For those professing a preference for one type of government over another, anugly reality is they all cut from the same cloth. Whether we are talking about Democracy,Communism, Socialism, or Fascism the strong link they share is one of dominance and a desire to control. While seen as vastly different systems with distinct goals, each is rooted in the promise people should sacrifice as needed for “the greater good.” The main flaw in a democracy is that it allows a simple majority to force their desires upon others. This is why our forefathers set checks and balances in the Constitution, however, even these do not guarantee freedom will remain.
Today, the burden of risk and the amount of “skin in the game” is not equally shared by all of society. Over time our financial system and institutions have been corrupted by crony capitalism and a political system that panders to the masses by exchanging favors for baubles. It could be argued that those in power don’t have to take away our freedom by force if we are willing to surrender it or trade it for a few paid weeks off work. Nor do they have to be fair in how they go about this if they simply get a majority of the populace to go along with their plan.
The suspicion governments are self-serving creatures is apparent in the old school British imperial definition of “commerce” which used free trade as a cover for the military dominance of weak nations. Those put in a position of being exploited often saw this as simply a ruse promoted by those wishing to abuse them. In short, opening borders and turning off protectionism simply makes it easier to rob countries of their wealth. America, a wayward child of England, has been accused of following this same path.
In my last article titled, “The first Global Inflationary Depression Is Possible” a case was made that the world was headed towards an economic crisis due to several factors. The problem is that such a scenario encompasses all aspects of life, from food and energy, to supply chains, geopolitics, and possibly even war. This article is an effort to offer up some ideas on how governments might respond to such an event based on current trends and some of the events that have occurred during the covid-19 pandemic. If we accept the idea that governments are self-serving and that a huge majority of the people suffer during an economic depression, we should expect frictions to develop as the populace seeks solutions to ease their pain.
Sadly, governments across the world have overreached and crushed the rights of individuals during the pandemic. People have been denied the ability to travel, locked in their homes, followed by drones, and even been jailed. This may have been just a taste of what we might expect if governments are put under pressure to perform. Many people have pointed to the fact that in the past “war has been the go-to answer” often used to take our eyes off of problems. Hopefully, that will not be the case, however, many of the other options possible in the age of almost total surveillance do not seem much better.
It is wise to remember that when all is said and done, those in power will not be kind to us but they will rapidly throw us under the bus without a thought. Silencing dissidents or those that protest or disagree by limiting free speech is only a start. Lock-downs and curfews take on a whole new meaning when harshly enforced. They can include things like house arrest, cutting power, links to the internet and communication, and even water to areas where unrest gets out of hand. You can expect governments to remove anything that gives us the power to control our fate.
A month ago in the Washington Post, not long before the Colorado mess, neoconservative icon Robert Kagan wrote, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” We may accuse Kagan — husband of Victoria Nuland, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century, and co-author (with Bill Kristol) of the “benevolent hegemony” theory of world conquest that was the real reason for America’s Iraq invasion — of much. We can’t accuse him of not knowing history. The graphic was a bust of Caesar, perfect for a six thousand word opus on stopping Donald Trump at all costs, whose sniper-scope subtext was as subtle as the Bullwinkle float at the Thanksgiving Day parade. It could have been headlined, “Where’s Hinckley When You Need Him?”
Kagan kept trying to suggest a biological solution to the Trump problem without actually saying it. The word count can get hot quickly when you’re trapped in that kind of mind-loop. Here he tries to express the idea, “We gotta stop Trump before the election”:
Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective… What limits [his] powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent.
If elected, Kagan went on, it would mean:
Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans threw every legitimate weapon against Trump and still failed. Will they turn instead to illegitimate, extralegal action?
What’s the irony level of a clarion call for a Caesarian “intervention” appearing in the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Washington Post? Can that level of hypocrisy be quantified?
This is the paper that re-branded itself as America’s living bulwark against authoritarianism after Trump’s election, covering its new slogan like the naming of a Pope. They ran multiple self-referentialstories about the significance of their decision, and paid CBS $5.25 million to introduce football fans to “Democracy Dies in Darkness” via a preposterous Super Bowl spot, which was narrated by Tom Hanks with the leaden gravitas of the U/North ad in Michael Clayton. It showed scenes of Normandy, Selma, and Apollo 11, then a montage of journalists who died for truth, before declaring, “Because knowing makes us better”:
This was after Trump’s inauguration, and right after his conniption-fit inspiring “The FAKE NEWS media… is the enemy of the people” tweet. The Post’s message couldn’t have been clearer: we’re willing to die for the truth, and under Trump, we may have to. (After Kagan’s piece, the message seems to have been reversed, but who’s counting?)
Poor Bob Woodward was dispatched to tell the slogan’s origin story on Face the Nation. It’s revealing in hindsight. We learned from Jeff Gerth’s epic Columbia Journalism Review story on Trump-Russia coverage that Woodward tried to warn Post reporters away from the “garbage” Steele Dossier, only to discover a “lack of curiosity” on the subject from staff. It’s therefore an eyebrow-raiser that Woodward took this early moment to note that “Trump is right” that “some of these stories have been out of bounds,” but “the key is to get the big things right.” It was a muted plea, but at a time when it was heresy to suggest Trump could be right about anything, even partially, Woodward was showing a measure of the courage the Post was bragging about. No one caught it.
As with so many blobsters infesting government and its nether regions, Leon Panetta likes to demonstrate that his contempt for the people of this land is boundless. He can’t possibly believe what he is saying. Everyone from the FBI to The New York Times has declared Hunter’s laptop authentic. Therefore, Leon Panetta is either a fool, a lying scoundrel, or insane.
“After 2016, the national security state, the foreign policy establishment, & the gov’t-funded NGO-plex orgs redefined the word “democracy”: it no longer meant a consensus of individuals, it meant a consensus of institutions.” —Mike Benz
The din of war drums beating hasn’t completely drowned out the barrage of lying bullshit issued by US Deep State blobsters in their effort to keep reality at bay from a citizenry gone restive and aggrieved over the seemingly deliberate ruination of our country by the people who run it.
On Thursday, FBI Director Chris Wray and Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas warned Americans that terrorist threats are rising in the US since Hamas attacked Israel, October 7th. Mr. Wray explained: “Here in the U.S., we cannot and do not discount the possibility that Hamas or other foreign terrorist organizations could exploit the conflict to call on their supporters to conduct attacks on our own soil.” We must be especially alert to the “lone wolf” lurking amongst us, he added.
Neither of these officials noted that the rising terror threat here had any relation to the thousands of aliens streaming daily across the US border unvetted, or that the agencies under Homeland Security were helping to distribute them into every corner of America by plane and bus, giving them free cell phones, loaded debit cards, and other rewards for breaking the law.
And that “lone wolf” bit — is it possible that any number of them actually arrived as trained and pre-organized cadres or squads? How would we know? Most of them are military-age young men. Are these unreasonable questions to ask? And if Hamas was so supernaturally successful in secretly planning the mass murder and kidnapping operation of 10/7 from Gaza that the world’s supposedly top intel agencies were blindsided as it rolled out, why should Americans have any confidence that the FBI has a clue what any of those unvetted border-jumping mutts are up to here? Especially since those free phones enable them to find each other and hook-up right from the get-go, without delay. It’s even possible that those phones were preloaded with their comrades’ numbers on speed-dial. Not to mention that illegal migrants have been coming here in huge waves for years, and surely some have been busy ever since setting up networks aimed at making trouble that new arrivals can easily slot into.
Since the FBI has been so preoccupied the duration of the “Joe Biden” regime tracking down every native-born living soul who attended the 1/6/21 riot at the US Capitol, instead of using the agency’s assets to monitor alien networking, you have to wonder why Mr. Wray even bothers to comment on the current situation. He can only embarrass (or incriminate) himself more deeply. One thing for sure is not happening: any effort by Mr. Mayorkas and his 260,000 employees to make the US/Mexico border any less porous. If it hadn’t occurred to them yet, they might consider closing down the US-funded United Nations operation in Central America (with help from several international NGOs) that is running way-stations to transport aliens north to our border in hundred-plus bus fleets at a time, taking every possible advantage to accelerate the flow. I guess we’ll just have to stand by and see what happens.
Speaking of mind-blowing bullshit, emanating from a different pseudopod of the DC blob, former CIA Director Leon Panetta chimed in with Fox News’s Bret Baier last week to declare he still thinks that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian dis-info operation.
, as its English spokesperson. We covered last week their insane, deranged threats to hunt down and punish all “Russian propagandists,” meaning anyone (including Americans) critical of Ukraine
Daily Bell: Are you denying, then, that we need the state to defend us?
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Indeed. The state does not defend us; rather, the state aggresses against us and it uses our confiscated property to defend itself. The standard definition of the state is this: the state is an agency characterized by two unique, logically connected features. First, the state is an agency that exercises a territorial monopoly of ultimate decision-making. That is, the state is the ultimate arbiter and judge in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving itself and its agents. There is no appeal above and beyond the state. Second, the state is an agency that exercises a territorial monopoly of taxation. That is, it is an agency that can unilaterally fix the price that its subjects must pay for the state’s service as ultimate judge. Based on this institutional set-up you can safely predict the consequences. First, instead of preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to its own advantage. That is, the state does not recognize and protect existing law, but it perverts law through legislation. Contradiction number one: the state is a law-breaking law protector. Second, instead of defending and protecting anyone or anything, a monopolist of taxation will invariably strive to maximize his expenditures on protection and at the same time minimize the actual production of protection. The more money the state can spend and the less it must work for this money, the better off it is. Contradiction number two: the state is an expropriating property protector.
Introduction: Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, born in 1949 in Peine, West Germany, studied philosophy, sociology, economics, history and statistics at the University of the Saarland, in Saarbruecken, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, in Frankfurt am Main, and at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. He received his doctorate (Philosophy, 1974, under Juergen Habermas) and his “Habilitation” degree (Foundations of Sociology and Economics, 1981) both from the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Dr. Hoppe is the author of eight books – the best known of which is Democracy: The God That Failed – and more than 150 articles in books, scholarly journals and magazines of opinion. As an internationally prominent Austrian School economist and libertarian philosopher, he has lectured all over the world and his writings have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Daily Bell: Please answer these questions as if our readers were not already aware of your fine work and considered opinions. Let’s jump right in. Why is democracy “the God that failed?”
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The traditional, pre-modern state-form is that of a (absolute) monarchy. The democratic movement was directed against kings and the classes of hereditary nobles. Monarchy was criticized as being incompatible with the basic principle of the “equality before the law.” It rested on privilege and was unfair and exploitative. Democracy was supposed to be the way out. In opening participation and entry into state-government to everyone on equal terms, so the advocates of democracy claimed, equality before the law would become reality and true freedom would reign. But this is all a big error.
True, under democracy everyone can become king, so to speak, not only a privileged circle of people. Thus, in a democracy no personal privileges exist. However, functional privileges and privileged functions exist. Public officials, if they act in an official capacity, are governed and protected by “public law” and thereby occupy a privileged position vis-à-vis persons acting under the mere authority of “private law.” In particular, public officials are permitted to finance or subsidize their own activities through taxes. That is, they are permitted to engage in, and live off, what in private dealings between private law subjects is prohibited and considered “theft” and “stolen loot.” Thus, privilege and legal discrimination – and the distinction between rulers and subjects – will not disappear under democracy.
Even worse: Under monarchy, the distinction between rulers and ruled is clear. I know, for instance, that I will never become king, and because of that I will tend to resist the king’s attempts to raise taxes. Under democracy, the distinction between rulers and ruled becomes blurred. The illusion can arise “that we all rule ourselves,” and the resistance against increased taxation is accordingly diminished. I might end up on the receiving end: as a tax-recipient rather than a tax-payer, and thus view taxation more favorably.
And moreover: As a hereditary monopolist, a king regards the territory and the people under his rule as his personal property and engages in the monopolistic exploitation of this “property.” Under democracy, monopoly and monopolistic exploitation do not disappear. Rather, what happens is this: instead of a king and a nobility who regard the country as their private property, a temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put in monopolistic charge of the country. The caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his protégés’ advantage. He owns its current use – usufruct – but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation. To the contrary, it makes exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock. Exploitation becomes shortsighted and capital consumption will be systematically promoted.
Daily Bell: If democracy has failed what would you put in its place? What is the ideal society? Anarcho-capitalism?
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: I prefer the term “private law society.” In a private law society every individual and institution is subject to one and the same set of laws. No public law granting privileges to specific persons or functions exists in this society. There is only private law (and private property), equally applicable to each and everyone. No one is permitted to acquire property by means other than through original appropriation of previously un-owned things, through production, or through voluntary exchange, and no one possesses a privilege to tax and expropriate. Moreover, no one is permitted to prohibit anyone else from using his property in order to enter any line of production he wishes and compete against whomever he pleases.
Daily Bell: How would law and order be provided in this society? How would your ideal justice system work?
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: In a private law society the production of law and order – of security – would be undertaken by freely financed individuals and agencies competing for a voluntarily paying (or not-paying) clientele – just as the production of all other goods and services. How this system would work can be best understood in contrast to the workings of the present, all-too-familiar statist system. If one wanted to summarize in one word the decisive difference – and advantage – of a competitive security industry as compared to the current statist practice, it would be: contract.
The state operates in a legal vacuum. There exists no contract between the state and its citizens. It is not contractually fixed, what is actually owned by whom, and what, accordingly, is to be protected. It is not fixed, what service the state is to provide, what is to happen if the state fails in its duty, nor what the price is that the “customer” of such “service” must pay. Rather, the state unilaterally fixes the rules of the game and can change them, per legislation, during the game. Obviously, such behavior is inconceivable for freely financed security providers.
Which happens to be the job of the two-party system: creating the illusion of having a democratic choice between two opposing parties while ensuring that both parties advance the same overall agendas.
Voting in a western “democracy” is like that bit in the opening intro of The Simpsons when Marge is driving with the baby and the baby has a toy steering wheel. The baby thinks she’s driving the car but it’s just a fake toy to keep her busy and let her feel like she’s participating.
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All the worst atrocities in human history have been perpetrated or permitted by the government of the people who perpetrated them. None of the world’s most evil people are in prison. The law isn’t there to protect you from bad people, it’s there to protect bad people from you.
That’s why you should always, always, always be distrustful of all efforts to extend the law and expand government power over you. It’s not happening because your government wants to help you. Your government is not your friend.
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Republicans push war with China while sometimes acting as skeptics on Russia warmongering, Democrats push war with Russia while sometimes acting as skeptics on China warmongering. This creates the illusion of opposition while giving the war machine everything it wants.
It is important to note that national interests do not necessarily change merely because of regime type or ideology. A liberal Russia would still have interest in securing its borders, just like the US, which would not tolerate Chinese or Russian troops being stationed in Canada or Mexico.
Writing for The Volokh Conspiracy, hosted by Reason magazine, George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin argues that the war in Ukraine amounts to a clash between liberal democracy and authoritarian nationalism and that these stakes must be taken into account when continuing to support Ukraine.
Somin argues that the ideology of the winning side in a war receives a boost, pointing to the rise and then fall of fascism and communism. These examples are lacking, to say the least, and hardly prove that a wartime victory necessarily leads to the triumph of the winner’s ideology.
To begin with, Somin’s own examples of the rise of communism and fascism seem to refute his own point. The more or less liberal democratic Entente powers won the First World War, but rather than seeing liberal democracies empowered, we saw them fall to the forces of fascism and national socialism.
Alternatively, the Bolsheviks hardly had a ringing victory in the First World War. Rather, the Communists handed over vast swathes of land to the Central Powers to withdraw from the war, were then embroiled in a drawn-out and brutal civil war, and eventually had their invasion of Poland crushed by the nascent Polish state.
Undoubtedly, global communism received a boost after the establishment of the Soviet Union, but one can’t deny that this was at least partly due to the USSR’s support for communist subversives around the world.
Or take the Cold War. With the USSR’s collapse into a rusty heap, one might expect that the triumphant Western democracies would have been joined by the rest of the world based on Somin’s theory. Despite declarations of the end of history, that has hardly happened.
One merely needs to look at who is and who is not sanctioning Russia right now to see that the victorious ideology is hardly guaranteed to be swarmed by new friends eager to hop on the bandwagon.
Rather than the war’s being primarily an ideological struggle between the forces of good and evil, there is a more sensible and sound explanation for why the war is being fought, which in turn alters how one views what is at stake; that explanation is found in how states seek to advance their own interests and power, or what we might call “national interest.”
By now many readers are likely familiar with the offensive realist interpretation of the crisis, and then full blown war, in Ukraine offered by John Mearsheimer in 2014 in Foreign Affairs and later in a YouTube lecture that has since been viewed over twenty-eight million times. In short, Mearsheimer argues that the Western powers are responsible for the crisis because they ignored Russian national interests and security concerns, notably offering future North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership to both Georgia and Ukraine at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest.
Russia was outraged by this and made its displeasure known, first by verbal protestations and later by invading Georgia.
It happened in the socialist twentieth century, which promoted the biggest mass murders in human history in countries such as China, Soviet Union, and Cuba. And it will happen again under the woke progressive socialism of the twenty-first century: the leaders want to be new kings, and they use the masses as infantry to be sacrificed on the battlefields.
In the research paper Egalitarianism and the Elites, published in 1995 in the Review of Austrian Economics, one of Murray Rothbard’s most brilliant insights was that even the implementation of an egalitarian society requires leadership. As the fall of one system to the implementation of a new model of society cannot come out of nowhere, someone must command and lead this process. And naturally, these leaders will occupy powerful positions.
Indeed, Rothbard’s affirmation demonstrates how human existence is unequal and how some are naturally more qualified to lead the social processes. In a free-market society, the leaders are the entrepreneurs. With their ability to forecast future needs, they generate new solutions and create new productive arrangements. As a consequence, they create profit for themselves and value for their customers.
On the other hand, in a state-centered society, naturally someone will stand out and command the conquest and maintenance of power. In this sense, there are a lot of possible arrangements, as there are a wide variety of situations in which leaders can be involved. Recently, Western civilization is living a moment in which social constructivism has reappeared, now under the name of “progressivism.” However, even with a new name, progressivism is nothing more than an attempt to refound society.
For those more concerned with the failures of constructivism, Ludwig von Mises in his book Theory and History has already explained why constructivism is arbitrary, in contrast to the complex social process in which individuals are involved. Thus, constructivist movements (as Black Lives Matter, for example) are nothing more than the instruments of people who want to achieve power and determine the path of our society.
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.
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.
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