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Author Archives: theartfuldilettante
Watch “The Conservative Student’s Survival Guide” on YouTube
Watch “The Conservative Student’s Survival Guide” on YouTube
Monday Reflections
One of the problems with being relatively wealthy if you are a parent is that you cannot provide your children with necessity.” (Share this on Twitter)
“There are so many ways that things can fall apart or fail to work altogether, and it is always wounded people who are holding it together.” (Share this on Twitter)
“There’s some real utility in gratitude. It’s also good protection against the dangers of victimhood and resentment.” (Share this on Twitter)
‘Acting Up’ – or Just a Desperate Cry for Attention?
Clients often ask me if the children (or adults) in their lives are just looking for attention when they “act up” or become emotionally distraught. This is often true, but the goal isn’t attention as much as what I call “visibility.”
People have a reasonable need to feel that their lives are important and that they are visible to others. Visibility is the end result of achievement or success, and it cannot be faked in order to make visibility an end in itself. An author achieves visibility when she convinces readers that she has something valuable to say. A sports hero achieves visibility when he demonstrates talent on the playing field. A businessperson achieves visibility because he makes a profit by creating and selling a product or service of value to many.
So you can’t seek attention or visibility without first focusing on the means that make it possible. And that, not the visibility, has to be the end in itself. In the absence of actually earning it, the failure to get visibility can often lead to anxiety, which in extreme cases can lead to desperation. When people develop emotional disorders or maladies as a bid for attention, it doesn’t mean they’re deliberately faking it. While this may sometimes be true, what may actually be happening is that the person has become anxious and desperate because he or she has failed to understand that visibility can only come from a continuous policy of achievement over time.
There are also achievements in character or personality as well. You don’t obtain visibility in personal relationships primarily through career achievement. Somebody becomes good friends with you or marries you more for your personal traits and qualities (hopefully) than anything else. If you haven’t nurtured these qualities over time in a rational, principled and thoughtful way, you won’t obtain the desired visibility from somebody who reflects the ideals you already practice daily. You might end up with friends or a spouse in name only, but you will still not be satisfied, because you never satisfied yourself.
Some mental health professionals encourage people to get caught up in their childhood. “You didn’t get what you needed as a child,” they intone. “You must now work through that as an adult.” “Work through” is never concretely defined, and hundreds of psychotherapy sessions will give you no better understanding of that (though it might put a nice pool in the therapist’s back yard). This is because “working through” generally does not correct the most basic error: Failing to tend to the self and to develop it in a way that brings pleasure and genuine satisfaction.
To make matters worse, ethicists and moralists throughout history have emphasized what they consider to be the “virtue” of selflessness. So we end up with millions of conscientious, thoughtful people – the ones with the greatest potential for earned visibility – trying to become the opposite of what they require. They’re taught that the ideal is to tend to others, and never to themselves. And then they wonder why they suffer from depression, anxiety and other manifestations of low self-esteem.
If we want to feel good every day, it’s necessary to pursue the only course that can make that possible: self-interest, self-nurturing and recognition of the same in others. And better yet, when we find others we value or care about, it makes us better people to encourage the same in them. It’s mentally healthy for us and those we care about to seek our own happiness first. Selflessness cannot be the ideal if it is practiced with no regard for our own well-being.
Nobody can experience genuine happiness without a strong sense of self. It’s time to embrace the tools and the ideals that can make that possible.
Michael J. Hurd
Should We Commit to Fight Russia—for Finland ?
The prime ministers of Sweden and Finland, Magdalena Andersson and Sanna Marin, both signaled Wednesday that they will likely be applying for membership in NATO.
The “prospect” is most “welcome,” says The Washington Post: “Finland and Sweden Should Join NATO.”
The editorial was titled “A Way to Punish Putin.”
Before joining the rejoicing in NATO capitals, we might inspect what NATO membership for these two Nordic nations would mean for the United States.
Finland is a nation the size of Germany, but with a population only 4% of that of Russia and a border with Russia that is 830 miles long.
Should Finland join NATO, the United States, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, would be obligated to go to war with the world’s largest nuclear power to retrieve Finnish lands that an enraged Russia might grab.
Moscow has already indicated that, should Sweden and Finland join NATO, Russia will introduce new nuclear weapons into the Baltic region.
Why is it wise for us to formally agree, in perpetuity, as NATO is a permanent alliance, to go to war with Russia, for Finland?
Given the war in Ukraine and concomitant crisis in Eastern Europe, it is understandable why Stockholm and Helsinki would seek greater security beneath the U.S. nuclear umbrella.
But why would we voluntarily agree to give Sweden and Finland these war guarantees? Why would we commit to go to war with Putin’s Russia, a war that could, and likely would, escalate to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, especially if Russia were losing?
Finland was neutral during the Cold War. Sweden has been neutral since the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th century.
How did we suffer from their neutrality?
In Helsinki and Stockholm, the benefit of a U.S.-NATO commitment to go to war for Finland or Sweden is understandable.
But how does it benefit our country, the USA, to be obligated to go to war with a nation that commands the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons — over some quarrel in the Baltic Sea or Gulf of Finland that does not affect us?
Asked for his view on Sweden and Finland’s campaign to join NATO, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had a note of warning:
“We have repeatedly said that the (NATO) alliance remains a tool geared towards confrontation and its further expansion will not bring stability to the European continent.”
Should Putin’s Russia clash with Finland or Sweden today, the U.S. is free to respond, or not to respond, as it sees fit, depending on our own assessment of risks and rewards.
Why not keep it that way? Why surrender our freedom of action in some future collision involving our main adversary?
History holds lessons for us here.
In March 1939, six months after Munich, when Czechoslovakia disintegrated into its ethnic components, Britain issued an unsolicited war guarantee to Poland, then negotiating with Germany over the port city of Danzig taken from Germany by the victorious Allies after World War I.
When Germany, on Sept. 1, 1939, invaded Poland, Britain was obligated to declare war on Germany over a matter that was not a vital interest of Great Britain or its worldwide empire.
Lest we forget, it was the Bucharest Declaration of 2008, opening the door to membership in NATO for Ukraine and Georgia, that led to the recent crises in Eastern Europe and the current war.
The Russia-Georgia War of August 2008, the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, and Putin’s annexation of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine all proceeded from NATO’s decision in 2008 to open the door to membership for Georgia and Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine today is partly due to the U.S. and Ukraine’s refusal to rule out NATO membership for Kyiv.
No NATO nation today has a border with Russia nearly as long as that of Finland. If Finland joins NATO, will we put U.S. boots on the ground along that 830-mile border with Russia? Will U.S. warplanes fly in and out of Finnish airfields and air bases up to the border of Russia?
Collective security is said to be a good idea.
But the core of NATO security is provided by U.S. war guarantees, while most of the collecting is done by our 29 NATO allies, which could become 31 by summer’s end.
Otto von Bismarck predicted that the Great War, when it came, would be ignited by “some damn fool thing in the Balkans.”
And World War I was indeed triggered by the assassination of the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo in June 1914. The Germans came in in part because the kaiser had given Austria a “blank check” for war.
What enabled America to stay out of both world wars for years after they began was our freedom of “entangling alliances” when they began.
But today we not only lead an alliance of 30 nations, but we are adding two more members, one of which has a border of 830 miles with Russia.
How long does our luck last?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
Leftists in Power — Biden and all of Them — are NOT Reformable
Will Trump be President again?
President of WHAT?
The federal government is so corrupt, as we learned from Trump’s presidency and Trump’s eventual removal from office, that there’s nothing left to reform. Our Deep State/whacko/DemCom/RINO/propaganda media Establishment sets the agenda and pulls the strings no matter who is in office. Look at the military. The top brass is filled with corrupt generals, like Milley.
You cannot reform the unreformable. You don’t do business with sociopaths, thugs or thieves. You arrest them, you stop them, you convict them, you restrain them, you remove them from power forever, and you take away their freedom because otherwise they will eradicate YOUR freedom.
Can this be done? How can this be done? I don’t know. What I do know is we have to defeat these people like we defeated the Nazis and the Soviets. We didn’t hold an election run and rigged by Nazis and Soviets to get rid of Nazis and Communists. That would have been laughable.
Keep this in mind as we go through the motions of another election cycle. Remember what happened last time. RINOs still dominate the Republican Party and cannot be trusted even if they actually win a rigged election this time.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Watch “Government Can’t Fix Healthcare” on YouTube
Rule by the Unhinged
The last 5 presidents got us into $30,000,000,000,000 in debt. Just switching between R’s and D’s won’t solve it.” [a meme on social media]
Defund 90 percent of the federal government–especially schools; privatize medical care and retirement; massively cut taxes; beef up the military (for defensive purposes ONLY); and pay down the debt with the massive economic growth that follows. Oh, and transition to the gold standard. That’s what we need to do, and neither party will do.
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If you know any leftists, are they worried about what’s happening to the country? Or do they think military defeat, hyperinflation, censorship and unlimited government will lead to peace, prosperity and the brotherhood of man?
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Leftists no longer virtue-signal. They literally compete to signal how INSANE and EVIL they are. We are under the political & cultural rule of irredeemable psychopaths.
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“I acknowledge one must acknowledge that prices are going up.”
— Kamala Harris, the regime’s “vice president” on 4/12/22
Revolutions have been fought — and won — with far less provocation than the unimaginable stupidity and arrogance of people holding power today.
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“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
— Victor Hugo
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“Remember also that the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
Inflation isn’t What the Experts Say. And it is deliberate
Definition of inflation
Monetary inflation is highly desired by the state. This has been the case thought history and still is the case today. That is because inflation facilitates government spending beyond revenue it takes through taxation. Government spending gives rulers, politicians and bureaucrats greater centralised control and commanding power over people’s lives (i.e., the economy and society).
Without inflation, the state finds itself shackled within the confines of what it can take via taxes. Therefore, governments will not miss a change to gain control of the monetary system. Once the state does have control of money, inflation becomes inevitable and institutionalised. This is why, in recorded history, nearly all cases of great inflation and hyperinflationary socioeconomic collapse (e.g., Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe and more recently Venezuela) have been a result of government (and/or its central bank) deliberate policy.
It is because of the insatiable appetite to spend more than they take through taxes that governments, through political deception and coercion, tend to undermine a sound money system and repress monetary freedom in favor of one that facilitates currency debasement (i.e., money printing). That is to say a fiat currency regime monopolised by the state and forced on the people by legal tender laws.
As such, from the statist economics standpoint, the definition of inflation had to be distorted and the public miseducated about it —so that the process of currency debasement (i.e., monetary inflation) may go unnoticed and accepted by those whom it hurts the most, the general pupation.
The popular and textbook definition of inflation is a generalized rise in the prices of goods and services. Commonly measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI). This definition is not wrong per se but it is inaccurate and grossly misleading. Deliberately so.
The original and more accurate definition of inflation is the artificial increase in the supply of money (and credit). By artificial it is meant that the expansion of the supply of money is not determined by the market (i.e., the people) but rather by the government, usually through a central bank.
So, this confusion in terms is not coincidental, it is deliberate. Given the rise of Keynesian economics and the inherently inflationary 48 Comments we, humanity, live under for fifty years now.
Deliberate distortion
The original definition of inflation has been distorted for two principal reasons. First, the government and its monetary agency—the central bank—shield themselves from any future blame for the continuing rise in prices and the currency loss of purchasing power that inevitably happens as a result of inflationist monetary policy. This enables the government and mass media outlets to divert the blame to something or someone else. The usual scapegoats being “greedy businessmen” or “corporations.”
Second, the official and distorted definition of inflation—a generalised increase in prices of goods and services—conceals the truth, the true source of inflation, thus preventing the public from knowing that inflation and the currency’s loss of purchasing power is a deliberate policy of government/central bank. Not knowing this, the public will not protest against it.
For example, this report claims that most Americans believe “corporate greed, profiteering and price gouging” is the cause of the current inflation crisis in the United States, where price inflation hit a 40 year record high.
What’s more unsettling is the same report found that the majority of those polled also believe that the government should step in and resolve the problem. In other words, the public wants the causer of the problem to solve the problem.
Such is the depth of economic misinformation and miseducation we face. Perhaps, if the public knew that since the establishment of the current US central bank in 1913, the dollar lost more than 95 percent of its purchasing power relative to gold (the commodity that gave the dollar its initial value, stability and global acceptability), they wouldn’t blame the inflation crisis on “corporate greed”.
Economist and social philosopher Murray Rothbard wrote:
“Government is inherently inflationary because it has, over the centuries, acquired control over the monetary system. Having the power to print money (including the “printing” of bank deposits) gives it the power to tap a ready source of revenue. Inflation is a form of taxation, since the government can create new money out of thin air and use it to bid away resources from private individuals, who are barred by heavy penalty from similar “counterfeiting.” Inflation therefore makes a pleasant substitute for taxation for the government officials and their favored groups, and it is a subtle substitute which the general public can easily—and can be encouraged to—overlook.”
The government’s monetary agency and the current fiat money system are the cause for today’s increasingly inflationary and chaotic monetary situation. Not corporate greed, speculators, free-market capitalism, Vladimir Putin, or the weather.
Under a fiat currency regime, the central bank can easily, artificially and systematically increase the money supply, almost like a magic trick, which makes inflation (mild or severe) the norm. And this inflationary process gradually destroys the purchasing power of the currency resulting in higher prices. This policy, while benefiting the government and associates, defrauds the people and impoverishes society, economically and morally.
Economist Hans F. Sennholz noted:
It is not money, as is sometimes said, but the depreciation of money—the cruel and crafty destruction of money—that is the root of many evils. For it destroys individual thrift and self-reliance as it gradually erodes personal savings. It benefits debtors at the expense of creditors as it silently transfers wealth and income from the latter to the former. It generates the business cycles, the stop-and-go boom-and-bust movements of business that inflict incalculable harm on millions of people.
Professor Sennholz further noted:
Monetary destruction breeds not only poverty and chaos, but also government tyranny. Few policies are more calculated to destroy the existing basis of a free society than the debauching of its currency. And few tools, if any, are more important to the champion of freedom than a sound monetary system.
Conclusion
A generalised rise in the prices of goods and services, is a consequence of inflation, not inflation itself. Inflation was classically (pre-Keynesian economics) defined as an artificial increase in the supply of money and credit.
Nowadays it makes sense to use the terms monetary inflation to specify the artificial increase of the money supply, on one hand. And use price inflation to refer to a generalised rise in prices of goods and services on the other.
Irrespective of the confusion in definition, inflation stealthily distorts and debilitates the economy, steals the people’s purchasing power and impoverishes society while benefiting the ruling political and business elites.
History (and common sense too) makes it clear that fiat currency regimes are unsustainable arrangements that always and inevitably fail. As such, there is no reason to believe today’s cruel and oppressive fiat currency regime will defy Natural law to stand the test of time.
Evidence suggests it is more sensible to believe the fiat dollar standard too will crumble. And when it does, we hope economic miseducation and misinformation will crumble along with it.
Author:
Manuel Tacanho is founder of Afridom, a sound money based digital banking startup for Europe and Africa. He’s also an advocate of free markets and sound money for Africa’s economic development.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 