The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
We’re told not to end friendships or break family ties “just because of politics.”
OK, then how about this:
Your leftist friends and family want you to starve, freeze to death or die of the heat due to the elimination of fossil fuels. They want you to walk or get a horse and buggy if you can’t afford a $50K or $100K electric car by 2030. They want you to spend 90 percent of your week working to support a 30 year old living in his parents’ basement playing video games and wanking off to porn. They want you to endure hyperinflation so immigrants who fled Venezuela because of hyperinflation can now experience it here, while staying for free in former luxury hotels and flying for free first class in luxury airplanes paid for by YOU while you get to live like those immigrants did back in Venezuela.
They want you to be censored on Facebook and YouTube, pay way higher taxes, be regulated into oblivion with rules that contradict each other and rules that THEY, as good progressive Democrats, do not have to follow. They want you to face the full wrath of the FBI if you take any political position they don’t like. They want you prosecuted with a felony if you call the man next door wearing a dress a man, when he decides one day he’s really a woman. They want you to face felony charges for this while rapists, shoplifters and murderers are let go to satisfy government racial quotas for prisons. They want you to subsidize multiple million dollar payments to EACH member of a politically protected racial class to which you do not belong. And they want you to obey ANY medical directives the government deems to be for the common good, while being forced to pay for the abortions of strangers. They don’t want you to have a viable alternative in any election and they don’t want you to complain about it.
When you focus on the actual facts, this is exactly what your leftist and Democratic friends and family support. Do you still wish to consider them loved ones?
Everyone who reads my posts wants to know: Who’s my pick? Trump or DeSantis?
Either.
Re: Trump and his alleged baggage: I will take Trump 1000 times over any Democrat (i.e., totalitarian), and I will also gladly take DeSantis–in both cases, with reservations, since I don’t agree with either on everything. Sadly, with ballot fraud and mail-in voting to continue in “swing” states–to say nothing of what they have in store for us next–it doesn’t matter too much. No Republican is going to win, because no Republican can win without swing states; and Atlanta, Philadelphia and greater Phoenix, controlled by sinister DemComs, will determine the outcome for what’s left of the American republic.
For now, I see the best option as supporting conventionofstates.com in a last desperate but still plausible attempt to restore our original Bill of Rights and Constitution. Beyond that, I only see secession and breakup for the states and localities who cannot roll over and willingly submit to a ridiculous, collectivist yet fully toxic and dangerous woke empire. Yes, this will likely lead to bloodshed, and that is tragic. So is a one-party, totalitarian country.
This glorified, totalitarian mobster who made billions off a scamdemic, killing who knows how many with an ineffective, toxic “vaccine” and instead of being humiliated, tried and executed for treason, smugly continues to lecture lesser mortals. Our once great nation, who defeated Hitler, won the Cold War, ended slavery and raised the bar on human freedom, is not well.
The opening lecture that I deliver every time I teach a Principles of Microeconomics course, which I do each semester, is on what the economic historian and liberal philosopher Deirdre McCloskey calls “the Great Enrichment.” I impress upon my students (most of whom are in their late teens) that they and everyone they know are off-the-charts materially wealthier than were the vast majority of all humans who ever lived. I explain that millennia after millennia, our human ancestors breathed, toiled, and perished in poverty so grinding that we today can barely imagine it.
This pattern of existence, when reckoned in historical time, was suddenly shattered just over two centuries ago. First in Holland, and then even more spectacularly in Britain, ordinary people gained steadily greater access to goods and services that in the past either were available only to royals, nobles, and members of high priestly classes, or – more commonly – weren’t available to anyone at all. Even Louis XIV, likely the most powerful man in the world, could not travel in motorized vehicles, escape from the heat of summer into air-conditioned rooms, converse in real time with people out of earshot, avoid having his face disfigured with smallpox, improve his vision with contact lenses or Lasik surgery, or treat his gonorrhea with antibiotics.
A key purpose of my intro econ course is to help my students understand that and how peaceful, commercial cooperation – today spanning the globe and involving billions of people nearly all of whom are strangers to each other – emerges to create and maintain our astonishing material prosperity.
Some students more than others resist my explanation of how. One such student – a freshman who I’ll call “Sarah” – came up to me after our most recent class and asked this question: “Isn’t our wealth the result of slavery?” She continued: “My high-school history teacher taught us that our wealth was extracted from slaves.” Sarah seemed to be convinced by her high-school teacher’s explanation.
Don to Sarah: “Yes, I’ve heard that claim, but I don’t buy it. How do you explain the fact slavery in America ended 157 years ago and ever since then the wealth of ordinary Americans has continued not only to grow, but to grow far more impressively than it did when slavery still existed. Think of what happened in the 20th century. Ordinary Americans got easy access to electrification, radio, television, automobiles, a continent-spanning network of paved roads, air travel, air conditioning, supermarkets, antibiotics, contact lenses, and laptops and smartphones. All of these pieces of prosperity were created long after slavery’s demise.”
Sarah to Don: “Yes, but these things were made possible by the wealth that whites extracted from slaves. Without the wealth produced by slaves and then stolen from them, we wouldn’t have had the foundation to produce what we did after slavery ended.”
Don: “American slaves worked overwhelmingly in agriculture. How did, say, cotton picked by slaves in Louisiana in 1860 turn 160 years later in Michigan into middle-class homes equipped with wi-fi, Google Home, and refrigerators stuffed with orange juice from Florida, pineapples from Hawaii, and sauvignon blanc from New Zealand?”
Sarah: “The wealth stolen from slave labor was eventually invested in factories that produced all these things.”
Don: “Not so. Consider, for example, Henry Ford. He was born into modest means on a Michigan farm in 1863 to a family with no history of slave-owning. What made him successful in business?”
Sarah: “You’re asking me?”
Don: “I am.”
Sarah: “I’m not sure. I don’t know the specifics.”
Don: “Henry Ford had entrepreneurial ideas. He also had the gumption and the freedom, as the economist Deirdre McCloskey says, ‘to have a go’ at putting his ideas into practice. Ford, like countless other lesser-known entrepreneurs, created wealth. Ford grew rich by dramatically increasing the efficiency of producing automobiles that the masses eagerly bought. His business success owed nothing to slavery.”
Sarah: “I get that he didn’t use slaves. But I feel that the capital to start his company probably came from wealth that had earlier been produced by slaves.”
Me: “First, the capital that first backed Ford came from a man named William H. Murphy. Born in 1855 in Maine, Murphy moved to Detroit where he and his father were successful in the lumber business. I’m pretty sure that post-Civil War Michigan lumbermen didn’t earn any income from slavery. Murphy, like Ford after him, created his wealth by running a successful business.
“Second, regardless of the source of the capital that Murphy invested in Ford’s new business, that investment would have been worth diddlysquat if Ford hadn’t had the vision, energy, and freedom to use those resources in ways that produced outputs that the masses wanted to buy and at costs low enough to make it worthwhile for Ford to continue to produce. This is what I mean when I say that Ford created wealth – wealth, obviously, for himself, but also for his customers in the form of automobiles that were worthwhile to purchase, and for his workers in the form of opportunities to earn incomes higher than they could have earned by working elsewhere.”
Sarah: “But I still feel that the seed money for all these later companies like Ford’s came from the slave economy that lasted in this country for centuries.”
Don: “Sarah, don’t feel. Think! Don’t you see that Ford created wealth? Don’t you see that he created value that didn’t exist until he put his entrepreneurial ideas into action? If Henry Ford could, without slavery – as you admit – turn some amount of wealth into a larger amount of wealth, why can’t other people have done the same, before and after Ford? Even if – contrary to fact – all of the seed money for the Ford Motor Co. happened to come from former slave owners, what created Henry Ford’s wealth and the valuable goods that he produced for millions of Americans was Henry Ford’s entrepreneurial vision and effort put into operation in an economy that permitted him to act entrepreneurially. No amount of resource-value grows into a larger amount of resource-value automatically.
“The ability of an entrepreneur to turn some amount of resource-value into greater resource-value doesn’t depend upon the source of the initial funding that the entrepreneur used to launch his or her venture. What matters is the entrepreneurship and the freedom of markets, which emphatically has nothing to do with slavery.”
Sarah: “I don’t know. Capitalism followed slavery. That must be significant.”
Me: “Do you remember my lecture from about three weeks ago in which I warned against the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy? You’re committing that fallacy now. You can’t legitimately conclude that if event A is followed by event B, that A caused B. Maybe it did, but maybe it didn’t. In fact, it’s possible that B happened despite, and not because of, A. Just because people leave their homes in the morning carrying umbrellas doesn’t mean that the rain that started later that day was caused by people carrying umbrellas.”
“Slavery was prevalent throughout human societies for millennia. If slavery was the cause of capitalism, don’t you think that capitalism would have started at least seven or eight thousand years ago? If slavery is the source of our prosperity today, why are not all countries in the world as rich as are the United States and Sweden? Do you realize that Brazil had slavery until 1888, nearly a quarter-century longer than the U.S. had slavery? Yet Brazilians have always been, and remain today, much poorer than Americans.”
Sarah: “I’m not convinced.”
Me: “Well, may I ask that you keep an open mind for the rest of this semester? Perhaps what’s still to come in our economics course will help you to better understand why I’m certain that modern prosperity has no connection whatsoever to slavery except that it is capitalism – and the ideas that support it – that brought about slavery’s demise.”
Sarah: “Yes, I’ll keep an open mind. Good night, professor.”
Me: “Thanks Sarah. That’s all I can ask. Good night. See you in our next class.”
“Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry,” attributed to Thomas Jefferson. That’s where we are today. We label it “elitism”, because connected members of The Party (wealthy Democrats and wealthy RINOs) may do whatever they wish regardless of the law, while the rest of us may not do anything we wish, at least if it offends The Party.
It’s also a dictatorship if the government authorities may show up at your house, as the FBI now routinely does, if your only offense is supporting a party in opposition to The Party. If you supported Trump and showed up at the U.S. Capitol January 6 simply to quietly and peacefully show your support, you’re a domestic terrorist — for that reason alone. If you support changing the curriculum of books in government-funded schools your children attend, because you don’t particularly care for Communism, mandatory drag queen shows for 6-year-olds, mandatory gender mutilation for 9-year-olds or racial supremacy ideology being taught to your children — for that reason alone, you are a domestic terrorist. If you don’t want a government-mandated experimental medical treatment for the cold and flu — for that reason alone, you are a domestic terrorist, censored through social media (essentially run by the government) and you’ll probably get a visit by the FBI too.
I have no hope that Republicans will ever get us out of this mess. At a minimum, they should be doing everything in their power to defund the FBI and arrest anyone at the top who’s responsible for these brazen violations of the U.S. Bill of Rights, done out in the open, right in front of us with totalitarian glee. If the House of Representatives under (temporary) control of Republicans can’t or won’t do that, then will they do anything if ever given full power of the government again, which they won’t get thanks to mail-in voting and ballot fraud?
We need a revolution. But if most people don’t even want a revolution, or are too complacent to care, the minority of us who want a change will have to watch everything descend into tyranny like America has never seen.
Socialism is a doctrine based at root not on love for the poor but on hatred for the creators, meaning anyone who makes money.
To start, let me make a key point: socialism at its root is not about economics. (I will use the term socialism and Communism interchangeably).This is why endless attempts by conservative publications to promote better economic education fall on deaf ears among leftists. The conservatives claim socialism has failed, but the socialists say, “No, it hasn’t. You capitalists are focusing on the wrong outcome.”
In fact, economic education is only useful if the culture and its leadership value wealth creation. Socialists do not. Every socialist “experiment” in history has been a failure with respect to abolishing poverty. It is quite clear that socialism has created and sustained poverty everywhere it has been tried, as for instance, by Russia and China. under pure Communism. In recent years, tired of mass poverty both have allowed some capitalism. Russia backed gangster capitalism and even that has made them somewhat better off economically (though not politically) than before. They are now undermining their economy by promoting a senseless and vicious war. China has allowed some capitalism under very strict Communist supervision accompanied by frequent threats against successful capitalists. Cuba and Venezuela have stuck defiantly with pure Communism and poverty. Millions of people who want chance in life have been fleeing from both countries
So, what is behind socialism? It is motivated by a certain ideal, a certain view of morality, which is the opposite of capitalist morality. Socialism is based on the doctrine of altruism, the morality of self-sacrifice. (Altruism, which means that your life belongs to others, is not the same as helping valued friends and relatives, as I’ll explain in another article.) In contrast, capitalism is based on the morality of self-interest, which means the right to trade freely with others and to profit from trade. In a free, capitalist country, everyone is better off but everyone does not come out exactly the same because people differ in their family circumstances, ability, ambition, effort, persistence, and integrity.
Is there a way around the fact that everyone does not start life in the same circumstance? Consider the policy of ancient Sparta. Children were taken by law from their parents at birth, raised in state institutions, and released at about age eighteen. This is a form of totalitarianism that even the communists did not stoop to, although they did something similar by making all children go to communist schools.
Socialists do want to promote universal literacy. This may sound appealing; who could be against teaching every child to read and write? But what is the real motive of making all kids go to socialist-run schools?
To understand the motive for socialist education, we first must understand socialist politics. Socialism means that the government owns the means of production. (To this end, calling Sweden socialist is simply dishonest; it is a welfare state just like most free countries, though with a higher tax rate than some.) Socialism may occur as a result of a violent revolution or through initial elections. Socialists who first get elected do so under the promise that everyone will have some degree of political freedom and some sort of a guaranteed life, which includes a good standard of living.
But the economic promise cannot be met because socialism always causes and sustains mass poverty. When the voters see they have been deceived, they start to complain; this threatens the whole socialist state. To protect their power, socialists must start by limiting, controlling, or abolishing freedom of the press, the airwaves, public debate, and open Internet communication.
Socialist governments also work to fix subsequent elections. They limit who can run for office. They limit or abolish airtime for unapproved candidates. They take control over counting ballots. They may check on how people vote and can even make such necessities as food dependent on voting the right way.
Disillusioned people may oppose the government, so demonstrations are outlawed. Eventually, the government must set up a force of secret police to ferret out troublemakers. (Venezuela uses Cuban and Russian secret police to keep order.) The police are used to identify harass, threaten, torture, imprison, and kill dissidents. Some socialist states allow emigration—after all, there are fewer people to feed and to make trouble. One way or another, the best, most ambitious, and skilled people frequently get out as soon as they can.
Now let us go back to education. Ideally, education involves giving children basic skills, which include learning how to think. But just teaching people how to think is too risky under socialism. People must be taught to obey socialist dogma. Otherwise, people might start thinking for themselves. They might expose government failures, contradictions, lies and corruption. They might want more freedom.
More freedom cannot be allowed. So schooling, whatever else it does, must include large doses of socialist propaganda. As a “bonus,” students who complain can be immediately threatened and are readily targeted as possible future dissidents. In short, rather than encourage the development of the mind, socialist schools work to stultify or rigidify the mind in the realm of politics.
Independent thinking is discouraged or forbidden and replaced with orders to memorize and spout socialist (Marxist) propaganda. As noted, when emigration is allowed, millions of people, those who want freedom of thought and opportunity, move to countries where they have the right to live as human beings.
Socialists claim that they will bring people to a higher moral plane. But that plane is actually lower. Citizens must constantly look for “traitors” to the cause—those who expose corruption or want freedom—and inform on them, including on their neighbors and even family members who dare express dislike for the rulers. The failure to turn in so-called “traitors” could result in threats, prison terms, torture, or death.
People quickly learn to censor themselves when they see what the consequences of speaking openly will be. Integrity must be crushed at all costs.
Of course, socialist leaders themselves may be hypocrites by secretly accumulating millions of dollars in wealth, often through drug dealing, theft, or running quasi-capitalist businesses on the side. George Orwell’s Animal Farm illustrates the hypocrisy of socialism, but in the end, this book is not really a critique of socialism at all. The Pigs who take more than their fair share of the common food are only condemned because they take too much. By implication, things would have been fine if they all had shared equally. Hypocrisy is not socialism’s main failing. The collectivist morality, by which everyone must selflessly share rather than being in charge of their own farms and trading freely with others, is never questioned.
What about socialist health care? We know that in Venezuela, the whole system has collapsed because there is not enough money to fund it. Donors from outside the country heavily support the few medical resources that are available. As for Cuba, finding trustworthy data is impossible because the government manipulates data as it wishes. But isn’t Cuba praiseworthy for training medical professionals? No. Their main purpose for training professionals is to send them to other countries as indentured servants—with the government taking most of the salaries. (Many of these health workers defect.)
So, if creating wealth for all, political freedom, quality health care, and education that promote thinking are not what socialism is fundamentally about, what is the ultimate motive behind it? It is not just power for power’s sake: after all, lots of dictators of various political persuasions seek that.
The deepest motive of socialists is negative: it is to destroy capitalism, which means to destroy the process of wealth creation as such.The true socialist’s core agenda is to prevent anyone (except selected socialist rulers) from earning more money than anyone else, even at the cost of keeping everyone at the near subsistence level.Socialism is a doctrine based at root not on love for the poor but on hatred for the creators, meaning anyone who makes money. (For more on this subject see “The Age of Envy” in Rand, 1993, Ch. 9).
What is the evidence that destroying capitalism is the number-one priority? The giveaway is that socialists are indifferent to the poverty they create; they are fine with everyone being equally poorso long as capitalism is wiped out. The duty of each citizen is to obey, to sacrifice his own hopes, goals, and plans for the sake of the collective—to be selfless, to give up wanting anything for himself except what the state permits.
At the deepest level, socialism entails the destruction of the human soul—which means the destruction of the mind, of rights, of values, of hope, of freedom—the turning of helpless victims into frightened, selfless beggars hoping for a crust of bread. This is the deepest meaning and motive of socialist “idealism.” Socialism is nihilism.
Socialists claim they are for “social justice.” But what does that mean?
Economically, social justice for the left means that no one should do better than anyone else. Some people may work harder than others, but they should not be allowed to benefit. Everything goes in the collective pot, which means everyone gets what someone else earns.
Economically, this is social injustice.
Compare this to capitalism in the context of free society where everyone gets what is earned through voluntary trade. This is real justice. Socialists have twisted the concept of justice into its opposite: getting what you did not earn is justice; getting what you earned is social injustice.
Edwin A. Locke is Dean’s Professor of Leadership and Motivation Emeritus at the R.H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the American Psychological Association, the Society for Industrial & Organizational Behavior, and the Academy of Management. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (Society for I/O Psychology), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Management (OB Division), the J. M. Cattell Award (APS) and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Academy of Management. He, with Gary Latham, has spent over 50 years developing Goal Setting Theory, ranked No. 1 in importance among 73 management theories. He has published over 320 chapters, articles, reviews and notes, and has authored or edited 13 books including (w. Kenner) The Selfish Path to Romance, (w. Latham) New Directions in Goal Setting and Task Performance, and The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators. He is internationally known for his research on motivation, job satisfaction, leadership, and other topics. His website is: EdwinLocke.com
If musicians and concertgoers are upset by the so-called “deceptive” practices of a “monopoly” like Ticketmaster and want the government to do something, they actually may want to redirect their attention towards another entity with monopoly power that also attempts to hide fees. That entity is … the government.
If only we had a thinker who could portray (again, in a best-selling book, later made available for free) what benevolence, respect, and happiness could be achieved when people come to live as free, moral equals, swearing by their life and love of it to “never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
The United States Has Been Destroyed by Its Ruling Elites
Paul Craig Roberts
Against the backdrop of the United States’ recognition of the investigation against Donald Trump as politically motivated, structural and ideological controversies, and concerns that the American economy will enter a recession, the GEOFOR editorial board asked Paul Craig Roberts, Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy (USA), a PhD in Economics and US Undersecretary of Treasury in the Reagan administration, to share his views on America’s future.
GEOFOR: Special Counsel John Durham “acquitted” Donald Trump on the so-called “Russiagate”, writing in his report that the FBI investigation was politically motivated. How will this news affect the Democrats’ fight against Trump?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The Special Counsel’s vindication of Donald Trump and denunciation of the FBI for conducting a politically motivated investigation devoid of any evidence should collapse the equally fraudulent Biden regime investigation of Trump on fake documents charges and the New York state prosecution of Trump on alleged expense misreporting charges. It has been clear for a long time that the list of fake charges against Trump, supported by the media, are propaganda to prevent Trump again running for President and to teach all future potential presidential candidates that they will be destroyed if they attempt to represent the people instead of the unelected ruling oligarchy.
However, the Democrat Party and the presstitutes that service them have no respect whatsoever for truth. Facts simply do not matter to them. This is true also of American Universities, law associations, medical associations, the CIA, FBI, NSA, the State Department, the regulatory agencies such as NIH, CDC, FDA, the large corporations, and many establishment Republican members of the House and Senate who serve the economic interests that pay them, not truth. It is also the case with a high percentage of Democrat voters who have been conditioned by propaganda to hate Trump. To Democrats what matters is not facts, but getting Trump. Truth is not permitted to prevent the destruction of Trump.
Consequently, the US is moving toward a fatal split in the society from which recovery is impossible. Trump represents ordinary Americans who prefer peace to the neoconservatives’ wars, who want their jobs back that the greed-driven capitalist global corporations sent to China and Asia, who want their children properly educated instead of indoctrinated with sexual perversion, Satanism, and told that they are racists. In contrast, the Democrats are increasingly Woke–people who believe that truth is an oppressive tool of white supremacy, that Christian morality is tyrannical and discriminatory against pedophiles and other sexual perverts, and that, as “President” Biden himself has said, white people are the greatest threat to America. See: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/05/15/us-navy-enlists-drag-queen-for-digital-ambassador-role-to-attract-more-recruits-2/
Now that official investigations by the House Republicans have brought the utter corruption of Biden and his son to light (see: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/05/16/bank-records-show-biden-family-received-10-million-in-payments-from-china-foreign-interests-house-oversight/ ), the Democrats, the dangerous and corrupt military/security complex, and the complicit whore American media, are desperate. They all stand as being exposed. So, rather than apologize for their mistreatment of Trump and his supporters–1,000 of whom the Democrats have illegally imprisoned–they will likely strike out while they still control the Executive Branch, the US Senate, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and federal agencies such as the IRS that have been armed and militarized.
Alternatively, the corrupt and threatened Democrats might cause war between the US and Russia, or Iran, or China in the hopes that a war will unify even Trump supporters, especially the super-patriots among them, around the “President” against “foreign enemies.”
GEOFOR: Recently there were reports that former Vice President Mike Pence seriously intends to compete with Donald Trump in the presidential race of 2024. How do you assess his chances and why did he decide to take such a step?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: Mike Spence has no chance whatsoever of prevailing over Donald Trump. Pence is running as a service to the ruling establishment. Spence is a pretend Christian Evangelical. Evangelicals don’t oppose Armageddon, because they believe they will be wafted up to Heaven, while those still on earth get consumed in fire. The Ruling American Oligarchy hopes that Spence will draw off the Christian Evangelicals from the Trump vote, thus reducing Trump’s margin of victory so that the Democrats can again steal the presidential election. As evangelicals are not very astute, the Democrats might succeed in derailing Trump and the American people. Pence, of course, would not become president.
GEOFOR: We can’t help but ask about the migration problem. After the abolition of Section 42, analysts predict a new influx of refugees from Mexico and Latin America. What will such problems lead to and will they affect the election of the head of the White House next year?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The Biden regime is spending billions of dollars “to defend Ukraine’s borders,” but won’t spend one penny to defend America’s borders. The Democrats want the Hispanic and Black immigrants, who they will give the vote, because the immigrant-invaders water down the white majority population and destroy the ethnic basis of the US. Instead of a unified nation, there is a Tower of Babel.
As the Democrats control the major cities in most states and thereby the election rules and vote counting, It doesn’t matter how people vote. As Stalin said, the only thing that matters is who counts the vote. Only a total fool would expect Democrats to count votes that gave victory to Republicans.
GEOFOR: Passions around the American public debt, inflation, jobs and the possible new collapses of American banks are only growing. Tell us, please, what awaits the American economy in the foreseeable future? After all, the recession in the United States will have an impact on the whole world one way or another…
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The United States, despite my best efforts and the efforts of others for decades, has been destroyed by its ruling elites for the sake of short-term profits and short-term growth in power over the people. By offshoring its manufacturing jobs, the global corporations destroyed the American middle class and the ladders to upward mobility that had made America the “opportunity society.” Today many former American manufacturing and industrial cities look like the remains of bombed cities.
As US corporations produce the goods abroad that they market to Americans, the goods enter the US as imports. Thus, offshoring production for the home market worsens the trade deficit.
The trade deficit has to be financed. This is no problem for the US as long as the dollar is in demand as the reserve currency by all countries in order to pay for their international transactions, and countries with trade surpluses keep their monetary surpluses in US Treasury bonds, thus financing both the US trade and budget deficits. Washington in an act of incredible stupidity has driven a dagger through the heart of the US dollar as world reserve currency, thus ending Washington’s ability to pay its bills by printing money. The dagger was the Biden regime’s Russian and other sanctions and the seizure of Russia’s central bank deposits. This finally convinced the rest of the world that holding dollar balances exposed a country to the risk of expropriation or control by Washington.
The consequence is that the world is moving away from the use of the dollar, instead settling their trade balances in their own or other currencies. Therefore, the demand for dollars is declining, but the supply is rising because of the US trade and budget deficits.
Sooner or later the US dollar’s exchange value will fall, setting off high inflation in the US that is outside the control of the central bank. American living standards will fall, and the US will begin to look like India in 1900.The hatred of white people that Democrats have taught to blacks and immigrant-invaders will result in internal war. The only question is whether white Americans will have been so indoctrinated with their guilt that they are unable to defend themselves.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts – Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy, US economist and ex-Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, a member of the Cold War Committee on the Present Danger.
Serge Duhanov is a journalist, specializing in international relations and national security issues. Не worked as the NOVOSTI Press Agency’s own correspondent in Canada (Ottawa, 1990-1992) and the US Bureau Chief (Washington, 1996-2001) of the newspapers Business MN, Delovoy Mir and Interfax-AiF.
The official RIP date for America was 2020. I have not felt like an American since that year. We are an occupied country, not a free republic.
We need a Constitutional convention. It’s provided for in our Constitution. Check out conventionofstates.com and decide for yourself. Its purpose is NOT to rewrite any of the Constitution. Its purpose is to RESTORE the Constitution by massively rolling back federal power and spending.
It might fail. But we won’t know until we try. Failure is CERTAIN on our current course. The country is like an airplane falling out of the sky and hurtling toward the earth. This may be our last chance to avoid civil war, totalitarian dictatorship, or both. On our current course, it is 100 percent certain that your life will become miserable and the lives of your children will be unthinkable.
Michael Munger recently raised an issue of the utmost importance: proponents of classical liberalism have forsaken the task of making the moral case for capitalism. Thinking that drawing everyone’s attention to capitalism-induced prosperity is enough to capture minds and hearts, as Iain Murray elaborated, all we did was throw economic logic at people, “hoping it will stick.” But with that we left a moral vacuum which progressives and collectivists were eager to fill with their vision of a good society. We need, as George Leef summarized, “teachers and professors who will make the moral case for liberty.”
If only there were a radical proponent of individual rights who could help accomplish the task. Someone who would spend her life advocating capitalism as the only moral system, who would call capitalism the “Unknown Ideal,” sell millions of books dramatizing and explaining the virtues of individualism and capitalism, and inspire thousands of minds. If only there were someone who could have warned the new intellectuals that they “must fight for capitalism, not as a ‘practical’ issue, not as an economic issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it.”
Maybe such a thinker could explain the “moral meaning of the law of supply and demand,” which is that in a free market the economic value of man’s work is determined by one principle: “the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return.” Or maybe, she could demonstrate that money, “those pieces of paper, which should have been gold,” are not just a medium of exchange or store of value, but “a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce,” and that your wallet is a “statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money.” Maybe, just maybe, such a thinker could help the advocates of classical liberalism and free markets rethink and put their positions in moral terms.
“Near total lack of empirical lived experience with socialism’s manifest defects,” Munger points out, contributes to the rising interest in socialism. Imagine if that same thinker, having suffered socialism herself, could convey the horrific experience of living (or more precisely, slowly dying) under socialism to those who, hopefully, would never have to? She could, say, write a novel, a tool humanity invented to immortalize stories and experiences. A catchy title like We the Living could seize the attention of millions of readers, while educators today would only need to order some copies to their classrooms for free and hand them out to students. That would be something.
Sure, this thinker could still do more. As Iain Murray said, if we were to make a moral case for capitalism, we might need “to look at the foundations of moral thinking” itself. Maybe she would even need to be so extreme as to call for “nothing less than a moral revolution,” pointing out that, on the basis of altruistic morality, “capitalism had to be–and was–damned from the start”? This radical new view, of course, would put her at odds with, and lead her to be ignored by those unwilling to challenge conventional morality, which ascribes moral importance only to pain, need, suffering, self-abnegation, and sacrifice. Imagine, however, if she did not waver, and proceeded to lay the foundations of a new morality that designates the pursuit of one’s own happiness, ambition, success, and achievement — everything capitalism allows and celebrates — not as morally irrelevant (at best), but as supreme values.
We lack “a liberal Utopia…a truly liberal radicalism,” Munger quotes F.A. Hayek saying. Hear, hear. If only we had a thinker who could portray (again, in a best-selling book, later made available for free) what benevolence, respect, and happiness could be achieved when people come to live as free, moral equals, swearing by their life and love of it to “never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 