RSS
In the mid-1980s, Soviet officials saw a need to open up their economy in hope of achieving Western-style innovation and productivity. That was the decade in which Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were sponsoring the neoliberal pro-financial policies that have polarised the U.S., British and other economies and loaded them down with rentier overhead.
The Soviet Union followed a privatization policy far more extreme than anything the social-democratic West would have tolerated. It agreed in December 1990 to adopt the neoliberal blueprint presented in Houston by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to transfer hitherto public property into private hands.[1]The Economy of the USSR. A study undertaken to a request by the Houston Summit: Summary and Recommendations (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, December 19, 1990). The promise was that the privatisers would find their interest to lie in producing abundant new housing, consumer goods and prosperity.
The Soviet leaders believed that the neoliberal advice they received was about how to follow the path by which the advanced industrialised nations had developed and made their prosperity seem so attractive. But the advice actually turned out to be how to open up their economies and enable U.S. and other foreign investors to make money off the former Soviet republics, by creating client oligarchies of the sort that U.S. diplomacy had installed in Latin American and other puppet states. The Cold War’s isolation of the former Soviet Union gave way to turning its republics into prey for financial and natural-resource exploitation by U.S. and other Western banks and corporations.
The result was kleptocracy, euphemised as a free market. Banking, real estate, natural resources and public utilities were privatised in the hands of appropriators who managed their acquisitions in their own self-interest, which they found to dovetail with that of foreign investors and banks. As a Russian joke of the 1990s expressed the ensuing crisis: ‘Everything the Party told us about communism was false; but everything they told us about capitalism was true!’
Vladimir Putin described the destruction of the former Soviet Union as the great tragedy of the late 20th century. What made it a classical Greek tragedy was how inevitable yet also how unanticipated its destiny was when the Soviet republics accepted shock therapy and abolished the government’s role as investor, credit creator and regulator in 1991. Privatisation did not end dysfunctional planning. It merely privatised social dysfunction, soon proving to be as economically and demographically destructive as an outright military attack would have been.
Every economy is managed by some class or another. In the absence of public authority, planning passes to whomever is in control of banks, land and related sources of wealth, and above all the allocation of credit. Today, three decades after the post-Soviet carve-up began, the concentration of banking has devastated, indebted and impoverished the population, leading to shorter lifespans and rising emigration.
This excellent but heart-breaking book describes the tragedy wrought by post-Soviet neoliberal remaking of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Sanghera and Satybaldieva describe how U.S., World Bank and IMF officials, posing as helpful advisors claiming to help these republics adopt the model by which the Western economies had grown prosperous, pressured these countries to act on behalf of foreign financial institutions and corporations more than for their own populations. These ‘aid-giving’ (or more accurately, debt-creating) institutions acted on behalf of Western banks and investors to promote the carve up and financialisation of post-Soviet land, real estate, oil and mineral wealth.
Soviet planning had provided housing as a right, along with access to education and basic health care. There was no market for housing and no mortgage debt. Government financing of housing by its own credit creation kept housing charges low. There was overcrowding, but at least families were not driven into debt to obtain housing, education or medical treatment. That is a major reason why so many Russians and other post-Soviet populations now feel a certain nostalgia for Soviet times, bad as they seemed in 1991.
The subsequent malaise was unnecessary. The post-Soviet economies could easily have been made vibrant and affluent. They could have given title for real estate to its existing occupants and users. In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union, occupants and users of real estate were given titles, obtaining property free of debt. But if state controls on rent and speculation had remained in place and social housing construction had been adequately financed, people would not have had to amass huge debts to own homes, buildings and land. This would have minimised the economy’s cost of living, helping the post-Soviet states develop a low-cost agriculture and industry.
The Soviet planners paid little attention to how the course of rent and interest payments were polarising the Western economies. Not having levied charges for land rent or interest led them to miss their economy’s great advantage compared to Western finance capitalism: freedom from land rent, monopoly rent, interest and usurious financial practices. It has been these rentier revenues that have ended up polarising and impoverishing the Post-Soviet economies.
The post-Soviet republics could have used their own central banking systems to finance restructuring, keeping credit creation as a public utility as it was in the Soviet times. That would have freed these economies from reliance on foreign banks to extend dollar credit to be spent locally. Without wages being paid or other income received after their currency collapse wiped out domestic savings, there was an immediate need for debt financing to survive. Public banking would have freed economies from the need to borrow dollars or other foreign currency, especially to obtain housing.
National treasuries could have given value to this money by taxing the economic rents created in real estate, agriculture and industry. That was the ideal of classical economists, after all. Taxing the land’s rental value would have prevented it from becoming an object of speculation. Instead, rental income was paid to the commercial bankers who emerged, financed by Western banks instead of a new national central bank. The post-Soviet tax systems burdened labour and industry, while property owners were largely untaxed, steering their economies along rentier lines.
The ‘rule of law’ sponsored by Western backers enabled managers and political insiders to register public land, oil and mineral resources, public utilities and factories in their own names, and ‘cash out’ in hard currency by selling many (and often most) shares in their new companies to Westerners. Most of the proceeds were kept abroad, leaving local economies in need of foreign credit to function.
To make this asset grabbing irreversible, the neoliberal rule of law and ‘security of contract’ were legal straitjackets giving creditors the right to foreclose on the property of debtors – without rights for debtors and renters, who were evicted if they could not meet their mortgage payments or pay higher rents as housing was gentrified. As Sanghera and Satybaldieva summarize, ‘By instituting neoliberal financial policies, the Central Asian states re-wrote the social contract and created a new class dependency between financial elites and borrowers. Debtfare states were established that facilitated, justified and normalised unequal class relationships to ensure debt-led capital accumulation. They minimised the oversight of the financial sector, and eliminated strong protections against predatory lending. The political elites legitimised the neoliberal framing of debt as empowering.’ The effect was not to empower the population but to marginalise it while driving smallholders into debt and depriving them of their homes.
What was lost was the concept of housing and other basic needs as a human right. ‘In the Soviet Union there was a definite set of property rights that people could rely on, and the state would respect and implement,’ the authors describe. ‘The bundle of rights included rights to land and housing, and rights to occupancy and use for tenants and their families. Rent, interest and speculative gains were ‘non-labour’ income, and were not allowed.’
After 1991, however, housing throughout the former Soviet republics had to be obtained by taking on debt. They thus traded away domestic state-sponsored financial, fiscal and real estate self-reliance to follow a dream of obtaining widespread U.S.-style prosperity, not realising how polarising the policy of debt-financing would be. In the absence of domestic savings (which had been wiped out by hyperinflation), commercial banks obtained loanable funds by borrowing abroad. Domestic private-sector debt thus found its counterpart in rising debts to foreign banks.
Describing how ambitious individuals obtained title to prime housing, shopping centres and marketplaces before entering political office, the authors provide a list of local mayors who enriched themselves further by selling off public land and municipal assets. Corporate housing became a vehicle for appropriators to evict former employees and long-time tenants, gentrifying real estate much as in the U.S. Rust Belt where factories were being closed down. The new owners were free to maximise whatever they could squeeze out, with no attempt made to provide the social protections taken for granted in the West for debtors or renters.
Obtaining housing after 1991, required going into debt. Unlike the 5% range of mortgage rates in the West, much of the population borrowed money at effective interest rates between 25 and 50%. It was like trying to buy a home by resorting to American-style payday loans. There was little way to pay them off. Moreover, women and the non-affluent rural influx into the cities had to rely on microcredit, typically bearing 80% annual interest.
Sanghera and Satybaldieva single out the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for their efforts to legitimise such usury while sanctimoniously claiming that it ‘empowered’ women as debtors. The reality, they point out, was that, ‘the International Finance Corporation and other international donors mandated these MFIs [microfinance institutions] to become fully commercialised to achieve high returns on equity. The average interest rate was 44%.’ The result, as Satybaldieva has pointed out elsewhere, has been a disaster:
Many women, who were previously employed as factory and agricultural workers, and as teachers and healthcare specialists, were forced into petty trading through Western sponsored microcredit schemes. . . .
Second, many women borrowed money to pay for services, such as health care and education, which were previously available for free. Key social services saw significant cuts in state spending, which not only reduced public sector pay but privatised and commodified basic necessities, enabling affluent groups to access better quality services while low-income groups were deprived of them. . . . A 2021 survey of online microcredit borrowers in Kazakhstan showed that 29% of respondents took out loans to pay for emergency expenses, 21% to make ends meet, and 16% to pay off debt on bank loans. The rest used the loans to pay for medical treatment, utilities, educational fees. Only a small minority of loans was linked to buying consumer goods.[2]Elmira Satybaldieva, “The Debt Oppression in Central Asia,” Naked Capitalism, June 7, 2021.
To enforce collection, local microcredit lenders mobilised local district officials and elders to shame women for missing their repayments, even descending on families at funerals to insist that they bear collective responsibility for the debts of the deceased. The amounts involved are enormous, the authors report. ‘Between 1995-2012 microcredit enabled a transfer of up to $125 billion from poor communities in the Global South to financial centres in the Global North.’
Women became the most radical opponents of Western-style neoliberal reforms. In Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital and largest city: ‘On 26 May 2016 about 700 people, mostly rural women, protested in front of the US Embassy demanding debt amnesty from banks and MFIs that had been created and supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation. Holding placards that read “Occupy FINCA”, “Debt kills”, “Save our homes from banks” and “Humans above profit”, the protesters did something very significant that day.’ They attributed responsibility and blame for their situation to Western financial institutions rather than on their personal failings. Similar anti-debt protests and attributions occurred in neighbouring Kazakhstan.
What made the debt burden a national problem was that homebuyers and businesses typically agreed to denominate their debts in dollars in order to lower the exorbitant interest rates charged for loans in local currency. As economies were dollarised, their local exchange rates depreciated as a result of the balance-of-payments deficits resulting from trade dependency and general economic imbalance. The cost of servicing foreign-currency debts rose in proportion to the depreciating exchange rate.
Poverty drove labour to emigrate. Ironically, this helped stabilise the balance of payments for many Central Asian countries. Remittances from Kyrgyzstan’s exodus of migrant workers account for about 30% of its GDP, and Kyrgyzstan had a similar ratio of 33%. That was typical of Central Asia. Similarly, Tajikistan’s migrant workers in Russia sent their families back home income amounting to over 30% of its GDP.
Post-Soviet Central Asia lacks the basic reforms almost universal for thousands of years. Already around 2350 BC, the Sumerian ruler Urukagina proclaimed a reform that stopped creditors from entering the homes of debtors and simply grabbing their possessions and animals. From Mesopotamia and Egypt down to Roman times the rights of debtors were protected by requiring written records to document all creditor claims and limiting interest rates. But Western advisors made no attempt to create such rule of law in Central Asia. What their legal system achieved is closer to barbarism, as Sanghera and Satybaldieva conclude:
In seeking to liberate the population from the Soviet form of welfare dependency, the neoliberal architects produced new parasitic and exploitative forms of market dependency, in which the powerful propertied class appropriated and exploited surplus value that others generated. The asset-rich and transnational capital became richer by taking from the asset-poor through interest, rent, capital gains and low wages. The massive transfer of wealth left much of the population in a state of indebtedness, poverty, misery and distress.
On the international level, the neoliberal rule of law is what corporate lawyers have written to enable Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) courts to block government attempts to fine or charge foreign investors for the ecological and social damages they cause. Global oil and mining monopolies confront governments in a united front, having mobilised the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation to pressure host countries to abide by pro-corporate rules that limit the rights of their governments and blocking democratic electoral oversight or pressure. In the face of these courts and the often naïve (or corrupt) contracts signed with government, no countervailing attempt was made to create state regulatory agencies, courts or international law to give post-Soviet economies the protections common in the United States and Europe.
What Western investors wanted most from Central Asia was its natural-resource wealth. The authors describe how U.S., World Bank and NGO advisors imposed contracts favouring the interests of Western oil and mining companies. Chevron set its eyes on the vast oil reserves in Kazakhstan’s Tengiz oil field. What Kazakhstan wanted was Western expertise as contractor and minority investor. But Chevron wanted control – and to leave the host-country government with as little revenue as possible from the sale of its oil.
The result was one of the world’s most predatory oil contracts – nothing like what Kazakhstan thought it was to get, but a bonanza for Chevron. The contract promised that the government would receive 80% of production, reflecting the normal 80%/20% production-sharing agreements for European and Middle Eastern countries. However, the authors describe, Kazakhstan ended up with only 2% of the project’s revenue. Corporate lawyers drew up a contract obliging Kazakhstan’s government not to receive any profits at all until it had borne the immense costs of developing the oil field itself (borrowing from the IMF) and met a long-term production target – by which time nearly a quarter of the Tengiz oil reserves would be emptied out and sold.
Chevron’s operation proved to be as disastrous an ecological horror story as it had caused in Ecuador. It was fined $303 million for violating environmental protection laws, but pressured President Nazarbayev to repeal the fine to show the world how ‘investor-friendly’ Kazakhstan was! When popular opposition arose to demand a fair contract, international investors, the response by international investors and Western government officials and their front men at the IMF, World Bank and USAID was to claim that renegotiation would violate the rule of law and sanctity of contracts.
Kyrgyzstan suffered in a similar way from foreign gold-mining polluters. These ‘externalities’ were borne by the host countries, with no cost to the foreign investors for their illegal, irresponsible and predatory behaviour. If the West truly had sought to help the post-Soviet states become prosperous, its diplomats would have helped negotiate fair natural-resource investment agreements, environmental protection, worker safety and other public regulation. Instead, Sanghera and Satybaldieva conclude: ‘The neoliberal investment rules regime binds governments to agreements signed with transnational corporations . . . If agreements are violated, investors feel justified to take host states to international arbitration for damages. . . . The rule of law . . . claimed that . . . the state cannot infringe individual rights and freedoms, and the domain of private property must be protected from majoritarian politics.’ Neoliberalism thus did not get rid of state planning. It established corporate dominance over the state, forcing host-country governments to give ‘the interests of transnational capital [priority] over those of their own population, and cooperate with foreign corporations to limit democratic voices and weaken resistance.’
Some conquered countries recover, as Germany and Japan after 1945. But conquest of the former Soviet states took the form of corrupting their economic structure by installing a kleptocracy. The destiny of Central Asia and other post-Soviet states remains shaped by the way in which their land, mineral resources and public enterprises have been privatised at the hands of a client kleptocracy in alliance with foreign capital. Like the land grants created by the Norman Conquest and those of Spain in the New World, the post-Soviet asset grab has created a new oligarchy empowered to collect land and natural-resource rents for themselves, and for U.S. and other foreign shareholders and creditors. The widening maldistribution of property and debt dependency is likely to block their development for many decades.
The accusation that Tacitus put into the mouth of Rome’s adversary, the Celtic leader Calgacus two thousand years ago – ‘They made a desert and called it peace’ – might be levied against the Western neoliberals who impose financialised austerity, dependency and debt peonage, and call the takeover of government by rentiers a natural and inherent rule of law. The challenge for Central Asia is how to reform in the face of the vested interests that have been put in place over the past thirty years. Reform is resisted not only by the new rentier interests and their foreign sponsors, but also by the narrow ‘middle-class’, which does not find its interest to lie in joining with the majority to revive public spending and tax land rent and other economic rents.
Resilience cannot be restored without public spending, but the rentier business plan is to minimize taxes by shrinking the government, especially by privatizing its public utilities and other functions to create opportunities for charging monopoly rents, and to oppose taxation of economic rent. Today’s mainstream economic philosophy and academic curriculum throughout the West backs this neoliberal program by denying that there is any such thing as unearned rentier income or wealth.
Yet only a rent tax can recapture what insiders have appropriated. At issue above all is whether credit, the banking and tax system will be managed as a public utility or for private gain. A national treasury or central bank must be empowered to create money so as not to rely on foreign banks. The guideline must be that no economy should borrow in a foreign currency that it does not earn, e.g., by exporting to earn the foreign currency needed to pay debts. There is no need to rely on foreign banks to lend dollars to be converted into domestic currency. In such cases the central bank has to create the domestic currency anyway. Foreign credit is needed only to pay for trade and payments deficits, not for domestic investment or consumption.
These tax and financial reforms failed as classical economics was rejected after World War I. The world today needs to recover its basic approach in order to free itself from the pro-rentier detour that it has taken, not only in the post-Soviet republics most conspicuously but now also plaguing Europe and the U.S. post-industrial economy itself.
To avoid the foreign dependency inherent in the neoliberalism sponsored by U.S. diplomacy, the World Bank and IMF requires an alternative body of economic theory, above all the distinction between earned and unearned income and the concept of economic rent as the excess of market pricing over intrinsic cost value. That was the thrust of classical political economy in the 19th century – to free markets from the rentier class. Value and price theory were the analytic tools to isolate economic rent as unearned income. These concepts provide the basis for managing a mixed public/private economy, public investment and credit creation, and for protecting domestic labour, industry and agriculture. In elaborating a theory to guide policy, the disastrous neoliberal promotion of rentier interests throughout the post-Soviet states provides an object lesson for what to avoid.
Notes
[1] The Economy of the USSR. A study undertaken to a request by the Houston Summit: Summary and Recommendations (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, December 19, 1990).
[2] Elmira Satybaldieva, “The Debt Oppression in Central Asia,” Naked Capitalism, June 7, 2021.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
What’s happening now? And what does the future hold?
Central Asia’s stans were dirt poor and backward before, during and after communism.
During Communism people lived in abject poverty while Nomenklatura lived at first world level.
Now, during Neoliberalism, people live in abject poverty while Elites live at first world level.
There was only one foreign gold mine producing gold in Kyrgyzstan. However, the Canadian-owned Kumtor gold mine was nationalized earlier this year. Kyrgyzstan is a bad example for illustrating exploitation by international capitalism because their treatment of the one foreign mining company they had producing anything was extortionate and not a single other foreign mining company has been interested enough in their country to develop another mining project to the production stage. Sometimes you also have to blame the people of a host country for screwing up.
Thank you for this article. Part of the struggle in the world is for investment capital. Investors want a return, want their investment to be safe, and often want to influence the society they’ve invested in. Each polity should want to attract as much investment capital as is possible, but without falling to its influence.
If an investor wants a top return, he should get it. If he wants his original investment to eventually return to him, that too should happen. But he cannot be given more than that.
It’s also wanted for locals to develop capital, not to consume excessively, which they can invest. In the US, it is said to be good when workers consume. But it is actually good when they save. Workers should work long hours, to again save. Ideally, you have a large class, a middle class, which has some capital.
Trade protections are what to look at, export driven models like in Asia which trade goods for investment. If I spend my money on a capital investment, that money works for me. If I instead spend money on a barren mistress or on a travel, I gain nothing.
Consumption taxes, as opposed to an income tax, also are thought to discourage consumption, encourage investment. Rothbard disagreed with this last point.
He’s right on the . . . uh . . . money.
The mis-named “free market” is a euphemism for kleptocracy.
“Privatisation did not end dysfunctional planning. It merely privatised social dysfunction.”
Oh, my god. Truer words were never said. When you leave “central planning” to Wall Street, it is worse than when you leave it to the government.
And don’t you try to pawn off that bullshit that, “Oh, golly gee, uh, they could have no central planning.”
And the moon could be made of green cheese. But it ain’t. And central planning will never go away. The “free market” just gives the job to the absolute worst people for the job.
“Every economy is managed by some class or another.”
Wake up and smell the flowers, free market babies.
Every. Every. Every economy is managed by some class or other.
Read it and weep, you dumbass libertrarians:
“Soviet planning had provided housing as a right, along with access to education and basic health care. There was no market for housing and no mortgage debt. Government financing of housing by its own credit creation kept housing charges low. There was overcrowding, but at least families were not driven into debt to obtain housing, education or medical treatment. That is a major reason why so many Russians and other post-Soviet populations now feel a certain nostalgia for Soviet times, bad as they seemed in 1991.”
Thanks. I wish more looked at attracting capital, as you have. Foreign investment is good; it just has to work for a nation and not the other way around. If I live on a desert isle, say undeveloped Australia with many people; development is only happening with investment.
Bootstraps would be a slow means to develop. It just requires an open mind to get real economics. It’s simple, but the Marx vs. Mises divide is misleading. South Korea or Japan are excellent, positive examples of common sense development.
told
It’s better that people own their own houses.
There really is not much difference between a billionaire owning a neighborhood or the government owning it. Either could be well run or not, balanced by transparency, regulation, and an opposition/competitor, or not.
Ideally, you have a large middle class that owns some of its own capital, little people owning things, controlling their own destinies a bit. An Englishman’s house is his castle.
The trend is towards servitude, concentration of wealth and power; so, society has to be designed towards a bit of smallness, decentralization. Nothing in excess.
Good question. I cant speak to the local laws and regulations now but they appear to all be joining in to Russia’s economic eurasion integration amd China’s belt & road intitative. I do know also that at the last SCO meeting all nations agreed to start trading and settiling in their local currencies more. It would appear to address the need to break away from the failed policies listed here.
Thank you for the lesson. I was not aware of this book. I didnt keep up with what happened in those countries when the USSR collapsed. This was helpful
I agree with you generally, but there are positives to having “organic growth.”
Charleston, SC, grew organically, without city planning, and has a great deal of charm and character. People really enjoy living there. The organic nature seems more genuine, more real, more worth preserving. Charleston was designed and built essentially with fewer private or public forces controlling it.
Contrast this with a planned city with straight roads, which might in some ways be nicer but which has less distinction, less particularity. “A mother loves her child not because he is best but because he is hers.”
There’s always a bit more complexity to these issues. Nationalism tends to value “organic” traditions very highly, things that were not, or do not seem to have been, elite driven.
“The Soviet Union followed a privatization policy far more extreme than anything the social-democratic West would have tolerated. It agreed in December 1990 to adopt the neoliberal blueprint presented in Houston by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to transfer hitherto public property into private hands.[1] The promise was that the privatisers would find their interest to lie in producing abundant new housing, consumer goods and prosperity.”
Hudson, either out of ignorance, or perhaps deliberately, sets up a “straw man” (“privatization”), which he then attempts to destroy. An old ( but transparent), trick. Just another shell game.
Anyone who seriously believes that Russian,er, “privatization” based on recommendations from the criminals in the IMF, the OECD, and the EBRD , has got anything at all to do with free markets and genuine private business dealings between the producer and consumer, entirely free from government influence and control, has got, at the very least, “a screw or two loose” as they say. (But what did I expect from a Marxist “economist”?)
No different from the fake “privatizations” carried out in the US and the UK and similar, all that happened was that state control of various industries was to be hidden/masked behind a fresh coat of paint (ie lies) called “privatization”.
In other words, in the case of the former USSR, overt, out in the open state ownership and control of all industry and commerce ( ie full on communism, which Hudson apparently advocates), was to be replaced/hidden by a system whereby ownership of industries was ostensibly placed into “private” hands, but whose hands would still be ruled behind the scenes by the “mailed fist inside the Velvet glove” called the state, instead of being completely ruled by the wants and demands of consumers in a free market.
In other words, Soviet style communism was phased out and replaced with a fascism more in line with the “successful” fascism already on display in the West.
“The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.” Ayn Rand
“Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.”
Ludwig von Mises
“If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.” Ludwig von Mises
Regards, onebornfree
“Central Asia’s Neoliberal Tragedy”
“The goal of the ‘liberals’ – as it emerges from the record of the past decades – was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot – by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli.”
Ayn Rand
“The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial-that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions.” Ludwig von Mises
Regards, onebornfree
If the West wants to survive it simply needs to cast off its Jewishness.
I was curious to see if anyone would be defending the rape and plunder of the old USSR.
Quotes by Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises complete the proof that Hudson is a dishonest/ignorant lout.
Excellent article.
When the Russians fell upon hard times, there was an expectation that the state must provide all citizens with food, housing, and health care, albeit low quality. As the USA falls upon hard times, there is no expectation due to a twisted culture. The results will not be pretty. Portland and Los Angeles are leading examples.
Just a thought, low iq nations always have shit economies. SK and Japan weren’t always high IQ. Muslim countries will continue to falter unless education becomes a more important thing than praying five times a day.
Before buying any books, read the now-classic article that explained it amazingly well:
The Harvard boys do Russia
https://xevolutie.blogspot.com/2016/08/545-harvard-boys-do-russia-janine-wedel.html
Note the original publication date, May 1998. Rumor was, not that many years later, one of the most avid readers of the article was V. Putin. His actions afterwards make sense if true.
the trend isn’t towards servitude naturally so! Servitude is a deliberate calculated product of elitist political economy as is clear from the way all capitalist society is run.
It is past servitude now as current political economy is Covid and the Depopulation of Humanity. The Billionaires have attacked the whole global human population and are in the process of reducing it to a level futility from which the people would never be able to rise again to any kind of meaningful social existence
what did we expect as technology advanced brining all sorts of means to the powerful that could be used against the people. As wealth concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, the need for social control advanced even as the need for costly labor grew less and leas as machines became facile and eliminating the need for human workers
so the Capitalist problem has become what to do with humans as technology advanced requiring less and less labor. the quality of the capitalist response would be clear as we see what he has done in this issue for example. As the Bolsheviks fell he raped the former Soviet Union. what did we think he would do when he had to deal with the growing redundancy of labor to machines ? exactly! Kill off all the people! heartlessly, relentlessly! all! older, middle aged, younger, children 5 to 14
Even though I always knew this to be the capitalist level of social savagery I am still stunned by the use of Biden for example. Biden’s senility is being made full and absolute use of, no wastage of any of it. The relentless destruction of western capitalism is truly horrifically impressive, alongside the equally comprehensive depopulation taking place. The Governor Gavin Newsom is instructive indeed. What did he expect? did Newson really think that the capitalist have made room for him, that there will be places for such as he at the end of this.
The Billionaires are just a few people yet the are able to convince all they need in order to effect their program to work for them or they would not succeed. But they have no room for Fauci and company. And who would they be able to trust anyway given the nature of the game they play of which they are past masters. To be sure of their safety ultimately the power must be theirs alone, comprehensively, absolutely. No others must have the slightest potential of slipping out into ultimate usurpation of the social power at the end but the capitalists
And again as the Capitalists, the Jewish elites smash America utterly in front of our eyes, the west as a whole, destroy global economic systems, infrastructure, global transportation, health, food…their resolve and commitment to their class interest, their perfect heartlessness is most impressive.
Last chance for the people of the world. No doubt at all what’s afoot anymore, what the game is and what the popular option is. It is time for the people to rise up and do that job for the people that must be done…or lay down and die of they wont want to. Give up already then!
So Sad.
I wish I learned more of this through Doctor Hudson’s perspective and Books as I was coming of Age. So glad I left Active Duty prior to 9/11; and Fortunately “Dodged a Bullet” not taking an IT Contract with a NYC Branch of an Foreign Bank which had Offices in the WTC(“Whew!”).
I’m so glad that I wasn’t working for the Chicago / Harvard Teams, or any “Western Team” operating in the Former SUN Nation-States.
Being stalked and plundered by Ethnic/Cult Parasites during my Navy+Post-Navy Years, I find reading about these Nation-State Level Scams quite disturbing.
Empires+Colonial_Expansionists notwithstanding, we hope to see Nation-States adopt Policies+Systems that don’t feed KleptOchlarchies.
😃👌Well summerized😄 👍
To remember😃👍👌
So they believed the Americans? Imagine!!!!
🤷😱
One problem with consumption taxes is that they weigh more heavily on the poor. People living on $10 a day probably spend most of that on food. Take a dollar off them for tax and they’ll feel the pinch. Was Bezos taxed when he consumed all that rocket fuel?
There’s this British guy, actually he used to be American, so he’s a funny kind of Brit. Actually he wasn’t really American. Anyway, check it out: a psychopath runs loose in Russia:
“Bill Browder” (not his real name)
Video Link
an alternative body of economic theory, above all the distinction between earned and unearned income and the concept of economic rent as the excess of market pricing over intrinsic cost value.
In a capitalist economy, there is no permanent unearned income. Competition rules pricing – cost value is irrelevant. The only unearned income is the one enjoyed by the non-working lumpenproletariat, thanks to the current voting system.
“Advice” ! Advice from people driven by interest and not by benevolence! “Advice” with ulterior motives😏
Neo-colonialism and neo-slavery⛓️🔗
Yes, it means both we are “free” to take what we want, and what we take is “free,” i.e. we don’t have to pay for it. This has been the West’s modus operandi for many centuries, going back to time of slavery and Western colonial regimes that stripped (and continue to strip) Africa, Asia, Middle East, and South America of their resources. There are, to be sure, costs associated with colonialism–including that of maintaining large, well-trained, well-equipped military. At some point, the costs outweigh the benefits, as UK discovered, and vast numbers in empire-less nation are reduced to hand-to-mouth existence, and as we see, too, in US, where collapsing school systems, dysfunctional health care system, homelessness, and huge prison population have turned country into dystopian nightmare.
“J” – (quote) –
“In a capitalist economy, there is no permanent unearned income. Competition rules pricing – cost value is irrelevant. The only unearned income is the one enjoyed by the non-working lumpenproletariat, thanks to the current voting system.”
YOU are 100% incorrect. That is, if you are referring to the American business situation and how life REALLY IS in our country.
There is all kinds of “unearned income” to be had in the USA. Only they do not call it that. Wall Street is ripping off people constantly, along with all of the “gurus” in the so-called financial “industry.” The EFFECTIVE tax rates of the richest people and the corporations are the lowest since the end of World War II. The (remaining) American middle class, if they still have jobs that pay anything, are the ones who are footing the bill, not counting the money that gets printed out of thin air, which is then loaned to the bankrupt U.S. government.
The United States USED TO BE a country in which worthwhile products were made, which could be purchased by its workers earning (relatively) good wages. NO MORE! The USA is now an oligarch controlled fascist state, the main “business” being screwing other people out of their money.
Except that in ‘the West’ they do it stealthily in smallish steps, deploying deception and bipartisan treachery plus corrupt&venal MSM+PFBCs. Some proof is already ‘in here,’ see Ayn Rand mentions, say. Another proof is the privatisation of medicine; ‘naturally’ [in the neoliberal frame], profit is prioritised before any ‘healthy’ outcome. A friend of mine actually witnessed some visibly bleeding person being turned away from an hospital [in the US], due to being unable to present a credit card. rgds
Don’t like Hudson.
Why not give each person/family a free and clear deed to his/her/their apartment/home? Go back as best you can to old land records and restore farms to owners. Roads, bridges, nature, utilities, etc. are given as shares to locals. Watch how private ownership groups would be fair and efficient. Not perfect but better.
Libertarianism works if tried. Hudson’s halfway house would fail.
What were the Africans doing with all their resources? Were the Arabs capable of drilling for the oil under their sands? Should the West have received nothing for doing all the necessary work to obtain and use those resources? What, out of the goodness of their hearts? Seems to me, the people of Great Britain were doing a whole lot better when they had an empire. I’ll let you in on a secret, the collapsing schools in the US are the ones with too many black kids causing mayhem and the huge prison population is what helps to keep honest citizens safe. A country with 46 million blacks is bound to have trouble educating them and keeping them from committing crimes.
Marc Alaux describes the post comunist Mongolia as he saw it as a traveler in his book Sous les yourtes de Mongolie. The transition to the market economy looked pretty painful.
You are spreading Mises B.S., because you yourself are confused. This is what happens when you get diverted into cul-de-sacs of bad thought. Lolbertarianism is a dialectic of neo-liberalism.
After Perry’s black-ships arrived, the Japanese leadership did not say, “Hey give me some dollar loans!” I want to industrialize, and be like the U.S!
They instead redoubled their efforts and exported what they could make, using their own labor, and then acquired dollars. They also sent Japanese students abroad to learn technology at the highest rate possible.
Japan then imported some Neo-Liberal banking strategy, but soon dismissed it. They also listened to economists, such as Peshine Smith, who was trained in the American System of Economy. The American system uses SOVEREIGN CREDIT (Not foreign investment), to then boot strap industry. It also uses Tariffs – not free trade.
Mises and Lolbertarianism is not real economy, you have been duped.
The only need for dollars or some other form of FX is to acquire those things you cannot make domestically. Neo-liberal mantras about the need for foreign investment are refuted by history, which is why economic history is no longer taught. Then the Mises crowd rushes into pass their hypnosis… useful idiots.
Debt instruments grow outside of nature, and at an exponential rate. If you are a country and you borrow Dollars, or some other form of money not your own, you better be damn careful. Lolbertarianism is silent on debt mechanics, and it cherry picks monetary history. Russia is a cautionary tale on what not to do, as they destroyed themselves in the 90’s as this article discusses.
Schacht’s NSDAP trading banks were a good example on how to acquire foreign technology and not go into debt. The debt relation between sovereign countries was examined yearly, and the books were closed out.
For example, if National Socialist Germany needed Tin from Burma, they would make an order for it. Burmese were paid in Kyats when the Tin transferred. German’s got to work making industrial goods, such as sewing machines, etc., which then transferred to Burma. Both parties would resolve the debt relation and never had usurious claims by the (((Creditor Class))). Lolberatarianism of course is horrified at the thought of national socialism and sovereign money.
Hudson doesn’t say it outright, but Debts were routinely erased by the God-Kings of the ancient near east. They also limited creditor claims to 1.5X the original amount.
This is more hypnosis you are trying to pass as some sort of wisdom:
Investors want a return, want their investment to be safe, and often want to influence the society they’ve invested in.
Investors must be limited to 1.5X, otherwise it is excess claims, and hence it is usury. Lol’s don’t even understand what usury is, and then make claims about how investors are some sort of God bringing net benefit, and free markets are god-like. It is a cult.
If an investor wants a top return, he should get it. If he wants his original investment to eventually return to him, that too should happen. But he cannot be given more than that
He doesn’t get top return, he must be limited . Too bad so sad, you cannot take excess gains. China’s smashing of Evergreen is a good example, as the “bondholders” get to take a haircut. The bondholders do not get to take usury on society.
If he cannot be “given more than that” then you agree with Fascism or National Socialism.
I notice that MH studiously avoids mentioning the Tribal nature of those who plundered the USSR. Almost all of the oligarchs were Jewish as were the Harvard Mafia who masterminded the process.
Or marrying your first cousin.
👍😾
And like everywhere and every time the arrival of countless so called NGO benefactors😃😃😃
Expression that I discovered in another article of UNZ : “Government funded NGO” (and by naive small donors, often poor moreover)😃😄😄
Michael has already done more than enough by raising the conscious levels among thinking people.
He has almost single handedly resurrected Classical Economy, to then become part of the discourse.
I recommend that he studiously avoid the “tribe” or he will be destroyed. Will we benefit if his books are taken off the shelves, or he is banned?
Usury, rents, unearned income, sordid gain, imbalanced FX flows, etc., are not exclusively the domain of the tribe. Mammonism can infect the brain of any group of people, and even many Aryans go against their nature, and operate as a self interested parasite. Look how many Lolbertarians always show up for a Hudson article, when their LoL doctrine is apologetics for parasitism and sordid gain taking.
Yes, the tribe is over-represented in parasitism, but it does Hudson no benefit to point it out. The tribe is an evolutionary parasite, which becomes obvious when you employ Classical Economic Analysis to examine their behavior.
I agree, have you ever read 5000 years of debt?
One born free-dumb managed to be # 16.
Since you camp-out waiting for a Hudson article to post, I figured you should be #1. You are falling down on the job.
Classical Economy is a threat to Lolbertarianism, as it exposes the leading intellectuals such as (((Rand))) and (((Mises))) as the propagandists they are.
Here is Hudson commenting on your type, and others who live in an alternate reality:
https://www.unz.com/mhudson/soros-and-china-the-vocabulary-of-neoliberal-diplomacy-in-todays-new-cold-war/#comment-4912434
You are a flea, and live in flea-bag motel. You have checked in and you cannot check-out, because to do so would mean rewriting what you think you know.
Demoralized people don’t have the bravery or testicular fortitude to confront contradictions resident in their noggin.
Haiti, I’m sure – would welcome you to their free-market paradise.
Jul 26, 2019 World ‘will diminish role of dollar and US banking system’: Russian minister at Non-Aligned Movement
Anya Parampil sits down with Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov at the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Venezuela. They discuss the emerging multipolar world and efforts to establish a financial system independent of the US dollar.
Video Link
I think the sanctity of Western imposed laws should be shattered by Asia and the laws that are ambiguous and that allow for the predatory behavior of the IMF and friends should become void. The legal system as we know it is being fully controlled by the US and the US DOJ. US dominated law has become a threat to a majority of countries if just because of its sheer complexity and its one-sidedness. Normal people in government and in the public everywhere are being trapped just as Frédéric Pieruci, Weng Wanzhou and so many other well informed people were trapped. This is the opposite of the idea most people have of Justice.
Kleptocrats have been draining and selling the peoples natural resources for the benefit of themselves and their controllers since days of yore. This facade of a treasury, federal reserve, office of budget and management is a joke.
For our overlords, there’s no such thing as a budget or financial management. If government had accountability, we wouldn’t be looking at $30 trillion in short term debt or the $100-$200 trillion in long term liabilities.
Every four years the debt bomb is passed on to the next robber barons as the circle of corruption flows like a oozlum bird that travels in ever diminishing circles until it’s engulfed in its own orifice.
What do you call a parasite that is GlobalHomoZioBIGsRxMIC3 ?
Evil is too generous a name for this dark void consuming humanity.
No, do you know if Graeber covers the Talley Stick Era in his book?
Debt mechanics really popped out at me when I modeled King Edward’s Talley Stick Economy, especially what happened in the big fairs, like Mayfair.
This was my first exposure to debts and credits being “force” balanced by the King. It was unadvisable to leave the fair without a clean slate. The English of that day also had little gold and silver as the Jews were allowed to take the metal with them when they were kicked out, so the fairs used Script instead.
Later, when I read Hudson, I notice that he notices – the same things in ancient economies, like Corvee labor being a debt to the King, and then the laboring population uses that King’s debt as money and to pay taxes.
Reap what you sow… Want to control oil regions? Blowback… Want to take others natural resources? Generations later you get climate crackdowns. Dont want 46 million blacks in prisons and faiking schools? Dont import them and then breed them tow work for free… I thought the US was supposed to be built on “Judeo Christian vlues”..?? They must have skipped the verses about reaping and sowing..
Once again, you conflate socialism with communism. A co-op is socialism. State ownership is no different than bank ownership.
https://www.panarchy.org/proudhon/state.html
Oh. Well, then, carry on.
Wealth is not a product of investment. Investment may (or may not) facilitate wealth-creation, but, in itself, it is not the source of the wealth (nor is “labor,” btw).
A worldwide revolution in which a plan to demolish the elite couldn’t be too far off…
Should say Kazakhstan, I’m guessing.
I can’t recall on the tally sticks but the book goes in-depth about debt in ancient economies, pretty much what your last comment entailed. I highly recommend the book, the author is Jewish and explains a lot of useful things i think he might be a gatekeeper but he died last year.
On the tally sticks, have you ever watched the masters of money? It’s another good resource to expand your knowledge.
Video Link
Portuguese translation at
https://www.resistir.info/m_hudson/tragedia_15out21.html
Yes, I like Bill and think his heart is in the right place. Although lately he is having a hard time. We need to really revisit that period. Hudson claims the west is a detour in History, but we actually had periods where we did the right thing.
Speaking of rents, I wish the bastards would lower them. Because the goddamn rents are too high. The rents are too high. The rents are too high.
‘In the Soviet Union there was a definite set of property rights that people could rely on, and the state would respect and implement,’ the authors describe. ‘The bundle of rights included rights to land and housing, and rights to occupancy and use for tenants and their families. Rent, interest and speculative gains were ‘non-labour’ income, and were not allowed.’
Gee, the Soviet Union sounds like a much better place than you witless no-brains seem to allow. Gosh, no wonder most Russians want to go back to it. But of course you know better than them.
Regarding the foundation of Capitalism – the accumulation of capital – ‘The Empire of Cotton’ (Sven Beckett) gives an in depth review of the ‘war capitalism’ and ‘cheap labor (slavery)’ advantages of the West/Britain.
And ‘Debt: the First 5000 Years’ is also illuminating. Too bad the author, David Graeber, died young in the magical Autumn of 2019 (along with PCR Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis). Same time as the startling Repo Market Meltdown.. and over 19 CEO’s stepped ‘down’ in a short span. Not to mention the prescient ‘Event 201’… hmmm.. no pattern here …. ?
You have me thinking about something, which I first learned from reading E. Michael Jones…it’s about risk. The way you seem to be positing investment is the usurious way, but maybe I’m reading you wrong, but what the usurious investment is, is this: the investor loans money to a business to start or grow, and wants interest on his loan AND the principal back, regardless of whether the business fails. That’s crap..it puts ALL the risk on the business, and ALL the benefits on the investor…the fair way to do it would be investor puts the money into the business, and only gets something back if the business succeeds, or only gets interest but not principal, or only principal but no interest no matter how long it takes, etc. It is shared risk. What a true nation of people would do to help each other out, and help each other succeed. What we do is Vampire capitalism…I now see what that phrase means. And how it ties into so much of this foreign investment, etc.
“Germany’s unforgivable crime before WW2 was its attempt to loosen its economy out of the world trade system and to build up an independent exchange system from which the world-finance couldn’t profit anymore. …We butchered the wrong pig.” —
Winston Churchill (The Second World War – Bern, 1960)
I don’t suppose Luddie liked FDR’s Four Freedoms any better.
In Soviet times, most people in the Central Asian Five lived somewhat above the poverty level while the Party *nomenklatura* lived at a Roslindale / Croydon level and drove Ladas, Samaras and Volgas.
These days, most people in the Five live on, below or just above the poverty line while the new Kleptocracy live at a Monte Carlo / Malibu level and drive imported 4×4 SUVs. Many of them own flashy expensive homes abroad, flashy yachts moored on the French Riviera.
Walmart knows all about privatizing profits and socializing costs; the Walton *famille* are as rich as God Almighty while their employees are actively encouraged to apply for food stamps, paid for by the US taxpayer.
There has to be an educated elite that understands these sophisticated concepts.
The most pressing question is how do you find and train these people – and they cannot be psychopaths. Russia is constantly looking for the “300.”
In ancient Venice, they would look at both sides of the debt/creditor contract, and then decide the risk and spoils. For example, if a rich creditor contracted a fishing expedition, and no fish were caught, then the creditor would take the hit for the costs of the expedition. It was understood that the ship captain debtor was taking life risk and also risking his assets (the ship, etc.) If there was a good haul of fish, then the profits for involved parties were spelled out in advance. It takes a third party to intervene between two way relations, and the third party has to be trained.
Catholic doctrine since Aquinas has devolved, and modern humans are less sophisticated than our forbearers. This loss of knowledge and sophistication was due to recycled usury funding hypnosis through false narratives and dialectics. For example, Lolbertarianism would be a dialectic, which was funded into existence. If the average person is “iced out” with false doctrine, then they are removed from the battlefield. Their life energy can also be harnessed to fund the creditor elite class.
Zippy is a Catholic, and he followed Aquinas, who in turn followed Aristotle.
https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/usury-faq-or-money-on-the-pill/
We exhort you not to listen to those who say that today the issue of usury is present in name only, since gain is almost always obtained from money given to another. How false is this opinion and how far removed from the truth! We can easily understand this if we consider that the nature of one contract differs from the nature of another. – Vix Pervenit
The key is to avoid using a 3rd nation’s currency as a way to measure relative value. If someone was inventing foreign trade for the first time today, the inventor wouldn’t use a 3rd nation’s currency (ie the US dollar) to measure relative value, instead, that inventor would choose something like bitcoin as a measure of relative value.
Reality is a tough concept for some to comprehend. The history of mankind is the history of one group taking from another. No group is without sin. Africans stole, raped and enslaved other Africans. Is it your contention that their enslavement in certain parts of the Americas was “blowback”? Did the Arabs have to share their oil and the profits because of all the gold they stole from the Eastern Roman Empire? The Christian values of the US is what helped make it a great nation, one that both Arabs and Africans are willing to do almost anything to immigrate into. That’s a bit of reality. Maybe you can comprehend it.
The Reagan Administration was supply-side, not neoliberal. The Glass-Steagall Act was repealed at the end of the third presidential term after Reagan had left office 12 years previously. There was no job offshoring or globalism. These mistaken policies originated after the Soviet collapse in 1991.
What American corporations do in the Third World is much worse than old-school British colonialism. The British, despite their occasional mistakes, created infrastructure, provided education and invested in their colonies without expecting the natives to pay them for the privilege. And the Empire was one of the first polities to outlaw slavery. American banks replaced it with debt slavery.
Love your work, Mr. Roberts, keep up the good fight!
True , of course, IS.
The corollary of that attitude may be the lack of acknowledgement that the fastest economic recovery in European history was Germany’s 1933 onwards Mercantilism , the creator of which is forbidden mention .
Mofo-Bill writes:
Readers, have you noticed how the Mofo is to Michael Hudson, what Jen Psaki is to Biden ?
Mofo, why are you the 24/7 apologist for Hudson ? He’s written the article, so he should speak for himself.
Or is Hudson too demented to post a coherent response ? Perhaps he’s too thin-skinned to accept constructive criticism.
Meanwhile Mofo, I notice in a previous comment that you claim Libertarianism is apologetics for parasitism and that Libertarians don’t understand what usury is.
Well readers, let me pose this question to all of you:
All you Michael Hudson groupies, I ask you, SHOW ME one article, one video in the last 20 years where Hudson has ever called for ENDING THE FED.
Failing that, show me where Hudson has ever asked for an AUDIT of the Fed (as Ron Paul has tabled in Congress on countless occasions – and his son Senator Rand Paul continues in that tradition).
Let’s turn our attention to the 2008/09 GFC.
In the immediate aftermath of the Lehman Bros collapse and the market meltdown, the Zio-owned banking/Insurance industry was destined for bankruptcy.
Goldman Sachs-of-sh!t, J.P Morgan, AIG, Citigroup and all the rest that had been reckless would have gone bust.
The Zio shills all demanded a taxpayer funded bailout and that money be allocated for TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Programme).
Of course, bailouts for reckless behaviour is NOT Capitalism.
In Capitalism you reap what you sow. If you’re prudent and do the right thing by your customers and clients, you prosper.
If you exploit them and refer to them as ‘Muppets’, whilst engaging in the most reckless financial chicanery imaginable, you deserve to go the way of Enron.
Ron Paul was shouting ‘NO BAILOUT’ from the rooftops – all documented, countless videos showing Dr Paul saying they should ALL go bust.
So Mofo, show me one video or article where Michael Hudson vociferously demands that there be no bailout during the 2008/09 GFC in REAL TIME. (ie: as the crisis was unfolding in Sept/Oct 2008 and not 5 years down the track after the event as he is known to do).
Of course, there is NONE.
We know that you’ll come up empty handed.
Because Hudson will NEVER CRITICISE HIS ZIO-CABAL BENEFACTORS !! Because Hudson was ALL FOR privatising profits and socialising losses when it came to his Zio backers.
As always, Mofo talks a big game, but when it’s time to put the rubber to the road, Mofo can’t walk the walk.
That’s why you’re unaffectionately known as the resident MoFo here on UR.
Mofo-Bill writes:
This Mofo speaks of ‘testicular fortitude’, yet he and his messiah Michael Hudson are such CRAVEN COWARDS that they refuse to debate the Libertarians in an open forum.
Admittedly, no country on Earth has practised Free Market Laissez-faire Capitalism in its purest and unadulterated form.
Nor has any country practised pure Trotskyist-Marxist centralised totalitarianism as Mofo and Michael Hudson advocate (although in the case of the latter, they’ve come very close in the examples I’ll furnish below).
But let’s look at those countries that came closest to the Free Market/Minimalist government intervention/Low tax ideal.
We have Great Britain and the U.S in the 100 years or more leading up to the formation of the Zio-owned Federal Reserve.
We have China (1978 – present day).
Let’s look at those countries that come closest to the policies Mofo advocates:
We have China (under Chairman Mao 1949-1976), Soviet Union, Nth Korea, Cuba, Albania …. need I say more.
Basically, wherever countries come closest to the practice of Free Markets/Minimal government/Low taxes, we have stellar economic outcomes.
Wherever Mofo’s discredited heavy handed Socialism is found, we find 3rd world sh!t-holes.
You are some kind of retard!
I am a NSDAP national socialist, who is for sovereign money and a form of mixed economy.
This has most definitely been tried in history and it worked. It is working in China now. My comment history is full of analogies of China vs NSDAP economy.
You keep repeating the same autistic talking points and cannot learn. This is what I mean by demoralization. Your brain is messed up, and cannot accept data at variance with what you think you know.
Hudson is not a Trotskyist, which I have also explained to you, but since you are unable to learn, it is like pissing in the wind.
Agree to a degree. But Bitcoin and other cryto currencies are outside the purveyance of the nation state…. Putin at Valdai was clear they will be preserving the Russian state and not letting it devolve into fiefdoms. China is on the same track (just ask Jack Ma). So nation states will be using their own sovereign digital currencies.
Ok if you know what group always takes from another then yould know from your bible “justice” dictates thieves will have to pay ome way or another…. That is why nations always fall and always rise and there will be wars and rumors of wars u til the end. So what exactly is the complaint? Reality is stolen fruit eventually becomes rotten whether one calls themself a Christ follower or not.
There’s a distinct difference between a loan and an investment. As an investor, one would OWN part of the corporation and succeed or fail as things turn out. As an investor, you OWN part of the profits forever.
As one who loans another funds, that does not create an ownership in the venture. The risk reward relationship is taken into account at loan origination time. The lender has no future profit besides the interest on the loan and owns nothing.
The only crap involved with this is the stuff between your ears.
The magnet that attracts the world’s rabble isn’t christian values, it’s ‘free stuff’.
Turn off the ‘free stuff’ and the dolts of the world will stop coming.
Maybe you can comprehend it.
Mefobills probably has an economics degree so thinks that Hudson is some kind of genius. He probably also thinks he has some actual knowledge about how the world works.
All of economics is opinion. There’s no hard empirical proof for any of it and that makes it bullshit. The practitioners of economics are therefore bullshit artists. Economists are the whores to the bankers and gov’t. They will write up some nonsense to justify anything and everything their masters want to implement. They can do this with a clear conscience because it’s bullshit. Anything can be made to sound reasonable.
Economists are a lot like the climate frauds in that they can’t produce even an after the fact analysis of any significant economic event with a single voice. They argue among themselves for who can bullshit the best to get the next grant or invitation to the next scheme to defraud the public.
Of all the non STEM fields, economics is the worst because it has the most impact on how the political and banking filth manage to accomplish their never ending scams. Economics needs to go the way of Phrenology as it is just as ridiculous.
RoatanBill:
OT, speaking of videos. I think you will find much to agree with within the Psychopathic Takeover of America posted on Newslinks today. Especially the last part.
You actually believe that? I work in NYC, the Africans and Arabs here work pretty hard. Not like Europeans, but like 3rd world hustlers, selling and trading all the time. The Mexicans and other Hispanics work in some pretty rough trades, too. They come here to make money, the lazier ones just stay home. Of course some come to rape and pillage, but even they are harder workers than the ones who stay home to rape and pillage.
The illegals, working or not, should be ejected. Every last one of them, along with any of their US citizen children born there. The legal principal of ‘fruit from the poisoned tree’ logic should apply.
Two of my previous employees are now in the US on welfare and they’ve sent pictures and videos to their friends and relatives on the island of how they’re getting along. I’ve seen them. They are there for the ‘free stuff’ and possibly to bag a gringo to marry them. They are both young women who left their kids with grandma, also my employees. Their stories and documented proof of their life style is a strong inducement for others to join the caravan heading north and the morons in the US let them in.
I don’t doubt that there are lots of people working, but a huge portion also get child care credits, free medical, free food, all sorts of benefits that they really aren’t entitled to because they didn’t follow normal procedure to be vetted to gain entry into the country. There are US citizens that aren’t getting the same benefits precisely because they aren’t illegals; they aren’t worthy of support.
I’ve been an expat for 16 years on Roatan island, Honduras. I left Texas when I saw the beginning of a police state being erected after 9/11. I went through the Honduran immigration process and therefore have a right to start a business and employ their native population. I did it legally and I get no free stuff.
BTW – I’m a white guy, electrical engineer / professional software developer. My wife’s white, a mathematician / professional software developer.
Thanks for the heads up.
The David Icke speech was right on the money. How the swine wearing costumes manage to live inside their own skin is beyond my understanding. Modern day Judas, selling out their neighbors for money.
Although the psychopaths are the obvious problem, the people that put them into their positions are just as culpable as they are for any actions taken. Those would be called voters. The people that are adamant that government must exist are culpable for all the disastrous actions all governments around the world take. They are complicit in the patently obvious evil that government is.
In the larger life of society, the people are made to submit to the orders of those who were originally meant to serve them -the government and its agents. Once you do that, the power you have delegated will be used against you and your interests every time. And then you complain that your leaders misuse their power. No, my friend, they don’t misuse it; they only use it, for it is the use of power, which is itself the worst misuse.
Alexander Berkman
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
Ayn Rand
Yes, some people are devoid of integrity or rectitude.
Absolutely agree…way too many people believe in democracy and are willing to overlook the inherent unworkability of allowing idiots to vote.
I agree they should all be ejected, they drive down wages, ruin the quality of life and add to the tax burden.
I’m always amused when non-Christians try to explain Christianity to me. Christians usually seek mercy, not “justice”. And, yes, I believe everyone pays for their crimes in the end. You probably missed the part of American history where a bunch of Pale skinned guys fought a war that resulted in blacks being freed. And that the overwhelming majority of Americans never owned a slave, never got rich off another guys resources and basically lived out quiet, hard-working lives. Collective guilt is an Old Testament thing.
Christians are supposed to turn the cheek like their Semitic bdsm G_d but have no problem murdering people for whatever reason. Christian morality is not superior to say Greco-Roman pagan morality.
This might help:
Video Link
Really? I’m not sure that you understand much about either Rome or Greece if you write that. A citizen of Rome, say, had some rights, but non-citizens had very few. Slavery in both Greece and Rome was harsh and slaves could be tortured or killed at the whim of his master. It’s been estimated that as many as 40% of the Roman Empire were slaves. The helots of Sparta were treated pretty poorly, there was a day every year when the Spartans could hunt and kill any helots they found troublesome. Not that there weren’t good Romans and good Greeks and some of the philosophers of the time preached a higher morality. The early Romans were a masculine people who abhorred promiscuity, homosexuality and weakness. It was when they began to fall into degeneracy that many turned to Christianity and its high moral standards. Pacifism as a Christian value was tossed early on during the establishment of the Faith. Turning the other cheek isn’t the worst thing in the world, almost impossible for most of us, but not getting inflamed by the first smack, the first insult, the first slight, isn’t a bad thing.
Your first sentence displays your extreme arrogance. You again don’t know your bible. Indeed you tell the tree by it’s fruit… Go learn what that means.
And give me a break. The civil war was about preserving the union – not freeing the slaves. The other pale countries were not happy that they outlawed slavery and so the US had an advantage and began to put pressure. That was the real motivation.
“Collective guilt is an Old Testament thing”
Strange… The Book of Revelation is simply a culmination and compilation of all the “Old Testament” prophecies… So how does that work??? I guess you never read it then.
Realist, Truth Vigilante…
The names alone indicate some sort of high self regard, a personality defect.
Lol’s are high on their own supply. Nobody is buying what Lol’s are selling. The ship has sailed.
We are entering into a post-modern, post globalist world. It is characterized by tribalism, and nationalism, traditionalism, secessionism.
Lol’s want “international movement of money” and they want no borders. They want a globalist world order, where some sort of magick free market works like a god… it is a cult.
A new national sovereignty age is arising.
Hudson focuses on MIXED MARKETS, and DEBT ACCUMULATION and Polarization of economies.
Communism/Bolshevism is NOT MIXED MARKET, it is a command economy, as if everything is inelastic priced.
You LoL’s are equally bad to communism and are part of the dialectic of globalism. The LOL doctrine preaches free market, as if everything can be elastically priced. Lolbertarianism makes pretend that all labor is equal, and that there is no such thing as in-groups working to self aggrandize.
The cat has two paws, and bats the mouse between them. Lol’s are one paw, and communism (command economy) is the other, and the cat has a jewish head.
Lol’s are so dumb they don’t even know they are unwitting agents of Jewry, and are part of a dialectic. They are used as a cat’s paw, and probably are not even paid; the brainwashing is complete.
Hudson has resurrected Classical Economics, and he focuses on ancient economies.
The ancient economies can be analyzed, and Classical Economic Doctrine applied.
Classical economics has something called price/value theory. This theory helps determine where there are empty calories, where prices are not signaling for supply and demand.
The higher prices are funding a rake-off – a taking, a rentier action. In Lol Lol land, there is no such thing as empty calories, as the market is a perfect predictor – or so they say, which is at variance with known history.
It is true, that Ne0-Liberal Economists engage in bull-shitting, but so do the LoL’s. Neither doctrine has any concepts for price and value theory.
Reality is missing, so the doctrines are unreal.
I give you LOL’s because you apparently believe that economics isn’t voodoo; that it actually has something to offer. Your support for one of the chief frauds in the economics faux profession, Hudson, amounts to a belief in some cult priest. I find it strange that you mention cults when you’re clearly deeply in one.
I won’t speak for the other commenters you mentioned, but I’m an anarchist. I find that libertarians are way too timid for me. I do appreciate their NAP stance and wholeheartedly support that part of their philosophy, but not much else.
I’m anti globalists, socialists, communist and every other form of criminal enterprise that comes under the general heading of government. It is government that has elevated the economics fraud to its current position because it needs their priests to bless their depredations of the population along with their partners in crime, the bankers and more generally, the finance industry. As for nationalism, that’s an undiagnosed mental disorder.
The fully cognizant of jewry are the organizers in government, finance and the economics scam that have invented central banking, fiat currency, negative interest rates, paper gold, deficit spending and all manner of hocus pocus that is at the present time starting to unravel.
Economics is bullshit from one end to the other. The parts of economics that make any sense are those that they purloined from common sense and claimed as their great contribution to knowledge.
Economics is full of theories but short on proof. So short, in fact, that their priests can’t prove a damned thing. It is all opinion, supposition, extrapolation, speculation, inference, interpretation and every other form of slight of hand that allows them to endlessly pontificate without ever saying anything that can be firmly tied to the real world.
Engineers know, not speculate, but know that 2+2=4 and that it is always that way. Economists can dream up negative interest rates, currency (not money) from nothing, call precious metals barbarous relics and champion gov’t profligacy in the form of deficit spending and jump starting an economy, etc. It is their rationalization of outright fraud that is their stock-in-trade.
The entire world would be much better off if every economist was hung from the nearest tree along with the bankers and other finance whores and the political class. When the entire world’s economies blow up, I pray that happens.
Mofo-Bill writes:
You see, this is classic Doublespeak from the Mofo and the charlatans he represents, as he employs the standard Zio tactics of accusing others of what his movement is the chief proponent of.
Michael Hudson and Mofo NEVER mention shutting down the Federal Reserve and severely crimping the power of the Zionist Usury Banking Cartel that controls the entirety of the western financial system.
WHY would they ever bite the hand that feeds them ?
Mofo, I won’t be calling your Big Government Centralised Socialist Statist movement ‘Unwitting agents of Jewry’ as you have done to the the Libertarians.
That’s because you and Michael Hudson are their WITTING agents, fully cognizant of the role you’re playing in enabling the exploitation of the masses through Jewish Usury banking.
That’s why Libertarianism has a tremendous (and growing) following – while your pitiful movement wallows in the shadows.
Plenty of Engineers became economists because they were pissed off, like you. The narrative they were hearing did not comport to reality.
Frederick Soddy was an engineer, scientist and Nobel Lauriat.
Clifford Hughes Douglas was an engineer who became an economist because he noticed that input prices and output prices of the bomber factory he was working in, did not add up.
He then created a new economics doctrine, called Douglas Social Credit Theory. Soddy worked at things from a thermodynamic perspective. Douglas has the first proof that I have seen, which shows that banks create money. So, you would hang Douglas from a tree?
Hudson is not a traditional economist, and learned his stripes on Wall Street while analyzing flow of funds for large banks (Chase Manhattan I think). The objective of the big banks was to see how much “debt” the third world could handle by using flow of fund analysis. Somebody who has moral fiber, like Hudson, objects to this sort of Usury and takings.
From Wiki on Hudson:
I have engineering and science degrees, and am closer to Soddy and Douglas in thinking, where I analyze flow of funds and conversion of types. Hudson came to the same place by a different route.
The Lol’s that visit this site, for the most part, have strong opinions and convictions. But, if you scratch the surface of what they do and say, it is not based on any hard analysis (STEM type analysis) but instead is an emotional response. They got punked with false economic doctrine early in life, and are unable to adjust. Their brains are calcified. I often accuse them of acting like scared little girls. Chickenshits cannot accept facts when they are staring them in the face. Soddy, Douglas, Hudson and these types of people are brave sorts, who are only interested in finding out the truth.
I would include Benjamin Franklin also as an engineer, scientist type, and he promoted the American System of Economy, which was then taken up into the constitution. Franklin also put his life on the line.
Lol’s are actually regurgitating an implanted memory, that has nothing at all to do with the founding of the country. They are agents for (((London))) bankers, they same type that offended Hudson early in his life.
Hudson continuously calls for a public option. Jeez, does your bull shitting never end.
You are a know nothing and make claims at variance with reality.
Hudson also advised advised Dennis Kucinich in 2008 presidential campaign. Kucinich put forth house bill HR2990, which effectively would have abolished the FED.
Kucinich of course, came under death threats, and I would imagine Hudson did too.
https://stuartbramhall.wordpress.com/2017/06/17/hr-2990-historic-bill-to-abolish-the-federal-reserve/
Libertarianism is not conservative, it is a branch of liberalism.
The ‘FREE MARKET” created the private banking cartel that is the Federal Reserve.
It is some sort of caved-in-head ideology that on one hand advocates for privateering, and then on the other hand wants the Fed abolished.
The FED came into being as a Money Trust, so private banks could have all of their reserve loops linked up.
Prior to the FED Reserve, the TREASURY controlled bank reserves, and hence had some control over credit emission.
I’m a NSDAP type. The Nazi’s had a state bank. You keep accusing me of things that indicate to me that you are actually crazy. Things get all confused in your head.
shows that banks create money
That’s common knowledge for anyone tuned into the fraud that economists champion – fiat currency, and know that every dollar is a debt instrument, that debt created at loan origination time.
My gripe with economics is that it can be used to justify just about anything the bankers and political class want and they can always find some economists to write a paper that provides a glowing rationale for what turns out to be pure bunk.
As a profession economists are whores to the bankers and gov’ts. Every once in a while there’s someone with economics training that can see through the fraud and tells the truth, but they are hard to find. People that can justify fiat currency, MMT, UBI, purposeful inflation, etc to cheat the working man are scumbags.
I have visions of you standing at the border, inviting in all the dregs of humanity. Nationalists care about their borders, language and culture. They don’t want to be deracinated and dispossessed from the lands of their fathers.
Libertarianism is a branch of liberalism, and liberalism is a mental disorder.
You cannot hold conflicting ideas in your head, and be taken seriously.
MMT is only an analysis of the existing paradigm. Those that use the analysis to initiate purposeful inflation are often NOT ECONOMISTS, but instead are self interested in-groups. The in-groups want their particular industry, or whatever to make gains at the expense of the public.
And yes, economists who are hired by private banks and NGO think tanks, will not bite the hand that feeds. They are paid shills. Who funds Lolbertarianism?
An economist that graduates from UMKC (MMT doctrine) usually cannot find a job, as they are not steeped in ne0-liberal jewish economic orthodoxy, and hence are not good for passing the BS that you object to.
Rational people do not take Lolbertarianism seriously, as it has been thoroughly debunked. Lols are part of neo-liberalism, and it is galling that they wrap themselves in the cloth of morality, when their doctrine is the road to serfdom. Dupes.
Douglas gap theory cannot be argued against, which means that some injection of money is required. Douglas wanted to inject into the price system, which would lower prices on some goods at point of sale. Douglas wanted to return to labor what was owed to them.
In other words, some credit injection is required, but it has to be calculated. Lolbertarianism is so retarded (meaning not advanced) that it has no room for these concepts and analysis of reality, which is why it belongs on the ash heap of history.
I prefer what these people thought to something some economics groupie thinks.
Nationalism is an infantile sickness. It is the measles of the human race.
Albert Einstein
Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism” is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by “patriotism” I mean that attitude which puts their own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation, which is the concern with the nation’s spiritual as much as with its material welfare – never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
Erich Fromm
By ‘nationalism’… I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
George Orwell
The Mofo writes:
Of course no rational person that doesn’t have an axe to grind, would ever think disparagingly of Libertarianism.
As for your ludicrous claim of it being ‘thoroughly’ debunked, the fact is that it hasn’t even been infinitesimally debunked.
That’s because it works spectacularly – documented to have done so.
Meanwhile, your Socialist policy prescriptions have been abject failures – witness the experiment with the Soviet Union, China under Chairman Mao.
ALL total failures – like you Mofo.
Now, if you’re going to reference mouthpieces of the establishment and those aligned with the Zio Usurers for your alleged ‘debunking’ like pseudo-economist Paul Krugman, then you’re really clutching at straws.
No one takes that fool seriously.
As for the sods like Soddy-miser and Douglas that you mention, who are on par with Michael Hudson in that no one of significance ever references them or has even heard of them, these are the pinnacle of good-for-nothing non entities.
That you resort to mentioning individuals like this is indicative of how intellectually bankrupt your movement is.
Meanwhile, the philosophical roots of Libertarianism can be traced to the Founding Fathers of the United States, the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
Starting with the Classical Economist Adam Smith, Libertarianism is exemplified by individuals like Frederic Bastiat, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe in the modern era.
H.L. Mencken described himself as a Libertarian.
Let’s face it Mofo, there is NO individual representing that branch of Centralised Big Government Trotskyist-Statism that you and Michael Hudson are adherents of, that is remotely of the stature of those colossal individuals mentioned above.
ALL of your heroes of the ‘Industrial-Socialism’ movement that you espouse are intellectual pygmies – not 1 man in a 1000 has ever heard of them, such is their negligible contribution to the discourse.
Thanks for defining your notion of what a nation is.
I consider Nationalism as a container for its people. There are radiating waves of kinship; Family, Tribe, Nation.
The radiating waves of kinship also include language, culture, and if there is kinship, it becomes a race of people over time.
A container of people, a nation, PROTECTS the people within. You think nationalism is offensive, I think it is defensive.
Putin’s Russia is protecting its people within from attacks, such as what occurred in the 90’s by the Neo-Liberal/Lolbertarian economics that almost dismembered the country.
FreeMarket Nostrums created an Oligarchy, and average Russians had their birthright sold out from under their feet.
Instead of nationalism, they are advocating “poles of interests.” These poles are countries banding together to protect themselves from the ravages of liberalism, of which lolbertariainism is a part.
https://fort-russ.com/2019/07/dugin-constructing-multipolarity-on-the-basis-of-cooperation-peace-and-justice/
Things are totally confused in your brain, so it is interesting to read your posts.
It is like going into the psycho ward at a mental hospital.
Socialism and Communism are two different things. This is what Hudson meant by getting fleas, and not going to the flea bag hotel. Your language and concepts are retarded. One needs to take a flea-dip after dealing with Lol’s.
A police department is socialism. A fire department is socialism.
The mixed economies of Scandinavia were Socialism, and they were successful. They were also single race homogenous countries that were not destroyed by immigrating indigestible in-groups, such as Moslems from the middle east. Jews especially push doctrines for free movement of people, so they can move about and act as a parasite.
So, on one hand your are against ZOG, and on the other hand you are for it. LoL
Anybody who is honest, can look at the data and see that rapes, deaths, and various social metrics are all WORSE for those countries that did not protect their borders, language, and culture. But, ideologues like LOLbertarians will make pretend that immigration is a net good.
If you ever bothered to pull head out of rectum, and actually read Hudson, you will find that he is a vocal advocate for mixed economies. Say it to yourself three time to put it in memory. Mixed Economy, Mixed Economy, Mixed Economy.
He is also for the LOWEST PRICE. In some sectors of the economy, socialism (inelastic sectors) delivers the lowest price.
It would be high prices to have competing sewers, or competing power infrastructure.
Lolbertarianism cannot deal with dams and water-ways, as small landholders do not have eminent domain, and hence the flooding continues, and the commons are never improved.
Lolbertarianism makes pretend that it delivers the lowest price, and hence economic freedom. It doesn’t.
Making pretend about reality is for little girls. Privatizing the commons and doing rake-offs RAISES PRICES, and hence people lose economic freedom.
The founding of the U.S. was not privatizing the commons, and the founders injected state credit (from the first bank) into building canals and fortifying ports. This was so that commerce would be LOWER PRICED.
Lol’s are anti-americans, operating with an (((implanted))) memory, and they actually think they are conserving something, when they are destroyers.
The U.S. is becoming permanently inefficient, as Ne0-Liberalism wants to privatize the very air we breath, and attach debts to the commons. Meanwhile, LoL’s will be applauding Ne0-Liberalism, because you know- it is private corporations, and the private free market and other gibberish.
The philosophical roots are Jewish. This is you being all confused again.
Anybody who is honest (you aren’t) can look at the intellectuals and luminaries of the Lolbertarian movement, and find out who they are.
Your lips move, but it is a Jew hand up your butt animating you.
Thomas Paine, “Let it be known that the Continental was the cornerstone of our success.”
Lol’s of that day, if they existed (which they didn’t at that time), would have been jumping up and down about how money needs to be gold or silver.
The country would have never come about had the founders listened to you and your toxic BS.
You’re jumping to conclusions again. I never defined my notion of what a nation is, but will now.
A nation is an area of the world where the largest and most powerful criminal gang has absolute control. Some nations have (or had) a relatively homogeneous population like the Scandinavian countries and others are a mix of peoples from all over the world, like the US. A nation’s chief characteristic is not its people, but its government and what that government does in world affairs.
The State – a criminal gang with flags.
Alan Turin
So what is government? Very simply, it is an agency of coercion. Of course, there are other agencies of coercion – such as the Mafia. So to be more precise, government is the agency of coercion that has flags in front of its offices.
Harry Browne
In the case of the US, there are so many cultures, ethnicities, religions, etc that trying to make a case that a nation is its people falls apart.
This is what you said:
This is what you are saying now:
OK… fair enough.
Here is Parenti on the actual workings of civilization, and it is not your definition:
All class based civilizations in history emit narrative, where said narrative makes their class seem as indispensable to the operation of said civilization. This can become parasitic when the (((class))) hates its population.
It is Jewish trick to conflate class with government. You have been duped.
In the case of modern western civilizations, a hidden elite of string pullers is manipulating government. This (((class))) is a finance oligarchy.
Finance Oligarchies are sanctioned and defended by Lolbertarian gibberish, as if self interested in-groups cannot exist according to the doctrine. Reality can be defined away, or ignored by purposefully omitting words or ideas.
Video Link
It’s just like Hudson says. You get into these circular arguments and you have to spend too much time defining things.
The ruling Oligarchy is using race and other division techniques to keep the population at each others throats.
That way they can buy up the country cheap, and nobody looks up at who their (((owners))) are.
Here is an UNZ article that you probably disagree with, where a Hispanic is noting how the Democratic party is using blacks and liberalism as a destructive wedge. This keeps the population in Chaos, so it can be led by the nose. Meanwhile, the finance oligarchy gets richer and polarization becomes more severe.
Hudson talks at length about polarization, but there is no concept for polarization in Lolbertarian LOL LOL land, or what he calls flea-bag hotel.
https://www.unz.com/article/if-republicans-were-smart-theyd-brand-democrats-as-the-black-party-gaining-hispanic-and-asian-votes/
The democratic party became the “new democrats” under Bill Clinton, where they suck-up to Wall Street and the Donor Class. Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar and a compromised individual, so he was ideal for our hidden ruling elite, as a puppet.
Oh wait, isn’t the donor class making their nut using usury and taking rents on the population?
Those concepts don’t exist either in LoL Lol land, the parallel universe where reality is suspended.
You are one slimy character. You are putting into my mouth what others have said and I referenced them, that is all.
I don’t give a shit about Parenti or you.
Anybody can go back and read the thread, and notice that I was posting what YOU QUOTED.
Since YOU QUOTED, these people to bolster your argument, then YOU AGREE WITH THEM.
Now you are trying to wriggle off the hook, as if you didn’t post the quotes.
You are the slimy one, and as crazy as Truth Vigilante. Regular non-crazy people can read the threads above, and will be warded away from Lolbertarianism.
Your ideology has been confronted, and you don’t have the testicles to man-up and deal with your logical inconsistencies.
Thanks for being grist for my mill. Keep it up.
You should care about Parenti as he actually describes reality, where you live in a false parallel universe of bull-shittery.
Hudson is actually circling above the target, and is taking flak from your type.
I posted quotes to show that other people also have a low regard for nationalism. That does not mean I agree with them or disagree with them. It means they have a low opinion of nationalism and I agree with that. I gave you my take on nationalism and apparently that isn’t good enough for you.
You insist on putting words in my mouth and making assumptions as tough they are true.
There are no logical inconsistencies in my view and you have exposed none. Making shit up is your forte, but that’s to be expected from someone that thinks economics is worth a shit.
Harry Browne’s description of government is exactly right.
Or put another way:
Libertarianism is based on voluntary exchange and in societies where it’s been practised, or as near as possible to the ideal, we’ve witnessed relative peace and prosperity.
Contrast that with the societies where Mofo’s beliefs are the norm – where governments achieve their objectives through intimidation.
Mofo-Bill writes:
That statement shows what we’ve known about you from the beginning – that you’re a Socialist. (All socialists, sooner or later, bring up the Scandinavian countries as ‘proof’ of the success of the collectivist mindset).
Let’s focus on Sweden for starters. Sweden was a capitalist country with a more or less free market capitalist economy for much of its existence.
Having been neutral during WWI & II, it sidestepped the economic carnage and profited handsomely in trade with both sides.
With that in mind, it had already built up a tremendous NEST EGG of wealth and had one of the highest per capita GDP’s on the planet before it embarked on the failed socialist experiment post WWII.
And, as the socialist experiment proceeded over the decades, Sweden’s wealth on a per capita basis rapidly went BACKWARDS year after year.
Yes, their standard of living is still reasonable – that’s because they BEGAN the journey from a very high base.
One might say that their standard of living is still reasonable DESPITE their disastrous socialist experiment.
Sweden’s failed experiment brings to mind the old saying:
If I implement your business proposal, I agree that I’ll end up with a small fortune at year end.
But that’s because I’m starting the year with a big fortune, and your scheme will see to it that much of it is squandered.
As for this statement of yours:
…. you forget that USSR stood for Union of the Soviet SOCIALIST Republics.
Yes, Communism means total state ownership of the means of production whereas ‘democratic’ socialism allows private ownership (although you’re in some form of indentured servitude as you’re subject to a crushing tax burden).
But as Socialism fails, which it ALWAYS does, it entails even more repression from the statists that rule with more extraction of wealth so that the ladder of upward opportunity is effectively closed for many and we end up with rule by a privileged oligarchy – much like we have right now in the U.S.S.A.
Turning our attention to another Scandinavian country that the socialists claim is a success story, let’s focus on Norway.
The fact is, Norway always had a much lower per capita GDP than western Europe prior to the 1970’s, until of course it discovered that river-of-riches (aka North Sea Oil).
So, despite the welfare state squandering of its riches, the income from oil is sooooo great (distributed over a tiny population of just over 5 million). that it more than compensates for its ill advised economic policies.
But when the oil runs out, Norway will go back to being an economic backwater as it’s been for much of its history.
I like Bill Bonner. He has the right attitude.
I like the Libertarian philosophy as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go far enough. It’s not militant enough. Anarchism is the natural extension for any libertarian that is completely honest.
Libertarians largely just look at things from the economic perspective. Yes, they bitch and moan about politics, but they want to change things from that economic perspective. That’s never going to work. They are focusing on the symptom, not the cause of the country’s illness, namely the government and its stranglehold on what is possible.
As long as the mafia known as the Fed Gov is in control via the police and military, the average working person will forever be taken advantage of to provide the labor to support the political class (mafia) and the human trash in the society. The trash votes to keep the mafia in power and the mafia takes care of their voting block. The worker, the middle class, gets screwed from both sides.
I like Ron Paul, but he’s not the type to pull a gun out and shoot the bastard trying to set his business on fire. What’s needed are the more hard core thinkers that appreciate the libertarian point of view but are willing to do what’s necessary. In Ron Paul’s article today, he states :
Important steps can be taken including cutting spending on militarism and corporate welfare, phasing out the entitlement and welfare programs, and auditing and ending the Fed. Those of us who know the truth should seek to convince our fellow citizens of the importance of restoring a limited, constitutional government that does not try to run the economy, run the world, or run our lives.
It’s too late for that. Reforming the US Fed Gov isn’t possible. It needs to be abolished and nothing should replace it. It is its size and monopoly position that attracts the psychopaths that ultimately control all gov’ts. Smaller gov’t, at the current state level, is a step in the right direction when it becomes its own country that has to figure out what money is and how to develop an economy that works. California would stop being granola land (fruits, nuts and flakes) if it had to survive on its own, for example.
Libertarians need anarchists to clear the ground for the libertarian philosophy to work.
All true that you’ve said Roatan.
BTW, I am an anarcho-capitalist as well as being a Libertarian. Being in one camp does not exclude membership to the other.
This is you wriggling off the hook.
You have a low opinion of Nationalism, primarily because you have been punked with false ideology, where you think nationalism correlates to aggression.
The nation state came about with the “Peace of Westphalia.”
It was to stop interstate aggression, not create it.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldhistory/chapter/the-peace-of-westphalia-and-sovereignty/
I’m trying to figure out what is wrong with lolbertarians, clearly your type is crazy and things get mixed up inside of the space between your ears.
Left is right and up is down in your alternate reality.
I think you are a Benthamite.
I am trying to figure out why LoLs are crazy. At first I figured it was just demoralization. That your brains were calcified (myelin sheathed) after being punked with false ideology early in life.
In other words, you were girly men that could not confront contradictions in your ideology.
Then there were other hints, like One-Born-Freedom wanting to pay money to see people hurt, or the numerous attempts of Truth Vigilante using logical fallacies, and never conceding the point when he is nailed. For example, Hudson did work to eliminate the FED, then crickets.
Bentham was probably the first Lolbertarian, or rather this type of Hedonism ideology was first articulated by Bentham. Bentham also wrote a book promoting Usury, and was a Jew lover, who used the anti-semite defense.
Charles Hanley in “History of Economic Thought” classified Bentham as a hedonist, one who asserts that individual actions are solely motivated by a desire for pleasure and avoidance of pain.
Lolbertarains as hyper-individualists are masking a desire for hedonism. Bentham also says that the community is a fictitious body, which is in alignment with Lolbertarian ideology. If communities are fictitious, then nation states and the rights of communities don’t exist.
Bentham.. the common interest can be understood only by what the interest of the individual… noting ought to be done or attempted by the government… hi rule of government is to “be quiet.”
So, Bentham was writing in defense of usury, he was a philo-semite, he was a hedonist and hyper-individualist.
Here is a link where took on the author Jafee, a promoter of Bentham.
He has more than two digits to his IQ, whereas my interlocutors here are two digit types, and are not even aware that they are helping me make the case that Lolbertarianism is defective.
Jafee, being intelligent, had the sense to run away, as he was being exposed.
https://www.unz.com/article/structural-crisis-senate-threatens-to-usurp-presidency-constitution-and-will-of-the-people/#comment-4422714
John Whipple counter-attacked Bentham (The proto-lolbertarian) in 1836, “The importance of Usury Laws – An answer to Jeremy Bentham.”
Whipple was not frightened by Bentham’s putting up a defense of Anti-Semitism, and Bentham’s assertion that anti-usury laws were due to prejudice against Jews.
Lol’s are silent on Usury, as if it doesn’t exist.
Whipple said this, “The real truth is that this feeling which he calls prejudice is the result of the moral instinct of mankind.”
In other words, average people have a moral instinct. Lol’s do not.
Bentham also had his body preserved in Alcohol, because he was a legend in his own mind.
Truth Vigilante, I’ve accused of this type of behavior – he is a legend in his own mind, and perversely thinks he is a moral arbiter of all that is good and right.
Anybody who wants his body preserved and displayed thinks very highly of himself and his thought constructs. He has an egoic mind.
So, here we have an egoic mind, hedonism, and defense of usury so he can take rents and unearned income from the commons.
An egoic mind sees commoners as Goyim, lower animals to be used for sustenance or self-aggrandization.
So, I’m beginning to think it is much more than just demoralization, and indeed it is a defective type.
It would be interesting to take a large number of Lol’s and do psychological analysis, to find out how many are psychopaths, how many are sociopaths, hedonistic tendencies, and other malformed personality defects.
The extreme butt-hurting that Lol’s feel whenever a Hudson article comes out is instructive. Hudson characterizes them as fleas living in flea bag hotel.
They bomb the comment section, with inane easily disprovable comments, but then self congratulate themselves as their high self image does not broker any condemnation. Self analysis is impossible with this defective personality type. The lack of self analysis is not due to demoralization (myelin sheathing).
I think the analogy of fleas needs to be upgraded: it is more of a stinging insect that delivers a parasite. The insect wants to reproduce and live off of a host.
The moral instinct of mankind is not present. A moral person when indicted as a usurer, would at least ask the question, “what is usury.” Not so in LoL, Lol land. They are too busy preening and pointing fingers. Not me!
It is so easy to twist Lol’s into knots, because the ideology is inherently corrupt, and full of logical inconsistencies.
Lolbertarianism has been thoroughly debunked, but you didn’t get the memo, and persist in your inanity.
The soviet union, also considered themselves as a democracy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_democracy
Like I said earlier, Lol’s get things all twisted up in their minds. The ideology is attractive to low IQ types, as it is a soporific for their natural hedonistic tendencies. Lol’s “feel” things, and have want based on emotion.
I have repeated many times that I am a National Socialist. Then Crickets for the LoLs.
Did it ever cross your two digit IQ brain, that the National Socialists fought against the Communists?
Communism is a command economy, it is not mixed market. You dumbasses continuously accuse Hudson of being a communist, when he promotes mixed economy.
Marx did do good analysis on the defects of capital, especially finance capital.
The national socialists brought finance capitalism to heel, so it began to deliver for the common weal. Labor was given its due.
Your “anarcho capitalism” is only a smoke screen for finance capitalism. Your mealy mouthed words about how “free markets” and how free-dumb delivers the goods to the greatest number of people is a bald faced lie, disproven by history. Your hedonism does not allow a community, a commonweal, to exist.
The founding fathers were not Libertarians. Hudson has much more in common with them than your type does.
Your type is Benthamite. Bentham also put up smoke screens, and was an active disinfo agent, not a Truth Vigilante.
In my comment # 98, I clearly indicated I’m an anarchist in political leanings and specifically stated libertarians are too timid for me.
In your comment #104, you start off with claiming you know my stance on immigration so you could start building your straw man. After me telling you explicitly that I’m not a libertarian, you insist in putting me in that category as part of the straw man construction. This tells me you live in some fantasy land that allows you to just make stuff up. BTW – I’d eject all illegals along with their US citizen children that only got that designation via their parents criminal activity as my comment #87 on this page clearly indicates.
At my comment #106, I provided a minimal introduction of my own and then listed 3 quotes from people whose names most would recognize. I never stated my definition of nationalism only their condemnation of it.
In your comment #108, you clearly included part of George Orwells quote and then proceeded to claim that it was mine. That is your first lie, and allowed you to continue building your straw man. Since I provided 3 quotes, you chose to associate me with one of them that suited your agenda.
In your comment # 112, you doubled down on the lie by claiming explicitly that Orwell’s quote was my own. Another lie that allowed you to continue your straw man build.
In your comment #113, you once again presume to know my position on Pedro De Alvarado’s article. More straw for the straw man, more of your childish lolbertarian bashing. BTW – lolbertarian isn’t a word.
In my comment #114, I was hoping you’d get the message and just go away.
In your comment #115, you continue straw man construction.
In my comment #116, I explained why I listed the 3 quotes and noted your penchant for inventing things not in evidence.
Now you’re back and continue to ignore what I’ve said in favor of what you’d like to invent to support your straw man argument.
The nation states murdered over 200,000,000 people in the 20th century with their wars and I’m supposed to believe that nations are associated with “peace” as in “Peace of Westphalia”. I’m just not that naive or stupid. You yourself are equating ‘nation’ to the governments that negotiated the “Peace of Westphalia” when it suits your needs but want to claim that nationalism hasn’t anything to do with governments. It is you that is confused, but that is to be expected from someone that thinks (and I use that word loosely) economics has value.
I’m done humoring you with replies as it’s a waste of my time.
You are that naive and stupid.
Lolbertarianism and anarchism are on the same spectrum. They are part of the same thing.
The operative condition of mankind is conspiracy of class, just as Michael Parenti describes. This class maneuvers nation-states. If you cannot accept that reality, that is not my problem and it is you being a chicken shit and a weakling, unable to grapple with verifiable history.
Your shit-tier anarchism gives free-dumb for class conspiracy to operate without restraint. If you cannot diagnose a problem, you cannot fix it.
Your comment about how you don’t give a damn about me also indicates that the milk of human kindness does not run through your veins.
This is why I am wondering why and how Lolbertarians are crazy, and I consider Anarchists to be hedonists on the same spectrum. You are probably even more crazy than the Lol’s.
No civilization can exist with your type being given free reign. I also consider your type to be sociopathic, where you don’t give a damn about your neighbor, but instead you extract from civilization.
I get it, people don’t want to hear they are naive and stupid. Lol’s especially have a high self regard for themselves.
Your done humoring me because you cannot defend your positions. Run away.
I’m impressed. I point out that you’re a lying sack of shit and you keep right on coming.
You should have become a politician as your abilities to ignore what you can’t refute are amazing.
Mofo-Bill wrote:
I never heard of this bloke Bentham (he’s not part of the Austrian School of economic thought so why would I bother with him ?), and if he was promoting Usury then he clearly cannot have been a Libertarian.
Of course, you seem to know quite a bit about him, having studied him in depth, and this is not surprising – seeing as you are an apologist for the Usurers.
In relation to your latter comments, you wrote yet another bald-faced lie (something you excel at):
You know Mofo, when posting statements like the one above, you remind me of one of the core constituents of the Axis of Disinformation – none other than commenter John Johnson (aka Johnson & Johnson or J & J – seeing as he’s an apologist for Big Pharma and the experimental mRNA clot shot).
He’s the one constantly mouthing off about how hospitals are filled with the the unvaxxed – when in fact all data sets are saying it’s the vaxxed that are coming down with and spreading Covid and/or coming down with a vaxx induced illness or death.
I suspect that, like J & J, you are double or triple jabbed. This would explain the neurological damage that both you and J & J have exhibited in your fallacy filled rants.
Like you, J & J is of the mindset that if his lies are said often enough and forcefully enough, then it will eventually come to be accepted as fact.
This is the way of the Zio owned MSM and they have pursued this tactic for decades – as you are doing on behalf of your Zio brethren.
Of course, those that have been following our interchange here in UR and that have been following Dr Ron Paul and the Libertarians over the years, will already be aware that:
There are countless videos and article on the internet documenting Dr Paul’s campaign to that end going back over 40 years.
Meanwhile, you claim that Michael Hudson was against the usurers and also campaigning to end the Fed so I asked you to FURNISH JUST ONE EXAMPLE in the way of a video interview or article from a reputable source to back it up. (NO, the Socialist Workers Journal does not qualify as being reputable).
Of course, as is your way, you ducked and weaved and avoided responding to that request – because you know as well I do that HUDSON NEVER CAMPAIGNED TO END THE FED.
At every opportunity Hudson aided and abetted the usurers and this is nowhere more evident than his promotion of fiat money.
Why would he bite the Usurer hand that feeds him ?
Contrary to your stupid comment that the Founding Fathers had philosophies more aligned to your movement than the Libertarians, the fact is that the FF’s explicitly stated that money shall be in the form of gold and silver.
This notion is abhorrent to you – because gold and silver can’t be digitally created ex nihilo to dole out amongst the Zio cronies of the usurers that you’re in cahoots with.
That’s why you smear the return to a Gold Standard with every ounce of your Trotskyist being.
Mofo wrote this:
Anyone with half a brain knows that Hitler’s NSDAP and Stalin’s Communist Party are BOTH Left-of-Centre political philosophies.
Yes, one of them is radically left of centre but that doesn’t detract from the fact that they’re both on the SAME SIDE of the political divide.
Contrary to the Zionist indoctrination that you Mofo and most others have lapped up that Fascism and Communism were ideological opposites, this was far from the case.
And your flimsy argument that because they fought one another in WWII, it follows then that they must’ve been ideologically opposite, this is easily disproven.
Witness the wars fought between the English and the Spanish to secure hegemony over the civilised world in the 16th century and thereafter.
Both were monarchies pursuing ruthless imperialism in their exploitation, rape and pillaging of the riches of the third world.
They were ideological identical twins in that regard.
It mattered not in the final analysis that they were birds of a feather as each sought to rule the planet.
Similarly, Germany Vs the Soviet Union was a clash between the authoritarian centralised controlling statists to determine which totalitarian philosophy would rule the Eurasian land mass.
Of course, I recognise full well that Hitler’s Germany was demonised to the stratosphere and fables like the Holohoax were fabricated to further the smear.
I recognise that the real war criminals, in relative terms, were those on the Allied side – none more so than the Butcher of Bengal, aka Winston Churchill.
With that in mind I sympathise with the German nation and its tribulations over those two unjust world wars waged against it by international Jewry.
But Mofo, just because you say you’re pro NSDAP, it doesn’t make you anti-Zionist Usury.
Your political philosophy and your infatuation with a fiat monetary system that isn’t based on a Gold standard only serves to aid and abet the Zio usurers.
That you can’t see that (or more likely refuse to acknowldege it), is a reflection of your ideological and moral bankruptcy.
You said you were done?
You came back because I taunted you. Just as I expected you came back. You fell right into my trap, because you are not that bright.
I’ve been stating out loud that I am interested in the psychology of the fleas that inhabit this board.
Your coming back indicates to me that you have an egoic mind. Your previous comments indicate to me that you preen, and are not moral. You are part of clown world, part of the problem and not the solution.
I’ve also mentioned loudly that I am a Nazi, and then crickets. For all of your outrage, you and the other fleas are curiously silent on that too. I gave you a big angle of attack, where you could go after my character and nothing. Nazis are supposed to be the worst people on the planet, right?
In other words, there actually is something wrong with you – a personality defective. I haven’t put my finger on it yet exactly. Perhaps a sociopath?
It is more than just not having words, or language as Hudson says, it is willful ignorance. It is probably more than that, because once corrected, not only do you (and the other fleas) persist in your ignorance, buy you double down, trying to push false narrative.
Hudson is busy trying to find the truth of reality, but you and the other fleas come to this site and push obvious and easily disprovable falsehoods. You don’t even have a curious mind, as to where you are wrong – you are certain in your ignorance.
This being a pest and pushing false narrative on your part, must be malicious by definition. It is no longer just willful ignorance.
I’ve already explained to you many times, that all money systems in history were fiat.
You are a full-on two digit IQ dumbass, who cannot learn.
I’ve even tried to explain to you the different gold systems in history. I’ve even explained how the trading gold standard was good, and that Hudson promoted it.
This is a problem with dumb people. They think they are smart and they aren’t. It is beyond their ability to imagine that there is a big gulf between them and others.
Hudson probably has an IQ of 160 or higher. You are probably in the 90 range.
A 70 IQ difference is like you are talking simian, and he is on a completely different plane. You are lacking.
I only appear illogical and immoral to you, because you are incapable of understanding certain concepts.
Lolbertarianism is story time for kiddies, and its adherents are often dummies. The ideology is Pap, it is clown world stuff that doesn’t describe reality. You are a speed bump.
I’m not jabbed at all.
I knew early on that mRNA vaccines were bad, and that the medical Oligarchy had changed the definition from “gene therapy” to emergency vaccine.
Lolbertarianism doesn’t even have language for Oligarchy, as if it doesn’t exist.
The U.S. is an Oligarchy, a word that has existed since the time of Aristotle. Lol Lols cannot even speak of Plutocracy and Oligarchy because that would cast a bad light on their god – the free market.
Maybe your god is a false god?
Do you even know the difference between J and J, an adenovirus vaccine vs the mRNA types?
I doubt you know the difference, because you are dumb as a rock, and even your examples where you try to impugn me backfire.
Sadly, this is true, although the adherents aren’t all dummies. Real time experience reveals there is an underlying trait among them where they choose fantasy over reality as a way to avoid ever growing up and confronting reality.
Farrakhan, how ironic that you should be writing of Libertarians:
It’s ironic because that’s how I would describe those that demonise Libertarians.
Let’s look at the facts on the ground. Dr Ron Paul is the public face of Libertarianism.
And the fact is, there is no one, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE ON PLANET EARTH, that has done more towards exposing the malfeasance of the U.S Federal Reserve and its input in creating economic crises whilst enriching the Usury Cartel of Private Bankers in the process.
There are 435 members in the lower house of Congress and there have been many occasions where the vote has gone 434 – 1 on some bill like authorising more appropriations for the Military-Industrial-Security Complex to drop more bombs and napalm on poor brown-skinned villagers somewhere in the world OR perhaps a spending bill that entails a further expansion of the bloated Big Government.
There are more documented instances where Ron Paul was that sole ONE person in those 434-1 votes than all the other Congressman COMBINED in the last 100 years or more.
That’s called CONVICTION, that’s called CONSISTENCY and doing what’s right over political expediency.
In 1976 there was a Swine Flu [alleged] epidemic and, as with this Covid hoax, the Big Pharma players engineered a climate of fear and convinced the U.S Congress to vote for the widespread distribution of a vaccine.
The vote went 433-2 (the two that voted against the vaccine that was to be rushed into service and not properly tested for long term adverse effects, were the ONLY two members of Congress that were medical doctors).
Of course Ron Paul was one of those two. Ron Paul said that the vaccine would likely kill and disable many more people than it would save.
And so it came to pass as scores died and countless others had severe outcomes.
At the end of the day there is DOCUMENTED PROOF of positive real world outcomes of the good done by Libertarians like Dr Ron Paul.
Meanwhile, there is NO INDIVIDUAL that represents your movement (I assume it’s the same as that of Mofo-Bill who advocates ‘Industrial-Trotskyism’ or some such – seeing as we know from Michael Hudson’s history that he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Trotskyist), who has ever done anything of substance.
There is NO ONE from your movement that has done even 1% of the good that Dr Ron Paul has done.
There is No ONE from your movement that has campaigned to enlighten the public about the shadowy cabal of private bankers that are sucking the life-blood out of the working classes.
At the end of the day, real time experience shows that Michael Hudson and groupies like the Mofo have NOTHING TO SHOW for their efforts.
It is people like yourself that have chosen fantasy over reality.
Let’s hope you have an epiphany and snap out of it Farrakhan – because there’s certainly no hope for the Mofo.