Environmentalism: A hate story

Posted on October 5, 2010 by Mike P (the emptiness pro)

The twisted soul of an environmentalist can truly be a terrifying thing to behold. A recent propaganda video has given us a brief glimpse in to the violent, totalitarian revenge fantasies that lurk in the back of the these people’s minds. You may have heard about it. It has been kind of a media sensation and drawn a lot of comment over the last week or so. This video depicts young children and adults being blown up for not going along with the environmentalist program.

The video was put out by a group of carbon zealots calling themselves 10:10. Supposedly their goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 10% within one year, starting in 2010.  I had to get that information elsewhere though since that message, as insane as it is, is totally lost amidst the blood, guts and dead schoolchildren of their promotional video.

The video opens with an extremely annoying British schoolteacher hectoring and bullying her students about cutting their carbon emissions, and asking them to hector and bully their families in turn. She then asks the kids what they plan to do. Some kids respond by saying they’re going to ride their bikes more and that kind of stuff. When she asks for a show of hands of who wants to be involved, two kids refrain from raising their hands and instead shrug their shoulders indifferently. “No pressure, it’s your choice,” she reassures them. Before dismissing the class for the day, she pulls out a box with a red button on it, pushes the button, and blows the two recalcitrant kids to smithereens in front of the rest of the class. This scene is followed by a few other scenes of more adult situations that also end with blood and viscera flying all over the screen.

A lot of other commentators, some of whom I like, have written about this. Many are calling it a “misstep”, an “epic fail” or saying it is a just a prank that went too far. Some “green” commentators have gone as far as to defend it and say that it is exactly the kind of propaganda that is needed to shock people out of their complacency. So far the fallout from the video has cost the 10:10 group their corporate sponsorship from Sony. They may lose others. But asking whether or not this video serves the purpose of the people that made it is asking the wrong the question. Characterizing it as just a “misstep” or a goof is missing the point.

The video is evil. And it reveals the evil that is in the soul of environmentalists. What are the people in the video being blown up for? It is not for being so-called “climate skeptics”. It is not for openly rejecting, or even questioning the agenda of the 10:10 group. They are blown to piles of blood and guts for just being indifferent to the message of “climate change” zealots and not wanting to be bothered. Indifference is the biggest threat to totalitarians. Their enemies, those that fight them, actually legitimize them. At least they are paying attention! Those who do not want to be bothered, who just want to live their own lives, they are the ones who must be killed. This anger, resentment and homicidal rage directed at people that ignore you probably reveals a lot about the childhoods of the people that grow up to be environmental zealots.

It is interesting that the crime here is one of inaction, not action. One need not do anything to be condemned to death. In fact doing nothing is precisely the crime. But more than doing nothing it is not caring. Using this as the standard, the entire human race save for a few select “enlightened” individuals are potential targets for extermination.

How many people worked on the production of this video? It has fairly high production values. It was directed by a big name British director. A famous Hollywood actress and a famous British football star appear in it. One source said something like 50 actors , including the kids, and 40 film professionals behind the scenes were engaged to make the video. Apparently all of these people were bought in enough that no one raised the alarm bell. Another thing to think about is the parents of the kids involved. What were they thinking? A lot of these people can probably  be excused for just doing a job. But this is not some fly-by-night operation. These are not some dorks in their backyard making youtube videos. These people had big corporate money and famous Hollywood people involved. And apparently no one realized the effect this would have on the general public. This shows how far gone these people really are.

Maybe I am just some kind of prude with no sense of humor, but this video really did not strike me as funny. It struck me as evil and threatening. But it provides a good glimpse into the perverted revenge fantasies  that occupy the minds of “climate change” zealots.

Here is the video, if you can stomach it:

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All the food is poison

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Mike P (the emptiness pro)

Your diet is other people’s problem. Your consumption habits are up for a vote. You must appear before the appeals subcommittee and submit a form filled out in triplicate if you want to eat anything on the high calorie chart. Eating is not a private matter. Your diet is not just an expression of your personal preferences, it is an expression of your morals and your worth as a human being. It is an expression of your commitment to the ideals of the collective.

At least, this seems to be the direction we are going.

Different foods are now placed into different moral categories. Food that is supposedly “organic” is morally superior to non-organic. Food with pesticides or hormones, or food that is produced by big corporations is necessarily considered to be evil. Food produced by big corporations is also assumed to be unhealthy even if there is no evidence for this. Greasy and salty foods are the most evil. And Gaia forbid that you should be seen anywhere near a fast food hamburger.

You would think from the hysteria that everyone would just be dead. Empirically they are not. So what is going on? Why is food such an issue? Why do so many people feel entitled to tell everyone else how to eat? Why do people believe that their choice of diet makes them morally superior? What the hell does “organic” food even mean? Why are so many people convinced that most of the food available on the market is nothing more than poison despite the glaringly obvious empirical evidence to the opposite?

The idea that certain people with special diets are morally superior is not new. Jewish people have had this idea for 5000 years. Muslims are in on this one too. It’s not surprising that like previous religions, environmentalism has also developed it’s own sacred menu. It has it’s holy food items and it’s forbidden food items. This time it’s not holy unleavened bread and forbidden pork. It’s holy organic food and forbidden fast food.  Or “processed” food. Or corporate food. Or salty food. Or fatty food. The list of what is evil is always longer than the list of what is good. Instead of being blessed by a Rabbi and declared “kosher” the new holy food is blessed by a USDA bureaucrat and declared “organic”. Both of these high priests base their blessings on bizarre rules in arcane texts that are incomprehensible to outsiders and rational thinkers.

So the idea of morally superior eating is not new. But it does seem to be escalating in our culture lately. This is because of the growing violence of the state and it’s ever growing presence in our lives. The so-called “United States” is characterized by a regime of social engineering. The bureaucrats that claim for themselves the right to experiment on the public are constantly seeking to change other people’s behavior to suit their personal opinions. These people are supposed to be authorities, but their authority only comes from their willingness to initiate violence against anyone that does not obey. Since the source of their power must ultimately be violence, their motives must be pure. It must be the highest moral purpose to get others to conform to this or that opinion that the wealthy and powerful have about how people should eat and behave. People that push other people around don’t want to think that they are just thugs. They need a moral justification.

This attitude then becomes accepted and adopted by other people in society. More and more people become busybodies. Everyone becomes a social engineering test subject for everyone else. One of the main tools that state bureaucrats and religious leaders have always used to change behavior is guilt. They do not want to always resort to direct violence to control people. That is a bit messy and tends to puncture their moral facade. Better to shame people so they jump through the hoops you have set up for them of their own volition. This method of control is again picked up by others in society that are not bureaucrats and religious leaders, but nonetheless like to boss their family and friends around and generally lord it over everyone. The food issue gives them a perfect excuse. It’s a way to play at moral superiority while still remaining your old wretched self. Food bullying is power seeking behavior.

Socialized medicine fits in very nicely here as well. If we are all supposed to be a part of one big community and we are all supposed to provide health care for each other then naturally everyone’s diet becomes everyone’s business. Everyone’s consumption habits about everything become subject to public debate and scrutiny. This is why socialized health care is so appealing to busybodies and power seekers. It’s the perfect excuse to scold and bully others.

The idea that everything is poisoned is not new either. In earlier, more superstitious times people used to believe that there were evil spirits lurking about and ruining everything. In our enlightened supposedly scientific times these evil spirits have been replaced by chemicals, pesticides and hormones. Most people don’t know anything about chemicals. If you tell someone that this or that chemical is in some kind of food, and that it is also in some industrial cleaner, they will immediately panic. This is the reaction that people that say things like this want. A good tactic is to use the chemical’s scientific compound name. These always sound scary. Environmentalists can usually be convinced that there is a pressing need for the state to ban H2O if you refer to it by it’s chemical name. Although, they may want to ban water just because doing so would eradicate the human population of the earth.

Something else needs to be said about the idea that everything is poisoned. If this is how you feel, if this makes emotional sense to you, then you need to do some serious self-evaluation. If you are convinced that everything is tainted and that you are full of toxins and poisons, maybe you are. Maybe it is your personality that is toxic. Maybe your environment really is polluted all the time. Maybe everything you touch really is poisoned. Something to think about.

Any particular style of diet or any method of food production is not necessarily better than any other. I have my personal preferences, but that is all they are. There is no moral content to a food preference. Everyone has a right to choose their own diet. If you want to be a vegan, I say go for it. Do that thing. But ask yourself if you are really doing it  for health reasons. Are you doing it to boost your sense of moral superiority? Are you doing it to give yourself an excuse to look down on others? Are you doing it to give yourself an excuse to bully others? If you find yourself constantly lecturing and hectoring your friends and family about their diets, are you doing it because you are concerned for them, or because you want to control them and have power over them?

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Corporations

Posted on September 22, 2010 by Mike P (the emptiness pro)

Pretty much everyone hates corporations. If you want a surefire way to earn approval at cocktail parties and other gatherings of socially acceptable people, go ahead and make a comment about how evil corporations are. Talk about how they are poisoning the planet, enslaving their workers and turning everyone into empty consumerist drones by providing people with cheap products. This is guaranteed to get agreement from men and admiration from women. Righteous outrage over social justice issues has always been a great strategy for finding a date.

Sure we hear a lot of complaining about corporations, but none of the grumblers ever has a real empirical case with logic and evidence behind it. There are certainly some legitimate complaints to be made about corporations engaging in unethical behavior, but you are never going to hear the typical social justice cocktail party attendee make them. The valid ethical and economic criticisms that can be made about the behavior of corporations actually require some critical thinking skills to develop and understand.

First of all, what is a corporation? A corporation is a company or individual that has been incorporated. The root word is corpus, meaning body. It is a legal body. A legal individual. It’s essentially an alias that a group of people or an individual can use to do business as. Legally it is almost the same as an individual person. A corporation can have assets and liabilities and engage in contracts. The purpose of a corporation is to shield the personal assets of the individuals acting on behalf of that corporation from liability should these individuals cause damage to others while doing their jobs. If the CEO of a big corporation engages in actions that damage the property of others, he cannot be held liable as an individual. His personal assets cannot be touched. It is only the corporation that is liable.

This situation is what I call “non-contractual limited liability”. The question is, is this ethical? There is a debate about this. Often times the corporation is used by unscrupulous people as a legal shield for bad behavior. Quite often we hear about CEOs and upper management of big corporations engaging in unethical behavior and damaging others, while at the same time pulling their personal assets out of the very corporation that they are acting on behalf of. They do this so that when the company is held liable for these damages, if it ever is, the personal assets of the CEO and top management are untouched. This is the kind of moral hazard that is created by the corporate form. Often times corporations will have internal rules and reporting mechanisms to try to prevent this. There are also a whole bunch of laws that the state has made to deal with this sort of thing. Of course with the state running the legal system, we can always be sure that the powerful and politically connected will be shielded from liability one way or another.

This non-contractual limitation of liability is essentially a gift from the state. Whether or not this would arise on the free market, we can’t know. My guess is that limited liability corporations would probably exist in some form even without the state, but I’m not smart enough to be able to figure out how or reason out all the details. I’m not necessarily against people limiting their liability like this today even with the state. Thanks to the state, the tort law system is so out of control that some lady was able to get a huge reward from McDonalds for firing coffee all over herself. Given this environment it’s understandable that people want to limit their personal liability like this in order to do business.

Another valid complaint that can be made about big corporations is what economists call regulatory capture. This is what happens when the state regulatory agency that is theoretically supposed to be in charge of regulating the corporations in a certain industry instead becomes “captured” by lobbyists for that industry. Of course, this is pretty much exclusively the case when it comes to government regulatory agencies. Why would it ever be another way? The idea that your typical pinko liberal has that big business for some reason hates regulation is ridiculous and stupid. They love regulation. It keeps them from having to face new competitors and allows them to restrict production and drive up prices. No one is a bigger fan of regulations than big corporations.

Of course, lawyers also love regulations.

No state regulatory agency was ever created in the “public interest” or because of public demand. They were created at the request of the big players in various industries in order to help them fix prices, spy on their rivals and create barriers to entry for potential competitors. State regulations have always been an unethical mechanism big corporations use to create cartels, drive up prices and limit competition. The idea that a state regulatory agency is going to do what some whiny liberal geek wants is actually pretty funny. What the hell do these people expect? Do they really think that they are going to control the government and get it to do what they want? That’s pretty funny.

It’s important to point out that if you are a statist, and you like to vote and lobby the government for goodies and handouts that you want, or you want to use the government to limit your responsibility for your actions or your expenses, then you really don’t have a leg to stand on when complaining about corporations. You are a flaming hypocrite if you complain about corporations. Why should you get free stuff from the government if no one else can? Why should you have your liability for your own mess limited by the state if no one else can?

But of course, the complainers do not raise the valid objections that I’ve mentioned. They complain that corporations are poisoning mother earth, enslaving people, oppressing people and turning everyone into mindless consumers. Sometimes people complain that corporations have stolen control of the government from “the people”. This is also pretty funny. When the hell did “the people” ever control anything? Who are “the people” anyway? When in history hasn’t the state been controlled by the rich and powerful?

The only way that corporations can profit from unethical behavior is by getting the state to do their dirty work. This is something you may want to point out the next time you hear someone flapping their mouth about corporations and calling for more state regulations to control them.

In the latest installment of my podcast series I further discuss this issue of corporations. What do they actually do that is unethical? If we examine what corporations really do that is unethical, are these the kinds of complaints that we commonly hear? Why is hatred for corporations and big business so prevalent in our culture? Are corporations really enslaving everyone? Are low prices and “consumerism” really bad?

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This is a great video of Murray Rothbard where he explains how big corporations have always used government regulations to form cartels, cut production, drive up prices and create barriers for potential competitors. Not the kind of analysis that will win you any approval in polite company.

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Socialism: A love story – Social Engineering

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Mike P (the emptiness pro)

Social Engineering in the “United States”

So is there socialism in the so-called “United States”? Many people may think this is a ridiculous question. Isn’t the “United States” the world bastion of free market capitalism? Not so much. And yes, there is a variety of socialism in the US, but it is different than than the other varieties we’ve looked at in both motivations and outcomes. It is not the kind of socialism that conservatives in the US imagine is taking over either.

In the “United States” there is generally still some respect for individuality and some notion of individual responsibility. The notion that a person is responsible for his or her own fate and should not be dependent on the state or a collective is still fairly widely held. The issue in the US is not so much in creating equal outcomes, as in other kinds of socialism, but in creating equal opportunities. This leads to a different kind of program. Policies in the US tend to be focused, on the surface, on creating a “level playing field” for individuals and businesses rather than on just making everyone equal.

This leads to a different kind of wealth redistribution and a different kind of state structure. The focus is on research, studies and experimentation rather than straight up wealth transfer or a state takeover of the means of production. This leads to a regime that is constantly engaged in social and economic engineering. The basis for this social experimentation is the philosophy of positivism as put forward by Karl Popper and embraced by economist Milton Friedman among others.

People that buy into the theory of positivism make the claim that there are two kinds of statements that can be made about the world. These are empirical statements and analytical statements. An empirical statement is a statement about the real world, and according to positivists all empirical statements must be tested. Not only must they be tested, but they must be constantly re-tested to see if they still hold, or if there was not some factor that was missed that invalidates them at a later time. They must also be potentially falsifiable. Analytical statements are simply definitions of words, and are open to interpretation. They are statements analyzing human language and matching up symbols to reality.

While this may seem accurate at first, it contains an internal contradiction and is problematic when applied to the study of human behavior. The first question to be asked is what kind of statement is the statement that defines positivism itself? Is it empirical or analytical? If empirical, is it falsifiable? Could it ever be false? How would we know? Is it subject to testing? How could it even be tested? It seems that this statement itself is an attempt at an axiomatic-deductive statement that must be true a-priori. In other words, exactly the kind of statement that positivists want to rule out! So on its face there are already a number of problems with this philosophy.

The belief in this philosophy and its application to social science leads to certain logical outcomes. First of all the kinds of policies that should be implemented to bring about the “level playing field” must always be tested and re-tested. Policies must constantly be adjusted and re-adjusted to deal with new circumstances. There are no laws to economics. There are no a-priori true things that can ever be said about human behavior. No matter what the social goal is, the policies to bring it about must always be reviewed and re-adjusted.

The predicable outcome of this idea is a tax system that takes money from the productive classes and redistributes it to a class of bureaucrats and social managers. This class is theoretically engaged in an endless quest to create the desired “level playing field.” Rather than state ownership of the means of production or direct wealth transfer, socialism in the “United States” is characterized by an alphabet soup of government bureaus and agencies that oversee all aspects of social and economic life.

These agencies and bureaus are given the power to make “rules” and “regulations” to control social and economic life. These rules and regulations are not laws. They have been voted on by no one, yet they carry the force of law. The EPA, SEC, FDA, FTC, USDA and many more that you have probably never heard of are essentially given the power to legislate without the need to deal with the legislative process. Even the democratic pretense of allowing individuals a say in how they are governed is dropped when it comes to bureaucratic regulations. The population of the “United States” is subject to the rule of endless, unaccountable bureaucratic meddling.

But it can never be known if these policies are correct, so they must be forever studied, tested and re-tested. This leads the “United States” to fund endless studies of this or that social phenomenon in an effort to create different, more desirable circumstances by means of policy. This constitutes a direct wealth transfer to those whose “job” it is to study social phenomena. No area of social or economic life is considered off limits. There is endless snooping into all areas of life by those that would tell others how to behave. Those that presume to study society, usually in academia, become a self-interested class. They have an incentive to perpetuate the cycle of funding by producing studies that claim to show the necessity of both government action and yet more studies. This process has even corrupted what were formerly considered the “hard” sciences as we can see by taking a look at the debacle of so-called “climate science.”

In economic life the FTC, the SEC along with the Federal Reserve Bank and others engage in all kinds of economic engineering and market intervention. They adjust interest rates and make rules about trade and investing in order to create a supposed “level playing field” for business and ensure “fairness” in consumer and capital markets. In reality they are subject to corruption and  tend to entrench established and powerful interests. The agencies and bureaus that are justified on the basis of creating this “level playing field” for business are in fact captured by a privileged class of capitalists and bankers that use them to stifle competition, protect cartels and transfer wealth from poor to rich.

In the field of social studies there has arisen a self-interested class of social workers, managers and planners that implement programs to benefit various “oppressed” or “underprivileged” groups. This in turn leads to a class of self-styled “community leaders” that pretend to represent these oppressed groups on the basis of their oppression. They gladly receive funding from government programs, and organize their “people” into voting blocks. This has further lead to the current trend in academia of the study of the social results of capitalism on various “oppressed” groups. Gender studies, ethnic studies, queer studies and the like have become all the rage in elite academic circles. This elite academic class tends to nurture a resentment for the productive classes that they depend on for their incomes and as a result they popularize various anti-market theories among the general population in a perverse attempt at self-justification. All of these groups are natural constituents for bigger government and increased taxation.

This philosophy dovetails quite nicely with US imperial policy as well. The US government is supposedly engaged in conquering other countries in order to engineer their societies to be more “liberal” like that of the US. The ostensible goal is to make them “democratic” and instill in the savage population a respect for gender  rights and religious tolerance. And if the US didn’t get it right in Vietnam, no big deal. There is always Iraq or Afghanistan that can be used as a guinea pig to try out the latest theory on “nation building.” The purpose isn’t really to “win” anyway, whatever that would mean. This provides good cover for the maintenance of a bloated military, an elite intellectual circle of “foreign policy” specialists, and whatever big corporate interests are being served by the wars. There may even be some in the US government and military that actually take the idea of spreading freedom and democracy seriously. The news media in the US certainly pretends to take this goal seriously. They rarely even question it.

Another way that social behavior is manipulated and managed in the US is through the tax system. Various tax incentives or tax punishments can be implemented by social managers in order to adjust behavior. If some people in the government want people to buy supposedly “environmentally friendly” appliances, a tax incentive can be created to encourage it. And if a certain company that manufactures such products gives a donation to some congresspersons, so be it. If some people in the government want to force people to stop smoking or eating fatty foods, they can create a tax punishment for engaging in these behaviors.

A staunch belief in democracy on the part of most people in the US plays into this well. After all, the the people themselves can now get involved in engineering the lives of others by means of the ballot box. Elections are held every couple years, so in case the last policy did not work, the next one may. We’ll just have to wait and find out. And if we don’t like smoking or drinking or some other behavior of our neighbors, we can get involved in trying to implement policies to change that. After all, what anyone does is everybody’s business.

So we can see how the supposed goal of a “level playing field” combined with the belief in the philosophy of positivism creates a regime like the one in the United States. A regime of social engineers, planners and endless government agencies studying and regulating every aspect of life. Not only is every aspect of life inside the US considered fair game, increasingly the ruling class in the US sees its role as managing the entire world.

Here is Part V of the podcast series (20:19)

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UPDATE: I did a quick little explanation and refutation of the philosophy of positivism. I didn’t feel like I had quite explained it and refuted it well enough in the main podcast. (7:33)

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Here’s a link to a story on the African genital washing study.

Other parts: Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV

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Socialism: A love story – Fascism

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Mike P (the emptiness pro)

Part IV – Conservative Socialism (Fascism)

Aren’t conservatives supposed to be against socialism? This is a question a lot of people are probably asking when they read the headline for this entry. Despite their anti-socialist rhetoric, in practice conservatives advocate their own particular style of socialism.

The classic conservative socialist regime would be Nazi Germany. After all, Nazi stands for the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. They didn’t just pull that name out from between their pasty white Germanic butt cheeks. The Nazis, like all conservative socialist movements, were viciously against communists and egalitarian socialism. For this reason a lot of people are fooled into thinking that conservatives are necessarily anti-socialist. Marxists will always claim that despite what they called themselves, the Nazis were not actually socialists. It’s true they were not egalitarians, but like all socialist regimes they engaged in a systematic attack on private property and the rights of the people to engage in just property acquisition.

Another word for conservative socialism is Fascism. I’m sure we’re all familiar with that one. This term was coined by another one of history’s most loved figures: Benito Mussolini. He chose this term to purposefully bring back images of Roman imperial glory to the Italian people. Fascism comes from the word Fasces, the bundle of sticks with an ax-head sticking out that was a symbol of political power in ancient Rome. This kind of glorification of the past with a militaristic twist is always a hallmark of conservative socialist or Fascist regimes and movements.

This is the kind of thing fascists are into.

I want to make clear that I am not accusing all conservative movements of being Nazis. They are not. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are the two states in history that most thoroughly implemented a regime of conservative socialism. US conservatives are not these people. But there are certain motivations and characteristics that are shared by all conservative socialist movements, and the conservative movement in the US is a conservative socialist movement.

So what exactly is conservative socialism? What is Fascism? What are the motivations for it, what kinds of policies are implemented, and what are the economic and moral results that must follow?

Unlike Soviet style or welfare state socialism, fascism is not egalitarian in it’s motivations. In fact it is specifically anti-egalitarian. The motivation of  conservative style socialism is to freeze and entrench a certain social order. Conservatives and fascists of all stripes, from hard core Nazis to the much more mild mannered Tea party movement are characterized by a belief in some sort of mythical past where the social order was pure and virtuous. All of these movements then attempt to use the power of the state to get back to, or freeze in place whatever virtuous social order they fantasize about. Often times the desire to entrench the social order manifests itself as a call to preserve values. I’m sure we’ve all heard this before. US conservatives often styles themselves as defenders of values and claim that egalitarian liberals are attacking their values.

This motivation logically leads to certain policies that all fascist and conservative movements attempt to carry out. Corporatism, or a team up of big business and the state is one of the main economic policies that is implemented. Management of big industry by syndicates was the strategy in Fascist Italy. These syndicates would be a triangle of power consisting of the corporations, the labor unions and the state managers. These three power centers would get together and manage industries. What they would do would be to institute wage and price controls. This makes sense when you realize that the motivation is to entrench a certain order and certain values. An attempt to control price is an attempt to control value. Remember, in the US it was Richard Nixon, not some pinko liberal that instituted wage and price controls. Economically the wage and price controls must be followed by shortages and gluts in the marketplace. Tariffs and trade restrictions with foreigners also characterize fascist economic policy.

It goes without saying of course that conservatives and fascists hate the free market. The attempt to freeze the social order in place is necessarily a reaction to the threat that the free market poses to the established order. In a free market without the state controls and barriers to business erected by the fascist regime, competition would constantly be changing the social and economic order. New companies with new methods and younger, brighter entrepreneurs would constantly be coming to the forefront as the old companies, old bosses and stagnant methods fall by the wayside. This is precisely the kind of thing that conservatives hate. In the US the conservative rhetoric and lip service paid to capitalism and markets are based on the fact that these things are thought to be traditional to this country, not based on any philosophical belief in freedom or non-aggression. Conservatives love aggression.

Socially fascists usually have some sort of cultural or racial supremacist ideology, or at least a belief that certain types of people are better than others and deserve to have the state intervene to preserve their social position. In Germany we all know what the result was. In the US conservatives often get accused of being racists. This is not always a fair accusation, but it is understandable. Some conservatives actually are racist. But like all conservative socialists, US conservatives seek to entrench the social order and hearken back to the mythical past of the founding of the nation. Black people were slaves in the mythical and of the founding fathers that the tea party people love to fantasize about. So, I can understand why they would not want to go back to those days, even the warped idealized version that conservatives imagine existed. In fact, I agree with them. I want nothing to do with that world.

Check out the audio for part IV of the series where I talk further about the economics and morality of conservative socialism and fascism.

Socialism: A love story – Fascism (16:11)

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EXTRA: Yeah, I know that Ayn Rand made some mistakes, but she is still awesome, and this video shows why. Here she is dismantling conservatives. I don’t agree with everything she says here, but she is right on when she makes the point that it is ridiculous to look at the free market as conservative and collectivist dictatorship as progressive and liberal.

Other Parts: Part I | Part II | Part III | Part V

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Socialism: A love story – The welfare state

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Mike P (the emptiness pro)

Part III – Welfare State Socialism: Scandinavia

It seems that every pinko liberal you talk to these days is in love with the welfare state system in Scandinavia. One of the biggest criticisms that both American and European liberals make of the so called “United States government” is that it is not as much of a high-tax redistributionist regime as they would like. These people tend to advocate programs like minimum national income and universal government paid health care. The Scandinavian countries are held up as a successful model for this kind of socialism that the “United States” should emulate.

So what is the welfare state? How is it different from the kind of socialism we see in the USSR? Much like the orthodox Marxist socialism of the USSR the motivations for setting up a welfare state are egalitarian. The difference is the level of violence that the state bureaucrats are willing to employ against the general population. A complete red commie Marxist has no problem grabbing a machine gun and just pointing it at everyone in order to make people live their lives according to his personal opinions. He will actually be willing to shoot those that don’t obey, and shoot them in mass numbers. These are the personality types that are in charge of regimes like Cuba, North Korea and the USSR. The mass murderer and terrorist Ernesto “Che” Guevara is a good example of this type.

The pinkos that run welfare states tend to be softer. They are actually not willing to carry out the organized mass murder of their fellow countrymen. Rather than seizing all property and means of production for themselves, the welfare state socialists allow nominal private ownership. What they do is implement a high tax wealth redistribution scheme. This scheme punishes wealth producers and rewards non-producers. The greater the taxes on wealth production, and the greater the rewards for non-production, the more a perverse incentive for individuals to shift their role in society from producer to non-producer will arise. A welfare state has the tendency to turn philosophers into drunks.

The disutility of labor must also be taken into account. Human beings tend to have a preference for leisure over work. Leisure time is a form of non-monetary income. The recipient of welfare state financial support gains more than just the money that is redistributed to him, he also gains income from leisure time. On the other side of that coin is the wealth producer who loses leisure time. This situation only exacerbates the perverse incentives of the system. When “democracy” is added into the mix non-producers become a political constituency and form a voting block. The tendency then will always be for the state to increase it’s predation on wealth producers and increase it’s rewards for non-producers. Often times in welfare state societies over 50% of the population is receiving some form of redistributed income from the state.

In reality we see how despite the outward appearance of a free market in the Scandinavian countries, their economies are characterized by a general stagnation. Creativity and culture also stagnate as more and more philosophers become drunks. The society will tend to produce less outstanding thinkers and artists.

These moral and economic effects logically must always follow from a welfare state regime.

Please listen to an enjoy the third podcast in the series where I talk further about this issue of welfare state socialism.

Socialism: A love story – The welfare state (14:04)

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Other Parts: Part I | Part II | Part IV | Part V

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Responding to readers: College is worse than empty

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Mike P (the emptiness pro)

Hey everyone. Here is a slightly longer audio response to some of the reader comments and criticisms of my article on college. I talk a little bit more about my experience in college. I also go into  further detail about why student loans are a scam and a rip-off. They are not there to help students or provide opportunity. They are there to prop up the jobs and salaries of college faculty and staff. Like all violent statist systems, the college system is run for the benefit of those running it, not for the benefit of those it is supposed to serve.

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Here is a great video where Gary North of lewrockwell.com lays out some low cost strategies for getting college credit.

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College is worse than empty

Posted on September 9, 2010 by Mike P (the emptiness pro)

The economy is pretty bad these days, but it is particularly so for young people. Kids just out of college are screwed by the system in so many ways, and college itself is a big part of the problem. College these days is empty and useless. It destroys young people both emotionally and financially and then sets them at sea in the so-called “real world” without any marketable skills and a crapload of resentment. If college teaches you anything at all it’s how to hate capitalism and demand handouts.

The entire educational establishment from the lowest levels of the government school system up to the administration of the most elite schools are in on this scam. They trick young kids into thinking they will have no future if they do not go to college, and then turn them into debt slaves via the student loan system. This, along with social security and medicare is yet another way that the old, rich, decrepit statist generation that went before us is enslaving the young. Of course the system will have long since collapsed by the time any young people now will be old enough to enjoy the fruits of these government scams. So congratulations to the richest generation to ever exist on the planet. You’ve sold your children into debt slavery and doomed them to a life of financial uncertainty and bleak employment prospects so you could get a government check and not have to pay your own doctor bills in your old age. Big round of applause. Big fucking round of applause to you.

The student loan thing is a scam through and through. Kids are getting out of school these days with as much as $100,000 in student loan debt. Even more in some cases if you go to graduate school. It starts in high school or even elementary school. You are bombarded from the start with propaganda about how fantastic college is and how necessary it will be if you want to have any sort of future. Of course the people telling you this are all a bunch of parasites, also known as public school teachers, that personally benefit from the violent educational system that is holding you hostage. They even use the supposed necessity of college to force obedience. I was routinely threatened with bad grades, which would in turn prevent me from getting into college, which would in turn ruin my future, as punishment for even the smallest disobedience when I was in high school. Clearly these were people that cared about me and my future.

You graduated! Now you can be a debt slave like everyone else!

After bombarding you with all this propaganda they approach you in your senior year with offers for aid or student loans. These loans are provided by the state, and you can’t get out of them by declaring bankruptcy. They probably tell you this, but as a high school senior in a government school it’s doubtful you have any idea what the hell any of it means. Your parents will either be too scared by all the propaganda to refuse, or they will actually encourage you to do it. So you accept. These loans are available in some form to almost everybody, so the demand for college rises. With rising demand you get rising prices. Then, as you would expect, the quality goes down to accommodate everyone that is coming in on loans. There is a race towards mediocrity as the price explodes. This is exactly what you would predict would happen if anyone had taught you how to think somewhere along the line. But why would they? No one in the public school system has any incentive to teach you a goddamned thing. They have an incentive to keep your ass in that chair to be counted by some other bureaucrat so they can maintain their budgets, and that’s about it.

Student loans are not meant to help you or give you an opportunity. They are meant to enslave you to the state education bureaucracy and keep these people in their overpaid union jobs and cushy tenured positions. That is why every liberal politician is so eager to expand the program and why you hear so much bullshit propaganda about the need for every kid to go to college. The education bureaucracy are political constituents and the politicians serve them well. With your blood and your future.

There is also a negative emotional aspect to college. Far from being the liberating experience it may have been for our parents’ generation, college these days is confining and emotionally draining. I spent my first couple years, which were thankfully my only years, in bed. I was too depressed and upset to even bother going out. Why would I? There was nothing out there but a bunch of thoughtless, empty and indoctrinated people. They offered nothing in the way of real friendship, or even interesting conversation. This includes professors and students alike. I, like so many other kids in college these days, took refuge in drugs and drinking. What else was there to do? Why do you think so many kids become such raging alcoholics at school? It’s the one thing you can do that actually feels like doing anything at all.

Sure, its great if you are empty and conformist and studying something useless on a career track to being some kind of bureaucrat. You can get great training in kissing the ass of your superiors and abusing those below you at college. The Greek life provides fantastic and brutal training at this sort of thing. If you are in an academic field, where the only job possibility is to become a college professor yourself, you will also get great training at this key skill for bureaucrats.

No, you are not yourself. You are part of a socially created reality. This is what they will teach you.

The intellectual atmosphere is terrible thanks to all this cultural Marxist crap and postmodernist nonsense that has gotten so popular since the 60s. You will have your brain ground into paste and all the good ideas and original thoughts you may have will be squeezed out of you. You will immediately be attacked verbally and emotionally by faculty and students alike for expressing any thought that goes against the dominant ideology. Think I am exaggerating? Try an empirical test. See what happens on a college campus if you say that socialism isn’t a good idea. Try making the point that the free market is better both morally and in terms of improving the lives of the poor. You will have all the logical and empirical evidence on your side, but that will hardly matter. Or maybe you could try saying that black people and other so-called “ethnic minorities” can make it on their own without having their lives managed by government bureaucrats. The sociology grad students will get particularly pissed at you for that one. If you really want to see the emotional shit hit the fan express some doubts about environmentalism or global warming. Wow. You may actually put yourself in physical danger if you do that, so only risk it if you are sure you will be safe.

Of course, not everyone has this experience. After all, if everyone had this experience college would not be like this. Some people quite like college. But they are usually bullies and conformists themselves. They will probably graduate to be good little bureaucrats and statists. That is assuming they can get any job at all. If not they will become another member of the indebted, screaming hordes demanding free shit from the state. Either way the state wins. But for people that care about morality and have the ability to think, it’s rare for college to be anything other than a terrible experience.

UPDATE: I did a quick little podcast where I talk about my experience after I dropped out of college and offer a suggestion for intelligent people that want to avoid the college trap and start a career without going into massive debt.

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Socialism: A love story – The Soviet Union

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Mike P (the emptiness pro)

Part II – Ideal Type Socialism: The Soviet Union

The socialism of the former Soviet Union is classic, orthodox Marxist socialism. This is a regime characterized by the socialization, or state ownership, of the means of production. The motivation for this scheme is egalitarian in nature. The point is to make everyone equal, at least in terms of their relationship to the means of production. The promise of this regime is a society of equality and brotherhood and a rational planned economy where the right amount of everything is produced. Even is this were desirable, the reality is quite different.

Collective ownership of anything is impossible in practice. Everybody cannot own everything. Everybody cannot own anything. In reality what you get is state ownership of the means of production. This in fact creates systematic and entrenched inequality. The people that call themselves the state use force to monopolize the means of production. Since only the people that call themselves the state are allowed to “own” the means of production and they use systematic violence to enforce their claim, the result is a form of inequality that is much worse than anything you would find in a capitalist society. The attempt to “socialize” the means of production must necessarily create dictatorship and totalitarianism.

But the problems do not end there. Since the logic of the system forbids the “owners” of the means of production from profiting by their use, the means of production inevitably fall into decay. There is no incentive for the “owners” to actually produce or keep up their physical plant. There are no incentives for anyone else to actually produce either, since no one may profit by his efforts. The incentive is to avoid punishment from the authorities while pretending to work. The society literally begins to eat itself alive. Massive and crippling poverty must inevitably result.

The central planners in this kind of regime  have no profit and loss check to know whether or not their plans are meeting the demands and needs of the people. As Ludwig von Mises pointed out so many years ago, there is no means by which a socialist regime of this type can calculate. They can never have any idea if their plans are the right plans. In reality in the USSR they had to use production data from the US and West Germany in order to have any idea at all of what to produce. But of course, because of the incentive problems even these ill-conceived production plans could not possibly be carried out. Eventually the entire society became characterized by fear, lies and propaganda. This happened in other socialist countries, and it is a logical necessity that it will happen under any socialist regime of this type.

The extent to which a society is characterized by the socialization of the means of production is the extent to which it is bordering on total collapse. Without the other hampered market economies of the world with which it could compare itself the USSR would not even have lasted the 70 years it did.

I hope you listen to and enjoy the second part of my audio podcast series in which I further discuss this issue of “ideal type” or Soviet style socialism.

Socialism: A love story – The Soviet Union (20:29)

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Other Parts: Part I | Part III | Part IV | Part V

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Socialism: A love story

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Mike P (the emptiness pro)

Part I – Introduction

What exactly is socialism? This is a good question. Often times you will find that there are as many definitions of socialism as there are people that you ask. Often when you criticize socialism according to one definition, someone who ascribes to another definition will protest that what you are complaining about is not socialism.

As you can imagine, this has happened to me many times in the responses I get to this blog. A lot of readers raised this objection to my article Socialism is selfish. I did a subsequent podcast in which I responded to  the comments I got on that article, but the confusion over definitions remained. In my article and in that podcast I was using the classic, orthodox Marxist style of socialism as my definition. Many people told me that this is not the only definition and that there are a variety of types of socialism. They are absolutely right. So I’ve decided to do this series of articles and podcasts to try to put out some definitive stuff on socialism and it’s various types.

A great resource for examining the various flavors of socialism is a fantastic book by Hans-Hermann Hoppe called “A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism”. In this book Hoppe identifies and talks about 4 standard styles of socialism and states throughout history that have tried to implement them. He examines the motivations behind each of the various styles, the policies that logically follow from those motivations and the economic and moral consequences that logically follow from those policies. He then takes an empirical look at the reality of various socialist states throughout history to see if they match up with the theory.

This method of logical/deductive analysis of human behavior is called praxeology. It is a method that was developed by Ludwig von Mises and used in his groundbreaking works on economics and sociology. The idea is to develop axioms about human behavior that logically must be true, and then reason from there to try to make true predictions about the effects of various policies and actions. It is most often applied to economics, but it can be applied to other areas of social science. In this book Hoppe uses the method to analyze both economics and history.

An alternative method of social analysis, and a much more popular one, is called postivism. This is supposedly an empirical rather than a logical approach to social science, but as we will see throughout the series, this method always leads to empirically false conclusions.

The 4 types of socialism that are examined in the book and the states that best exemplify them are as follows:

  1. “Ideal Type” or Russian style socialism – USSR
  2. “Social Democratic” or “Welfare State” socialism – Scandinavia
  3. “Conservative Socialism” – Nazi Germany
  4. “Social Engineering” – The United States

This is going to be a lot of fun and I’m excited about the project.

The audio podcast is below. In this introduction I talk about the issue of defining socialism. I then introduce the book and talk about praxeology and positivism.

Socialism: A love story – Introduction (10:01)

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Other Parts: Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V

Posted in Audio, Economics, Socialism, Statism | 5 Comments