Big Business, War and Class Analysis

The biggest capitalists have been the deadliest enemies of capitalism

This selection is from Justin Raimondo’s 1995 introduction to Rothbard’s monograph Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy, in which Rothbard further develops libertarian class analysis in an examination of how “big business” and other monied elites have consistently controlled American domestic and foreign policy to the detriment of free markets.

by Justin Raimondo

Rothbard eagerly reclaimed the concept of class analysis from the Marxists, who expropriated it from the French theorists of laissez-faire. Marx authored a plagiarized, distorted, and vulgarized version of the theory based on the Ricardian labor theory of value. Given this premise, he came up with a class analysis pitting workers against owners.

One of Rothbard’s many great contributions to the cause of liberty was to restore the original theory, which pitted the people against the State. In the Rothbardian theory of class struggle, the government, including its clients and enforcers, exploits and enslaves the productive classes through taxation, regulation, and perpetual war. Government is an incubus, a parasite, incapable of producing anything in its own right, and instead feeds off the vital energies and productive ability of the producers.

This is the first step of a fully-developed libertarian class analysis. Unfortunately, this is where the thought processes of all too many alleged libertarians come to a grinding halt. It is enough, for them, to know the State is the Enemy, as if it were an irreducible primary.

As William Pitt put it in 1770, “There is something behind the throne greater than the king himself.”

This explains the strange historical fact, recounted at length and in detail by Rothbard, that the biggest capitalists have been the deadliest enemies of true capitalism. For virtually all of the alleged social “reforms” of the past fifty years were pushed not only by “idealistic” Leftists, but by the very corporate combines caricatured as the top-hatted, pot-bellied “economic royalists” of Wall Street.

The illusion of 'Stabilizing an Unstable Economy"

The “New Normal” world of lower economic growth

By Bill Gross's 

 They say that reality is whatever you wish it to be and I suppose that could be true. Just wish it, as Jiminy Cricket used to say, and it will come true. Reality’s relativity came to mind the other day as I was opening a box of Cracker Jacks for an afternoon snack. That’s right – I said Cracker Jacks! I can’t count the number of people who have told me during the seventh inning stretch at a baseball game to make sure I sing Cracker Jack (without the S) because that’s what the song says. I care not. No one ever says buy me some “potato chip” or some “peanut.” How about a burger and some “french fry?” In all cases, the “s” just makes it flow better. My reality is a box of Cracker Jacks, and I think little sailor Jack on the outside of the box would be nodding his approval if he could ever come to life, which maybe he can if the stars are aligned and reality is whatever we wish it to be.

Having mentioned Jack and the game of baseball, let me give you some opinions that come close to being hard cold facts, not wishes. First of all, baseball is the most boring game in the world next to cricket. I don’t know how to play cricket, which is the only reason I rank it second. CNN Sports did an actual survey of how much time during an average two hour and 39 minute game that baseball players are actually moving – you know, swinging a bat or running to first base. Five minutes and 13 seconds! The rest of the time the boys of summer are actually just standing around, scratching you know where, and spitting tobacco juice onto the nice green grass. Most disgusting, I’d say. And why, I wonder, does a baseball “season” consist of 162 individually boring games? In football you only need 16 or so to declare a champion, in boxing sometimes three minutes or less.

Towards A Recovery Of The Conservative Imagination

The Autumn of the Middle Ages

by Friedrich Hansen 

The American journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, interviewing Adolf Hitler before WW II, captured the German Führer, who after he introduced himself in German, with a motion to the throngs that awaited him, began speaking: “Tell the Americans that life moves forward, always forward, irrevocably forward.” 

Was Hitler a progressive or conservative? Certainly a difficult and irritating question which cannot be answered straight forwardly - however it symbolizes how much blurred the features of Western progress have become. The aim of this essay is to separate those blurred features by tracing them back to their roots in antiquity, and in the process referring to Jerusalem or Judaism with the same confidence that we invest in Athens and Greek philosophy. 

Anybody who has looked into this matter, as for instance Leo Strauss has done, will be surprised to observe that the enlightenment thinkers had disposed of three Western heritages, here represented with Rome, Athens and Jerusalem, with equal insouciance. The justification for this arrogance was nothing more than revolutionary urge or unquenchable desire for change identified by some as the birth of mindless progress. Against this the most perspicuous attitude of conservatives remained strong until recently, namely their reluctance to countenance the remaking of the world,  perhaps out of a deep respect for the contrast between the marvels of divine creation and our limited human intelligence, particularly in understanding the divine nexus between generalities and particulars or between the eternal and the immediate. After many losses in the culture wars the Christian resistance against the progressing sexual revolution has been all but broken, argues Rod Dreher.

Not for nothing political conservatism begins with Edmund Burke (1729-97), who regarded the separation or extraction of generalities from particulars or contingencies as almost impious. Firm moorings of universalist’ ideas in particularism could be called the Jewish genius, albeit not recognized to my knowledge by Burke. To the contrary it might even have inspired his Whig criticism of the Tory variety of conservatism, that “nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than the frailty and passion of a man. It is like that of the principle of evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil.” (Russel Kirk “Burke and the Philosophy of Prescription”, in: Edmund Burke – Great Lives Observed, ed. by Isaac Kramnick, spectrum books, Prentice Hill; New Jersey 1974, p. 138)

Ideological struggles and abstract ideas was not the natural domain of Burke, rather he was forced into that realm by the circumstances of the French Revolution, Russel Kirk tells us. Burke felt drawn to the conservative rejection equally of Rousseau’s romanticism, the rationalism of Voltaire and the Philosophes as well as the English rendition of it by Thomas Paine and John Locke. The prescience of Burke can be fathomed by his fierce attacks on Rousseau, the one and only surviving enlightenment prophet – post-modernity self-expression being the latest version of the noble savage - and therefore in my view the principal adversary of conservatives. However the confusion among the liberal Whigs could only be calmed temporarily by Burke and would soon wreak havoc on the conservative cause in the 19th century. By then the utilitarian variety of Whigs shared with collectivists the fatal redefinition of traditional Jewish sexual restraint and self-government as liberation of all duties and inhibitions – presented by Kirk as the “reform catalogue” underwritten by utilitarian and socialist reformers alike (Ibid, p.139):  The deist God was shared by Whigs and Rousseau; also on the agenda: man is by nature good; abstract reason to guide societal change; inexorable progress of humanity; choosing future over tradition. 

Guaranteed Income, Pay Limits – The New Drugs of Public Life?

There are clever ways to ruin a successful society

by George Handlery

We know that there are no truly local and thereby isolated developments. No criminal insanity that becomes the law of a foreign land will rest in the “Half-Baked Oddities Museum”. Be certain that what you filed as “how did those nuts come up with that?” will be presented to your community to save it and the world.

Bringing coal to Manchester is a deed that responds to a need that is already filled. Knowing that, we could avoid the critique of measures to which the title refers. It is unlikely that the readers, not being inmates of closed institutions, need arguments against the capping salaries to twelve times of the lowest paid by a firm. So, this piece does not intend to recruit support but warns, “You are next”. 

A word is needed about the unlikely venue of the imbecility. Switzerland is a success story where anything above 3% unemployment is a “crisis”. High-tech and luxury exports thrive. The currency is stable; credit costs are low without manipulation. All this regardless of major disadvantages. This is a small landlocked country inhabited by four nationalities, three of which are the people of state across the border. Add to this the climate and little arable land. This explains why, even in the 19th century, poverty was general and communities financed the emigration of their superfluous eaters.

With that said, one could conclude that we have a case of success – confirmed by a top rank in global competitiveness. Not so, at least not for the Left, the Greens, and armchair redeemers. This element is ideologically moved. It assumes that success by merit is impossible because any system to the right of Marx is built on exploitation. Therefore, without socialism, a just system is impossible. Success is explained away with an argument based upon the principle that “property is theft”. 

The End Of The American Imperium

So let the sun shine in

by David Stockman

Next week Congress can do far more than stop a feckless Tomahawk barrage on a small country which is already a graveyard of civil war and sectarian slaughter. By voting “no” it can trigger the end of the American Imperium - five decades of incessant meddling, bullying and subversion around the globe which has added precious little to national security, but left America fiscally exhausted and morally diminished.

Indeed, the tragedy of this vast string of misbegotten interventions - from the 1953 coup against Mossedegh in Iran through the recent bombing campaign in Libya - is that virtually none of them involved defending the homeland or any tangible, steely-eyed linkages to national security. They were all rooted in ideology—that is, anti-communism, anti-terrorism, humanitarianism, R2Pism, nation-building, American exceptionalism. These were the historic building blocks of a failed Pax Americana. Now the White House wants authorization for the last straw: Namely, to deliver from the firing tubes of U.S. naval destroyers a dose of righteous “punishment” that has no plausible military or strategic purpose. By the President’s own statements the proposed attack is merely designed to censure the Syrian regime for allegedly visiting one particularly horrific form of violence on its own citizens.

Well, really? After having rained napalm, white phosphorous, bunker-busters, drone missiles and the most violent machinery of conventional warfare ever assembled upon millions of innocent Vietnamese, Cambodians, Serbs, Somalis, Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Yemeni, Libyans and countless more, Washington now presupposes to be in the moral sanctions business?  That’s downright farcical.  Nevertheless, by declaring himself the world’s spanker-in-chief, President Obama has unwittingly precipitated the mother of all clarifying moments.

The screaming strategic truth is that America no longer has any industrial state enemies capable of delivering military harm to its shores: Russia has become a feeble kleptocracy run by a loud-mouthed thief and the communist party oligarchs in China would face a devastating economic collapse within months were it to attack its American markets for sneakers and Apples. So the real question now before Congress recurs: how is it possible that the peace-loving citizens of America, facing no industrial-scale military threat from anywhere on the planet, find themselves in a constant state of war?  The answer is that they have been betrayed by the beltway political class which is in thrall to a vast warfare state apparatus that endlessly invents specious reasons for meddling, spying, intervention and occupation.

Small Time Crooks

Why Wall Street Wants Larry Summers (and Why the Rest of Us Should Not)

By Laurence Kotlikoff

On the surface the debate about the Chairmanship of the Federal Reserve is about the merits of the two leading candidates, Lawrence Summers and Janet Yellen. But looks can be deceiving. President Obama leans toward Summers not on the merits but because the Wall Street bankers want him. Summers is one of the boys, and the bankers know that Summers will do their bidding, at the expense of everybody else.

Obama has declared that the two candidates' attitudes to inflation and unemployment are his main concern, entirely glossing over the fact that the Fed oversees and regulates the US banking system. Our recent near-death experience under Alan Greenspan's anti-regulation Fed chairmanship, aided and abetted by the deregulation pushed by Summers, should cause the President to think hard about banking regulation. Yet Obama and his tight-knit circle of advisors, almost all of whom are from Wall Street, are apparently too beholden to Wall Street to contemplate any serious regulation of an industry that continues to be out of control.

On the merits, Janet Yellen is the obvious candidate. For six years, 2004 to 2010, she was President of the San Francisco Fed. She is Deputy Chair of the Federal Reserve Board and former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. Her academic record is exemplary and distinguished. Her leadership of the Fed was widely admired, while Summers' Presidency of Harvard ended in a debacle. Yellen correctly foresaw the risks of the 2008 financial meltdown, while Summers famously missed it. She, not Summers, has hands-on experience running the Fed.

Moreover, she has not played the revolving door by cashing in on government service for personal wealth. That, of course, is why she is suspect on Wall Street. Yellen has proven herself to be less interested in her personal wealth than in her nation's monetary policy. For that reason, Wall Street leaders view her as dangerous.

Violence and the State : A Monstrous Pair

German Children Seized From Parents for Crime of Homeschooling

By GRACY HOWARD

The German government forcibly seized four children from their parents in a raid last Thursday in Darmstadt, Germany. Why? Because the Wunderlich children were home schooled – an illegal activity viewed by the German government as “child endangerment.”

Reports by World Net Daily and The Daily Mail said the police were armed with a battering ram, and held father Dirk Wunderlich to a chair while they removed the children. A team of 20 social workers, police, and special agents entered the home. According to a report by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), an organization that advocates for parental choice in education, the children were taken to unknown locations and officials told the parents they would not be seeing their children “anytime soon.”

In a phone interview, Wunderlich called the episode a “nightmare.” He said that for several days, he has felt “very down and crushed,” but is trusting that “this terrible thing is one piece in God’s big plan.”

Michael Donnelly, lawyer for HSLDA, said, “This shouldn’t happen in Germany. This is a very peaceful family.”

Obama dips toe in Syrian Rubicon

Iron has entered into the president's soul

By M K Bhadrakumar 

For the first time through the two-year old Syrian conflict, the United States has mentioned the holy cow - "boots on the ground''. The Secretary of State John Kerry has pleaded that the US Congress should approve the use of American ground troops although the Obama administration may not intend to take recourse to such action. 

This is a hugely significant turning point in the fast-developing scenario of US military intervention in Syria. There was added poignancy that Kerry was speaking at a congressional hearing on Tuesday with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seated beside him. 

Kerry's careful choice of words indicated that the deployment of ground troops in Syria is very much in the consideration zone of the White House. "I don't want to take off the table an option that might or might not be available to a president of the United States to secure our country," Kerry said. 

He then went on to add the caveat that President Obama would exercise such an option of deploying ground troops in Syria if there is a potential threat of chemical weapons falling into the hands of extremists. As he put it,

In the event Syria imploded, for instance, or in the event there was a threat of a chemical weapons cache falling into the hands of [al-Qeda affiliate] al-Nusra or someone else, and it was clearly in the interests of our allies and all of us - the British, the French and others - to prevent those weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of the worst elements.

A Fount of Economic Fallacies

Abenomics Held to ‘Teach Us Something’

By Pater Tenebrarum

After Japan has been berated by Western economists for more than 20 years, the mad-cap flight forward by the Abe administration is suddenly held to be able to 'teach us something' about what should be done with regard to economic stagnation. It is amazing what a little rally in the stock market and a few highly suspect GDP releases can accomplish.

As the LA Times writes in a recently published article entitled “Japan's economy is bouncing back, offering a possible model for U.S.”, 'Abenomics' (i.e., the same hoary inflationism that has been tried over and over again since John Law) is where it's at. The article is interesting mainly because it is a fount of economic fallacies on a par with Shinzo Abe's policies. An excerpt: 

“After two decades of economic stagnation, once-mighty Japan is beginning to revive — under policies that some experts say could offer lessons to the still-struggling economies of the United States and Europe.

While the Eurozone tries to break out of recession and the U.S. economic recovery remains anemic, Japan has begun to grow at an encouraging rate.

Magical Thinking Drags on Economics

Government Debt and Capital Destruction 

Many economists often attempt to set arbitrary thresholds. For example, if debt hits X% of GDP (or whatever measure) then it is “too” large and “impedes economic growth”. This article cites Carmen Reinhart attempting to do just this. It is the wrong approach entirely.

To understand why, let’s look at productive debt and contrast with government debt. If Joe borrows money to build a factory to produce Supersmart phones, then paying the interest and principle on this bond does not impede anything. His revenues would not exist without borrowing the money, and so we can say with certainty that this debt is good for Joe, it is good for Joe’s customers, and it is good for everyone else including Joe’s employees, Joe’s vendors, etc.

By contrast, what if John borrows to live a lavish lifestyle that his income would not otherwise support? EVERY PENNY spent to service this debt is a drag on John. At first, he was seemingly able to buy things without real cost. But when the first credit card bill comes due, then he incurs cost without being able to buy things. There is no magic number, no arbitrary threshold, no line in the sand. This debt is bad for John, and for everyone else that John touches. (I don’t think that there would be much, if any, consumer lending in a world where savers had to lend their hard-earned gold, a world in which the Fed was not the ultimate source of credit, but that is a different discussion).

The Three Types of Austerity

Without growth, Europe is heading for a train wreck

by Frank Hollenbeck

Reading the financial press, one gets the impression there are only two sides to the austerity debate: pro-austerity and anti-austerity. In reality, we have three forms of austerity. There is the Keynesian-Krugman-Robert Reich form which promotes more government spending and higher taxes. There is the Angela Merkel form of less government spending and higher taxes, and there is the Austrian form of less spending and lower taxes. Of the three forms of austerity, only the third increases the size of the private sector relative to the public sector, frees up resources for private investment, and has actual evidence of success in boosting growth.

Let’s take a closer look at the Merkel form of austerity being implemented in Europe in which governments “plan” to cut their spending and raise tax revenues. Of course, “planned” cuts are not actual cuts. Four years after the crash of 2008, the UK government had only implemented 6 percent of planned cuts in spending and only 12 percent of planned cuts in benefits. In almost all European countries, government spending is higher today than it was in 2008. A new study by Constantin Gurdgiev of Trinity College in Dublin examined government spending as a percentage of GDP in 2012 compared with the average level of pre-recession spending (2003–2007). Only Germany, Malta, and Sweden had actually cut spending.

Unintended Consequences

They’re of no concern to ideological crusaders and headstrong dogmatists

By THOMAS SOWELL 

One of the many unintended consequences of the political crusade for increased homeownership among minorities, and low-income people in general, has been a housing boom and bust that left many foreclosed homes that had to be rented, because there were no longer enough qualified buyers.

The repercussions did not stop there. Many homeowners have discovered that when renters replace homeowners as their neighbors, the neighborhood as a whole can suffer.

The physical upkeep of the neighborhood, on which everyone’s home values depend, tends to decline. “Who’s going to paint the outside of a rented house?” one resident was quoted as saying in a recent New York Times story.

Renters also tend to be of a lower socioeconomic level than homeowners. They are also less likely to join neighborhood groups, including neighborhood watches to keep an eye out for crime. In some cases, renters have introduced unsavory or illegal activities into family-oriented communities of homeowners that had not had such activities before.

The “Iron Triangle” of poor incentives

MIT professor: global warming is a ‘religion’

By Michael Bastasch 

Throughout history, governments have twisted science to suit a political agenda. Global warming is no different, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions,” writes Lindzen in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

According to Lindzen, scientists make essentially “meaningless” claims about certain phenomenon. Activists for certain causes take up claims made by scientists and politicians respond to the alarmism spread by activists by doling out more research funding. — creating an “Iron Triangle” of poor incentives.

“How can one escape from the Iron Triangle when it produces flawed science that is immensely influential and is forcing catastrophic public policy?” Lindzen asks.

The Arab Spasm

In the Middle East, all bets are off when deluded Westerners spring into action

By Peter Hitchens 

IT IS BECAUSE we no longer understand our own societies that we cannot understand other countries. We learn little from their problems and crises because we have stopped thinking about our own constitutions, laws, and liberties. The disappointment of the supposed Arab Spring—better described as an Arab Spasm—follows only a few years after the similar broken hopes that attended the fall of communism. Also cast aside are the brief delusion that China would become free once its people owned automobiles, and the theory that countries that hosted McDonald’s burger bars would never go to war with each other. The last of these optimistic fancies was blown to pieces when Russia and Georgia, both thoroughly colonized by the Big Mac empire, fought their savage little conflict in 2008.

The abiding belief that we can plant democracy anywhere, and that it will then flourish in harmony and love thereafter, is never cured by facts or upset by anomalies. It is immune to warnings. And whenever intelligent people ignore facts and defy reason, something interesting is happening. What is it this time? 

When George W. Bush first suggested that democracy might be brought to the Middle East—the last wretched excuse for his Iraq adventure—a few haggard skeptics wearily pointed out that there might be a problem with this scheme. Put simply, majority rule in these countries would inevitably mean Islamist rule. In several of them, divided between Sunni and Shia, it would also mean sectarian rule and a choice between cruel repression and civil war. Enthusiasts for liberal intervention dismissed these doubts as “simplistic,” one of those words always used by people who want to appear cleverer than they are. But for some years the question was not tested. Now it has been, and the simplistic skeptics have been shown to be right in every particular, most especially in Egypt, where nice liberal-minded ACLU types are currently excusing a classic army putsch. Yet for some reason it is still considered impolite for those of us who were right to laugh and jeer at those who were wrong. I am not sure why. Mockery is a good teacher, and leaves a lasting mark on the sort of mind that is untouched by ordinary criticism or mere facts.

Screw the periphery, hail the core

The Global Economy Suffers From Hypothermia

By Raul Ilargi

We've used the analogy before, in particular to describe what happened to the Roman Empire during the latter days of its existence. Looking around various economies in the world today, the same analogy once again comes to mind. One might say that what we see these days is analogous to the more advanced stages of hypothermia.

Early hypothermia may show in nothing more than cold feet, in itself an amusing analogy perhaps. But a body that is exposed to extreme cold over longer periods of time will at some point start to exhibit symptoms such as frostbite, which are the result of the core of the body trying to save itself at the cost of the periphery, the extremities. Typically, a human body, for instance, will lose its toes first because the heart can no longer pump enough blood (heat) to them and at the same time keep the body's core above a minimum temperature.

In our economies we see the same pattern. It is not generally looked at or even recognized, however, since 99% of us live in denial of the possibility that such a thing would even be an option. This is a direct consequence of the fact that, first, all major news makers and decision makers reside in the core, and second, that saving that core while letting the extremities die off is somehow seen as a good thing. Post-crisis policies around the globe are directed at saving the financial system, not the people the crisis has pushed into poverty. Since these people are not seen as crucial to the survival of the core, and the system as a whole, they are - almost ritually - sacrificed on the system's economic altar.

In a reason-driven society one would expect a discussion on the viability and the intrinsic value of the system itself, but our global economic system, as I've said many times before, exhibits far more symptoms of a religion than a rational scheme. Our "analysis" of the system and the crises it goes through takes place in the part of our brain that deals with belief rather than rational thought. Therefore, we are bound, nay, certain, to get this wrong. You might think that a body can survive minus a few digits, but that is questionable, not in the least, to stick with the hypothermia analogy, because additional problems and afflictions such as gangrene are a major threat to the body's ultimate survival.

As Coal Plants Shut Down, United Kingdom Faces a Power Crunch

The coming close encounters of the blackout kind

An increasingly strained grid will power the lights of London and the rest of the United Kingdom, as the country shuts down its coal plants and awaits new ones.

By Thomas K. Grose

London at night sparkles with beautiful lighting, from the 11,500 lights that brighten the Edwardian facade of iconic department store Harrods to the 4,000 that illuminate the outline of Albert Bridge, spanning the River Thames. But are these popular tourist attractions—and the rest of the United Kingdom—at risk of going dark?

British authorities have been issuing some dire-sounding warnings. In February, the man then in charge of Ofgem, Britain's industry regulator, warned of an impending "near-crisis" of energy supply, calling the situation "horrendous" and likening it to being on a roller coaster headed "downhill—fast." Deputy Minister Nick Clegg was quoted saying that he was working to "keep the lights on." (See related quiz: "What You Don't Know About Electricity.")

In June, Ofgem released a capacity assessment warning that "risks to electricity security of supply over the next six winters have increased since our last report in October 2012." The report warned that Britain's ability to provide spare electric power capacity could plunge to between 2 to 5 percent, about half what it is now.

The main reason for the possible crunch: Britain is closing a number of aging coal-fired plants—as well as some oil and nuclear ones—to meet European Union environmental laws. One fifth of the existing power stations are scheduled to close over the next ten years. According to Reuters, the U.K. is set to lose more than 12 gigawatts of generating capacity in the next two years.  Currently, the country operates 13 coal plants, but nearly half are slated to close by 2015, and all of them could be shut down by 2023, according to government figures.

Higher Prices and Supply Pinches

Though Britain does face a bleak shortfall of energy in the coming years, "consumers are more at risk from higher prices than blackouts," said Wilf Wilde, executive director of the Durham Energy Institute at Durham University. Indeed, Ofgem was quick to say in its recent assessment that it "does not consider disruption to supplies is imminent or likely, providing the industry manages the problem effectively."

The potential for central bankers to do harm remains bigger than that to do good

Markets reject ‘forward guidance’ – for good reason

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

The British media is obsessed with Mark Carney, the new boss at the Bank of England, who, this week, made his first public appearance as governor with a speech in Nottingham. There were adoring comments about his looks (the vague resemblance with George Clooney, supported with plenty of photographs) and his voice (deep, confident, reassuring), and as most journalists are more in awe of money and wealth than they are willing to admit, references to his generous pay package were also not missing. But there was also consternation that the words of the ‘most talented central banker of his generation’ seemed to carry so little weight with the markets.

The Wall Street Journal had previously described Carney as ‘a pioneer of forward guidance’. Forward guidance is the allegedly new central bank technique of telling the market where policy will be heading (or rather, assuring the market where it will not be heading), supposedly in order to make policy more effective. Despite Mr. Carney’s repeated assurances that rates will only be moved higher when unemployment drops to a certain level (7% is Mr. Carney’s magic number) and that this will not occur until 2016, the market has recently been happily selling fixed income securities, and in the process, has allowed the forward curve to start pricing in earlier rate hikes. To Mr. Carney’s pledge to keep rates low, the market has practically been saying, in the words of the inimitable Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, ”Yeah, well, that’s just like…your opinion, man.”

Whether the market will be proven right and whether rates really will move higher earlier than Carney contemplates today, is a question we cannot answer. The future will tell. (Personally, I remain of the opinion that the talk of ‘tapering’ in the US is overdone, that central banks will not manage a smooth ‘exit’ from their position of extreme accommodation, and certainly not anytime soon.) But the market is undoubtedly correct to not allow itself to be guided in its assessment of the economy’s future performance, and therefore future policy, by the BoE’s new super-bureaucrat.

On Decadence

The choice is ours to make

by Charles Hill

Decline” we Americans and Westerners mope about daily; “fall” most of us still hope to postpone. Decadence, it would seem, is the mean between the two.

The much-overused decline and fall trope, fixed permanently into our abstract vocabulary ever since Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire took a then-experimentally post-Christian Western Europe by storm, was meant to demonstrate the mortality of all human constructions. Oddly enough, however, Gibbon did it in spite of the Enlightenment’s discovery of progress by retreating to the oldest trope of all—the cyclical, organic metaphor of birth, growth, decay, death. Much of the 19th century was spent trying to reconcile progress with the cyclical via the uses and abuses of Darwin. In the 20thcentury, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee and Paul Kennedy rejoined that intellectual dispute, traceable to remote antiquity: Either the human condition is cyclical, like the seasons and the life cycle, or it is linear, starting someplace, going someplace, with a positive goal ahead. 

German, Briton and American all knew that America was perhaps the key to the answer. The greatest event in history, the discovery of the New World, had apparently put America on the linear track, destined to escape a cyclical fate. The presumption had a religious basis made clear by St. Augustine’s diatribe against cyclical thinking in Book XII of The City of God, and it even waxed imperial in Virgil’s time-transcending Aeneid, a very American epic, as illustrated by those three Virgilian quotations on the dollar bill. Like Gibbon, Spengler and Toynbee ultimately sited their declinism in the cyclical rhythms of life. Kennedy, American and steeped in all things Christian and imperial, instead found the fatal flaw in linearity. It was linearity of the Faustian kind: The rise to wealth and power generates delusions of inevitably more successful adventures ahead until “overstretch”, a form of national self-indulgence, brings down the entire enterprise.

Kennedy’s approach seems to have been inspired more by mechanics or physics than by that most influential, and also ancient, variation on the “rise and fall” theme, that of moral decay, or decadence. Livy’s Roman Republic maintained its manly virtues because “they turned away from a thousand daily temptations”, but, Tacitus said, the Empire was doomed as Romans “indulged every desire as soon as it came to mind.” George Kennan extended the Roman experience with decadence to our own:

Poor old West: succumbing feebly, day by day, to its own decadence, sliding with debility on the slime of its own self-indulgent permissiveness; its drugs, its crime, its pornography, its pampering of the youth, its addiction to its bodily comforts, its rampant materialism and consumerism—and then trembling before the menace of the wicked Russians . . . .1

Far more seriously and exhaustively than the supercilious Kennan, the French-born American historian Jacques Barzun took up the matter in his monumental From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present. 

Published in 2000 when Barzun was 94, From Dawn to Decadence covered a half-millennium of “Western Cultural Life”, describing four phases in nearly encyclopedic detail: from Luther’s Reformation—really a revolution that tore the West apart—to the Scientific Revolution, which provided the basics for universal material progress; from the Royal Courts of Europe to “the Tennis Court” of the French Revolution; from Goethe’s Faust as a driver of the modern era to modernism’s fragmentation of arts and letters; and from the mass illusion of a socialist utopia to the horrors of the Great War and finally on to the late 20th-century protest mob’s gleeful chant of “Hey, hey, ho, ho: Western Civ Has Got to Go!” Across the centuries in Barzun’s chronicle history moves in both a linear and cyclical manner. An explosion of dynamic individualism propels civilization forward toward a better future; but that same dynamic proves incapable of virtuous control, causing greed, violence and deepening self-indulgence to spiral society downward toward chaos. Barzun liberates us from the tyranny of either-or, but fails to offer much hope of escaping decadence in the process.

But pace Barzun, if America is exceptional, might it not be an exception to the inevitability of decadence? It is, at the least, a matter to which Americans have been attentive over much of their history.

Early on, Americans sensed that they were somehow exempt from Old World cycles of rise and fall, but that sense was nonetheless powerfully counteracted by a continuing, pervasive fear of decadence. The Puritans were consciousness personified, assiduous diary-keepers who were ever watchful for the slightest signs of grace or degeneracy. Yale was founded because Abraham Pierson and other divines concluded that Harvard was becoming doctrinally depraved. Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” revolved around the biblical warning of the prophet Amos that “thy feet will slide in due time.” Thomas Jefferson sought to refute the theory of the French naturalist Buffon that the plants, animals and even geographical features of the New World were degenerate, declining and weakening as a result of the fetid swamps and clogged forests that bespread the Western Hemisphere. Jefferson, outraged, sent troops to New England to gather evidence on the size and strength of the bull moose, and later instructed Lewis and Clark to be on the lookout for mastodons.

Thought Control In The Name Of Mother Earth - Part 3

"I have seen the future, and it works."

This is the third part of a three-part essay.

by Steve Kogan

In Assignment in Utopia (1937), Eugene Lyons offers what were at the time perhaps the best eye-witness accounts of Stalinism as a state religion. He was UPI's journalist in Moscow during the early years of Stalin's rule (1928-34), which coincided with Stalin's first Five Year Plan, and, despite all we have learned since then, his first-hand observations remain both vivid and strange to this day. Among several websites that I chose at random, for example, all give 1928 -1932 as the official dates of the plan, but none comments on the transformation of five years into four. Lyons literally saw how it happened. In his chapter "Two Plus Two Equals Five," he describes the frenzied proclamations of the arithmetic that would later appear as an instrument of psychological torture in George Orwell's 1984:

Optimism ran amuck. Every new statistical success gave another justification for the coercive policies by which it was achieved. Every setback was another stimulus to the same policies. The slogan "The Five Year Plan in Four Years" was advanced, and the magic symbols "5-in-4" and "2+2=5" were posted and shouted throughout the land... . Under their pseudo-scientific exterior of charts and blueprints the planners were mystics in a trance of ardor.

Even this "trance" was centrally planned, and it was set in motion by Stalin himself several years after the death of Lenin, when he took control of the state. The public declaration of his ascendancy, as Lyons witnessed it, took place during the May Day celebrations in Moscow in 1929. From that point on, he writes, Stalinism became the official religion of the regime. Lyons notes that "Russia is a nation of icon-worshipers. Symbols have a potency beyond anything in the West," and on this May Day "The great shaggy head of Karl Marx receded in the ... decorations," while images of Stalin were "lifted to a place of equality with Lenin in the outward symbolism of the faith."

After the wreckage of the First World War, the Bolshevik seizure of the state, and the civil war, the process of environmental devastation, coupled with the human cost, would now be raised to untold levels of horror. Two forces were now combined in one: "Stalin - and industrialization. Those were the two ideas from this time forward. They were blended. They became interchangeable. Stalin's dark, fleshy visage came to mean smokestacks, oil derricks, scaffolding, tractors, and each of these things came to mean Stalin." The celebrated "workers' state" lost whatever reality it might once have had now that "The last pretense that the workers owned the state was dropped - the state frankly owned the workers." The prisons of the Gulag turned ownership into servitude, and, in the wake of the first show trial (1928), which was aimed at engineers dubbed "wreckers," Stalin's grip on the nation became absolute. In Lyons' words, "The population of the slave-labor camps was now estimated in the millions, and thought control was made increasingly rigid."

To enforce what Lyons calls "a conquest of the peasantry," Stalin initiated a similar reign of terror over the countryside:

Hell broke loose in seventy thousand Russian villages... . A population as large as all of Switzerland's or Denmark's was stripped clean of all their belongings - not alone their land and homes and cattle and tools, but often their last clothes and food and household utensils - and driven out of their villages... . The total was beyond reckoning. Forcible migration of millions could not be organized or provisioned, but must proceed in fearful confusion. Tens of thousands died of exposure, starvation, and epidemic diseases while being transported, and no one dared guess at the death rate in the wilderness where the liquidated population was dispersed.

These and even earlier reports were swamped by decades of Soviet propaganda until they were corroborated in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic study The Gulag Archipelago (1974).

It was only in the mid-1980s, however, under Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, that detailed information on the ecological catastrophes in the USSR began to emerge. The sheer scope of destruction, both in time and space, roughly corresponds to the duration and geographical dimensions of the Gulag; yet even a well-informed researcher such as Paul R. Josephson has found a way to describe the industrial world, the American scene in particular, as though it corresponds to what happened in Russia. He does this by viewing the world in light of "brute force technologies," a catch-phrase that he calls his "analytical tool" for examining the "worldwide" transformation of nature. What was once an organic phenomenon has now become a scientifically engineered resource factory, in which the mass production of food, electricity, etc. is depicted as a kind of "Fordism" in the natural world. Like other environmentalists, Josephson claims a deep and special expertise, so much so that nations which have come under the spell of "big technology," be they as different as the former Soviet Union, Japan, Germany, Norway, the United States, and Brazil, "share more than they can truly fathom." As he writes in his prologue to Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (2002): "In most cases, the economic and political systems, whatever form they may take, and nature itself matter less than the way in which brute force technology is embraced, developed, and diffused." The term thus serves the same purpose as "the rape of the earth," "The Plunderer," and "the matricidal spirit," which is to advance a one-world concept that trumps every consideration except saving the planet.