Enter the demon

By Daniel McAdams

This is Your World

The Serbs and Croats could have had their bitch-fit and realized that as much as they hate each other they can still be trading partners. But Langley had other plans: impoverish them all and kill the best of them. Yeah they were so dumb, but no dumber than the highest “educated” American who watches any of the television or cable networks.

https://danielmcadams.substack.com/p/vukovar

We are in Vinkovci in a cab arranged from Osijek, from where the Habsburg world still dominated the architecture, the pulse, the very DNA of the city. The old Hungarian city of Eszék, some would argue and I would agree. Before the demons who arranged so-called World War I exploded the peaceful world of European monarchies in the name of the demon democracy, where two people can vote to slit your throat.

Oh it was not perfect, they claimed. So then they went on to murder millions and install the brutalism, the “democracy,” that continues to this day with absolute ciphers like Ursula von der Leyen, who would not have been fit to pull the burr from HRH Charles’ sandal. A woman astonishingly devoid of any sentience. Not even worthy of contempt. Merkel was a monster, but would could have imagined – at a time like this – that apres soi le deluge?

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We are in Vinkovci in a cab arranged from Osijek going to Vukovar. It is 1998. Earlier I am with Maarten in Osijek in the main square in the morning. Maarten did not like to get up early, as he, an Oxford PhD in modern history/philosophy, preferred to begin his day in the main square of Osijek barely before noon with endless cigarettes and espressos.

There was no rush, as he smoked his cigarettes with bleary red eyes and espressos. He had his notes and even in his desperate state he knew the plan for the day.

The evening before, we were dining al fresco near the Great Cathedral when suddenly a wedding party exploded from the church, flush with Croatian flags and a strong sense of national identity. Extremely Catholic, even as a political signature. Such a boy and beautiful woman. Croatia as a Catholic and nationalistic state had emerged from the ruins of Yugoslavia and if in a pure and platonic form we believe in secession it was a good thing. But of course it was all fake and contrived.

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Nationalism is a funny thing as Yugoslavia imploded, as it was a main tool of the US regime-change empire to destruct – and deconstruct – a multi-cultural, multi-confessional entity in the heart of Europe that could have posed a huge challenge to US/NATO plans to subjugate the former Soviet-sympathetic world into the new US satellite world.

The plan for the US to become the new USSR.

There was no NATO-expansion with a pan-slav identity. Hundreds of millions of well-placed dollars solved that. Whores for Moscow happily became whores for DC. Easy money. The worst communists became the best “democrats” because the systems were identical: fund the elites and suppress any opposition. The whores or their protegees still govern Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, etc.

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Ironically the multi-confessional Yugoslavia was held together by the strength of one of history’s unsung geniuses – Tito – (regardless of whether he was a force for good or evil), who somehow was able to carve out of nothing a sense of South Slav identity that was neither Soviet nor Langley. A convenient thorn in then-Moscow’s side…

Divide and conquer was not invented by President Clinton and his murderous neocons. Yet what could have been a normal “secession” according to confessional and even political lines, with an eye to cooperation heeding regional realities, was coaxed by the Strobe Talbot monsters of the day to benefit from the carpet bombing – metaphorically and physically – of the last pan-slav entity.

[Arab unity had long been blown up in service of the US empire – and, ahem – BTW]

Again back to normal secession, which is healthy. The Serbs and Croats could have had their bitch-fit and realized that as much as they hate each other they can still be trading partners. But Langley had other plans: impoverish them all and kill the best of them. Yeah they were so dumb, but no dumber than the highest “educated” American who watches any of the television or cable networks.

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Notice that bureaucratic failures are routinely portrayed as market failures (most people’s economic ignorance leaves them gullible) and are used to justify even more government: larger budgets, bigger staff, and wider powers. If (alleged) market failures require more government, as some people believe, how can government failures require, not more markets, but more government?

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-governments-create-problems-markets-fix-them/

by Sheldon Richman

My article “Complete Liberalism” prompted an unexpected challenge. An interlocutor, who says he owns a business and thus is not antibusiness, claimed that my article suggested that, unlike government regulators, businesses never get things wrong. Yet business failures outnumber successes 10,000 to one, this person said, for all kinds of reasons, both innocent and malign, including a desire to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes for as long as possible.

The problem with the comment is that my article never claimed that business people always get it right or are always virtuous. I’ve pointed out repeatedly that the best economists — especially the Austrian economists — never ignore the inherent existence of error in describing how markets work. And libertarian writers have never suggested that business owners cannot have bad intentions, which are magnified by access to state power. Quite the contrary! What these thinkers have emphasized are the systematic incentives and disincentives produced by free competition that reward pro-consumer performance and penalize incompetence and malevolence. Think of all the libertarian criticism of the malignant relationship between business and government. Now think of Ayn Rand’s businessmen-villains in Atlas Shrugged.

One need only read the accessible writings of Ludwig von Mises (“Profit and Loss,” Bureaucracy), F. A. Hayek (“The Use of Knowledge in Society,” “Competition as a Discovery Process”), or Israel Kirzner (“Economics and Error”) to see that the plague of uncertainty, error, and incomplete and dispersed knowledge figures heavily in good economic analysis. The question they sought to answer is: how can people coordinate their productive social cooperation in the face of such ignorance? Individual freedom produces the only answer for a great society: prices.

In fact, if it weren’t for imperfect knowledge, free markets would be unnecessary and profit and loss would disappear. Mises wrote:

If all people were to anticipate correctly the future state of the market, the entrepreneurs would neither earn any profits nor suffer any losses…. What makes profit emerge is the fact that the entrepreneur who judges the future prices of the products more correctly than other people do buys some or all of the factors of production at prices which, seen from the point of view of the future state of the market, are too low….

On the other hand, the entrepreneur who misjudges the future prices of the products allows for the factors of production prices which, seen from the point of view of the future state of the market, are too high. His total costs of production exceed the prices at which he can sell the product. This difference is entrepreneurial loss.

It’s hard to believe that an economist who writes about entrepreneurs with correct or incorrect judgments about the future could have thought that business owners were infallible. Economic analysis, after all, is supposed to be about real human beings who, whether they are acting as producers or consumers, are fallible.

The free-market position is that free and competitive markets are not perfect but better than government bureaucracies at detecting and correcting errors about what consumers will want and what they will be willing to pay. That’s what counts, isn’t it?

See the rest here

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