I think this idea that somehow Capitalism will outpace government, is one of the MOST dangerous fallacies. I’m going to throw out percentages that are complete bullshit, but I hope you get the idea.
Let’s say that the level of productivity enabled by the technology of ancient greece allowed the government to get away with taxing(stealing from, living off of) the production of the private population at a rate of 10%. It didn’t start there, it started small and grew, to 11% and then it failed. At that point it started to implode. But it took a long time.
The level of productivity enabled by our current level of technology on the other hand combined with externalizing our debt, has allowed the Western economies to tax into the 50-70% range. But there’s no mystery, the productivity only allows a lower rate than that. Technology is trying, very hard, to overwhelm the theft with sufficient productivity growth, but at this point the economic hurdles (regulation and crimiinalization) have grown so large and so inefficient, technology just can’t keep up. And the implosion will be much larger and faster than it was in history’s ancient empires. Because our productivity has allowed us to build up a much larger amount of error that needs correction.
Who are you and what have you done with the real Wheylous?? First of all, I don’t think any Austrian scholars have been predicting hyper-inflation, except in the very weak sense that it’s inevitable (the crack-up boom during competitive devaluation which will come, some day). Marc Faber has been predicting hyper-inflation but he has also predicted that it would occur in combination with a war - the war hasn’t started yet so neither has the hyper-inflation. Second, what the hell are you talking about, no hyper-inflation??? Sure, we’re not yet in a crack-up boom but real inflation has been averaging around 10% for almost a decade! That’s a rate of inflation that, if collected in taxes, would have caused a Second American Revolution just 100 years ago!! You’ve lost context, Whelous.
While that is true, do consider how easy it could be to “push the first domino.” Maybe some foreign nation begins to reject trade in US dollars. I think I read rumors that a few countries were considering trading for oil with gold, but that may have just been rumor. Or maybe a state would introduce an alternate currency. This may be seen as highly unlikely, but a few states and a few of their legislators have toyed with the idea. The point is, if one believes in the validity of the ABCT and Austrian economic principles, then one must believe there are two alternatives: a return to sound money and proper free markets; a continuation of the same policies. The second option leads to the further destruction of wealth and resources, which can lead us down two paths: warfare to attain resources from imperial conquests; hyperinflation.
TPTB know these things, and are playing their cards as carefully as possibly, while “table talking” with other nations with skin in the game, hoping to make it across the tightrope to where they would like to go, and that obviously isn’t to sound economics.
Significant money supply expansion has occurred but it is dammed up in the banks’ reserves, meaning that the full impact of its creation on the price structure has not at all been enacted. One then wonders, why is it all dammed up in the banks’ reserves? Maybe it’s because they’re desperately frightened of an unwind in the shadow banking sector that could be offset by one of money credit events looming on the horizion, such as european default, chinese bubble bursting, a failing bank here or there. The global economy right now is fragile.
All that said, there has been significant price inflation, but the BLS has revised their calculation methodology numerous times to lessen the impact of price movements on their indexes. See: Boskin Commission. It’s difficult to say what kind of inflation, but it is obviously more than 3%, maybe 6 or 7%, but maybe not 11%. See: here
I presume that there were certain ‘Austrians’ (you mean Schiff right?) who predicted hyperinflation, because they didn’t predict a global economy of fear and apprehension. The banks are afraid and investors are afraid. Notice how the stock markets correspond only to the press releases of the Fed and ECB. No new flows, then a dip, new flows, then a spike.
On recent indicators pointing towards the positive: see here, here, and here. Which indicators are you using? They’re not very important imho because they’re hard to trust. Mostly its investors who care, so there is that. But if you agree that the ABCT is correct, then you necessarily agree that there are certain consequences for a drastic expansion of credit, as has been happening in the form of QE, QE2, Twist, Twist2, ECB’s modification of credit standards, LTRO1, LTRO2, not to mention the IMF’s support of the ECB and the Fed’s open currency swap lines. The flow isn’t too heavy right now but it is there, and investors are playing their cards on what Benny will do.
So I don’t understand your optimism. Are you joking?
@ Clayton
Could you say (movies or texts) specifically influenced your beliefs on the Vatican?
I’m interested to see what will happen to South America over the near future. I could see them becoming a more significant power.
I’m interested in seeing what will happen if a lot of countries suddenly industrialize. Would the general price level jump? Maybe I just don’t know enough economics to answer this question for myself.
If by industrialize you mean update equipment and infrastructure to allow greater efficiency of production, no, prices would tend to fall, not only for the industrializing nations, but for all.
@Jargon: Well, my view is the result of fairly “open source” facts that are not even controversial. Here’s my line of reasoning:
The Bible - particularly the New Testament - is a lot of forgeries, misattributions, intentional mistranslations, and hocus-pocus rationale for being called “the Word of God” (the history of canonization is a mind-numbing mess).
Those who were in charge of this process - primarily the church of Rome with a little input here and there from the Greek church (the church at Byzantium prior to being renamed to Constantinople) earlier on - could hardly have been unaware of the fact that it was a lot of fabricated nonsense as they were the ones actually performing a lot of the fabrication!
This is dishonest enough in itself, but combined with the systematic elimination of competing records (so-called “gnostic heresies”) that would have given clues as to the exact nature of the forgeries - as well as a policy of hoarding virtually all bona fide writings (e.g. the Greek and Latin classics) within the church’s custody - it amounted to nothing short of an all-out war on human knowledge and in this pattern is evinced the truly sinister nature of their intentions: to foist upon the entirety of Europe a monstrous lie, The Big Lie, a lie so big and so irrefutable that nobody in a position to challenge them would even dare to try.
This, in itself, would only be a crime of the “unseen” insofar as it would have merely “set us back” so many years in terms of the progress we could have made had we not been befuddled by a lot of counterfeit morality and history. But they didn’t stop there, the whole monster morphed into a blood-thirsty, Saturnian consumer of human beings.
The role of the church of Rome in baptizing murder is prolific. The Crusades spring to mind as perhaps the most orgiastic expressions of this role but the Crusades are far from the only blot on their record - for the duration of the Holy Roman Empire they were virtually the kingmakers of Europe, deciding who would rise and who would fall and conferring their blessing upon the waging of internecine warfare between European powers. Needless to say, the Inquisitional model of rule-by-supernatural-terror was most effective. And contrary to popular belief, it really does still survive down to this day.
The power of Rome and the monarchs today is - among the vulgar masses - thought to be in eclipse and soon to perish. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. Just like any other kind of evolution, the evolution of power results in steady improvement in the techniques and effectiveness of the rulers in maintaining power. Those that don’t keep up with the state of the art are killed off and their territories annexed. I have no doubt that an understanding of the true nature of global power - that the Church, the monarchs and the ruling Elite families are very much at the pinnacle of power - is a Shibboleth in the upper crust of politics. Not knowing that the Queen really does rule England is a sure sign that you’re not part of the club.
Of course, at this point, we enter the realm of an information vacuum because what we’re talking about is essentially a Mafia - it is the system of legitimate organized crime called the State or whatever you want to label it as. It’s not your Post Office, it’s not your DMV, it’s not even the President, it’s the people who comprise the permanent network of title and privilege, regardless of whether it’s organized on the British, European, Roman or some other model. It is a system of private power.
So what we’re left with is praxeological deduction and imagination to paint the picture and fill in the details of the information vacuum. Today, the Vatican is a tourist destination but you really wouldn’t want to stumble into the wrong room. Something like Kubrick depicted here might happen to you. What’s going to happen, the Italian government is going to rip up the floors of the Cistine chapel looking for your missing body? Again, I’m painting in high contrast to get the point across but not that high contrast.
I still don’t understand why you seem to indicate that the modern state and organized religion are tied together. While I think that it’s correct to call the state itself an organized religion, this does not seem to be what you are arguing. Could you clarify what you believe that the modern state has to do with “traditional religion”, from a non-historic viewpoint? Or are you only talking about it from a historical sense?
You keep inserting the word “organized” where I’m not using it - the organization (division-of-labor, specialization) of religion is of little consequence, in my view. It has the same effect as organization in any other line of production - increased quality and reduced price for the purpose of greater customer satisfaction.
When we look at the social order, it is a cohesive whole. There isn’t actually such a thing as “religion” or “science” or “commerce”… the analysis of the social order into these different categories is slightly arbitrary and definitely very “fuzzy around the edges.” But given the usual way of slicing up the social order into its various parts, what I’m pointing out is that not all aspects of the social order are equally influential and, in particular, that I believe religion is the single most influential aspect of the social order.
I have in mind especially the dogmatic aspect of religion (the part that pertains to belief), not the ritual or community aspects which are very important but in different ways. In this respect, religion is actually a kind of meta-meme - it is a meme that manufactures other memes and also filters out memes by preventing them from even arising in the consciousness of individuals in the first place. And as the manufacturer of other memes, it is the systematizing meme or worldview or meta-narrative that ties everything else together. Hence, I believe that the perfectly natural role of religion really is, to a certain, to control people’s minds. This doesn’t have to be a sinister kind of mind control and I think that most people have at least a rough idea that this is, in fact, what religious dogma does and I think they view it as a mostly benign sort of mind control.
But controlling minds is also the first order of business of the State; this is why monopolization of religion is crucial. If the State does not monopolize religion, then critical priests, elders and shamans will - correctly - teach their followers that the State is evil and does evil acts. These people will not be cooperative in their own enslavement and will be a permanent pain in the ass. The State can either wipe them out or subsume their religious instruction by getting their religious leaders to defect. I call this “religious imperialism” and it is particularly pronounced in the Roman cult.
Once a monopoly religion has been established, it then becomes an organ of the State itself and becomes a reliable conduit for State propaganda.
A bit of both. I think it’s a historical puzzle - why has religion always been the first thing the State monopolizes? Surely, monopolizing agriculture is a more “practical” sort of thing to do since all that economic output can then be put to use feeding your army, and so on. But I think that this is a modernistic bias that is the result of the fact that we’ve lost context as a result of the very distortion of the social order created by the State - under the State order, labor is cheap (people are expendable, fodder), brains are cheap. But in the natural order of things, the human brain is the most fantastically sophisticated and valuable technological device that exists or ever will exist.
Take your biggest super-computer and place it next to a person. Now ask the super computer and the person each to arrange an assortment of arbitrary objects into some arbitrary order and see who gets it done first. If the super-computer has already been programmed for this task, ask it to do any other ordinary task versus the live person. You get the idea. Religion - viewed as a mind-control technology - controls the most valuable asset of all: human brains. And when you have a millions of human brains all thinking the same way… that is truly the most destructive weapon ever devised and the technologies for bringing about this condition are the “gears and levers” that make it all possible.
So, brains - considered as producer goods - are more valuable than granaries and it makes sense from an analytical standpoint that the State would move to monopolize the means for controlling brains long before it ever got around to trying to monopolize granaries.
Clayton -
*I think the impact of the community aspect of religion is vastly underestimated and I believe it actually plays a guiding role in the evolution of human beings… if you’ve ever been to a Christian rock concert and seen how the Christian girls respond to the band leader who - with handsome, sensitive features complemented by long, flowing hair and a rich beard - inexplicably resembles a portrait of Jesus, you will understand some of what I’m getting at
So are you indeed saying that it is the “faithful” part of the human psyche, the same one that religion targets, that is prone to control and manipulation by the state?
I also think that it’s undeniable that in most areas religion and the state are inseparable. Gods must be used in order to justify the rule of kings that no one wants, and actions which are against every individual’s self interest (even in instances where it is in the interest of the whole). In every culture pre-1700’s the state was directly backed up by god. Churches and the state openly benefited one another in Medieval Europe, rulers were actual gods in the ancient Middle East, and even in China and Japan where organized religion has always been a rather iffy thing it wasn’t a century ago that the Emperors were seldom mentioned in the absence of their alleged divinity and heavenly ordainment.
For this reason I think that it’s inconceivable that religion isn’t either the sister, or more likely mother of the state itself. With this said there has been an amazing reversal in trends over the past two centuries, and an amazingly thorough splitting of organized religion and the state.
Ideas are everything. Practically every system is theoretically possible and could be enacted if the ideological factors were exactly right. Irrationality, adaptation, conservatism, and assumption are part of the human soul, and for this reason people can adapt to almost any line of thinking and believe almost anything. In this way the literal replacement of secular religion with nationalism has occurred. I haven’t had a good rant about nationalism in a long time (I’m planning to on another thread) but how emotional people get about the concept of their nation is absolutely ridiculous. Nationalism, especially in our day and age, is as meaningless as it is sacrosanct in the eyes of the masses, and the sort of action it inspires on an individual and societal scale is absolutely astounding.
No, I don’t have that particular view. I’m aware of it but I think it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny - I don’t think that religion ‘gave birth’ to the State. The particularly rapine nature of the modern State is the result of the convergence of three key factors:
The natural desire to want to live at others’ expense; what I call the will-to-enslave
The Agricultural Revolution; this fundamentally altered man’s environment to such an extent that a great deal fo the hardwiring in the human brain is at best useless and, in many cases, counter-productive to man’s ends (as expressed in the most general sense of “flourishing”). In particular, the Agricultural Revolution gave rise to grain stocks, cattle herds and other forms of early capital stocks. Following a slightly amended version of Say’s Law, “Only what has already been produced can be consumed (by thieves).”
The human capacity for culture, that is, the “programmable” part of the brain that is capable of rebalancing itself against wholly novel social factors. This is the basis for social cooperation enabled through social factors such as duties, norms and, ultimately, law. But it is also a basis for social conflict and parasitism, that is, it can grease the skids for point 1 above just as well as for peaceful, non-parasitic cooperation
Again, I am a skeptic on the view that religion has lost the State vs. religion battle. I think that the State made its bones only with the aid and cooperation of religion. After a time, I think the State has forgotten just how badly it needs religion and the “Enlightenment” was actually the first salvo in what is now more than a two-century long battle between the secular and sacred powers. There has always been tension but the very first serious shot came with Martin Luther but the battle really heated up later around the time of the French revolution. The “New World Order” concept of bringing about a “global religion” is precisely meant to obsolesce all the old religions.
In any case, in most countries, they are not as separate as they are in the US. And I would argue that, even in the US, we exaggerate just how separate they really are.
Yes and no. People can certainly act like they believe almost anything but I think it’s another thing to say that they can actually be made to believe almost anything. Evolutionary psychology tells us that a great deal of human nature is actually “hardwired” - this doesn’t mean that behavior motivated from these hardwired circuits can’t be helped but, rather, that the effects of that hardwiring cannot be eliminated through training or conditioning. For example, hunger pangs cannot be made to go away through wishing. There is no social conditioning which will ever succeed in eradicating hunger pangs. And so on.
I think that the most “plastic” part of the brain is actually the part associated with social relationships. We have this incredibly complex capacity to reason about other human beings in an automatic and intuitive way (probably because we have a lot of the exact same circuits in our brains that they have in their brains); including how they will react to our actions. It is my view that this calculation - how will others react to my actions and/or what sorts of spontaneous behavior can I predict in others? - is the basis of the malleability of the social order itself.
As ideas/fads/memes/whatever sweep through society, they fundamentally alter the predictable behavior of others. Britney Spears is out and Justin Bieber is in (this alters the valuation of clothing, records and associated paraphernalia of the respective pop stars). So, the behavior of people is continually changing over time and we have a “sociology module” in our brain that permits us to “track with” these changes over time and rebalance our own decision-making in such a way as to adjust to the ever-shifting status quo.
Despite all you have written I still do not understand exactly what you see the connection between religion and the state is. Could you either quote where you have done this most succinctly or write this out?
What your three points don’t seem to answer is exactly what method was used in order to allow people to be dominated. I think that it’s practically undeniable that people have a will to dominate, and the capability to be dominated, but this does not explain what initially caused them to submit to domination. There is no better guise than religion and I think that it’s practically impossible to explain the seemingly eternal connection between the two after the establishment of the state, unless we believe that the two were linked. Hell, even in the Americas with absolutely zero connection to Eurasia and Africa the only large states which were established were those based off of religion.
I also don’t understand why you seem to indicate that
The states in most countries in the west and in East Asia aren’t almost totally separate of religious influence, especially since separation of church and state has been a staple of American government and the widespread belief/devoutness of people is shrinking before our eyes, in Western Europe Atheism is on par with those which who believe in an explicit god, and in East Asia religion never had much of a role to start with, and Taoism, Buddhism, and Shintoism sure as hell don’t have anything to do with the People’s Republic of China or Japan!
The state needs classical religion when democracy, nationalism, and the ideology of statism itself have all proved just as effective as explicit religion in justifying the cause of statism. Nothing was more totalitarian and centralized than the secular states of the USSR, Communist China, and Nazi Germany.
As for the video, wow. The professor nails it, and it’s truly amazing how much the reporter simply shrugs off the question even though it’s a totally valid and rational question which is, if anything, dumbed down in such a way that it might make sense in modern discourse, although even then it obviously failed. The fact that giving a reason to valuing the jobs of individuals in hundreds or thousands of miles away in one direction as opposed to another “isn’t worth responding to” tells you everything you need to know. I’m honestly surprised that got on FOX… The U of R isn’t an hour away from where I live, I might just pay that professor a visit.
Although some may not care to read this, I just finished it and thought it was quite interesting and makes a great case for itself. It’s titled “Jesus Is an Anarchist.”
I thought it was relevant to the latest comments here. It demonstrates how easily the words of Christ can be twisted to be a means to the State’s goal: enslavement (or absence of liberty). It shows how some of the words and actions of Christ and His disciples were done to deliberately mislead the State to allow them to continue preaching their message. And it all ties nicely together the notion that liberty is what we are called to (and how Christ’s one law or directive, the Golden Rule, is remarkably similar to the NAP).
Just thought I would toss that out there in case anyone would like to read it and/or hadn’t heard of it. The author, James Redford, is a poster here (I found the link in his signature).
a) Religion is just one of many aspects of human society
b) The State is another aspect
c) There is no necessary interaction between these two aspects unless you appeal to the meaningless sense in which “everything is connected”; In this same sense, the grocery industry has a “necessary interaction” with the State
d) Throughout most of recorded history, religion has been monopolized by the State. But so has law, security finance and miscellaneous commercial industries, varying from place to place and time to time. What I’m arguing is that organized religion (religion + division-of-labor) is like any other line of production in that it is voluntary. So, all lines of product except the State stand in contrast to the State on the criterion of voluntariness. The State (and private crime) are the involuntary aspects of the social order, in contrast to all other aspects which are voluntary.
e) Questions of apparent involuntariness in culture (e.g. “mandatory” clothing customs, arranged marriages, etc.) miss the point that compliance in these aspects is achieved through means that, for all practical intents and purposes, are still voluntary by comparison to overt threats against life, limb and property.
I don’t think method is that important. The hard question, as Hoppe identifies in many of his lectures, is why do people allow themselves to be dominated??
But that just pushes the question back one more step. “It’s all a trick.” OK, so why were people susceptible to this particular trick? It still doesn’t answer the question.
I think that this is a result of a very narrow definition of religion. Religion is a complex of ideas, attitudes and behaviors that - taken together - form a mystical cosmology that binds together the social, natural and psychological into a cohesive whole. In this sense, everyone is religious. You have a unifying cosmology, whether you acknowledge it or not.
I think when most modernists use the word “religion”, they actually mean a certain subset of religion concerned with superstition. The role of superstition in religion is vastly exaggerated in the post-Enlightenment world. Superstitions are there but it’s actually a bit of class snobbery to focus on superstition as the defining feature of religion because superstitions have tended to be the domain of the poor and ignorant.
Anyway, I just think it’s ridiculous to say that Asian nations are examples of non-religious States. In Shintoism, they worship and pray to their ancestors - that’s not religious?? In Buddhism, you meditate and you will ultimately be reincarnated. That’s not religious?
The problem is that the State’s quasi-religious narratives are much more transparently self-serving than the narratives employed by professional churchmen. And, frankly, the State are amateurs. They truly don’t get it that you can’t hit someone over the head and, at the very same time, expect that person to truly and deeply believe in your moral legitimacy. It just doesn’t work. The State - acting as its own priest - is faced with an insurmountable moral legitimacy problem. Nationalism does not substitute for religion… it is just a particular expression of tribal loyalty.
Religious leadership is based on something more complex than tribal loyalty. It’s about social goodness and purity that confer a worthiness of respect on the religious leader who maintains a following based on this distributed, uncoerced recognition of his spotless reputation. This true religious leadership is what is hijacked and ultimately counterfeited by the State’s monopoly religion. But the State has grown too big for its breeches and imagines that it doesn’t even need the blessing of priests to have moral legitimacy. It can just act the part. This is just like how it can operate a printing press responsibly without ever destroying the currency in an orgy of money-printing. Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure.
A note on strategy for the future of libertarianism:
When things like ObamaCare get passed, don’t weep for yourself but cheer for the ideas of libertarianism. People as society are accustomed to behaving in a manner similar to the Hegelian Dialectic. Example: 9/11. We get ‘attacked’, we react and attack random people. Gulf of Tonkin. Same deal. Banking crises to banking regulations. High housing costs to price ceilings and so on. Whether this pattern is imposed on humanity or it is genuine, it has been in place long enough that it’s imposition is not so necessary to the social psyche for its effects to play out. It sounds ugly, but libertarianism is not going to win if people feel fine about the government.
I don’t want the “Audit the Fed” bill to pass. You know they’re not gonna find anything, because the Fed had too much time to clean up their desks. If anything it will be an excuse for pro-Fed partisans to say “See? Your kooky paranoid little fantasies are just that, now leave the business to the smart people.” This isn’t how progress is made. It isn’t made by inching towards abolition within the political system, because that is easily monitored and affected by those whom it may concern. Progress is made by inching away from its legitimacy, without change from inside. Progress will be made when people are clamoring to burn the place down and congress continues to completely ignore them. Libertarians mustn’t have a significant voice inside the political arena, now that Ron Paul has blown up so large. ‘They’ know that this is a problem for them, and libertarians in office gives them an opportunity. If there must be libertarians in office, it’s best to do it at municipal or state levels where they can hopefully allow people to ignore federal stuff. For libertarianism to succeed, people have to lose hope in politics as they did in Soviet Russia, but this time with a knowledgeable and persistent libertarian influence coming up from beneath them.
The best thing that can happen for libertarianism is successive democrats getting elected into office, over and over. Then, all will be blamed on ‘the government’ no matter how corporatist the programs. Despite the fact that the Republican and Democrat positions are identical, Republicans in office would ever be pleading to ‘let the free market work’, thus further tarnishing its name.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Mitt Romney has been trying to pander to Ron Paul things. Libertarianism is becoming ‘a thing’ and they know it. Their only option is to try to co-opt it and morph it into something else like they did with conservatism. Grab the anti-drug, pro-gay, pro-abortion surface-skimming Johnsonians before they become a real problem and penetrate into the banking, industrial and military complexes. We’re going to see the end to the drug war, and more Republican candidates trying to look libertarian. Likely this will result in some minor ‘libertinean’ shifts and perhaps some unfortunate cases of deregulation. By this I mean that not all deregulations are equal and some can be detrimental without the simultaneous removal of state-privilege. That can’t happen. Big-Tent libertarianism will mean the end of the relevance of the truly important issues which are, I think you’ll agree, money, might, and the corporate-state.
Libertarianism’s only success can be from the spontaneous members who comprise the movement. If FoxNews gets too libertarianny then you know that we’re about to lose the fight. So I say, please let Barack Obama be elected, please let the debt unwind while President: Blue is in office. The true growth of libertarianism will be a culmination of a couple things: the failure central economic models and world indebtedness in the foreseeable future, the wealth of accessible knowledge on the internet (as long as it stays open).
The Russian expats I have met don’t blame “the government” for everything. They still tend to view the problems they experienced in the Soviet Union as generally coming from “society”, i.e. that they are inevitable in any social order.
What your’e suggesting sounds like the neocon BS before Bush got elected… “starve the beast” they said… the idea was to run up government revenues as high as possible, while holding taxes flat or maybe reducing them, thus forcing a “cutback” once the discrepancy became too large. What cutback? When has there been a cutback in government since 2001??? Don’t hold your breath because there ain’t any cutbacks coming. Which proves that that supposed neocon gambit was just another ruse for increased government spending. By duping conservatives into believing the genius neocons had worked out some brilliant strategy to cut government by expanding it, they reduced resistance to government expansion. Mission accomplished.
Expansion of government is never good news and we should not wish for it. It will not hasten “the end” of government, though it might just hasten the end of whatever little civilization is left within America.
