which should get posted tomorrow.

No, people, we’re not going to sacrifice private property and free market prosperity just to satisfy some anti-Semites. I’m still not convinced that all forms of liberalism must necessarily lead to white extinction. No one ever responds to me when I point out that Jefferson was both a libertarian and a racialist.

The liberal tradition was responsible for much good in the West. Its problem was in adopting racial universalism. It has not been shown here at MR that such an adoption must necessarily be made by liberalism - or Christianity, for that matter.

 

 

Posted by Money isn't property on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 13:21 | #

Couldn’t detect an argument in that.

Leon is good friends with Jewish attorneys! Who would have guessed!

Leon would you have you believe that an ethereal “right” to parasitic rent seeking is “property” and that this is inviolate. Rent isn’t property. USURY based on fiat currency and fractional reserve notes isn’t property ACCORDING TO HIS OWN DEFINITIONS!!!

Posted by Avenging Spirit of Ezra on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 13:42 | #

Not only is what was good enough for Ezra not good enough for Leon but what was good enough for the Almighty Lord Himself fails under the penetrating gaze of Hallerstein, the lickspittle waterboy for jew lawyers.

In the Old Testament, socialist racialism was YHWH’s prescription for the Twelve Tribes. This included DEBT JUBILEES, land redistribution and A BAN ON USURY. All of this is unacceptable for the kike Haller who merely sputters when confronted.

Beware this pegboy of the juden! This man who stands guard for a brood of vipers!

Where the Lord has said “Thou shalt not!” Haller has said “We shall O Lord! At your command!” Twisting the words of my God like Gary North.

Posted by Risk Free on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 14:05 | #

“Risk free investment!” shouts the kike in unison with the banker and a cornucopia of pickpockets and assorted swindlers! You must pay every penny and ten thousand more for it is your sacred duty before God to render holy pounds of interest for the farthings of principal because we hold highly this principle of justice!

Posted by Graham_Lister on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 14:37 | #

Leon Haller said

“But I’ll be damned if I’m signing on to some fascist/populist/leftist bullshit. I have to say, it’s the American WNs, especially in the paleoconservative mold - Sam Francis, Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow - who seem to have gotten things right.”

Leon there you go again with the Hayekian liberalism BS – as if economic efficiency is the highest of all goods? Are you saying if the trade-off between the free-market in its purest form and the salvation of European man had to be made in such a way as to restrict the operation of the market you would be against it? Seriously? Is Goldman Sachs profitability that important to you?

I’m OK with being a Post-Modern popularist along the lines of the Dansk Folkeparti. But Leon honestly is having an unregulated free-market in credit default swaps the height of European civilization…really? Again you make the mistake that market exchange and market derived relationship primarily embody the social-order – they do not – they are secondary, not primary, in any civilized hierarchy of values. The English, Danes and Greeks all exists as peoples well before the rise of modern liberal-capitalism.

On Jefferson I do believe I suggested that his racial views and his liberalism were incoherent – an example of cognitive dissonance. After all if Africans are humans too then are they not also holders of those ‘natural rights’ to pursue the happy life as they individually see fit? Once the egalitarian plateau had been established it was always going to be expanded to included blacks etc., within the context of American life.

One cannot be fundamentally both a communitarian and a liberal at the same time – either the health of the whole is ultimately you highest value/good or it is that of the individual. Of course we can and should be ‘secondary liberals’ in areas such as intellectual life etc., and use the market as a socio-economic mechanism were appropriate but this idea that market mechanisms are the solution to every conceivable political and social issue is profoundly ideological and profoundly stupid and self-defeating. Individualistic liberalism – including that embodied in the idea of the ‘free-market’ cannot be foundational to a particularist social-order that wishes to survive – after all if a cosmopolitan market in people, ideas, goods, services etc., is the best way to generate maximal wealth and utility why bother with nationalism at all – it’s an antediluvian throwback which only serves as a non-rationally derived constraint upon greater efficiency and modern ‘progress’ yes? Radical fungibility in everything within the ‘spaceless universalism’ of the market is more efficient and just, yes?

Do we really have to go over the same territory time after time?

The question is – what is the market good for? – and is good for what I want politically? I’d suggest being an ultra ‘free-market’ nationalist is something of an oxymoron.  And profitability/efficiency isn’t my highest political or cultural value nor can it be for any serious, ontological grounded, ethno-political formation.

Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 14:43 | #

Lister@36

So much I could say in response, but it would have to be a treatise in political economy. I don’t mean to be condescending, but if you really want to be a “broad intellectual” you ought to study some free market texts. I think we’re at needless cross purposes here.

Take regulation. In the US, it has been estimated that govt regulation at all levels diminishes US real GDP by upwards of two trillion dollars per year (out of an official approx $15 trillion economy). Some of us, ie, the racially aware, think the number is far higher, as the studies I refer to don’t count (in part because it’s extremely difficult to) the productivity costs of affirmative action - though any American who’s had to deal with dumb minorities knows those costs are real. [Note: affirmative action is a regulatory cost; black street crime is not, though the latter is a huge economic, as well as psychological, drain on society.]

The problem is that without your having a good background in economics or business, I’m not sure how to make you see the plausibility of that $2 trillion number. Moreover, your negative assessment of the imperative of deregulation suggests that you would not have the relevant knowledge to understand that, eg, deregulation (a broad term) overall helps small business, not big business. The latter typically uses regulations to cartelize industries, which in turn tends to ossify them, to the consumer’s (and society’s) ultimate disadvantage.

That deregulation is often poorly handled, indeed, that it is almost always only partial deregulation (and thus sometimes worse than the original regulations), does not negate the theoretical propriety of deregulation. It just means what it appears to: a botched job (the classic example in the US being savings and loan (partial) deregulation in the early 80s - or better, the current housing crisis, which was 100% a product of government: in part a matter of deregulating mortgage down payment requirements, but with such “sub-prime” mortgages still backstopped by taxpayer-financed Fannie Mae; full deregulation would have allowed home buyers and banks to negotiate their mortagages on whatever terms they chose, but with no taxpayer guarantees).

Furthermore, that the distribution of wealth in the US has dramatically increased in the past few decades (something I am apprehensive about) is not something that can necessarily be assigned to the pathetically limited deregulation we experienced in the 80s (and more than compensated for by additional economy-killing regulations since then). This wealth gap is perplexing, though it has many causes (and is occurring all over the world, btw). Part of it is due to our huge influxes of poor immigrants, which both add to baseline poverty stats, as well as hold down wages for the native-born.

Read comment #17. What is unsatisfactory to you?

Supporting free markets doesn’t mean exalting them above all other political goods. That’s a straw man. Even libertarianism is not economism.

Re the Nordic nations. Surely you must understand that their social stat successes (with which I’m not sure I agree; marriage, out of wedlock births, fertility, alienation - all not good) could be due to factors other than their forms of political economy. Germany is very successful (though before its free market reforms, esp re labor deregulation in the early 00s, it was the “sick economy of Europe”); that does not mean its success is due to government policy. It could be successful in spite of govt regulation, and even more successful with more of a free market economy.

If you were to study the awesome intellectual coherence of Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School (and that doesn’t mean only reading some shallow classical liberal philosophy), and then compare it to the incoherence of Keynesians, Marxists, and other interventionists, I doubt you would continue to be hostile to free markets. Support for free enterprise is not synonymous with Ayn Rand’s philosophy or classical liberalism.

Posted by Jewish Guru on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 15:02 | #

If you were to study the awesome intellectual coherence of Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School

It’s really easy to be “awsomely” coherent when you are speculating from an ivory tower on the Rockefeller dime.

You should really study Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem with regard to consistency and proof.

Reality shatters the jewish illusion quite quickly despite its “awesome” coherence.

Free markets! Women in the workplace! Children in the workplace!

nihilum sanctus says the marketplace to man…

It’s a sad commentary on this place that this fucking scumbag is allowed to take up our time.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 16:10 | #

@uKn_Leo

Book recommendations – can do.

A word of caution – avoid, especially on the internet, much (99% or so) of the self-described ‘far right’ (or WNs) – or rather don’t take them too seriously – firstly many of them are seriously ‘hard of thinking’ and secondly many are bonkers, toxic weirdos, ‘marginal’ personality types etc., obsessed with monocausal explanations for ‘everything’, ‘esoteric’ bullshit, ill-informed ‘gene talk’ etc. There is an entirely mainstream, but non-liberal, case for ethno-communitarianism to be made but few WNs would have the intellectual, political, cultural or emotional ability to construct such a case. One of the reasons I ‘hang about’ at MR is precisely because I think GW and others here do have the collective ability to make real progress on this front. Oh and avoid Nietzsche and anyone describing themselves as a ‘superman’ – they are delusional fuckwits.

On liberalism as such you could try - ‘Liberalism: A Counter-History’ by Domenico Losurdo. Described in the quite liberal Financial Times as “A brilliant exercise in unmasking liberal pretensions, surveying over three centuries with magisterial command of the sources.” This book is a forensic excavation that aims, and succeeds, in challenging the dominant narrative of the history of liberalism. This dominant narrative, self-regarding, self-congratulatory, claiming for itself a constant, peaceful path of progress, is described by Losurdo as a ‘hagiography’. It is one that Losurdo quite ruthlessly undermines at almost every turn.

OK some other books/authors (with a British favour) I’d say are really good places to start if you want to be a somewhat clever ‘non-liberal’ (note that isn’t the same as being a ‘bog-standard’ Tory):

Number 1 – Theodore Dalrymple – very good essays (for free) in both City Journal http://www.city-journal.org/author_index.php?author=47 and the New Criterion especially on modern culture and liberal folly. Collection of his essays are available try ‘Our Culture, What’s Left of it: The Mandarins and the Masses’. Two of his best essays are available for free – the first is on A Clockwork Orange and the cult of youth - http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_oh_to_be.html and the second on education in Britain http://www.city-journal.org/html/5_1_oh_to_be.html – which certainly speaks to some of my own personal experiences.

Number 2 – Roger Scruton – more free essays from City Journal – try http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_the-west.html (Forgiveness and Irony) and http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_urbanities-real_men.html (Real Men Have Manners). Forgive me but I have to quote the opening from this one:

Manners makyth man - the old adage reminds us of an important truth: that people are made, not born, and that they are made by their relation to others. Of course, a human being might exist in a state of nature, savage, speechless, solitary. But he would not have our distinctive form of life; in an important sense, he would not be a person.

Manners were once described as la petite morale, meaning all those aspects of morality left unspoken by the judges and preachers but without which the preachers would have no one to speak to. The Ten Commandments are not addressed to savages: they presuppose an already existing community of listeners, people already in relation to their “neighbors,” whom they might rob, kill, cuckold, or offend. Manners, properly understood, are the instruments whereby we negotiate our passage through the world, earn the respect and support of others, and form communities, which are something more than the sum of their members. But in a world where people hasten from goal to goal, with scant regard for the forms that secure the respect and endorsement of their fellows, these truths are increasingly obscured.

In the scramble for profit, the polite person is at a seeming disadvantage. He does not jump queues; he does not shout and push and fight his way to the goods; he loses precious moments giving way to slower, more defenseless people; he sits down to meals with family and friends, instead of scarfing a sandwich on the hoof; he listens patiently to bores and makes time for people whose only claim on his time is that they need it; he allows relationships to develop slowly and in an atmosphere of mutual respect; if he has a goal in getting to know you, he will reveal it only at the proper time, and when he has ascertained that you will feel neither used nor offended. He is, in short, a loser. . .

Few American ‘conservatives’ could write that profit maximization was not the highest possible goal of life. Anyone that does think making lots of money the ultimate ‘point’ of life is not worth reading or wasting time on – they are philistines.

Scruton’s books are very good too as he is a serious and substantive conservative (a rare creature indeed) – hence one I can respect.  Unfortunately much of ‘conservatism’ is little more than creeps defending the status quo, no matter what it is, for they own personal gain – anyway returning to Scruton try ‘Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism’ – especially his essay on the importance of national communities (a position very close to an explicit form of ethno-communitarianism).

Number 3 – in the Aristotelian tradition the majestic Alastair MacIntyre (see his best book ‘After Virtue’) defends and reformulates non-liberal (non-deontological and non-utilitarian) virtue ethics. Liberals hate virtue ethics as they are ‘particularistic’ in orientation - not their preferred mode of abstract universals. Good starting point for the insights that ancient Greek wisdom had about the human condition.

Number 4 – Bernard Crick’s wonderful little book ‘In Defence of Politics’ – great defence of politics as such – and a delightful essay on a defence of politics against its false friends such as the ‘a-political’ liberal.

Number 5 – some of Perry Anderson’s best essays are collected in his ‘Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas’ – very fair and good essays on figures like: Oakeshott, Hayek, Strauss, Schmitt, Rawls and Habermas along with more obscure figures like the philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro. He absolutely shows up Rawls and Habermas for the second rate non-entities that they were/are. Also see his ‘English Questions’ - on similar themes see Scruton’s ‘The Philosopher on Dover Beach’ and his ‘England: An Elegy’ (but as a Celt I loathe cricket).

OK so perhaps you prefer novels? On the cultural front of non-liberalism you could read -  Dostoevsky (obviously), J.G. Ballard, Cormac McCarthy especially his ‘Blood Meridian’ – the Judge is one of the best depictions in recent literature of the liberal ‘will to power’  and also, and not coincidentally, a brilliant portrait of ‘radical evil’. I think McCarthy suggests the Judge is the devil incarnate – but that’s just my reading of the novel.

Then there is Michel Houellebecq (a topic of discussion at MR previously - ‘Houellebecq and the narrow, very liberal culture of nationalism in America’ by cough cough…someone… http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/houellebecq_and_the_narrow_very_liberal_culture_of_nationalism_in_america/).

Oh and ‘The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade’ by Herman Melville is excellent - male, female, deft, fraudulent, constantly shifting: which of the ‘masquerade’ of passengers on the Mississippi steamboat Fidèle is ‘the confidence man’? The central motif of Melville’s last and most ‘modern’ novel can be seen as the symbol of the radical plasticity of American cultural history.

On America – the liberal nation per se and a regime/social-order I generally loathe – you could do worse than start with this - ‘The American Ideology: A Critique’ by Andrew Levine and/or the more journalistic but still very thoughtful Chris Hedges – see his ‘Empire of Illusion’. On another significant but generally idiotic aspect of American life you could try - ‘Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession’ by Richard Wrightman Fox. Note the above authors are all Americans so don’t be too upset - it’s not snotty Frenchies taking down to you (for our American friends looking in).

There’s the poetry of John Donne and Wallace Stevens if that’s more your thing. Really there is a lot out there.

There is an excellent essay by Thomas Nagel on the psychology of liberal intellectuals in his collection ‘The Last Word’ – narcissism is one of the key traits (Nagel is himself a self-confessed liberal).

Once your get me going on this stuff you can’t stop me lol. Anyways I’m always happy to talk books, culture, political philosophy etc.

On Jewish history and thought you could try:

Hannah Arendt – for example ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ is worth a read and her writings on Zionism, totalitarianism etc.

Norman Finkelstein - ‘The Holocaust Industry’

Gilad Atzmon - ‘The Wandering Who?: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics’

Yuri Slezkine - ‘The Jewish Century’ (we are apparently all Jews now! - Slezkine notes both Soviet Bolshevism and American liberalism were affected in fundamental ways by the Jewish exodus from the Pale of Settlement).

Mearsheimer & Walt - ‘The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy’ – cool, detached and analytical in their approach. Actually not particularly radical but highly controversial in the ‘land of the free’.

Peter Novick - ‘The Holocaust in American Life’ (why is it so central to American cultural life? – almost every major city has a museum devoted to it etc.)

OK last but not least – law. The law and legal systems (including international law and human rights) are intensely and profoundly ideological. Schmitt is a key thinker but difficult to get into. Luckily there is an excellent secondary literature in English emerging:

Start with ‘The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt’ by Gopal Balakrishnan.

On the bankrupt nature of international law see ‘Victors’ Justice: From Nuremberg to Baghdad’ by Danilo Zolo

And also ‘The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History’ by Samuel Moyn for a decent history of the inflationary development of international human rights law/politics.

OK more than enough for now I think. Pick whatever takes your fancy. I’m sure there’s enough of interest in that lot for you. And I’m sure most of the sensible people at MR could produce their own interesting and worthwhile lists.

But Leon Haller is right in that you cannot start at the ‘deep-end’ with something like Roy Bhaskar’s ‘A Realist Theory of Science’ – an ontologically grounded account of natural phenomena (and hence implicitly also social reality) as being stratified and hierarchical (with as a consequence having multilevel ‘emergent properties’) - without dong some general groundwork. I’m happy to admit I find Bhaskar ‘difficult’ and I’m moderately well-educated on the topic. The ontology of transcendental realism isn’t for beginners. And in a way what the philosophy of science has to say when applied to matters of political ontology is not immediately relevant for the ‘everyday’ ebb and flow of politics.

All are available on Amazon - many in kindle form too. I can think of more books but that’s enough for now!

Posted by Graham_Lister on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 17:02 | #

@Leon Haller

I work in the general area of life-history theory - all of life is based on trade-offs - evolutionary history itself is very much a complex combinatorial optimization process - but there are always constraints. One cannot simultaneously maximize all wants, goals, values, phenotypic traits etc. Even ‘non-zero-sum games’ eventually become or embody aspects of ‘zero-sum games’.

On the economics - yes let’s grow the pie - but for whom and at what cost and whom gets the biggest slices? - Austrian economics assumes a set of normative evaluations to such questions without openly admitting to doing so. Today ‘public-choice’ economists really do maintain that the ‘scientific answer’ to all human questions is ‘the market’ - no conservative can genuinely believe such drivel. Adam Smith certainly didn’t believe such nonsense did he?

If true justice is market justice why not go the whole hog and embrace Nozick and his bizarre “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” and his minarchism. It is a libertarian capitalist political philosophy. In the strictest sense, it maintains that the state is necessary and that its only legitimate function is the protection of individuals from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud, and the only legitimate governmental institutions are the military, police and courts.

Minarchists argue that the state has no right to use its monopoly on the use of force to ‘interfere’ with free transactions between people, and see the state’s sole responsibility as ensuring that transactions between private individuals are free. How on Earth is this not a version of liberal ideology? It’s individualistic liberalism on steroids. It has no room for any collective identity or agency in the realm of politics.

So for the ‘public-choice’ school questions of ‘political economy’ are verboten in that they ‘interfere’ with the ‘natural mechanism’ of the market (there is not very much ‘natural’ about property rights, contract law or indeed rights per se - where outside of the human world do such thing exist? Do chickens put foxes on trial?).

Yet we did have a real free-market in credit default swaps and other exotic financial products - a genuine, no regulation whatsoever, free-market in them - yet the reality and the overly simple theory did not match up. But the only answer from with right-liberal - generally Hayekian school of thought is - “more market, more market, more market” - it might as well be “four legs good, two legs bad”. (The cantus firmus of current political and economic theory is thoroughly Hayekian - our the form of old friend/bête noire neo-liberalism.)

The lack of critical thought is astonishing. But counter-factually for such people the market was ‘never’ free-enough to work as predicted - at its worst this line of thought is pseudo-science in defence of a theological commitment. Start with empirically grounded evidence and observation - economics is sadly often the other way about (reality must conform to theory - if not too bad for reality).

Anyway this might be interest to those of you that would like a different perspective on recent economic events.

THE CRISES OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM - Wolfgang Streeck

http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2914

Remember play the ball not the man.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by Leon Haller on Sun, 01 Apr 2012 03:32 | #

One cannot be fundamentally both a communitarian and a liberal at the same time – either the health of the whole is ultimately you highest value/good or it is that of the individual. Of course we can and should be ‘secondary liberals’ in areas such as intellectual life etc., and use the market as a socio-economic mechanism were appropriate but this idea that market mechanisms are the solution to every conceivable political and social issue is profoundly ideological and profoundly stupid and self-defeating. Individualistic liberalism – including that embodied in the idea of the ‘free-market’ cannot be foundational to a particularist social-order that wishes to survive – after all if a cosmopolitan market in people, ideas, goods, services etc., is the best way to generate maximal wealth and utility why bother with nationalism at all – it’s an antediluvian throwback which only serves as a non-rationally derived constraint upon greater efficiency and modern ‘progress’ yes? Radical fungibility in everything within the ‘spaceless universalism’ of the market is more efficient and just, yes?

Do we really have to go over the same territory time after time? (GLister)

I’m afraid we do, as it remains unclear to me why we cannot have a “bounded liberty” - which was precisely what America had throughout most of its rise to greatness.

The great Stephen Douglas, winner of the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates, notoriously or gloriously described the US as “free, white and Christian”. What is wrong with that formulation? I mean theoretically, as sociologically it was an apt description of America in his time, and arguably for most of our history.

Note that formula perfectly encapsulates the essential historical (post-Feudal, post-French Revolutionary) Right, which in my reading has always been composed of three broad traditions or ‘schools’: individualists, nationalists and Christians. Put another way, those schools comprise those who would use the State either to protect maximal individual liberty, or to advance EGI, or to inculcate (Christian) virtue.

[Note: there may be other political interests that can merit one being classified as rightist - eg, favoring harsh penalties for criminals, or an aggressive national ‘defense’ - and perhaps for them I should speak of a fourth school, one emphasizing order and security as independent goods, and call it “conservative”, even though imo that term is a kind of collective one denoting what all the other three have in common, or at least, where they work in common against the various schools of the Left.]

The real issue is whether each of these traditions ‘on the Right’ necessarily conflicts with the others. Can one be a Christian and a libertarian or a nationalist? Can one be a libertarian and a nationalist? How about all three?

The real question here is whether each ideology is comprehensively exclusive. That is, suppose I want to live in an all-white country, but within that country (and its racial boundary) I favor radical capitalism. Would that make me a racialist or a libertarian?

I don’t think this question is a flippant one. Is any actual social order perfectly congruent with an ideology? Could it be?

The US was founded as a liberal order, in which great emphasis was placed on individual rights and liberties. Yet it also overtly denied citizenship to black slaves, ‘wild’ Indians, and nonwhite immigrants, who were later forbidden. Is it your contention that our founding was philosophically incoherent, and therefore our nation ultimately doomed to be transformed into the polyglot society of today? Or might America’s current multiracial status be due to factors other than the intellectual working out of a foundational, ontological mistake? 

Why couldn’t America have remained what it was: “free, white and Christian”?

I hate to seem tiresome, but I’m trying to figure out exactly what your argument is.

Posted by Leon Haller on Sun, 01 Apr 2012 07:02 | #

Lister @80

[(voice of Darth Vader) “But Graham, I am a minarchist!” Really.]

[You would really hate the philosophical Rothbard, who thought the minarchists were statists. He was an anarcho-capitalist, which is the true antipode of collectivism.]

What is the justification for the State’s coercively interfering in consensual relationships or transactions? Surely, at the very least, such coercion must be justified, and by something more than “might makes right”.

Libertarianism, in contradistinction to liberalism, is actually an immensely rigorous body of thought - logically, ethically, sociologically and economically. I think you confuse libertarian philosophy with pop neoliberalism. Libertarianism is an ethical doctrine invalidating the use of non-defensive force (coercion) in human affairs. It holds that the individual is the correct unit of moral and social analysis, and that individuals should be free to conduct their lives as they see fit provided their conduct does not constitute aggression against others (eg, through theft, assault, fraud, etc). I don’t think one can cavalierly dismiss such a doctrine. Indeed, I think it represents a/the primary challenge to nationalism.

What is the moral basis for preferring tribalism to individualism? Books need to be devoted to analyzing this question (perhaps one of mine shall be titled Racial Minarchism). Anyway, this subject - the proper relation between the rights of the individual and those of the genetic collective - will be a considerable focus of my future scholarship (the other one will be the reconciliation of white preservationism with Christianity).

I must disagree with your assertion that we had a “real free market” in CDSs. The financial sector is very far from being a genuine free market. It is overlaid with generally ill-conceived and, precisely because we do not have a perfectly free capital sector, inadequate, regulations (please speak with any securities lawyer if you disbelieve me), not to mention that financial transactions occur within an arena where money is a creature of the State, and deposits are back-stopped by (US) Federal guarantees (that was the whole problem ... “moral hazard” - “privatization of profits, socialization of risks”). What is so unfortunate about these State-interventionist-generated crises is that they further destroy public confidence in capitalism. Yes, the real problems, however “theological” the reasoning may appear to those who don’t fully understand the issues, all stemmed from too little market-determination, not too much.

I really wish you would open your mind and read some Mises. The intellectual rigor is astonishing. (But start with the more readable Rothbard. Or start with Hayek, The Fatal Conceit.)

 

Posted by Leon Haller on Sun, 01 Apr 2012 07:16 | #

BTW, I like Dalrymple (I don’t see him as a social democrat at all), and I love Scruton (ditto)(the quote above was outstanding). That you esteem Scruton allows me to hold out hope for your ideological (and perhaps even spiritual) development. Scruton is a true and brilliant conservative; I never disagree with him.

Please don’t conflate me with persons who confuse market prices with moral or aesthetic values. Such a criticism isn’t fair to me. If I were a pure neoliberal money-grubber, I would hardly have returned to grad school in Catholic Thought, now would I? (Granted, I’m an outlier here, too.)

I defend capitalism because I think it the only just, as well as most efficient, economic arrangement. I reject libertarianism because I think it self-defeating in the long-run, and not only racially. I do believe we require a certain amount of what libertarians would argue is unjustifiable coercion in order to perpetuate the system of liberty itself. These coercive policies range from immigration restrictions to environmental controls.

But I do reject State imposed egalitarianism and redistribution. Interfering with wage scales or contracts, subsidizing education, forcing taxpayers to pay for others’ health care, etc, have nothing to do with Systemic integrity. They are just instances of temporary democratic majorities persecuting financial minorities - using the democratic State as an instrument of thievery. Opposing intra-white transfers of wealth hardly makes me an opponent of white EGI.

Posted by Three Point Plan on Sun, 01 Apr 2012 13:06 | #

OUTLAW COMPOUND INTEREST

PLENTIFUL, INTEREST-FREE, FIAT CURRENCY

DEBT JUBILEE

Haller thinks saying, in his extremely homoerotic way, that Rothbard is “immensely” rigorous is an argument against the financial plan of The Avenging Spirit of Ezra Pound. Don’t be fooled by the Kike folks.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Sun, 01 Apr 2012 13:43 | #

@Leon Haller

Wow you have hope for me Leon – thanks so much! Look I’ve written on conservatism before – much of it is simply a defence of the status quo – like the divine right of Kings was a ‘timeless’ truth back in the day. Much of it is a self-serving BS for the powerful and privileged of the time. Not all of it of course but yes a great deal – and that much of political ideology is self-serving for someone – that all forms of political thought generally represents some vested interest should not be a ‘radical’ thought but perfectly obvious to anyone with two brain cells. People rationalise why the world is the way that it is especially if they are doing quite nicely from it (and if they are doing badly they rationalise why it must change).

What I am interested in is intelligent non-liberal thought from anywhere in the ideological spectrum – some conservatives have important and true things to say on some topics but so to some on the non-liberal left. For example Perry Anderson is a very sharp guy – honestly buy his Spectrum book and read one essay – it’s not going to infect you with some ‘radical virus’ but he writes well, poses sharp questions and makes acute observations on recent strands of political thought/figures (he can also be very funny - his essay on the banal Timothy Garton Ash had me chuckling out loud). Some greens have important things to say also, I also look back to ancient Greece etc., - I think a certain ideological promiscuity is actually necessary to develop a robust critique of the hyper-modern liberal-capitalist order we ‘enjoy’ now. Perhaps my educational background/temperament plays a part – I hate the intellectually dishonest ideologue that dogmatically asserts that only ‘his side’ can make truthful points or interesting observations – no political ideology is that robust - none. I want to ‘gather evidence’ so to speak as widely as possible.

To that end I not interested in liberal ideologues of any type and I think ‘free-marketry’ is absolutely grounded in and 100% is a liberal ideology – sovereign individual freedom the the marketplace – how is that not a species of liberal ideology? Hayek was honest in that he insisted he was a liberal not a conservative. I believe him. The free-market is not some shibboleth for me that is sacrosanct – if you want to assert its primary importance become a libertarian Randian (the low-brow version) or a Nozickian (moderately high-brow version). But historically European peoples – Greeks, English, Swedes all existed quite a bit before the rise of modern capitalism. Any many European achievements are also prior to the rise of modern capitalism as system. Empirically it is nonsense to suggest modern capitalism is ‘central’ to history of European people. And I agree with Marx that modern liberal-capitalism left to its own devices is a revolutionary force – culturally, socially and so. And I also agree with Sandel that a society with markets in it and a ‘market society’ are very different social-cultural spaces. It really is important to a social order what its foundational commitments are.

In an odd way you seem to want to cut the Gordian Knot of liberal-capitalist modernity – let’s have a hyper ‘free-market’ system but without the ‘negatives’ (in your case blacks but Jews are OK whatever) – let Euros be hyper-collective on one question and hyper-individualistic in every other area of life. It seems to me that is a politics of idle wish-fullfilment – not as bonkers as pairwise duels being the ‘key’ to history but getting there. I doubt very many people would sign-up for such an ideological mix – they would probably suspect your commitment to ‘in-group’ social-solidarity was paper-thin and frankly not worth the paper it is written on.

Leon you have previous written that government workers are ‘parasites’ – that’s the ideological background you come out of. Goldman Sachs et al., are virtuous heroes of the private sector and the free-market while teachers, nurses, firemen, the chap delivering my mail, the ambulance driver are all ‘greedy scum’. That might fly in Jesusland it really isn’t going to go down well anywhere in Europe. Let alone if you want or need those people’s support. Let alone how insulting and perverse such an outlook is. Really you’ve also suggested only ‘leftists’ are greedy – really that is juvenile crap that idiotic libertarians with the emotional temperament and analytical insight of a ‘not bright enough to know how dumb they are’ 16 year old spews up. Really you can find such creatures on youtube espousing the wonders of Ayn Rand.

Well Leon given your belief in the primacy of market-exchange as the key embodiment of the Western tradition, the social-order as such, as just and by far the best mechanism around which to foundationally organise a society I really don’t understand why you are not a Nozick-style cosmopolitan?  Other than for non-rational reasons, psychological hang-ups etc? Let’s be frank even if you say you don’t believe in those things quite as completely (and in my view somewhat naively) as I characterise that you do, it does not take very much for you to fall back into those rhetoric tropes. I still recall your ‘hang Greek debtors’ rant from a while back… 

If maximal individual freedom is best secured/expressed by freedom within markets and that is the highest good/value then why, somewhat irrationally, express the wish to constrain the logic of this world-view with silly notions about collective entities (including nations) which only serve to produce ‘friction’ in the dynamics of market-exchange between individuals, sadly making it less efficient and hence everyone poorer? In a way free-market liberalism is also a form of universalistic thought and the encompasses it’s own version of the egalitarian plateau – all the world is ideally understood and acted upon as a market and all the people are equally free to play their part within it – that is a ‘natural right’ to maximize their incomes, profitability and so on in free exchange with other individual actors within the unrestricted marketplace.

After all in Lockean/Nozickian terms they own their bodies and minds and the labour power/capabilities that can be derived thereof – it is the most profound expression of the sovereign individual and their ability to act upon the world. Quite monstrously coercive and illegitimate for anyone to interfere with such natural rights. If there is one entitlement that in theory everyone has it’s the right to use their abilities in the marketplace without interference.

Nozick’s ‘entitlement theory’ is based on John Locke’s ideas. Under entitlement theory, people are represented as ends in themselves and equals (a least with regard to moral agency/worth), as Kant claimed, though different people may own (i.e. be entitled to) different amounts of property because people vary in their talents and abilities. Nozick’s ideas create an extremely strong system of private property and a radically free-market economy. The only just transaction is a voluntary one. Taxation of the rich to support social programs for the poor are totally unjust because the state is acquiring money by force instead of through a voluntary transaction.

Of course they fact that the ‘background conditions’ that allow individuals to exercise these talents are the product of a collective/societal effort and inheritance and that these ‘sovereign individuals’ are in fact enjoying a collective inheritance derived form an both an intra and inter-generational ‘moral economy’ and so that it might be thought that if they benefit from such they hence have obligations to that moral economy and at least owe something to the wider social order (otherwise they are merely intra and inter-generational ‘free-riders’) is absolutely not a set of thoughts that concern Nozick-style ‘thinkers’. Ontologically the ‘collective phenomenon’ of society is bogus and a ruse for unjust taxation. Really only individuals and their interests, which they alone can judge, exist. The sovereign and free individual is the only feature of social reality which has genuine ontological significance or validity.

So given all of that why should any rational economic actor restrict or constrain their potential income/utility derived from market exchange for non-rational reasons? If say you have a local dentist that is Chinese or Korean in background but is as skilled as any other dentist but charges half the price for the same general standard of care why on Earth shouldn’t you enjoy his services? Slightly higher-up the food chain if a producer of widgets can get Chinese workers to produce them for say $5 per day as opposed to a $50 per day worker in his native homeland why not move his widget production to China? Even if he didn’t want to his rivals may hence at a systematic level Mr. Widgets really hasn’t all that much room of manoeuvre So don’t resist these processes but see them as wonderful opportunities: embrace the radical fungibility and genuine egalitarianism of the market – not that everyone can be a winner - of course not it can’t work that way structurally – but everyone can equally enter the marketplace and do the best for their own self-interest as they understand it. And of course by happy coincidence this is also an indirect form of altruistic public service – on aggregate it is the best of all possible worlds – to be sure it’s a rather attenuated utopia but its the best we can achieve. Who knew that Goldman Sachs et al., are such altruistic people despise superficially appearing the opposite?

If all that is unproblematically true then it is best practice to expand markets as far as possible in terms of making them both deeper and wider – so as many as possible human interactions are understood and conducted on a market basis and the operation of those markets is not to be unnaturally restricted by outmoded and non-rational phenomena – let’s break down barriers between market actors and embrace the ‘spaceless universalism’, of a global free-market, yes? Let people do business however they best think and with maximally geographic flexibility and we should also happily allow workers to find the best possible position for themselves in this new global marketplace.

If unconstrained markets are really allowed to work as the do in theory they will always ‘clear’, be in equilibrium, hence everyone can find a place, however lowly, within such an order. So wealth and utility are maximised and everyone is a winner. Is this not the logic of global cosmopolitanism under liberal free-markets? And you know this thinking should rightfully shape every aspect of life – not simply widgets and narrow economic matters, but culture, art, even whole forms of life. Yes snobs might sneer at people expressing their individuality through which model of iPhone they buy (and other forms of consumerism) but really such people are dinosaurs. The world system is moving towards a kind of supermodern homogeneity in a global marketplace in which all economics actors are integrated and interdependent upon each other within a form of global commercial and cultural activity – yes secondary difference will remain – human identity is multifaceted - but the market and market exchange will ultimately be the ‘glue’ which binds the emerging global order both economically and culturally. And at some point in this systematic process – really the very plausible telos of a foundationally liberal and free-market social-order - the power and importance of nation states will inevitably be attenuated. English will be the lingua franca of this global cosmopolitan age – skilled professionals like architects will sell their abilities in a genuinely global ‘supermarket’ and follow the money – lesser skilled people too. People will increasingly enjoy genuinely eclectic life-styles in the ‘global village’ and international careers – moving jobs and geographical relocation across the world should not be thought anything other than a welcomed development as it will be a triumphant vindication of the power of markets to produce peaceful exchange and prosperity between people that would otherwise not interact and enjoy each others company, cultures, customs and so on.

Obviously America shows the way – as in so many aspects of life – of a post-modern free-market cosmopolitan social-order (society is too strong and rather outmoded term) grounded in individual liberty and personal freedom in embryonic form. Everyone is welcome – sign up for the rules, work hard in the free-market and enjoy the diversity of people, goods, life-styles etc., that unparalleled and genuine personal freedom brings. It might take the Danes, the Japanese et al. (backwards ‘loser nations’ that have nothing to teach anyone let alone outstanding thinkers like Prof. Nozick or Americans in general) some time to wake up to the virtues of the American way and ultimately the global future that will simply be an amplification and universal expansion of this form of life. Really what’s not to like about such a prospect?

Other than it ludicrous implausibility and unsustainability at any level – but when did a disconnect with reality ever stop economic thinkers or liberal philosophers?

P.S. perhaps I could change careers and sign-up for an MBA somewhere? Obviously I will need to work on my objections to Nozick’s penetrating insights into the nature of ‘the social’  - even if Darwinian natural selection tells a slightly different story with regard to the relationship between the parts and the whole, or the evolution of ‘social systems’ like multicellularity et al., (hierarchical selection…cough cough…the Price co-variance approach…cough cough). But I think I can overcome my silly concerns that all the same. After all abstract economic theory/philosophy beats mere empirical biological observation in any intellectual hierarchy – of course who could think otherwise?

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 01 Apr 2012 16:28 | #

Graham,

You will never read an informed commentary on conservatism from the left of the liberal spectrum, which is far too economic in its focus.  Yes, you will get the barbed point of view that “it is simply a defence of the status quo” ... of the dispensation of power.  But that is not what it is.  The beauty of it is in this psychological trick: that social stability, once generated, facilitates the freeing of the people to seek their own increase.  And social stability in this context should be viewed not as something imposed by the dead and self-interested hand of power, but as something arising from a sincere and generous commitment to the common interest.

All politics in the European world - all of it - issues from, and in some particular combination of, our traits of altruism and individualism.  We do not ordinarily make politics out of ethnocentrism, which sort of bubbles along in the background during normal times (ie, healthier times than now).  Conservatism is not lacking in altruism.  It feeds into the social good of stability, and that explains why, for example, British Conservatism, as a mini though-world, currently straddles wet and dry, or One-Nationism and neoliberalism.  It is why Conservatives - real ones, not out-and-out liberals like Cameron and Maude - lean heavily towards social conservatism.

Obviously, there is insufficient motive power in it to hold its own against the liberal flow.  But as revolutionary nationalists we do well to understand that at the end of the active phase of a successful nationalism - lasting perhaps half-a-century - stands some variety of conservatism again.  When the flood tide is done, it will always be there.  And not merely to underpin power elites.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Sun, 01 Apr 2012 20:17 | #

GW of course stability is a reasonable value but so is motherhood and apple pie. In the spirit of Schmitt politics, the vested interests of groups and differentiated social strata, are always at work in any social order that consists of millions of people. That shouldn’t be remotely controversial – social, cultural and economic stratification/differentiation will always be found in any ‘mass society’ it is how far one thinks it is prudent to allow these cleavages to expand – I think it is not wise (to say the least) to allow them to be unmanaged or maximally expressed. Maximal diversity/heterogeneity is dangerous to any coherent social order - including contra the right - vast economic inequalities (especially beloved it seems in the dog-eat dog world of the Nozick-Haller Republic).

But really is any conservative going to argue for the divine right of Kings? – yet at the time it was conservatives telling everyone the divine right of Kings was a ‘timeless truth’ and anything other was unthinkable – obviously self-serving tosh (much of trite clichéd conservatism is of this nature). Please serious conservatives to have important and interesting things to say but it’s beyond the banalities that the executives of Goldman Sachs ‘deserve’ they bonuses or that the Queen is ‘wonderful’ (or the ‘holy’ and sacred nature of the US Constitution). So stability but of what social order, for which particular arrangements – the ‘non-political’ conservative has no answer other than “what we have now” but what if what we have now is intolerable or unsustainable? Normative judgements and political commitments to a particular vision are inescapable so an abstract and content-free ‘stability’ doesn’t impress me as a political ‘value’.

Stability as I said of what, for whom and in what interests? The politics are all in the whom, what and why questions.

As for Perry Anderson (he is not a liberal) – his essays on Schmitt et al., are extremely complementary in contrast to the total contempt he holds Habermas, Rawls and the like in. Very well written too I may add.

Really I think both the right-facing and left-facing versions of liberalism are profoundly interlinked in a systematic way – hence I attack ‘cultural’ liberalism from the right – Dalrymple, Scruton, Sandel, Bork even, and economic liberalism from the green/left (social-democratic) perspective. Ultimately in the mode of Aristotelian thought to define the radical – but non-liberal - centre ground at both a high theoretical level (ontology, mereology, the nature of the human subject etc) and the level of practical politics. How? By the reassertion and demonstration of the proper and necessary connection between the parts and the whole in any sensible and sustainable social-order. That probably makes me unorthodox – I’d say original. At least it a different viewpoint.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 01 Apr 2012 23:24 | #

Graham,

The deep roots of conservatism can be traced back to the beginnings of the reign of Henry VII who, even before he had won the Crown, put in place the means to reign in the barons, stripping them of their armed retainers.  He then succeeded in taxing them, and allowed a merchant class to develop among the populace in an war-free age.  That, too, proved a lucrative decision.  In this little historical cameo the lineaments of conservatism can clearly be seen - a practical politics, non-philosophical, non-ideological (in fact, rather pragmatic), and a kind of politics that gets out of the way so people can live, and their lives can be tranquil and beautiful.

Somewhere in this is my ideal, as an ordinary English bloke who doesn’t want to be pulled through a hedge backwards every five minutes, of what the polity and its politics should be like.  I don’t care, frankly, who claims that conservatism is this or conservatism is that.  I am a conservative by default and a revolutionary nationalist by necessity.  I have the damned thing in my head and in my nostrils, and I’m not wrong.

Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 02 Apr 2012 08:25 | #

Lister@85

Most impressive mini-essay. I must go to sleep now, big day today (Monday). I will respond tomorrow night. Look here UK Tuesday, if you want.