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Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Capitalist’

Real Democracy Means Democracy Of Information: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Posted by M. C. on November 11, 2022

Caitlin Johnstone

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/real-democracy-means-democracy-of?r=iw8dv&utm_medium=android

The media are lying to us, as evidenced by reality never matching with their stories.

The politicians are lying to us, as evidenced by their never delivering on their promises.

The capitalist class are lying to us, as evidenced by their getting richer while workers get poorer.

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I don’t want innovations which improve my shopping experience or make smartphones a tiny bit better, I want innovations which eliminate world hunger, innovations which make it so people have more free time, innovations which help humans live in harmony with our ecosystem.

If you’re a middle class westerner, technology is already at a point where they’re not going to be coming out with any new personal gadgets that make your life significantly better. But there’s a massive amount of room for innovation that can make life much better for people as a whole. In terms of societal transformation technology still has the ability to radically improve the quality of human life, while in terms of rugged individualism technology is just going to give the wealthiest humans more of the same kinds of toys that are already failing to make them happy.

The line of technological progress which is premised on individuals purchasing new inventions for themselves has long passed its point of diminishing returns, and now those returns are functionally nil. We don’t really need any more inventions for individual purchase and consumption. What we need are collective-oriented innovations which change the way humans live on this planet. And it won’t look like flying cars or fancier personal gadgets, it will look like advancements which change and improve our ability to get food, shelter and resources to everyone.

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Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz

The Cuban Missile Crisis was ended by negotiations and compromise. Maybe Holman Jenkins should shut up.

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11:20 AM ∙ Nov 6, 20222,549Likes591Retweets

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Democracy of the vote without democracy of information is not democracy. It doesn’t matter if people are able to vote as long as the media-owning class are able to manipulate how they vote. “One person, one vote” is meaningless if influence and control of information is highly concentrated in an elite few. And it is.

Mass media propaganda, internet censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy and the war on journalism are all anti-democratic in nature, because they restrict the information the citizenry are allowed to access to inform their vote. And none of those instruments of narrative control have any influence from, or accountability to, the rank-and-file public. This means that while everyone gets a vote, how those votes are applied is subjected to aggressive and ubiquitous manipulation by the ruling class.

The US empire’s unprecedented investment in soft power control systems has given rise to the most sophisticated propaganda system that has ever existed. Human thought is being manipulated at mass scale like never before. If you control how people think, you control how they vote. 

See the rest here

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The National Football League’s Manipulative Militarism

Posted by M. C. on September 19, 2022

Come the Super Bowl, academics, pundits and talking points-sayers will obsess about its corporate advertisements. Never forget what the NFL is primarily selling: imperialism, militarism, and war without end.

by John Weeks

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-national-football-leagues-manipulative-militarism/

The National Football League (NFL) is a massive, capitalist endeavor. It provides wildly profitable entertainment, is adept at steering taxpayer money its way, and is a premier collaborator in our participatory fascist social order.

Capitalist culture is relentlessly anti-capitalist. As such, the NFL (a privately owned organization) makes for a good villain. Hollywood cast it as the “Evil Corporation” in the 2015 film Concussion.

The film features this line:

The NFL owns a day of the week. The same day the Church used to own. Now it’s theirs.

The implication that the NFL is as powerful as the medieval Catholic Church is downright adorable. Because, whereas skeptics raised reasonable doubts about the existence of the Christian God, no one doubts the existence of the deity the NFL venerates in its 32 tax-subsidized, stadium-temples. It’s called the Pentagon and it is vastly more powerful than the Holy Catholic Church ever was. It’s an actual god in our society, the Apollo to our American Zeus: mass democracy.

Democracy might be the God that failed to secure individual liberty, but it sure is good at securing national security budgets. Its think tank-monasteries are filled with obedient intellectuals who generate pro-imperial discourse. Its Hollywood rhapsodes praise the power of D.C. and its primacy. And the NFL is expert at providing a space for citizens to worship permanent militarism.

There are ceremonies, fly overs, and moments of silence. There are full-field flag displays, upbeat soldier profiles and always, always, always the National Anthem.

The military has even used stadiums as training grounds and maintains the capability to drop parachute commandos from a Lockheed C-130 Hercules onto the football field. The military might be providing support for Al Qaeda in Yemen, but hot biscuits, parachute commandos!? That is awesome!

The military previously paid the NFL for its PSYOP services. Following congressional controversy, the payments reportedly stopped. These days the NFL is just doing its unpaid, patriotic, participatory fascist duty. The effect is the same: public reverence for the war machine.

To be sure, the NFL might have engaged in negligence and fraud as its players suffered concussion related dementia, but the U.S. military has killed millions of children. And while there has been an alarming trend of suicide among NFL employees, since the 9/11 attacks combat soldiers and veterans have killed themselves in the tens of thousands. Four times as many soldiers have killed themselves than have been killed in combat.

The worst thing about the NFL is its relationship to government, but Hollywood would have us believe it to be an uber villain in its own right. A demon that must be held to account…by the government.

The Evil Corporation trope is fun because corporations have been implicated in much evil.

But who created the modern corporate model? The government, that’s who. As Chalmers Johnson explained:

The multinational corporation partly replicates one of the earliest institutions of imperialism, the chartered company. In such classically mercantilist organizations, the imperialist country authorized a private company to exploit and sometimes govern a foreign territory on a monopoly basis and then split the profits between government officials and private investors.

Lockheed Martin and Raytheon haven’t been put in charge of Ukraine, nor were Exxon Mobil and the Heinz Corporation made proconsuls of Venezuela. But they certainly reap the benefits of America’s benevolent global hegemony.

Under communism the government owns the corporations. Under democratic capitalism the corporations own the government. Communism is a lot worse because while Coca-Cola might be inadvertently trying to kill you with its government-subsidized, tariff protected, high fructose corn syrup beverages, communism starves its own citizens to death.

Yet our government likes to beat up on the corporations. Congress dragged NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell before it this summer. Critique Goodell all day long, sure, but he’s not responsible for losing the Afghanistan War.

In spring, Congress set its sights on the Hertz car rental corporation. Hertz also uses football to market itself (and always pays for it), but this didn’t protect it from being cast as the Evil Corporation by the U.S. Senate. While Hertz might have initiated false arrests (conducted by government police employees), this scandal is nothing compared to the massive injustice of the federal government’s decades long War on Drugs.

Come the Super Bowl, academics, pundits and talking points-sayers will obsess about its corporate advertisements. Never forget what the NFL is primarily selling: imperialism, militarism, and war without end.

About John Weeks

John is a member of the Society for Consciousness Studies, where he researches literary theory. Whereas dominant academic literary discourse revolves around Marx, Lacan and Derrida, he prefers Mises, Horton and Woods.

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Three Questions on Austrian Economics; Asked and Answered – LRC Blog LewRockwell.com

Posted by M. C. on November 1, 2021

https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/three-questions-on-austrian-economics-asked-and-answered/

Walter E. Block

From: Ash caesar

Hi,

I read your blog post on your website from time to time, and I have to say I quite enjoy it, so keep it up. I have three questions that linger in my head a lot, and It would be a great deal to help me clarify them.

Q1) In a video, you said that capitalists help workers in many ways (I forgot which one). One is that the Capitalist risks their capital to provide production for the workers. However, in my opinion, you only see one side of the equation because the workers also risk something because of their income, housing, and family relay on it. So by that logic, workers should have some say with the capitalist on decision-making.

A1) Yes, the worker, too, takes risks. In Mises’ view, we’re all entrepreneurs: employers, employees, lenders, borrowers, landlords, tenants, buyers, sellers, etc. However, in the case of the business firm, there’s a relevant different between owner and worker. I now set up a company. We make pencils. It will take, oh, a year, before the first pencils come rolling off the assembly line. I have to buy machinery, rent a factory, pay for insurance, pay workers’ salaries, etc. Suppose no one wants to buy the pencils in a year. May I go back to my employees, and say, hey, sorry, I’ve got some bad news for you, the pencils aren’t selling, so, give me back that year’s worth of salary I paid you? No. I’m bearing that risk. The employees may keep their pay for the year.

Q2)In man economy and state, Rothbard states that “There are no ‘objective’ or ‘real’ costs that determine, or are co-ordinate in determining, price” (Rothbard 343). However, in Post-Keynesian Price Theory by Frederic Sterling Lee, he agrees that demand affects the price. But, cost also plays a factor because that is how they determine mark-up prices, which makes up most of the modern economy.

A2) There is indeed such a thing as cost, but it is alternative or opportunity costs. An important aspect of Austrian economics is subjectivism: no one really knows anyone else’s costs. We, often, don’t even know our own costs, can only speculate about them. For example, this is took you about 15 minutes to ask me these four questions. What were your costs in doing so? You probably didn’t think about this when writing up your questions. But what was it? What did you lose by asking me these questions? Money from a job? Sleeping? Eating? Swimming? Who knows.

Q3) Is it possible to say that prices are essential in economic calculation. Still, you can also argue that(in a Walrasian economic model) the economy can be represented in a complex system of equations where one can update them by trial and error, thus finding the right prices?

Q3) The Walrasian system is not too awful when it comes to depicting equilibrium situations. The difficulty is that we’re never in overall equilibrium. We’re always tending in that direction, both from higher and lower than equilibrium prices, but never there.

Q4)Just a side question do you think that the Roman people had more freedom under the late-stage corrupt republic or the dictatorship of Caesar(no relation to my name).

Q4) Sorry, I don’t know anything about this. Ask David Gordon. He knows everything about everything.

Sincerely,

Ash

Best regards,

Walter

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Bernie Tells America: Pull Yourself up by Your Bootstraps! | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on April 18, 2019

Translation: “I made my money fair and square, so quit hassling me about it.”

It is at this point that we start to see Bernie Sanders undermine his own claims about millionaires, wealth, and capitalism.

https://mises.org/wire/bernie-tells-america-pull-yourself-your-bootstraps?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=ebfc7d7f14-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-ebfc7d7f14-228343965

On Monday, Bernie Sanders released ten years of tax returns, and it turns out he’s a millionaire. Thanks especially to revenues from book royalties, Sanders is now, as CNN put it, “in the category of the super-rich.” Or, as some might say, he’s part of “the 1%.”

After years of denouncing “millionaires and billionaires” and a supposed source of America’s economic problems, this information is a little awkward for Sanders.

Some critics of Sanders have claimed this makes him a hypocrite. Here’s a man who trashes millionaires, and yet is one himself.

“Hypocrite,” however, isn’t really the right term here. So long as Sanders pays the taxes he says millionaires should pay, his income alone doesn’t make him a hypocrite. Moreover, Sanders can (plausibly) claim that when he denounced millionaires, he didn’t mean all of them. He just meant 90 percent of them. And he can then include himself in the “good” ten percent.

Nevertheless, Sanders appears not entirely comfortable with his status as a rich man.

When confronted as being among those he has long villainized, Sanders became defensive:

“I wrote a best-selling book,” he declared. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

Translation: “I made my money fair and square, so quit hassling me about it.”

It is at this point that we start to see Bernie Sanders undermine his own claims about millionaires, wealth, and capitalism.

Bernie Sanders, Capitalist

For a normal person, Sanders’s defense of his riches would be no big deal. There’s little doubt that a great many wealthy people, when asked how they earned their money, would respond with “I worked for it. I earned it.”

But, when Bernie Sanders says this, it’s quite remarkable.

After all, one of the central myths of the Bernie Sanders wing of the American left is that people who become rich do so on the backs of the poor. Read the rest of this entry »

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