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The Bear’s Lair: The end of the classless society A typical piece of non-conventional Hutchinson analysis appeared today at Prudent Bear. If perhaps the bearishness at the very close has a somewhat studied air, nonetheless the whole speaks plainly enough about the aims and interests of power - and its results.
Traditionally, the United States has been economically unequal, but without a sharp divide between rich and poor in the political arena. Democrats represented the South, minorities and unionized labor, while Republicans represented small business and the professional classes. The truly rich have always been more or less evenly divided between the parties. Thus, except for a brief period in 1932-46, the U.S. never had a real class-based politics. One economic force was always likely to change this; the steady increase in inequality seen in the United States since about 1969. The household Gini coefficient of income inequality has risen from 39.7 in that year to 46.9 in 2005 – extrapolating that trend would suggest a figure of 47.3 by today. At around 40, the Gini coefficient was close to the optimal level. Unlike in egalitarian Scandinavia it left enough incentive in the society to ensure that entrepreneurship and hard work were fostered, but yet it did not cause divisions between classes. At 47, it is approaching the level prevalent in Latin America, (Argentina 52, Mexico 55, Brazil 60) which has historically exhibited a politics characterized by deep alienation between classes, producing as rulers an unpleasant collection of corrupt oligarchs and irresponsible leftists. The counterproductive Latin American politics appears to result from excessively high inequality. The important driver is that the conditions of the classes are so radically separated, and the likelihood of poor people working themselves into the middle class so distant, that politics ceases to be a process of attempting to produce a better society and instead becomes a corrupt search for rents. The elite control the system for most of the time, diverting public resources to their own use and securing re-election by offering state handouts to the impoverished masses. The masses in turn have no incentive to vote for a party that might allow them to better themselves, so regard politics only as a process by which handouts are produced. The “Christian Democrat” parties so common in Europe, to some extent represented historically in both major parties in the United States, never really appeared in Latin America. This does not appear to be purely a cultural problem. Similar pathologies appear in Africa, when the society gets rich enough to have wide divisions of wealth, in the Middle East, to the extent democracy exists there, and in certain Asian societies such as the Philippines, with the highest Gini in Southeast Asia at about 48. It is particularly worrying that there are no recorded cases of a middle-income or wealthy country with a democratic government successfully emerging from a Latin American income distribution. Once such a distribution is entrenched, economic growth slows to a crawl (productivity growth in Latin America is well under 1% per annum and in some cases negative) and the pathological social system becomes permanent. H.G. Wells postulated in his 1895 “Time Machine” the ultimate destination of a Latin American–style social system. In his future 800,000 years hence the human race has divided into two species, the eloi, who do no work and live only for trivial aesthetic pleasures and the morlocks, sub-men who work underground keeping the mechanical civilization running. Wells’s fantasy seemed far-fetched after 1920, as equality increased and the working classes became both educated and comfortably off. However the fantasy looks a lot closer to reality in 2007 than it did in 1957, when the movie was made. In the United States, one would expect political activity to begin showing Latin American characteristics, including a breakdown in social cohesion, as Gini rises towards Latin American levels. This appears to be happening. One example is the doubling since 2000 of the number of Washington lobbyists, whose objective is primarily to divert public resources to private uses. A second is the growth of earmarking in legislation, up 10-fold in the decade to 2005; earmarks are generally inserted in order to benefit some private interest at the expense of the general good. U.S. politics has always been corrupt, and was especially so during the 1870-96 Gilded Age, the previous high point for inequality, but the increase in the proportion of Gross Domestic Product spent on lobbyists, the proportion of GDP spent on corrupt government spending and indeed the proportion of GDP spent on elections themselves suggests that systemic corruption is rapidly increasing. The new immigration bill is above all an example of class legislation. The choice between a low or a moderate level of immigration depends primarily on non-economic factors—a voter’s interest or otherwise in increasing the diversity of the society, and the recognition that the global economy may work better and produce more wealth for all if there is a certain amount of migratory lubrication between different societies. However, the effect of more than modest immigration on inequality and therefore on class structure is highly significant. The Immigration Act of 1924, which largely restricted immigration to the richer countries of northwest Europe, produced the greatest social leveling the United States has ever seen, with the Gini coefficient declining by around 10 points between 1920 and 1965, the years of its salience (the 1924 Act replaced previous restrictions introduced during World War I.) After 1965, immigration policy was reversed, to encourage a larger flow of immigrants, primarily from developing countries. Initially, this had only a modest economic effect. Then the 1986 amnesty encouraged low skill immigrants, allegedly now numbering 12 million, to try their luck with the overstretched immigration bureaucracy. Even large companies, knowing that immigration laws would not be enforced, seized the chance for some cheap labor. Whatever the economic effect of moderate amounts of skilled immigrant labor, almost certainly positive, the economic effect of large amounts of unskilled immigrant labor is very clear: it drives wage rates down to rock bottom levels, particularly in personal service sectors where training is minimal and employment informal. That’s why a haircut costs less in real terms now than it did 30 years ago, it’s why even modest middle class households now have a cleaner and a gardener, which they usually didn’t 30 years ago and it’s why enormous numbers of dubiously constructed houses appeared when finance became available in 2002-06. For the elite, the eloi of the HG Wells future we appear to be entering, this is all very attractive. The servant problem, butt of jokes ever since equality began to increase after World War I, has suddenly gone away – the rich can and do have as many servants as they want, provided they speak Spanish. Chicken processors, construction firms, retailers, hotels and meat packers who employ low skill labor no longer need make any pretence of paying union wage rates; they can simply hire illegal immigrants to fill any gaps that may appear. Corporate profits are at record high levels and service sector inflation, a bane in the 1970s and 1980s, has more or less disappeared. The claim by eloi pro-immigration forces that the US economy has a massive new “need” for unskilled labor is, of course, pure bunkum. If there are 12 million illegal immigrant workers in the economy, about 8% of the working population, then since we know the value of output, productivity is in reality about 8% lower than we thought it was. That means that productivity growth, far from accelerating in the mid 1990s as Wall Street fatuously claimed, in fact slowed, as more and more bodies were required to achieve the same output. GDP may have continued to increase, but GDP per capita is also 8% less than we thought, and hence has shown little growth. It is this that has caused the curious phenomenon of an apparent rapid increase in GDP that in practice makes nobody any better off. However attractive illegal immigration is to the eloi, it is hell for the morlocks. Instead of the well paid factory jobs their fathers had, making physical products in which they could take pride, they are now reduced to competing with infinite numbers of illegal immigrants for personal service, retail and construction jobs that have not been mechanized or outsourced. Theoretically, they could get more education and turn themselves into brain surgeons or computer-aided designers; in practice, these possibilities merely make them mourn that they hadn’t paid more attention in math class. Thus the social gulf grows ever wider. The inability of the morlock element to achieve the modest comfort of their fathers brings other social pathologies. Since the morlocks are unable to “settle down” to marital bliss and a decent standard of living, illegitimacy and crime increase – only partly from the immigrants, legal or illegal, but also from the impoverished population as a whole. Political activity no longer offers hope of assistance, so they cease to vote or participate in politics, either directly or indirectly through unions and fraternal organizations. There is little point in saving, so they run up gigantic credit card debts, choosing to gamble away any windfalls they may receive. The eloi in turn withdraw themselves to gated communities, and Wells’s dystopia grows ever closer. The new immigration bill, with its ineffectual enforcement provisions and its enthusiastically inserted loopholes through which even more immigrants can arrive, is perhaps the most socially divisive policy since the taille of the French ancien regime, a tax that was exacted from the poor and the middle class but not from the nobility. It stems from the same cause as the taille, a desire by the political class and its financial backers to entrench their superiority over the common herd. Our choice of future is thus clear: it’s Wellsian dystopia or the Terror. Martin Hutchinson is the author of “Great Conservatives” (Academica Press, 2005) - details can be found here. Comments:2
Posted by Frank McGuckin on Tue, 22 May 2007 00:05 | # The importation of the predatory hindu legal immigrant has been a complete disaster for White Americans. They were brought in during the 1970’s as scab repalcement workers. Thousands of White American men were thrown out of work in the early and late seventies. They were replaced with the disgusating hindu legal immigrant. The predatory scum from india-a moderate amount mind you-were politically organized aroud their racial interest. And boy,did this pay off. They lobbied and lobbied. Thousands more of their kind flowed into America accelrating the process of economic and racial dispossesion of the majority Euro-American population. It seems that some people are passing themselves off as immigration reformers. America does not need an increase in skilled asian immigration. America needs a massive reduction in skilled asian immigration…reduced down to goddam 0 Let me put it this way:White Amerian doctors,engineers and computer programmers are not interchangeable with legal immigrant hindu scum. I believe the Sailer-Brimelow stragey is blather on about the bad unskilled hispanic immigrants and go light on skilled asian immigration. Perhaps advocate a coalition of Whites and Asians. I say NO FUCKING WAY. I do not uderstand why anyone concerned about the survival of European Americans would tolerate any asian immigration at all. Listen up you two fucking turds Sailer and Brimelow:Legal asian immigrants are actively involved within the borders of America in the economic and racial dispossession of the mjaority Euro-American population. No truer words have been written. Why isn’t this obvious point hammered home every week on Vdare.com.
China has colonized Silicon Valley. WE have been economically and racially dispossessed in Silcon Valley 3
Posted by Frank McGuckin on Tue, 22 May 2007 00:12 | # Great points James. I believe that Gates should have his wealth confiscated. Gates should be working on a southern chain gang till death. 4
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 22 May 2007 00:33 | # Frank, It’s a longstanding rule at MR to speak to one another and of others with civility. Expressed anger, however sincerely felt or painfully occassioned, gains us nothing and alienates many of our own. I would be grateful if you could bear that in mind. The plain fact is that capitalism regards labour as a unit cost, and as nothing else, and is bound to do so. It is the responsibility of government to limit capitalism’s amour propre for perpetual cost reduction in the interests of the people it serves. But government has become the slave and business the master. And the reason for that is the politicians’ ambition to win or cling to power, and the otherwise crippling costs accrued in doing that. And so we move on. For ambitious politicians can’t really be blamed for trying to out-spend to out-compete their rivals. The system is predicated on competition. But even then, it isn’t the system that is ultimately responsible, but the suggestibility of an electorate that buys enthusiastically into methods of mass salesmanship. I am reminded of a well-known Norman Rockwell poster that idealises the way it used to be. What’s changed? How did the infantilism of mass media consumption overtake the white American voter (and every other voter in the West, of course)? 5
Posted by a Finn on Tue, 22 May 2007 00:36 | # Only way forward in Usa is to advocate a reversal of the current immigration to it’s diametrical opposite. If elites say Usa (read: elites) suffer, so much more better. Any moderation in immigration politics in Usa is poison. 6
Posted by Daedalus on Tue, 22 May 2007 00:45 | # American business learned a lesson or two from the effectiveness of propaganda during the world wars. We have had to endure a blitzkreig of brand name advertisements ever since, especially since the arrival of television during the 1950s. 7
Posted by Frank McGukin on Tue, 22 May 2007 00:51 | # Guessedworker The hindu legal immigrant has inflicted terrible pain and sufferring on thousands of innocent White Amerian families. They have gotten away with murder. They inflicted terrible pain on my family How much longer are we suppose to be nice about it? If there are hindu legal immigrants reaading, I want hem to have zero doubt as to how I feel about them. Ill follow your rules in the future 8
Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 22 May 2007 00:53 | # GW writes: How did the infantilism of mass media consumption overtake the white American voter The main cause is the loss of biological independence caused by urbanization of the previously agrarian base. If you are biologically dependent on the civilization you become much more slavish toward its moral authorities. 9
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 22 May 2007 11:24 | # James, I think that is fundamentally right. The beauty and power of the American democratic model, which as a non-OMOV democrat I readily confess, lay precisely in the romantic notion that moral authority was vested in the true heart and good instincts of the ordinary man. But that was applicable only to the older generations - and progressively so, no doubt, from the one that fought WW2 back. They were more self-reliant, closer to the pioneer spirit, of course, and more firmly rooted in the natural mores and ways of a European mind. I know it is fashionable to rubbish such sentiments as idealisation of a non-existent past. But I don’t believe for one moment that it was non-existent. The pathologies of modernity reduce us in many ways, and such cynicism is one of them. No, this loss of something grown-up (in the sense of seriousness), something becoming to us as individuals is important. It could easily accord, as you say, with urbanisation in America. However, the same phenomenon occurs everywhere today on the old continent, and there’s a hitch here. In Britain the industrial revolution preceded universal suffrage by well over a century. Urbanised biological dependence created the movement for Reform. So maybe it is a dead-end there, and we have to look at other causes for the diminution and enslavement of the British character to and by modernity. Tom Sunic’s Homo americanus argues the case that a vulgar, Judaised, Yankee Americanism has conditioned our age. Although he is dating the demise in Europe from pretty early - post-bellum perhaps - nonetheless he proposes that the skids were really under things after the total victory of Americanised liberalism over Nazism in 1945. American liberalism and Soviet Communism he sees as two sides of the same coin. Perhaps I can get him to visit the thread and run your biological dependency theory through the mill. It would be interesting to see the outcome. 10
Posted by Frank McGuckin on Tue, 22 May 2007 16:53 | # White Americans already know that the quality of life in America has decayed over the years and keeps on decaying- with no end in site. The pundits aren’t telling ordinary White Americans something about the world they already don’t know. The same thing can be said about academic economists. Over at vdare.com they hang on to every pronouncement of the “great” man George Borjas. Is George Borjas telling ordinary White Americans anything thery already don’t know from personal experience? Shutting down legal immigration completly-0 non-white immigration- should be the primary objective. Academics and pundits will never support this. Which is better for the long term goal of completly shutting down legal and illegal immigration,amnesty or no amnesty? I think a case can be made that passing amnesty will push ordinary Native Born Americans to a state of full-blown revolt against the very system that wants to exterminate them. Amnesty will do this faster than anything else out their. Or to put it another way:isn’t worse better? And who here really believes that amnesty is not going to be passed one day soon. The Democrats will be in power for the next eight years. This makes an amnesty inevitable. There is only one issue:the economic and racial dispossession of White Amreicans in the nation they founded and created. Economic arguments for and against immigration are irrevelant, for how would White Americans bennefit by being by being replaced by hispanics,asians,muslims and nigras from africa and the carribean. Yet, if you listen to what they mainstream neoliberal/neoclassical economists say the economic health of the America requires a massive influx of non-whites everyyear. How can this be? Neoliberal/neoclassical economics is complete nonesense. Ordinary White Americans are the most important data points in this discussion. In fact we should state quite clearly to our enemies that this debate is over. Ordinary White Amricans have determined through personal experience that non-white legal imigration threatens the legitmate racial interests of White Americans. I wonder when vdare.com com will get around to doing this if ever, These days Peter Brimelow is courting the cuban invaders in miami. This is what they call in the military fratenizing with the enemy. Yeah, I hope amnesty is passed because it will bring about a race war a lot sooner and this would help resolve the issue a lot sooner. 11
Posted by Matra on Tue, 22 May 2007 17:33 | # I was unaware that Brimelow and VDare had no problems with Asian immigration. Could you post some examples of this apparent change. I ask because a quick search at VDare will bring up plenty of articles undermining the myth about Asians being okay immigrants. They, of course, focus on the most numerous immigrant groups for fairly obvious reasons. 12
Posted by gt on Tue, 22 May 2007 18:01 | # “The main cause is the loss of biological independence caused by urbanization of the previously agrarian base. If you are biologically dependent on the civilization you become much more slavish toward its moral authorities.” But the urban lifestyle is so…convenient! There are mini-malls and ethnic restaurants on almost every corner, physicians and hospitals within a ten-minute drive, tradesmen and landscapers in the yellow pages, Costco – everything is at your fingertips. And it pays well, too! All you have to do is…put up with certain things. 13
Posted by Frank Mcguckin on Tue, 22 May 2007 18:29 | # Well,vdare.com has become slightly better on asian legal immigration. However,several years back- I think it was during George W’s first run-Sailer wrote a peice arguing the case that the “superintelligent"asian legal immigant should form a political alliance with the less intelligent whitey against blacks and hispanics. I hope I’m wrong about this, but I think there is a possibility that when the shit hits the fan-lets say on the eve of violent racial conflict- vadre.com will push this as some sought of last ditch effort(Sailer’s citizenship nonsense). I won’t accept anything less than an admission of the obvious which is:within the borders of the US there are fundamental irreconcilable differences between White and asian racial interests. There is no need for a point system to favor skilled immigrants. The problem is that the US has imported too many skilled asian immigrants who have used their wealth and political clout to hasten the economic and racial dispossession of European Americans. Vdare.com should state unequivocably that the protection of the legitmate racial interests of European Amerians requires a policy of 0 asian legal immigration. Legal asian immigrants and their offspring have done very serious damage to European American families. They have distorted US labor policy in way that is resulting in the deskilling of the Euro-American workforce and undermining the development of Euro-American youth for careers in science,technology and medicine. What I have written is really kind of obvious and outrageous. Despite this,Vdare.com has been kind of gentle with post-1965 legal asian immigrants. At some point in time,vdare.com is going to have to make a decision:either vdare.com will openly state in a VERY POWERFULL WAY that it is an organization dedicated to opposing the economic and racial dispossession of the majority Euro-American population or it will become irrelevant to the majority Euro-American population, currrently undergoing economic and racial dispossession at the hands of asians,muslims,hispanics and nigras from africa. No more “we are broad coalition…. friends to everyone nonsense” 14
Posted by gongstar on Tue, 22 May 2007 19:18 | # V. good article. I’d like to think that a neutral would agree that the most lucid and intelligent writing is on this side of the argument. Lucidity, frankly, is never suitable for, y’know, lies, frankly, as Blair’s been, y’know, proving for the past decade. 15
Posted by Daedalus on Tue, 22 May 2007 19:36 | # Europe had serious problems long before the Second World War. A good example of this would be the French Revolution. The National Assembly abolished slavery in the French Caribbean colonies and granted blacks full citizenship and equal rights. Although this policy was later reversed by the First Consul, a dangerous precedent had been set. French racial attitudes were already extremely permissive by the time of the First World War. White American GI’s were shocked at the willingness of French women to fraternize with black soldiers. There were several riots on U.S. military bases because of this, in addition to race riots back home after the war. When discussing American liberalism, it is important to keep in mind that the United States has always been two nations with respect to race, and for that reason struggled with the issue longer than Europeans. Whereas the American North developed a tradition of liberal republicanism during the nineteenth century, the American South never did. The Jim Crow South was by far the most racist regime on earth during its time and only grew more authoritarian over time. Southerners legislated a comprehensive racial hierarchy that covered almost every aspect of social life, even ordinances that covered trivial things like playing checkers in public. In several states, distributing anti-racist propaganda was a felony (the extra-legal punishments were even more severe). The Jim Crow South was a one party state united in the defense of white supremacy. 16
Posted by Daedalus on Tue, 22 May 2007 19:42 | # Moral: It is simply absurd to argue that Europe was corrupted by the liberalism of places like Mississippi or Alabama. Racial equality was imposed on these states by the threat of overwhelming force in the teeth of massive and bloody public resistance. Anti-racism triumphed in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Ireland and so forth without so much as a whimper of resistance from the natives. Nothing like Birmingham, Selma, Oxford, or Albany ever occurred there. 17
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 23 May 2007 17:16 | # I am not averse to attending to “near” issues like immigration reform. But death deferred is not death avoided, and the only possibility for avoidance is an effective political and cultural revolution ... in, by my estimation, the next two decades. Soren raised two related issues in his discussion with Alex Linder, to whit meta-instability and the MacDonald paper. Similarly, I have argued that liberalism itself is decaying, and will most likely lead to Leviathan (for which read Wellsian dystopia, Martin). There are forces at work - and, specifically, they are the evolved, irredeemable nature of Man and this timely, inevitable business of political entropy - which are opening cracks in the timber already. Look at any comments thread on a UK national daily article touching upon immigration - there are the cracks. The discontent is building, and will only continue to build as the extremis intensifies. To crack liberalism will take more than that, though ... more than the race issue itself. Linder has a point about the JQ, doubtless - since, in the future, support for the MultiCult from Jewish sources like Margaret Hodge will be more exposed and easier to see. Hodge’s Jewishness was very quickly pointed out on the thread to her original Observer article. But even so, positive ideas and some motive force from a revolutionary elite are necessary at some point. As yet there is no sign of that. 18
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 23 May 2007 17:29 | # I will add just one other thought about liberal declension. There are no longer any motivating ideas in liberal arguments. They have had their moment, their final revolutionary moment. They had their opportunity to free Man from all his inborn tethers into their utopian dreamworld. They couldn’t. They can’t. So everything now is about managing the consequences, which are dystopian. They obsess about a regnant nationalism. They are nervous, as if they know the end must come in some form. They want to believe in RDNE and enriching society with Third World populations. But all they have left for argument are epithets and faux-moralisms. Meanwhile, the real principles are argued by us, and the creative ideas are ours. We are forcing into the debate the notion of a terrible injustice done to our people, and they have no reply. Little by little the road to actual discussion about repatriation to the status quo ante is opening. Twenty years is time enough. But we need to develop on all sides quickly and in at least as well-organised way as the cultural left, with its Jewish intellectual and activist core, did after WW2. 19
Posted by Daedalus on Wed, 23 May 2007 21:27 | # Liberalism has to be destroyed first. Otherwise, attacks on the status quo will continue to bounce harmlessly off their intended target. Trying to persuade a liberal to embrace his EGI is like speaking to him in Klingon. 20
Posted by Joel Godfrey on Thu, 24 May 2007 00:35 | # For any Americans on this site, if you want to send emails to your senate or send them faxes opposing the amnesty bill their offering go to numbers.com and send them faxes as much as you can. I’ve spent much of the last two weeks doing this and writing letters and even calling for the non-Minnesotan Minnesotan senators to not sign the bill. As well I’ve faxed and emailed my non-Minnesotan Black Muslim representative from detriot. We’re so lucky in liberal Minnesota! They had to shut their phones down and started worrying. The bill is now postponed again and there seem to be more and more senators not willing to sign it because they know they’ll be tared and feathered for being traitors against 23 million unemployed of the US and traitors against the vast majority of people in America according to zogby polls over the last 15 or so years. 21
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:08 | #
Race-replacement and the Gini coefficient. Now, you’d think a man in Greenspan’s position would know this, if only instinctively. (Hmmm, I wonder what about him could be overriding his instinct in this matter? ....) Post a comment:
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Posted by James Bowery on Mon, 21 May 2007 23:34 | #
Our choice of future is thus clear: it’s Wellsian dystopia or the Terror.
The wide-spread involvement of even medium and sometimes small businessmen in this travesty may result in something along the lines of the Holodomor as leftist elements akin to those in Latin America grab control of the revolution. That’s why I put forth my net asset tax proposal in 1992 as an alternative. The predicted centralization of wealth has continued with the predicted consequences.
politics ceases to be a process of attempting to produce a better society and instead becomes a corrupt search for rents.
That’s why my reform includes a citizens dividend as replacement for the false dichotomy between vampire capitalism and vampire communism.
Fundamentally, the bounty of economic rent arising from civilization is a problem due to the corrupting nature of bounty. It is actually worse to leave that bounty in the hands of the wealthy than it is to merely distribute it in a citizen’s dividend evenly across the entire society—because corruption of the wealthy is more destructive than corruption of the poor. Moreover, if the poor aren’t even at subsistence, it is hardly a corrupting factor short of the race between female fertility that occurs in Malthusian degeneracy. The problem at present is we don’t have a system that is clean enough to expose the problem of Malthusian degeneracy. A society in which economic rents are evenly distributed across all citizens would avoid the worst forms of corruption while clearing the social decks to let people recognize Malthusian degeneracy and the need to contain consequent dysgenic selective pressures.