Communism, Socialism, & Capitalism in the 21st Century

"In a recent issue of Imprimis—Hillsdale College’s digest of liberty—author Michael Rectenwald described the economic goal of the Great Reset as “‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’—a two-tiered economy, with profitable monopolies and the state on top and socialism for the majority below."

"Draconian government lockdown measures destroyed businesses and eliminated competitors of corporate monopolists. These policies were a dream come true for corporate socialists."

Both of these quotes exist simultaneously within the same email.

Is it socialism for the poor or socialism for the corporate overlords? Doesn't that make it socialism for everyone?

"At the same time, too many young Americans have not been taught what socialism really means."

That's true. No one at Hillsdale, for instance, is learning what socialism is. They're learning socialism is "government does thing" or "capitalist monopolies buy influence in the government through lobbyists and use their money and influence to squash smaller competitors. They're certainly not learning that socialism is "the workers owning the means of production", better known as "what socialism actually is".

"Or the dismal history of its failures wherever it has been tried."

If socialism fails every time it's tried then why does the US have to spend trillions of dollars starting proxy wars all over the planet and embargoing other countries to kill socialism every time?

Now mention China (which is capitalist imperialism per Lenin's definition) or North Korea (which is an explicitly capitalist, hereditary absolute monarchy with an economy 100% geared toward making as much money for the Kim family as possible through legal and illegal means). Also Nazi Germany (which was a kleptocracy where high ranking Nazi officials did all they can to loot the countries they invaded and secure as much for themselves at the expense of fellow party members as possible).

That's why I say I'm not a socialist. Socialism doesn't mean anything. Everyone is a socialist, they're just socialist for different people. The right wants socialism for billionaires and the left wants socialism for the winners of the intersectional oppression olympics. Me, I'm not a socialist, I'm a communist.

You have to be a realist, I think. 1. I'm not going to vote against my own best interests. I'm not going to vote to make some rich asshole richer at my expense. A rising tide does not raise all ships when 99.99% of ships are owned by poor people and are full of holes and are taking on more water than they can pump out. I'm not going to vote to make rich people richer, I'm going to vote to take money from rich people and give it to myself because fuck you, that's why. And 2. with increasing automation and outsourcing we're going to end up with a situation where half the jobs, or more, no longer exist (we're already living in a world where there are more people than jobs, and the existence of bullshit jobs is proof of that) and at that point you have two options, you can either let the majority of the population starve to death while the 20 billionaires who own half the planet's wealth get richer, or you can pay people for existing because there are no jobs. That's it. Automation makes communism inevitable, so I might as well get in on the ground floor.

Let's not forget that while Hillsdale may not take "one penny of government money", Larry Arnn's other business took a $700,000 loan from the government that was later forgiven and he didn't complain and call it socialism and say that it rewarded irresponsible people. That's disgusting hypocrisy and I won't countenance that.

Trump, Save Me from Your Followers

The past couple days makes me think that maybe Hitlery Clinton was right and half of Trump supporters really are deplorable.

I still think Trump himself is a decent guy. He is the only presidential* candidate I've ever wanted to vote FOR (as opposed to always voting against someone), and I'm glad he did become President, as I've wanted him to be President since 1999. That much is true. If I do vote in November I without question will vote for Trump again because the alternative is unthinkable.

Still, I've never been a boot-licker. He has done some great things, and I still think he's the only good President we've had since JFK, but I think the reason he's been successful is because he basically throws shit against the wall and sees what sticks. He changes his mind every day. Naturally, when you've had 7000 ideas it's no surprise that 3500 were good just by dumb luck. He burns through staff members faster than the company I work for, and that's saying something. He hires "The best person in the entire world" and then fires the person in a week because they all turn out to 1. be shit or 2. contradict him on his latest pet idea.

I've called him out on a number of shit moves he's made, mostly bombing Syria in response to bullshit chemical attacks and his eliminating certain environmental protections (NOT global warming, which is complete and utter bullshit, but stuff to do with national parks).

And while he has improved the economy a little bit, it's not as good as when I was a kid before Clinton sold our factories to China. Most of the improvement is just in the stock market, which was pumped with 10,000 points of artificial liquidity by the Fed to make it look like the best thing ever, "The strongest economy the world has ever seen." Nixon did the same thing. Nixon made it look like he fixed the economy by dramatically increasing the debt. It got him re-elected in a 49 state landslide, but it took decades for the US to recover, and when it finally did Clinton killed it again.

And now this quarter-assed approach to dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic is by far his worst move yet. Still, that's not the bad part. As some people have pointed out, Trump really has no power here. He cannot coerce states to lift their own quarantines, so when he says "America will go to work again in a week" he has no authority to enforce that. It's just bullshit rhetoric meant to inspire people. Individual governors can tell him to go pound sand and there's nothing he can do because of the Tenth Amendment† (unless it's to spread progressivism, then SCOTUS is willing to abrogate the Constitution and conjure up laws out of whole cloth‡).

No, the bad part is not Trump or anything he's done, but his followers. They seem to be almost as assaholic as leftists. Almost.

They really seem to be fucking stupid. They seem to be some sort of Team America parody of extreme reckless jingoism. In the span of two weeks Alex Jones went from saying Coronavirus would signal the death knell of globalism to now saying it is a globalist hoax designed to institute a one-world police state. He went from talking about how the disease was so horrifically deadly that China was burning tens of thousands of bodies, turning the rain over Japan black from soot, to saying that seasonal flu is tens or even hundreds of times deadlier.

Every one of them seems to have the Team America theme playing on a continuous loop at full blast. MURICA! FUCK YEAH! COMING AGAIN TO SAVE THE MOTHERFUCKING DAY, YEAH! MURICA! FUCK YEAH! FREEDOM IS THE ONLY WAY!

“Coronavirus be a globohomo§ plot! I gots to buy me some more guns! 15 ain't enough!”

Are you Sarah fucking Palin or something? How many guns do you need? It's just like the people who hoard enough TP to build a fort.

“Muricans ain't scared of no flu bug! Coronavirus is a hoax by the Democraps to usher in Agenda 21! Literally NO ONE has died from Coronavirus! 8 BILLION people die every year from flu. 9 BILLION! We're going back to work! Murica! Fuck yeah!”

“If you criticize any aspect of anything Trump ever says you're a commie lib prog bundle of sticks!|”

Trump supporters, conservatives, and LOLbertarians are just as bad as Bernouts and progressives. They do engage in the purity spiral just as well, only instead of kicking out anyone who isn't woke enough they kick out anyone who isn't jingoistic or contemptuous of the environment or worker's rights enough.

No group seems to be capable of understanding nuance or context. No group seems capable of tolerating difference of opinion. You either agree 100% or BTFO. It's almost as if humans really are shit-flinging apes that got lucky like the atheists believe. Humans are just intelligent enough to be dangerous and invent bio-weapons, H-bombs, and AI-controlled social credit scores, but not intelligent enough not to be assholes to each other.

I can't fucking stand these people who say “Real Americans want to go back to work!” So literally anyone who disagrees with you, no matter the reason, is not a real American? It's not just that they are uninformed or mistaken, or maybe just have a different opinion, no, they are literally an enemy of the state?

“Real Americans LOVE working!” Really? I've never met one. Everyone I've ever worked with has hated working, they just do it because they have to. That's why they have to pay you to do it, because you wouldn't do it for free because it's shit. Even people who I've known who are workaholics admit they hate working, they just want to get it done with so they can accrue enough money through savings and investments to retire as soon as possible. The only people who seem to enjoy their jobs are the Youtubers who make six figures through ad revenue or e-begging, or selfish retirees who already have enough money to live off of but go back to work out of boredom, and in so doing steal jobs from younger, less credentialed people.

I almost want to sit out the election in November because 1. I live in New Jersey so my vote literally doesn't matter because the state would vote for Pol Pot or Jeffrey Dahmer if he had a “D” after his name, and 2. because I don't want to contribute to the victory of Trump's assaholic fans. I don't want to make them happy.

Please, dear President Trump, if you really are God Emperor, save me from your asshole fans.



* There were a few NJ senate candidates I did really like and vote for in the primaries, but none of them got the nomination, and I still think Alan Keyes is the smartest person to run for President and not get nominated.

† The Tenth Amendment to the US constitution says that the states have the sole and absolute authority to decide matters that are not explicitly granted to the federal government in the Constitution.

‡ Whole cloth is the metaphysical substance from which blatant lies are made.

§ Globohomo = Globalized + Homogenized. I had to look it up too because I thought it had to do with gays.

| Not sure if big tech will allow me to use the other word, better to be safe.

Porn Is Free Speech

"We either all hang together or we all hang separately."
- Ben Franklin

Ben Franklin, who had sex with like five or six thousand women in his lifetime, was absolutely right when he said that.

Franklin was also quite familiar with porn, which existed in the 18th century, by the way. Since the photograph hadn't been invented yet, maybe, people had to use drawings, but what was acceptable for mainstream publication were very different than what they ware today. Porn could be printed in newspapers and no one gave a flying crap about that at the time. Many of these porn drawings depicted old Ben and his innumerable dalliances with everything that moved. One such image (that I unfortunately cannot find online) depicts Ben in standard porn pose, holding a woman sideways with one leg over his shoulder, and penetrating her with his massive cock. You could buy this on any street corner in Philadelphia.

"The things I do for my country."
- Also Ben Franklin, referring to seducing French aristocrats' wives and mistresses to secure the alliance that won the Revolutionary War

I'll discuss more on the history of porn later in the month, and the much freer attitude toward porn the founders had, and how radical leftists in the late 19th century invented the idea that masturbation was unhealthy as a means of controlling men, but for now let us focus on Franklin's first quote.

If the British attack each colony individually then they can defeat the colonies individually with their superior numbers, weapons, and training. However, if the colonies join together they can become a much more powerful force than the British would be willing to muster, and this new United States could win its independence. Only then, when the common enemy is defeated, should all the ancillary disputes colonies be debated.

Unity is strength. It's written into the motto of the United States: E Pluribus Unum, "Out of many, one." It's the rally cry behind Gengis Khan's rise to power, that a single arrow can be broken, but a bundle of arrows tied together cannot. It's what Maximus told his fellow gladiators, "Whatever comes through that door, we stand a better chance of surviving if we fight it together." Unity is strength, because many people can be in more places, fight more enemies, come up with more ideas, and accomplish more work than any single individual can.

Conquerors throughout history have employed the tactic of divide and rule to break any unity, because an individual can be dominated a lot more easily than a group. Napoleon famously brought his army to bear against a divided enemy, defeating each individual group in turn, and in so doing defeating a much larger enemy by creating several smaller enemies to fight one at a time.



This is a tactic we see being used in politics all the time. The elite have got us divided by race, sex, and all sorts of other bullshit to keep us fighting each other so we don't band together and overthrow them. I've spoken to people at length about this during the last election, people on the "left" and never-trumpers on the "right" and they all said "NO! Orange man bad! REEEEEEEEE!!!!!!! He will nut inside us!"

Now, after that rather long introduction, let's get on to the meat of the issue.



Paypal has banned Pornhub, which, according to this chart, is the 38th biggest website, and the second biggest porn site on the planet, so it's a pretty big deal (Paypal is number 68 on the same chart). Of course the anti-porn people are braying loudly over this, offering up ululations to their deified egos. Conservatives similarly chant "Good, get rid of the degeneracy!" and then go back home and beat off to men piledriving each other because they're all so deeply in the closet that they're in Narnia. Meanwhile the leftists can't decide whether porn makes women into livestock (they don't give a wet bucket of shit about men, who are just prop cocks), and the ones who call it "sex work" and praise it like certain ancient peoples praised temple prostitutes.

Of course all of these same people who cheer the deplatforming of their enemies hiss and complain when they are the ones who are being censored and deplatformed. As Styx alludes to in the above video, the vast majority of the anti-censorship people are hypocrites (just as I said a decade ago about the anti-war people).

It shouldn't matter whether it is the almighty government or "muh private corporation", it's about one thing and one thing alone: control. Authoritarians love to control people, and controlling access to private economic transactions and free speech (as well as the right to self defense, which they hate as well) is the ultimate form of control. You don't need to round people up in a concentration camp like the three million people China has incarcerated, or shoot people in the heads, like China does with its mobile execution vans. All you have to do is take away a person's right to earn money and that person will simply starve to death, or else turn to a life of crime, giving you a pretext for imprisonment.

Remember, liberals get the bullet too. No matter how far left you are (or how far right, when the pendulum inevitably swings in the opposite direction), you are never far enough. You are never pure enough. Any group, Antifa, the MRA, Alt-Right, they always enter purity spirals and eat themselves. They always crucify members who are not pure enough, and hate these not pure enough even more than they hate their supposed enemies. We are seeing in this election a growing number of people who think Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist who used to vacation in the Soviet Union and has lived in an actual communist village, is not far left enough.

And now we have a handful of big tech oligarchs, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, who are controlling what we can think, and say, and do, who can have a job, why can buy and sell goods and services. We have an authoritarian control grid whose power will soon be so great that it can never be challenged. And the only way to defeat them is together. Any attack on the free speech of anyone must be treated as an attack against everyone, whether you like the person or not. It doesn't matter if the elite are trying to censor Alex Jones, porn, Dave Rubin, Hasan Piker, that Nazi guy they made a movie about, anyone you don't like, if we don't stand together against censorship and deplatforming we will all surely hang separately. A tech oligarch or government powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take from you everything you have when, not if, when the pendulum of society inevitably swings in the opposite direction. The proper thing to do is to allow the free and open exchange of ideas, not to censor anyone. Let people reach their own conclusions. Try to be more persuasive and win people over to your side. Working together is the only way we can continue to live in a free and open society.

Was Thanos Right?

If you look at history you start to get the "evil" idea that Thanos was right. Every time the population is halved, or at least a significant part of it is eliminated, the standard of living of the survivors increases.

The Black Death (which was not bubonic plague, it was a hemorrhagic disease, which plague is not*) turned Europe from a continent where lords owned the people as slaves to one where workers had the power to demand improved standards of living and allowed for the creation, for the first time ever, of a middle class. Social mobility was created. Had millions of people not died and the social order of the world not been overturned those opportunities would never have arisen.

After 100 million people died in the Second World War America, as the only industrial nation that was not destroyed, saw the greatest boom economy in human history. For the first time ever a man with no education, no training, and no connections could demand, and get, a job that could support a wife, three kids, two cars, a house, a month of vacation, and retire in 30 years and live off a full pension. It was the first time ever that young adults could venture off on their own and not have to live in multi-generational families just to make ends meet (something still tragically seen as normal in our crippled economy). Had millions of people not died and nations not bombed to oblivion that opportunity would have never arisen.

Even in the Soviet Union, with that man-made catastrophe rent by Stalin that saw the murder of 20 million people, actually dramatically improved the lives of the survivors. An entire nation of peasant slaves was turned into an industrial super power with a standard of living half that of the United States in only 70 years. The survivors did have their lives improved. That would never have happened under the Tsar where everyone lived as chattel in an agrarian shithole.

History seems to attest to the fact that there really is a finite amount of resources, and if you eliminate half the people everyone not only gets double the share, but those double shares are worth even more.

"But why not just double the resources?"

Because things that are not earned have no value. Low IQ people take resources given to them by guilty Westerners and use those resources to quadruple their populations. Doubling the resources just exacerbates the problem by incentivizing bad behavior.

Everyone wanted silver, which was rare and highly valued. Wars were waged over silver. But when Spain discovered Potosi, the largest silver deposits in the world, and the supply of silver increased dramatically, all of a sudden silver became worthless because everyone had it and the Spanish economy collapsed.

Everyone wants to be a trillionaire, but when Zimbabwe made everyone a trillionaire the money became worthless. If everyone has a trillion dollars then no one will work, no one will pave roads, or build houses, or bake bread, or raise chickens. Why work when you're rich? But then, since no one is working, all those ordinary goods become extremely valuable and money becomes worthless.

Increasing the supply of a given resource devalues it. Increasing the supply of food, for example, would cause the excess food to rot and be wasted, or would incentivize people to have more kids who would demand more food, which would require resources to be doubled again to meet the new demand.

Any perceived increase in standard of living brought on by increasing resources is an illusion predicated on credit. Extraction of ground water and phosphate have allowed for an increase of food production which has allowed 6 billion extra people to be born in excess of the carrying capacity of the planet. The problem is ground water and phosphate take thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years to become replenished. Meanwhile they are exhausted in generations. Saudi Arabia totally depleted its ground water supply in a couple decades. There are places in America where the ground has subsided 70 feet or more because of the extraction of aquifers that took millennia to fill up. Whole "guano islands" were mined below the waves to extract phosphate for fertilizer and for making explosives and have been depleted in the past century.

It's a simple calculus: extraction of these resources allows for the increase of the population because most people have no concept of a future beyond their own death (or maybe the deaths of their children), an increase in population leads to an escalating pace of resource extraction beyond the point where those resources are being replenished, which leads to a population crash.

Now, it's true that places like Japan and Europe, especially Eastern Europe, have seen declining populations, but Africa's population is exploding. Within the next 50 years 1 in 3 people on the planet will be African if this trend continues. Sustainable agriculture can only support 2 billion people, and there will be at least 4 billion Africans who will not work, who will not invent new particle physics, who will not build rockets to colonize Mars. 4 billion more mouths to be fed by an increasingly smaller pool of Western workers who are being replaced in their home countries.

The long-term survival of the human species requires colonization of other planets. That cannot happen if dumb Westerners keep giving aid to countries in Africa and across the third world where people breed like crazy. There is a finite supply of resources, and those resources must be apportioned toward advancing the survival of the human species over the long-term, not increasing the population dramatically in the here and now.

The long-term survival of the human species requires the immediate end of foreign aid across the board.

“But wouldn't the population just grow back if half of it is eliminated?”

No, not if you eliminate the half that breeds beyond the replacement level.

You're committing the fallacy of assuming humans are fungible, like bacteria. If you eliminate half of a colony of bacteria the colony will just continue to grow until all the resources are consumed. If you double the resources for the colony to grow on the colony will continue to grow until all the resources are consumed.

If you double the resources on Earth some humans will continue to breed until all the resources are consumed. If you remove the half that is breeding beyond replacement level then those resources can be recycled, as they always have been.

Resources are recycled. There are water cycles, phosphate cycles, nitrogen cycles, carbon cycles. Humans use resources, die, and the dead bodies decompose and return the elements to the Earth to be reused. If population is kept stable, at the carrying capacity, then resources can be recycled endlessly. The world will not become overrun with Japanese people, ever. Japanese people are not exhausting resources to fuel their bottomless thirst for expansion, like in China or Saudi Arabia, or Chad. If the wasteful half is eliminated, or simply not allowed to expand, then the stable, sustainable half can reuse the world's resources endlessly until the Sun dies.



*The disease that killed most of the people in the Americas when the Spanish arrived is called "Cocoliztli". It has the same symptoms as the Black Death: high fever, profuse bleeding, large dark spots - especially around the neck and genitals, bloody diarrhea, bloody vomiting, severe body pains, delusions, discoloration and necrosis of the skin. Death was usually in 3-5 days after onset of symptoms, an extremely short amount of time. We don't know the incubation/latency period is, there are very few diseases that kill that quickly. People with Ebola usually linger for 21 days or so. Cholera can kill quicker, but that's from fluid loss.

Coupled with the fact that the disease is spread primarily from person to person, and was devastating in areas that were virtually rodent free while sparing other areas that were teaming with rats, indicates that some unknown viral hemorrhagic fever was the worst killer of humans of all time. It wiped out 75% of Eurasia and 90% of North and South America. We are all the survivors of some extremely virulent disease that nearly brought humanity to extinction within a span of 300 years.

Milton Friedman's Basic Income

It's as Moses says in The Ten Commandments: "A city is made from brick. The strong make many, the weak make few, the dead make none."



We've known about this for how long? People on the left like to have a permanent underclass from whom to extract votes and people on the right believe the asinine notion that starvation is a good motivation to make people work. No, it's not, it's a shitty motivation. People who have all their basic needs met work harder, have more enthusiasm to work, and reinvest more into the economy. That's not me saying it, that's Adam Smith saying it. That's Milton Friedman saying it. I don't care what Rust Lumbar or Sean Hannity, who owns Section 8 housing yet pretends to be a regular blue collar guy, think. They're snakes and vermin.



Friedman suggested something he called a "negative income tax". Anyone making below what was at the time a living wage ($3,000 a year, or $21,000 a year today) would be given the difference up to half ($1,500 or $10,600). The minimum amount never changes. With welfare today if you're collecting and you have a job you're penalised, which disincentivises people on welfare to work. On Friedman's plan the minimum amount is guaranteed, so you can work and earn more and never have to worry about having money taken away from you.

The Future Requires Universal Basic Income

Technology is advancing to the point where it will be necessary to do one of two things:



1. Kill billions of people who will have no jobs



or



2. Pay people to live



Universal basic income is opposed by the left because they won't be able to use welfare to bribe voters, and it's opposed by the right because poor people can go die in a gutter. UBI can be instituted by redirecting current government spending toward helping people instead of turning politicians and executives into royalty and demigods, and it will solve many many problems that fall under the broad category of "human suffering". We've reached a point as a species where we have the technology to eliminate most human suffering, we just refuse to do so because of the two reasons stated above.

The Failure of Economics

The problem with all economic systems is money. There's not enough of it. Alternately you could say there are too many people, but I'm not going to go down the path of suggesting genocide, so let's say the problem is not enough money. I read somewhere that even if all the money in the world was divided equally among everyone that would mean everyone only gets about $5,000. And no new money would be made because everyone would be too poor to do anything. There's just not enough money in the world for 8 billion people.



You look at all the times when there was a spectacular economic situation for some people and you see the reason is always because the world has become hell on earth for others. The US prospered like no country before or since during the 50s-70s because WW2 destroyed all possible competition and lead to the deaths of 50-100 million people. Even the paupers in America lived as kings because there were jobs galore and they paid unbelievable wages. Once the rest of the world rebuilt then the wealth of America vanished, it spread around elsewhere.



What else do you see? Places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the native population does not work, at all. They can pull unlimited money out of the ground and they import basically slaves ("sponsored workers") to do all the labour for the native population who all live like kings off welfare. But that's ending too. They realise that oil is not infinite so they are desperately trying to diversify their economies so as to avoid what would inevitably be the devolution of their crapulent societies into Somalia.



I've read the literature, methane, created by bacteria in the deep ocean vents, is transformed into butane and propane under heat, and has been shown to turn into crude oil in laboratory conditions mimicking the upper mantle. Oil is not a fossil fuel, but it's not inexhaustible, just like ground water. We're extracting it faster than it's being replenished. I don't care if the Earth is "9,000 miles deep" as one Youtube commentator has expressed, you can see that technology is not advancing anywhere near fast enough to make up for the decreasing supply of available resources, be they ground water, oil, gold, or anything else. The thickness of the Earth is the problem, not the solution. It's just not possible to drill that deep, and gold or oil or whatever just isn't worth nearly enough to justify developing drilling technologies further. There's not enough money.



The only way to fix the global economic disaster that is looming fast, without starting another world war, is to discover some previously unknown magic resource to take the place of oil. There needs to be something super abundant that is extremely valuable and extremely useful as a resource and it needs to be extremely easy to attain and we need to find it soon or all hell will break loose.



Communism, socialism, capitalism, corporatism, "social democracy", they don't work because of human nature and because of the nature of the world itself.



Communism bullshit.



First of all, Marx was a hypocrite who understood nothing about human nature. "When a people's basic needs are met then people will work for free. Work will be its own reward." Bullshit. Bullshit. People will not work for free, even if all their basic needs are met. People will only work for money or for a cause to which they are totally devoted (like family or religion). People will not work for nothing if they don't have to, and they will not work if there is no correlation between work and reward.



Second, planned economies don't work because it's impossible to predict the future to that degree of specificity. That's why planned economies always have shortages. A grocery store in a communist country might have one salami hanging up and you're not allowed to have it, but the party bosses can have mansions and limousines and caviar.



"But that's not real communism."



Bullshit, but let's indulge your fantasy.



"Communism works perfectly on paper but the problem is that real communism has never been implemented."



No. If by "real communism" you mean a stateless, classless society then you have to admit that "real communism" is a utopian fantasy that can never ever be realised ever in this or any world. The second you get two people together you have a hierarchy, because people have different degrees of competence so someone will always be better than someone else, and a hierarchy on the scale of a society is a class structure. You also develop a state structure, even in hunter-gatherer societies (so called "primitive communism"). This is "our" land, as opposed to "their" land. And tribes went to war with each other constantly because humans are territorial animals, just like chimpanzees. So if you're definition of "real communism" is a utopian fantasy than you might as well admit to being wrong from the start.



"Real communism" also doesn't work well "on paper" because humans won't work for free. Work is not its own reward, if it was people wouldn't need to be paid to work, and of the thousands of experiments that have been done to disprove this basic reality of human nature none has ever succeeded. No hippie commune or Marxist revolutionary vanguard has ever produced a system where people will work for free because "Well isn't that swell, I might as well help my neighbors out. And work is just so gosh darn fun too." If you worked all the time and got nothing out of it then you wouldn't keep working. That's not even a human trait, that's true of all animals. Unless you're getting more than you put in then the activity isn't worth the caloric output.



Socialism is bullshit too. Unless you have a very small, ethnically homogenous population that can pull wealth out of the ground there's no incentive to sacrifice for others in society. That's just human nature too. In-group preference. Four million Norwegians floating on an ocean of oil might pay 70% income tax to give all their fellow Norwegians "free" healthcare, but that will never work in a place like the United States where there are 350 million people of every ethnic group who don't trust each other and are unwilling to sacrifice for members of different tribes.



What happens when you have bureaucrats divvying up handouts supposedly to the people most in need? What happens every single time? They give handouts to the people who will vote them into office. Politicians buy votes by giving away "free" shit to people with low IQs who breed like rabbits because, surprise, selfishness is another part of human nature.



Maybe robots might be able to work out the system of handouts perfectly. Robots, who were deemed the overlords of humanity and had unchallengeable might, and who acted out of pure rationality and followed routines by rote without any outside factors influencing their judgment might be able to make a social welfare state work. Robots would be dispassionate enough not to be bought off by special interest groups, and if they were willing to let humans live (as pets, say), then, and only then, could socialism work. Or you might get a system where the machines decide we all must be plugged into the Matrix because humans are self-destructive by nature.







And capitalism bullshit.



The US economy is worth $18 trillion. There are 350 million people (50 million of whom are illegal). Divide the two up and you get $51,000 per person per year.



So why are there people with $100 billion and other people struggling to survive on less than $20,000?



You'll see corporations with big CEOs who make $100 million bonuses on top of the money they already make sitting on the boards of directors of six other corporations, yet they won't pay their workers a living wage. Pundits always say that the profit margins are razor thin. Well if the profit margins are so thin that the company can't pay a living wage yet the CEO can make $100 million, or with smaller businesses where the bosses can hire and promote their incompetent friends at outrageous salaries, then those businesses have very shitty business models and deserve to go out of business. If carpetbaggers can exploit their workers to make millions and not even give those workers enough to live then those people should be put in jail. It's like Citi Group or the AIG or the Goldman Sachs. Everyone in upper and middle management of those corporations should be in jail for life.



So what's left? Could post-economics work, or is it too doomed by the flaws in human nature?

The Myth of "Education"

Education is bullshit. It's a bullshit feel-good panacea that educated people parade out because they've been programmed to believing that lie through the propaganda that is education. You spend enough money and get deep enough into debt purchasing a worthless education you're going to start thinking education is the solution to all the world's problems.



It also saves the educated from having to really do anything while still looking like they care. Throwing money at a problem (especially other people's money) is a convenient form of slacktivism.



When everyone has a college degree college degrees will be worthless. It's like that Zimbabwean money. If you give everyone a hundred trillion dollars there's nothing they can do with that money other than use it as toilet paper.



That's why this push for "free" college for everyone is a self-defeating idea, and the people who propose it - the policy makers, not general public - know this. They're not serious about universal education being the solution to society's problems, it's a scam.



That's the point. When everyone gets a degree then in order to stand out, in order to have an advantage in the real world you'll need to get a higher degree, meaning you'll need to get another loan and go deeper into debt. The push to get everyone into college is all about selling more debt to a population that is already bankrupt.



You have to fit into the system, or be made to fit into the system. You'd be a fool (an educated fool) to think otherwise. It's all about debt. The banks want your money and they want you to have an ego boost when they take your money and give you something largely worthless in return. Naturally these people will get defensive about their worthless product and defend it because they've allowed their sense of self-worth to be based on the possession of this worthless thing called education. Few things will crush a person's will to live more than the certain knowledge that they've wasted their youth, their money, and possibly their entire lives by being cattle for bankers who, by and large, never went to college.



Just look at that quote I have up from Richard Rose:



"Do we want the Truth or do we want to be "educated"? There is a tendency of people in control, whether in universities or in governments, to want to "educate". Not for the Truth, but for the convenience of the moment, thinking they are the prophets of the zeitgeist, and by their manipulation of the public mind they will bring people around to the "right" direction."



Every time some elitist, usually a Marxist, comes across someone who disagrees with their asinine, impossible, self-contradictory beliefs the Marxist will say that that person who disagrees needs to be "educated". If that's not the most terrifying Stalinist thing you've ever heard then you're painfully naive. People needing to be "educated" for "wrongthink" is straight out of Pol Pot's playbook. Believing that the problem with people who disagree with you is that those people need education and that the government needs to be empowered to provide that education has been a recipe for the worst genocides of the 20th century.



Aside from colossally expanding the debt and eliminating one's intellectual opponents, the push for more education is entirely a strategy of the elite to make the general populace more passive. Education is a modern, atheistic religion, and is defended as such. It has cathedrals, a priestly caste, sacraments, tithing, sacrifice, promises of salvation. It's a religion. And that's one of the key functions of any religion. Religion acts as a social glue. If you get everyone believing the same things you can maintain some semblance of society and a power structure. "Don't question your masters." That's the message of education.



It's no surprise that within a generation of when universal public education for children was instituted in most developed countries that the first global mechanised war broke out. Public education is based on a highly regimented Prussian military model designed to turn children into cogs in the machine of the body politic. Far from making people smarter education traps people into the same cognitive box. Education is the opposite of free thinking, it forces people to think the same thing or fear ostracism, or worse.



Education is not intelligence. Education is not problem solving ability. Education is not intellectual freedom. It's the opposite. It's a series of shackles on your mind designed to extract your wealth and make you docile.



The truth is that intelligence, real intelligence, is largely genetic (between 60% - 80%). Nothing, no school, no training program, no $40,000 piece of paper, can make you smart. People can acquire certain skills or memorise a series of facts, but that's not intelligence. A person who has an encyclopedic memory of facts doesn't necessarily have a higher level of problem solving ability.



That's not to say that there's no value at all in formal schooling. I want my doctor graduate with high marks from medical school, I want the engineer who designs the bridge I drive over to excel at engineering school, just like I want my electrician to get the proper training at electrician school. One of the big casualties in this push for universal education is the marginalisation of trade schools, you know, schools that actually teach people how to find and keep a job and succeed in the real world.



The real purpose of education, the intended purpose, is to install certain programs into the minds of young people so that they can learn skills and get a job and become productive members of society. Education gives you skills, and skills are not intelligence, but they're not supposed to be. The system of education is supposed to identify children's latent abilities and help guide them to develop those abilities to the utmost. Not everyone will place in the 99th percentile in terms of intelligence, by definition, and they don't have to be.



Everyone doesn't have to be a genius, and it's arrogance to think they should all be genii in order to make society better, or to make humans better. You're not going to make better humans through education, but if you can give people jobs that give their lives meaning then you won't have to make people better, because they'll have fewer incentives to be bad when they've got fulfilling lives.

Poverty Does Not Cause Crime

Poverty does not cause crime. Taoudenni is the poorest place in the world, and they don't even have a word for crime. The couple of times a year when there's a disagreement between two men (the population is 100% male, because the environment is so harsh the women and children live hundreds of miles away and the men see them a few months out of the year) the village elder comes up with a solution and everyone accepts it as final.







What causes crime is relative poverty. If very poor people live in the same area as very rich people that conflict causes crime.

The Mystery Of The Shemitah

Jonathan Cahn explains what he calls "The Mystery Of The Shemitah" for 77 minutes. Basically, there's this Biblical injunction that every 7th year the Jews were supposed to stop working and erase all debts (I'm still wondering what they were supposed to eat), but the Jews always defy God's comands, so they ignored this injunction for 490 years. As a result the Babylonians came in and destroyed Jerusalem and sent the Jews into exile for 70 years - one year for every sabbath year ("shemitah") they had ignored. At the end of 70 years the Persians come in and wipe out the Babylonians and the Persian king Cyrus rebuilds Jerusalem and puts the Jews back in their homeland.



Rabbi Cahn says the same rule applies to the United States, because the US was unique in that it was the only modern state that was founded on the principles of God's word, in effect setting up a new covenant like the one the Jews had thousands of years ago.



1870 - shemitah year - the US surpasses Britain as the largest economy on the planet

1917 - shemitah year - the US becomes a superpower

1945 - shemitah year - a new financial world order is established based on the US dollar



As long as the US (this rule only applies to the US and Israel) stays right with God then every seventh year will be a blessing, but if the US defies God then every seventh year will be a curse.



1973 - shemitah year - the US legalises abortion, defying God

2001 - shemitah year - 9/11, the symbol of America's economic might - the World Trade Center, which was built in 1973 - is destroyed, followed by a huge financial collapse of the stock market

2008 - shemitah year - the Great Recession starts, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression (which also started on a shemitah year)



What happens next? I don't know. The last shemitah year was September 2014 to September 2015, which passed, and while there weren't any further economic disasters or terror attacks, the Supreme Court did deem itself infinite power over all aspects of everyone's lives allegedly to protect the "rights" of maybe one tenth of seven tenths of one percent of the population, but really it was a naked power grab that followed 30 years of public indoctrination to move the overton window.



Is there anything to this? I don't know. This might all just be coincidence. It is an interesting hypothesis, and it is an interesting lecture.

Post Economics

Here's my take on the issue of capitalism versus socialism. Neither of these systems are ends in themselves, only means to an end, and that end is what I'll call "Post Economics". Post economics is a social order that has no economic system at all because people have evolved beyond the need for one. That may sound like fantasy, but there are examples of post economic societies that have existed for thousands of years. They are called monasteries.

The monastery is an enclosed society with very little contact with the outside world. Many are completely self-sufficient. They may start out with donations from outside, from a parent monastery or whatever, of things like building supplies and tools, but from then on everything they need is manufactured within the monastery itself. Food is grown, sheep might be raised for wool to make clothing, trees planted to supply wood, and so on.

Some people might fear losing things they value in a monastic society, but nothing of any value is lost.

Ambition. Monks have no ambition! Yes, yes they do, otherwise they would have never joined the monastery in the first place. The ambition of the monk is the supreme ambition of enlightenment (Kenosis in the Christian tradition, Moksha in Vedanta, Nirvana in Buddhism). All earthly ambitions are but pale reflections of the supreme ambition. On the relative side there is the fulfillment of perfect morality. What is missing is the ambition to collect stuff. Instead of buying new chrome hubcaps or building a gazebo or whatever, you would rather spend that energy helping the less fortunate, the sick, the disabled, the homeless.

Individuality. Well, certainly monks lack individuality! Not true. They may dress the same, and eat the same food, but they do that by choice. Individual monks still possess their individual talents, and it is part of the perfection of morality to develop those talents to their utmost for the benefit of others. If someone is good at medicine that person serves as the doctor. If someone is good at smithing that person maintains the metal tools, monks who can sing serve in the choir, scholars can become experts in particular fields.

Science is not lost in the monastery. The opposite is true, monasteries saved science from being destroyed in the West, and most of the great scientists of the past 500 years started out as monks. It is only very recently that the religious institutions of higher learning have secularised and a small group of atheist scientists have began saying science and religion are incompatible.

Neither is art, or music, or literature lost in a monastic society. Monks still produce great art and great music, they just don't put on a concert to get a lot of money, score some coke, and bang some groupies in a different city every night.

Hedonistic pursuits are lost, but they are also lost in communism since communism sees work as its own reward and wanton sex and drug use as a waste of energy that could be used to work, so the loss of hedonism would only be a problem as far as capitalism and European socialism are concerned.

The primary thing that is lost is selfishness. The thought "What's in it for me?" is the primary casualty of the monastic system. Monks don't ask "What's in it for me?" they do their work out of a sense of duty, to help others and to glorify God. If it's your time to scrub the floors or wash the dishes you don't complain how you would rather listen to Metallica or chopping fire wood. Monks do not act to see what they can gain, they act to see what they can give. Farmers grow crops, doctors heal people, tailors sew robes, and carpenters build things not because they can get money to buy a new Lamborghini (or Toyota), or ridiculous outfits that will be worn once and then put in the back of a closet, monks work because it is what is right.

For most humans, throughout history, this is a truly alien concept, but it is a human concept that has been embraced voluntarily by millions of people over thousands of years.

So about capitalism and socialism? We need to view the debate about reaching the ultimate goal of post economics. Which system will bring more people to eliminating selfishness within themselves? Which system will bring about the desire to glorify God and serve our fellow man? It is a decision that cannot be forced upon anyone. Coercion won't lead anyone beyond economics. Right off the bat we can eliminate European socialism, which is cultural Marxism or social justice warriorism or whatever you want to call it. That's the exact opposite of morality and enlightenment. Soviet socialism is a lot closer to post economics, but it is also entirely authoritarian and centrally planned, so there's that whole issue of coercion. The bad form of capitalism, that I call crapitalism, with billionaire CEOs who run AIG into the ground and get golden parachutes, and celebrities making obscene amounts of money and buying fleets of Maybachs and chopping down a whole acre of mahogany to put in the mansion you never live in, or that allows Apple or KFC to carve their logo on the Moon because "They paid for it," that's pure selfishness, so that's no good either. There has to be something, a healthy, gradual system that will take us to post economics eventually, but we'll never figure it out if we're arguing about economic systems as the end and not the means.

I suspect that that system lies somewhere in a much smaller state, with more freedoms, where like-minded people come together to achieve a common goal. Big huge states of tens or hundreds of millions of people must be broken up into much smaller poleis, because if there is one thing that kills compassion and breeds selfishness and indifference, it is large agglomerations of people. The brain can only associate with so many people, and only so many groups of people can associate with one another before groups of total strangers no one cares about start appearing. Plato said that 5,000 was the ideal number of people for a city-state, and research from modern neuroscience and sociology tells us he was right. Now, that's not a first step, but it is an intermediary goal to work toward. The first step, I would say, would be reducing the size of government, because the present system is not only unsustainable, it was known to be unsustainable 80 years ago. Now it is rapidly collapsing. We must begin to act, and we must keep the ultimate goal of the post economic system in mind when we act so we know which direction to go.

The Minimum Income

This is part two of the Kallipolis series, which began with "Only Veterans Deserve to Vote".



One thing I've never understood was brought up in one of my favourite books Generation Kill. You go all over the world and poor people are skinny, yet in America, for some unknown reason, poor people are obese. That makes no sense. Why are poor people fatter than rich people in America? How can someone living entirely off the welfare possibly purchase or otherwise acquire enough food to actually become obese? That does not make sense.

You look at these Mexicans who come over to mow lawns or put up roofs (rooves?), they are 130, 140 pounds, and it's pure muscle. They get paid one shiny penny per hour and they work themselves to death and they have zero body fat. I like that (I like their work ethic, not that they are underpaid or die early). I greatly admire the amount of work they do. More poor people should be like that. One big problem is that there aren't enough good jobs for poor people. The roads are disintegrating, inner cities look like war zones, all this construction needs to be done but there's no money to pay for it because all the money goes into the pockets of bureaucrats.

I read somewhere that at least 80% of all money spent on welfare in the US goes to pay government salaries, not to actually help poor people. If all that money were redistributed from the bloated government then every adult in the US could be given $10,000 per year. I actually recorded (I have not uploaded or even thought to edit it yet) a 50 minute video defending the idea of replacing welfare with a minimum income. 1 January everyone gets a direct deposit of $10,000 into their bank account (this makes the bankers happy because of all the new customers they get). The people who won't work wouldn't work anyway under the current system, so you're not actually losing any additional money, poor people who do work and are making slave wages are automatically lifted out of poverty, it incentivises more people to invest more because they now have more to invest, and for the people who don't need the extra money you get it back with taxes, so you don't lose anything that way either.

Yes, but how do you pay for it? Welfare spending is (one of the contributing factors in) bankrupting America. It's a sunk cost. The government is spending that money anyway. If the money is already spent it might as well be spent on something useful. But I do have some ideas on how to eliminate government spending while maintaining the minimum income.

Step One: cut the size of government by 50% over the next 10 years. As I mentioned earlier, nearly all the spending on welfare is wasted on the government itself. Get rid of everyone in the federal welfare department and have the jobs reassigned to the Treasury without hiring any additional employees. "But you've just laid off thousands of people!" Yes, but remember, with the minimum income they're still getting paid anyway.

Step Two: Stop inflating the currency. The number one reason people are poorer today is because the money is worth less. In fact, the US Dollar is almost completely worthless, having lost over 90% of its original value (The British Pound, by contrast, has lost only about 10% of its original value). People are talking about raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, but if the value of the Dollar had not been destroyed by inflation than the current $7 minimum wage would be worth about $23 an hour. Here's a real world example of inflation. 100 years ago you could take a $20 gold coin, worth exactly $20 USD, and have a finely tailored suit made. Today you can still use that same gold coin to get a finely tailored suit made, but the gold and the suit now both cost $2,000 USD. The gold coin and the suit are still worth exactly the same, the US Dollar is just worth 100 times less.

Step Three: Stop the war on drugs. Legalise and Tax. I read about 8 years ago that if weed was legalised the government could tax it and make $400 billion per year. That right there is equivalent to federal welfare spending, just with weed. You break the backs of the cartels, empty the prisons, and make a huge windfall in taxes simultaneously. That's win-win-win. That's a Charlie Sheen level of winning.

Step Four: Stop policing the world. There are 50,000 US troops in Germany and another 50,000 in Japan even though we beat them 70 years ago. Der Fuhrer is not coming back. The Reds are not going to pour through the Fulda Gap with "more tanks than God" and make it to the Rhine in a week. What the hell are we doing there?

Step Five: Stop the waste in general. SpaceX has spent about $500 million on its Dragon capsule and has already tested it and it works beautifully. The only thing holding them back is red tape. The official NASA government contract for the Orion system, which was obsolete when it was first proposed, and has not gotten off the paper yet, is $17 billion. What's wrong with this picture? The government has tried to produce a POS rocket, spent a load of time, wasted a tremendous amount of money, and hasn't made anything. The SpaceX guys see there is a huge market for commercial spaceflight design AND BUILD something that works perfectly for a fraction of the cost and they're finished already! And why is government so damn slow and why does it wast so much money? It's just like the welfare problem. People see government as a means to line their pockets because they can't do real work producing something. Government is nothing more than one giant slush fund.

I'm not saying government has no purpose. I'm not a wackjob looser utopian fanatic who brays about "the free market" solving all the world's problems. I don't want Apple to put their logo on the Moon even if they pay a trillion dollars for it. I don't want ExxonMobil to drill for oil in Yellowstone. I don't want Blackwater policing US streets (and I don't want to see the friendly-looking police I remember as a kid dressed like mercenaries with machine guns and black ski masks either). I think a world with three or four nuclear powers is a much safer world, and I see nothing wrong with bombing Iran or Saudi Arabia into submission to kill their nuclear ambitions. If a million Iranians die that's better than five billion people who would die in a nuclear war. Stopping nuclear proliferation is not policing the world, it is the calculus of survival. Nuclear weapons represent such a grave threat that they are awarded a special category. Policing the world necessarily involves nation building. Blowing up reactors and then hauling ass is not nation building, it's limited war. The government should police the streets, put out the fires, and kick ass in limited, defensive wars (keeping Iran from getting nukes is defending the US). The government should maintain protected wilderness areas and make people like BP accountable for releasing millions of tons of oil. And the government can do all this in a much more efficient way than it does now. And being efficient starts with cutting jobs and eliminating corruption. I'm not saying everyone needs to be perfectly moral, although if my only veterans get to vote scenario was adopted that would contribute greatly to the morality problem of government (not because veterans are inherently moral in themselves, but because history and moral philosophy will become a mandatory part of their training).

And I think all that can be done while implementing my minimum income system. I'd love to say more but I can no longer see the top of the page, so I'll save that for a part three.

Is Peace on Earth Possible?

Kriyananda explains why the yuga cycle gives him hope that peace on Earth is possible in the future.



Now, Kriyananda is not some up in the air "crazy wisdom" guru who uses religion to disguise socialism. He does not go out and promote hedonism under the guise of tantra, though he has made a number of gross errors in his life sexually. He has stated that government spending is responsible for collapsing the economy, he has built several successful communities around the world that have thrived for decades, he is not a cultural Marxist or an economic Marxist, but he does understand the value of community and working together rather than competing.



How can we get peace on Earth? The realist answer is that the old guard of super rich super greedy New World Order elite need to die out. People like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and the Coca Cola Brothers and Mark Suckerface. People for whom there is not enough money in the universe. People who would sell their own mother for a penny and commit treason to get a no-bid contract. Then the younger people can learn from the example of Ananda and move toward communal living.

Why "Taxing the Rich" Doesn't Work

There are at least 7 reasons why the idea of taxing the rich and giving it to the poor does not work. I'll break them down for you below.



1. "Not Rich" Syndrome

The definition of who is "rich" is a lot like a number of other terms that belong on sliding scales. Someone who is rich is usually someone who has more money than the person making the definition. "I'm not rich, but that guy over there making $30,000, he's rich." That guy says "Rich? You must be joking! I'm just getting by, but that guy, making $80,000, now he's rich." The third guy says "I'm not rich! Those greedy bastards making $250,000, they're rich, and they should be taxed more!"



2. "Not I" Syndrome

The people who do admit they are rich usually believe they deserve some exemption to having to pay higher taxes. A leftist who wanted to raise taxes on the rich called in to The Savage Nation a few days ago and he admitted that he was, in fact, rich. However, he believed he shouldn't have to pay higher taxes, only other rich people. You see, he takes every tax exemption he can so he only pays a fraction of what a less crafty person would at his income bracket, and he believes that his genius at finding these loopholes means he is entitled to pay less. The caller wanted to raise taxes but did not want to close the loopholes that would shield him from having to pay those higher taxes! Taxes, in this instance, become a penalty for stupid people.



3. Rich People Don't Pay Taxes

The 80 people who possess half the money in the world never pay taxes anyway. Warren Buffett pays as little taxes as possible, so do the Clintons and the Bushes. The really rich people don't get money from income, so they already don't have to pay income tax – the form of tax that people who want to "tax the rich" want to increase, and they have armies of lawyers to find every single loophole to get out of paying the taxes that do apply to them. Warren Buffett always says that income tax should be raised and that his secretary pays more income tax than he does, but what he never mentions is he makes very little income. Most of the money Buffett gets is in the form of capital gains, which he conveniently does not want taxed any higher. He's distracting the public with one hand to disguise what his other hand is doing.



Remember, in the US, the IRS does not care how much you pay beyond the minimum amount you owe. You can legally give them as much money as you want over what you legally owe. If you owe $50,000, you can legally give them a million dollars and they will gladly accept it to buy a new hammer or toilet seat.



4. Corporations Don't Pay Taxes

Just like rich people, corporations (which somehow count as "people" but unborn children are just "tissues") don't pay taxes either. Corporations are to people what Superman is to man. Corporations can deduct expenses, like utilities. If you try to get off having to pay your gas bill or make a car payment you'd get your gas shut off and your car repossessed. A corporation can get a tax break. Corporations can use past losses to offset future gains. In the red last year? It doesn't matter that you've made billions, you can subtract what you didn't make from what you did and get free money from Uncle Sam! Corporations can create smaller, shell corporations in tax havens to launder money and avoid paying taxes. And the big one, corporations that are really super in the red can get bailouts if they have their hands in too many cookie jars. If a big corporation like AIG were to go bankrupt it would cause a depression, so the government can't let that happen. You see, some corporations are "too big to fail."



5. Dekulakization

Whenever taxes are raised the only people who lose more money directly are kulaks. Kulaks are the mythical "tight-fisted" independent farmers (mostly Poles and Ukrainians) who Stalin murdered out of racial hatred while claiming to fight capitalism. In American terms the kulaks are the entrepreneurs. They are the people with two mortgages on their homes to fund a business that employs a couple dozen people. On paper they may be millionaires, but very little of that money is liquid. In fact most of these modern day kulaks are in the red, but few ever speak of real world economics, and so these paper millionaires must be taxed to the point where they lose their businesses. Destroying small businesses is a death sentence for the economy, because that's where most new jobs are created. Raising taxes is like pouring cement into a car's engine.



6. Eat the Poor

The only other group of people hurt by higher taxes are poor people. Fewer businesses means fewer jobs. Fewer jobs means more unemployment, and unemployment tends to go hand-in-hand with being poor. That's not the only way poor people are hurt by higher taxes. Those tax-exempt corporate people can raise their prices if they ever get in a situation where they can't weasel their way out of having to pay a tax, thus forcing poor people to have to pay whatever the corporations owe. Sure, minimum wage might go up every few years, but it's always behind inflation, so an extra dollar an hour is really less than what you were paid five years ago because the price of commodities has gone up. It really is the case that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, whether taxes are increased or not.


7. To Each According to His Need

If we're going to redistribute wealth, and do it globally and do it right, chances are you won't see a dime. A billion Africans take precedent over the average poor person in America, because they are just that much poorer. Poor people in America have a car, a TV, and are obese, while poor people in Haiti literally eat cakes made from mud to eliminate hunger pangs because there's not enough food to eat a real meal every day.



And if we were to do this just in America? The people who would reap the rewards are the same people who reap them now: the welfare scam artists. Deadbeats who have ten children so they can get food stamps to pay for makeup and booze, people living together who all file separately so the household looks really super poor on paper, I've seen all types. There are people who know how to game the system to suck up as much welfare as possible, and they often live better than the people working two jobs who support them with their taxes. Do you think this would change if we just "tax the rich" more? In a country where 80% of government spending on welfare is lost in bureaucratic inefficiency and political slush funds, I don't think so.



Bonus 8th Reason: What is Fair? 

Alright, you've convinced me, let's do this. Let's tax the rich. Let's make them pay their fair share. So, what is their fair share?



The problem with the definition of fairness is that it is even more nebulous than the definition of rich. That's why leftists have switched over to using the word equality, because enough people have caught onto the fairness nonsense. Leftists love to say the rich should pay their fair share, but if you ever press them to give a real world percentage they will turn irate and say you are deflecting the issue. Leftists never say anything concrete because then people would see they're idiots. It reveals the lie to get into details, so they stick to slogans that they repeat Ad nauseam, just like Rules for Radicals tells them to do. How much taxes are fair? More. It's never fair because you can always tax more, but if leftists ever said this you'd see they're not interested in fairness, only control.

The Cause of Economic Trouble

Kriyananda talks about how big government and fiat currency are the cause of our economic troubles. The solution is to establish small communities based around cooperation and simple living rather than greed and welfare (Yogananda's "world brotherhood colonies", now realised under the Ananda villages in the US, Italy, and India).

"We Don't Need More Copyright" - Tom W. Bell on Intellectual Property

"We don't need more copyright," says Chapman University law professor Tom W. Bell. "Probably we could dial it back and still enjoy this great wealth of culture that's been generated, that's already in our libraries."

Bell, a self-described "intellectual property skeptic," sat down with Reason TV to discuss his new book "Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good."

Contemporary copyright law is a statutory privilege that inevitably contradicts our constitutional rights to free expression. The prospect of litigation scares off artists who want to create new works that exist in legal grey areas, like mashups, tributes, or parodies.

Bell's solution rests on a much simpler idea: we should emphasize common law instead of copyright. Common law -- which is to say, the established precedents that govern ordinary property, contracts, and torts -- already form the foundation of the American legal system. It provides plenty of encouragement for artists and designers to create new works, without the statutory failures of the current system.

How might the arts fare in a world without copyright protection? To a large extent, we already know the answer. Perfumes, jokes, recipes, fashion, furniture, and automobile design have never enjoyed copyright protection. Yet there's no shortage of creativity in any of these fields. Artists still find ways to make money -- sometimes a great deal of it -- in the absence of special legal protection.

After meeting with policymakers on Capitol Hill, Bell is hopeful about the prospects for reforming the Copyright Act. Legislators are starting to accept what consumers have long understood about the digital age: modern copyright law hinders the very innovation it was designed to promote.

Runs about 8:30.

Ukranian Trade War

The EU and NATO want to surround Russia to eliminate all threat to their power. They want to take Ukraine for themselves to get the natural gas. This is the same reason they got rid of Gaddaffi, because with him gone they can loot Libya's fuel without a strong nationalist leader to tell the globalists to get lost.

Wage Slavery

Just some thoughts on minimum wage, living wage, and slavery.

Why Grover Norquist Is Right

Yes, the title is a double entendre, by design.



I read a piece on page 14 of The Star Ledger today, that dying albatross of a New Jersey newspaper, hearkening back to halcyon times when the big name media told us what to think. A nameless opinion writer opined "slowly, yet sanely, some Republicans are snapping out of their mass hypnosis. One-by-one, they're renouncing allegianc to Grover Norquits and his paralyzing no-tax hike pledge." (emphasis added)



Whomever this writer is, he or she is clearly not living in reality.  You see, there's the real world and then there's Filburt's world, and you don't have to be a rocket surgeon to know which is which. The author, hearafter dubbed Steve, talks about "Mitt Romney's eye-opening defeat." Eye-opening? Romney lost by 3% of the popular vote, which is well within the margin of error for all major polls. This was as close as the 2004 election, which no one said Bush won by a landslide, or that Bush shellacked Kerry, or that the Democrats need to seriously rethink their strategy.



Steve goes on to say "In a Rasmussen poll last week, 72 percent of Americans said they want tax hikes in the formula for reducing the nation's debt."  Yeah, and about half of Americans pay no federal income tax, so they have no stake in the game and therefore their opinion's do not count. To put it another way, if 72 percent of Americans said they wanted to reintroduce slavery would that mean we should reintroduce slavery or that slavery was morally right?



"They realize 'compromise' isn't a dirty word." Compromise with insanity is, and increasing taxes in the middle of the worst economy since the Great Depression is insane. It all boils down to something called the Laffer Curve. When you raise taxes above a certain point (most economists agree that that point is about 33 percent) the amount of revenue the government takes in from taxes decreases because there is less incentive for people to work if they see all their hard earned money going out the crapper. Kennedy increased tax revenue by cutting tax rates, Reagan increased tax revenue by cutting tax rates, and Obama will send us into a new depression if he raises taxes.



Let's face it, most people have no understanding of basic economics, which is why they vote for things like birth control and food stamps. Young adults take student loans they can never pay off because society tells them they need a worthless degree to get a job they that does not exist so they can dream about living like millionaire playboys. Millions of people took home loans on houses they did not need and could not afford because society told them that home ownership was the "American dream," leading to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 that nearly collapsed the world economy.



The government is spending more money than any amount of tax hikes could solve. At the current rate of spending, even if 100 percent of all the assets of everyone who makes over $60,000 a year were confiscated it would only last a few weeks and permanently destroy the world economy. Federal debt is 114 percent of GDP with over $90 trillion in unfunded liabilities. World GDP is only $70 trillion, so even all the money in the entire world is not enough to solve this problem. Spending MUST be cut, drastically, or it really will be the end of the world. Only AFTER the Democrats agree to something like $600 billion in spending cuts, minimum, will it be morally acceptable for Republicans to agree to compromise to tax increases. If those spending cuts do not come FIRST you can raise taxes all you want and it will not make one iota of difference.

Hyperinflation Diary

A woman tells her story of growing up after the end of the First World War and the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic. This chilling tale is testament to what happens when governments permit the unlimited printing of money, such as is happening with the Fed and QE3 (so much crap they had to start another pile). According to wiki "QE3 was announced on 13 September 2012. In an 11-to-1 vote, the Federal Reserve decided to launch a new $40 billion a month, open-ended, bond purchasing program of agency mortgage-backed securities and also to continue extremely low rates policy until at least mid-2015."