The strait up truth!

“The rightist rhetoric turns against itself as its followers engage in invidious distinctions.”

Interesting. You don’t see Veblen’s “invidious distinction” trotted out very often these days which is a pity. More the pity that it is misused in quote above. It’s probably uncharitable to take cheap shots at the article, which is a beautiful, anti-fa inspired, fairytale history of the modern age. I just wish more care would be used for Marxist and non-marxist socialist phrases such as “class struggle” and “invidious distinction” because it impossible to detest them adequately when they are improperly deployed.

The term “invidious distinction” was coined by Thornstein Veblen in his seminal “The Theory of the Leisure Class”, in which Veblen argues that one of the primary human motivations is to evoke envy in our fellows. Veblen thought that because all value is subjective/arbitrary, it’s quite reasonable to assume that the most efficient value signal is that which creates the most envy in other men. A man’s social standing is therefore efficiently established by status symbols that invoke envy such as a Rolex or a Mercedes. The peculiar consequence of this is that often, men desire a thing like a Rolex because other men want one, even up to the point when the object lacks any utility whatsoever other than signalling wealth, which itself is defined as having things that others want. Invidious distinction is therefore best evidenced through conspicuous consumption, however nearly all actions that do not have subsistence as their aim are undertaken to gain social standing or signal social standing by invoking envy.

Thus the quote above could be rewritten to be “The rightist rhetoric turns against itself as its followers engage in non-subsistence activities” which is kind of … dumb. If the author is prognosticating that the authoritarian new order will turn on itself, it’d be nice to know have a more substantive explanation than “non-subsistence activities”. Moreover, if the authoritarian new order is to shed it’s “shock troops” in exchange for “meritocrats” it’d be nice to know why. That’s my 2 cents, but I’m curious to know what others think of this curious tale! 🙂

The corruption of upwardly mobile middle-class rabble rousers will disillusion their voluntary followers. Arbitrary police and military repression usually extends to extortion and intimidation beyond the drug slums to the middle and working-class neighborhoods.

Also, the rise of AI, data mining, and complex algorithms, as well as the proliferation of electronic devices that record and analyze our private spaces is a pillar of the new order. Essentially, we are being watched by machines.

People need to reject the material order. Spiritual awakening is key.

Revolutionaries will find new ways to defeat these technology-based tactics. Dogwhistling, communication on a personal level (rather than by mass media or the internet), and old-fashioned tribalism should help. Also, leaderless resistance can play a role. Weaknesses will be found in the crumbling edifice, and many hands can chisel separately.

Infiltration and sabotage can also be applied.

Possibly unrelated, but maybe thought-provoking:

Consider the man they just arrested for the mail bomb scare. Reportedly, this person was a career criminal with drug dealing and grand theft on his record and he was caught in possession of a white van with decals on it depicting his targets. This man is a caricature of a Trump supporter, ready-made for the cable news broadcast. Does anyone else see the absurdity of it? Can this guy be for real?

The authoritarian New Order usually begins to decline through ‘internal rot’ – uber- profiteering and flagrant abuse of work.

” However sustaining their advance is conditional on dynamic economic growth ”
You cannot fool all people all the time.
Our Dutch Rutte governments now for some ten years have told us that the economy is growing, alas the average Dutchman by now knows that ‘there are lies, big lies, and statistics’, in other words, it may well be that the economy is growing, but the average Dutchman does not see his buying power increased.
On the contrary, those that work have a more or less constant buying power, those that do not work, for whatever reason: cannot find a job, permanent illness, retired, see quite well how their material position deteriorates steadily.

a better title for this article might have been ” what’s wrong with everything for dummies” ?

The alliance of big globalized bussiness and big Governments is an unbearable burden for most of the populations

Since the 70`s you have to work more and more and to study more and more for less and less

I foresee that if this continue in the next 20 years millions and millions of people will die of marginalization , of hunger , misery and grief .

The Left have abandoned the Working Class and embraced identity simply because central planning does not work

“Caricature of a Trump supporter”

Drug-dealing, grand theft.

These folks are eternal democrats.

Trump supporters are law-abiding folks who want a bit of middle-class normalcy back that disappeared when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992.

I’m surprised to be honest that the guy would not want more Hillary. Felons allowed to vote. Reasonably generous welfare.

This is the most important problem governments, and in the wider sense humanity is encountering.
The pendulum is incessantly swinging from center to right and than reverses from right to left.
Marx theories are totally one sided and do not solve anything. Extreme swing to the left brought at start enthusiasm of the working classes and for certain time progress of the humanity was phenomenal. But in time the progress did stop and population become lethargic and progress become stagnation leading to depression. Similar thing happens when pendulum is swinging to the right.
Eventually the purchasing power of the population diminishes to the size when crisis of the system is inevitable.
Most important task of the governments is to control the economy that the extent of the swings are small as possible.

Things seem to have improved in Asia since I first went abroad in 2000. In the US, on the other hand, life seems to have gotten more and more difficult.

If you had told me in 1993 when I left home that Gen Y of age 30 would live at home and that entire families of white people would be homeless or that MBA’s would have to work in Bistros at age 25 I would have said…you’re crazed.

The odd thing in the US is that it is the middle-class seems to have gotten hit the worst. The white underclass and blacks have always had it hard and poor. Much of the time they deserve it because they have babies at 19 and don’t go to college. But the destruction of the middle-class whites is quite phenomenal.

UNBEARABLE

It is unbearable for the middle-class. The underclass does not care. Big governments tend to be corrupt, so money talks.

If you live in the ghetto or the trailer park you have no expectations anyhow. You were not going to be a great citizen anyhow.

But for the middle-class things will be shocking.

…but will a new popular class struggle emerge?

I doubt that such a thing ever occurred to any substantial degree. “Popular” class struggles need to be seen for what they are; temporary expedients whereby one set of rulers uses the populace for their own ends and against their competitors.

Too many people get suckered into supporting “popular” movements and sometimes do gain temporary benefits, but when their handlers get what they want, the fun and games are over. The author noted the concept, saying,

Between the end of World War Two and the late 1940’s, the popular classes were able to secure democratic rights, populist reforms and social organization. [but then began]…bullying of traditional allies…

and he could just as well have added, betraying traditional allies, the lumpenproles, and middle class do-gooders and wannabes.

Commies, Zionists, Democrats, Republicans and Trumpettes, this is for you.:

“These people will take you and use you, Bella,� he* warned me, “and then they will throw you away.�

-Bella Dodd, School of Darkness Chap 9

*If I remember correctly, she was quoting Earl Browder, who was Chairman of the Communist Party USA, 1934–1945. Prior to that he was head of the CPUSA’s Agitprop activities. His words were prophetic, since he himself was tossed under the bus and he abandoned membership in the Commie Party.

But for the middle-class things will be shocking.

No “will be” about it.

You noted it in your comment #10 and my observations agree,

But the destruction of the middle-class whites is quite phenomenal.

The assault on the middle class has been taking place for decades and many people have been feeling it although most apparently still hope for some Messiah, and many of them apparently think either Hillaryena or the Trumpster was it. Where they get their faith I’ll never know.

Same thing in Spain ,and in most of western Europe I would say . The macroeconomy is going well for the chosen ones , and the microeconomy is going very bad for most of the population .

Consider the man they just arrested for the mail bomb scare. Reportedly, this person was a career criminal with drug dealing and grand theft on his record and he was caught in possession of a white van with decals on it depicting his targets. This man is a caricature of a Trump supporter, ready-made for the cable news broadcast. Does anyone else see the absurdity of it? Can this guy be for real?

“Breaking Proof of Deep State Hoax!�
“Clapper Talks About Cesar Sayoc Before He’s Named as Suspect!â€�

Video Link

Much of the time they deserve it because they… don’t go to college.

Wrong.

Schooling in the USA for some time been nothing more than babysitting and brainwashing and that’s by design. Completing college nowadays is mainly for immature, dependent losers especially since many of them will be burdened with a non-marketable degree and debt for decades and in any case, the majority will wind up as wage slaves anyway. The way to go now is to learn a trade, especially one that a person can practice independently and with low capital, and get to work, but the window for even that seems to be fast closing too.

If one has the talent (rare) sales can still be a good road to relative independence with no “collitch” needed.

“If you live in the ghetto or the trailer park you have no expectations anyhow. You were not going to be a great citizen anyhow.”

“But for the middle-class things will be shocking.”

Spot on, Jeff. I see remnants of the onetime middle class around me. People with a degree or advanced degree, people with identifiable special skills (accountancy, engineering) who guard their expertise as would a 15th century guild worker, people with decent table manners, people who regard themselves as removed from po’ White trash and ghetto Blacks.

Then their Fortune 500 company kicks them out of their corporate featherbed, they spend a year or two or more discovering their specialized skills are worth half of what they’d thought, and when they land a job, they’re expected to cook the books or sign off on dodgy products, acting as designated corporate fall guys in the event of an investigation.

When I was in university there was no Leftist programming. People were there to become engineers, IT specialists, doctors, nurses, businessmen, accounting.

You maybe had to take an “African-American studies” course but that was just to get enough credits to graduate.

Also, by the time most people went to college (when I did from 93-98) they were adults with opinions.

Sales is a diminishing field now with the internet.

A shrewd observation is my immediate reaction. Most likely true of the organised institutional left which, when it’s old product no longer sells doesn’t want to declare bankruptcy and shut up shop.

“Government exists to spend. The purpose of government is to serve the general welfare of the citizens, not just the military-industrial complex and the financial class. Didn’t we have a stimulus, oh, eight years ago? It was tiny and has not been entirely spent. As Yellen implied, we need more spending of the non-military kind (what Barney Frank memorably called “weaponized Keynesianismâ€� doesn’t stimulate).”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/leesheppard/2016/04/02/we-need-fiscal-policy/?fbclid=IwAR02l1AlZGMpapbTOdURjgRknx6Kai-24Z6fXBCXyBolgdgodvjSmYmXAdw#1c4e7dea8b40

This is what has been missing for over 40 years in the US, government’s role in the economy. When any politician brings up the fact that it’s time we used fiscal policy as it was designed, neoliberals have a socialism meltdown. Both parties have been taken over by the Kochtopus, the libertarian fascist ideology that hides behind the term “neoliberalism”. The ultimate goal of this zombie ideology that was thoroughly discredited in 2008 but continues to roam the earth is to replace nations with privately owned cities. This experiment was going on in Honduras, following the 2009 coup, until it was finally ended by a SC ruling that it was unconstitutional.

“In a libertarian society, there is no commons or public space. There are property lines, not borders. When it comes to real property and physical movement across such real property, there are owners, guests, licensees, business invitees and trespassers – not legal and illegal immigrants.â€� ~ Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute

This is the struggle – the struggle to maintain public space on a planet that was never meant to be owned in the first place.

The macroeconomy is going well for the chosen ones , and the microeconomy is going very bad for most of the population .

As always.

Whenever someone makes a broad comment about “the” economy, I begin to yawn. The distinction you make is a critical one.

You don’t have to live through a nuclear war to inherit a horrible life-all you have to do is be a middle-class person who suddenly finds yourself in the stinking underbelly of a city.

The urban white trash underclass and blacks don’t care. They’ve been on the street their entire life-stealing, pumping out kids they will abandon or abuse, drinking cider or strong lager in public, selling drugs, pulling scams, stealing, doing jail time.

They’ve always been penniless and lived from day to day-taking drugs, stealing cars, using prostitutes, breaking and entering.

A middle-class person expects that if they behave themselves and follow the rules, there is some sort of social contract. When they end up on the street, they have no idea how to get by.

It is one reason that middle-class whites have adopted working-poor characteristics. Binge drinking, tattoos, out-of-wedlock sex, interracial relationships. Fifty years ago, they had something to lose. If you got a tattoo on your neck, you were never going to be middle-class. It was a mark of white trash barbarity. If you had a kid out-of-wedlock, you were a prole. If you passed out in public high or drunk and got arrested it was a huge embarrassment.

Now of course, there is no reason for civility. The only people who get rich are thugs, athletes who can play a child’s game very well and porn stars like Stormy Daniels. If you behave decently, follow the rules and get a qualification it makes no difference…you might as well have been smoking crack all your life and left school at age 12.

For the 1% this is a good thing. They are living behind walls of money and power and do not give a shit whether someone has a desk and their name on it or whether they sleep in the road. Everyone outside the castle walls is just part of the teeming masses.

When I was in university there was no Leftist programming.

The whole country was “leftist” programmed since at least the 1920s and comments like yours demonstrate how effective it was and still is. It’s long been known that universities and colleges were hotbeds of Commie agitation and Upton Sinclair wrote about the subversion of schooling back in the ’20s with his “Goosestep” and his “The Goslings.”.

Many others wrote similar things. Here’s another.

Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

-Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934), Ch. 8, p84
https://archive.org/details/abcofreading00poun/page/84

Sales is a diminishing field now with the internet.

Depends, but it’s still better for some than wasting time, energy and money in skool; they’re the ones who don’t need to be tended like sheep.

My mid-Michigan university was considerably Polish Catholic from the auto factory towns like Flint.

A professor trying to convince people with relatives behind the Iron Curtain that Communism was a great thing would have had few believers. This was not a popular school of thought in heavily-Slavic industrial Midwest regions like Chicago or Detroit or Pittsburgh.

Of course that was the 90’s and the wall had just come down.

Upton Sinclair was a socialist himself.

Of course people who want to get an engineering or accounting degree will take the African-American studies course or adopt PC long enough to get the diploma so they can get a good salary.

Until this oft-repeated and intoxicating myth is abandoned,

The purpose of government is to serve the general welfare of the citizens…

one may as well abandon hope for improving the general welfare of anyone and I’d like to see some evidence that it was ever put into practice.

The idea that governments are instituted and exist for the benefit of the multitudes is not only historically inaccurate, but though a relatively recent pretext, is as quaint as it is cute.

“Almost all the governments, which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally, either on usurpation or conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent, or voluntary subjection of the people.�

David Hume, “On Government� (1777)
http://lf-oll.s3.amazonaws.com/titles/2472/Hume_OnGovernment1777.pdf

The assault on the middle class has been taking place for decades and many people have been feeling it although most apparently still hope for some Messiah

The vaunted middle class deserves everything they are getting. They consumed themselves into oblivion by living it up on credit. Their structural spending habits and demand for crap they couldn’t really afford is what created globalism in the first place. It wasn’t something “done to them” by evil elites, they willingly did it to themselves. To top it all off, in their bottomless selfishness they refused to have enough children to ensure the material prosperity and strength of the nation going forward.

The middle class, the bourgeoisie, was never a product of superior virtue or ability. It is a product of machine industry and the numerous special vocation-classes the machine has bred up in the course of its development, not discluding financial services and the clerical needs of large scale bureaucracy. It is neither a solid peasantry nor a minor aristocracy, but an unjustly enriched urban mob.

The disappearance of this aberration from the field of history is both inevitable and desirable. These shallow, consumerist idiots have been the ultimate source of nearly every social dysfunction we suffer from, from deficit spending to sportsball infatuation to the collapse of religion, education, and the family. The demise of the middle class testifies to the intrinsic emptiness of this way of life, and the fading out of the ideas of money and its political weapon, democracy. Empty suburbs, empty shopping malls, empty sports stadia will be all that remains in another three generations, once the decimated, depopulated masses adjust the harsher and more sober conditions of Caesarism.

I agree that central planning does not work with the caveat that what is meant is that it does not work for the average person; it works out very well for the politically-connected at Murder, Inc.

Having said this, I am not so sure the Left was ever really for the working class and has merely dressed the Emperor in new clothes for the next act of the pursuit of meaninglessness and nihilism.

Finally, the Right is not opposed to central-planning either; they just redefine it but this is just semantics and sophistry.

“Solid peasantry” “Aristocratic nobility”

What do you want? India? Philippines? Why do you think a load of Indians are fleeing Mexico which is owned by a few Spanish aristocrats?

Not to mention that with no middle-class the 1% are completely unaccountable.

Religion? Jews are doing alright. Catholics in the Northeast are doing better than the Evangelical Protestants. So are Hindus, I’d bet.

People become Evangelical Protestants for the same reason Muslims in poor countries go to the mosque 5 times a day.

Social dysfunction is most evident below the earning power of $50,000 a year, not above it.

Of course the GOP always got the poor white prole vote in order to stagnate the wages of the middle-class. Eventually, you end up with a country where the wealthy have to live behind walls while the masses teem outside…just look at Honduras.

Another positive proof that the all thing is a hoax.

Leaflets on the windows.
Leaflets on the windows can be done two ways.
One way to do it that when somebody like something he smacks it on the window. The windows will have an empty spaces because of mismatch,
Other way is to do it with with huge number of leaflets select the best and put on the windows organized so there will not be empty spaces.

The Left was doomed to fail in the US because blacks and Mestizos endanger white working class to enough of a degree that they will side with law-and-order police tactics, gun lobbies, lower taxes.

It causes them hardship but few of them relish not less of a police presence, a ban on handguns or more taxes with their stagnated wages.

The GOP can thus be assured of a white prole voter base.

I’m curious to know what others think of this curious tale!

Well….a well presented comment, so my answer is: not much. Or, disagree with Veblen.

Don’t think that envy is the thing. Power is.

Power over the world around us, and that includes people. Especially people.

And, on top of it, the current “left” in West (for a lack of better world), seek that power because of some deeply psychological issues.
Not quite sure what those are. Doesn’t matter. The result, their obsessions with “equality”, “identity” and such, is more than obvious.
Or, to use analogy on a street level: it’s not important why this bitch is shrilling at me. What is important is only can I floor her without consequences (people passing by, cameras , easy escape routes and such). Something like that.

As for the current class thing, articles like this or not, we are going to have the polarization of haves/not haves accelerated. Middle class turn now. Maybe 20 % of them will stay “up”, but the rest will keep sinking to the bottom within next 5 -10 years, IMHO.

The nature of the beast.

The Left have abandoned the Working Class and embraced identity simply because central planning does not work

I guess you are onto something there.

You stated,

When I was in university there was no Leftist programming.

When I refuted your claim, you changed it to,

A professor trying to convince people with relatives behind the Iron Curtain that Communism was a great thing would have had few believers.

You just used what’s known as a straw man fallacy and that ain’t nice. In fact, it’s a tactic often employed by “Lefties,” so you’ve apparently learned that lesson at least. Most likely acquired the skill from them without even realizing it. In fact, I shouldn’t have to tell you that one can be a “Leftie” without necessarily being a Commie. As you noted, socialism qualifies too, and parts of it would have probably resonated with the population you described.

Upton Sinclair was a socialist himself.

So what? The fact is common knowledge. What, exactly was your point? My point was that even a socialist could recognize that the whole country was being subverted and that one of the means was for “Leftists” to infiltrate the schooling systems and he was appalled enough to write two books about the subject.

Of course that was the 90′s…

By that time the country effectively gone Commie for decades. Despite the rhetoric of the manipulators, this country has been “Leftist” for practically ever.

The dumb ass middle class allowed this to happen because moving up isn’t important to them. What is important to them is stupid shit on TV like Dancing With The Stars, America’s Got Talent (one talent most don’t have is using their heads) and other inane crap. Most are quite happy to just get by.

Superb comment. You are correct on all points.

I still believe that a strong middle class would be closer to ideal than what we now have, but it would have to be one based on hard work, sound reasoning, and virtue, all of which have been succumbed to subversion and stupidity a long time ago and it’s impossible for me to believe those things will develop any time soon.

Schools have long been known as part of the process.

I wonder what the advocates of “higher education” will have to say about this.:

For the giants among the elite (themselves rather impressive intellectuals) have seen to it that experts are a glut upon the market. (Mr. Stryker, did you read that?) Their strategy has been awesome: they have created, in the disguise of what most citizens consider a college education, a vast system of unimaginative vocational training paid for by the very parents who consider it an escalator to power for their children and the key to the general welfare. It has been a covert coup d’etat of almost classic proportions,

A NEW HISTORY OF LEVIATHAN Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State EDITED BY RONALD RADOSH AND MURRAY N. ROTHBARD,1972, p5
https://mises.org/system/tdf/A%20New%20History%20of%20Leviathan_2.pdf?file=1&type=document

The product of such an education who joins the system becomes an intellectual who can only be described as an efficient (and often well-paid) combination of court jester, royal favorite ever looking over his shoulder, brilliant eunuch, and uncommitted devil’s advocate.

A NEW HISTORY OF LEVIATHAN A NEW HISTORY OF LEVIATHAN Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State EDITED BY RONALD RADOSH AND MURRAY N. ROTHBARD,1972, p5
https://mises.org/system/tdf/A%20New%20History%20of%20Leviathan_2.pdf?file=1&type=document

I am not so sure the Left was ever really for the working class and has merely dressed the Emperor in new clothes for the next act …

Without a doubt, and there are many examples. Here’s one, and it’s probably typical.:

Anna Damon …[was] …An important auxiliary member of the Politburo, Anna was the daughter of a wealthy Chicago family. She was assigned to work with Charles Ruthenberg, the first secretary of the American Communist Party….she exercised a powerful influence over the rising Party leadership. She was reputed to have developed for the Party such figures as Earl Browder, Roy Hudson, Charles Krumbein, and others of the Politburo.

I had first met her in the thirties when she was executive secretary of the powerful International Labor Defense, a mass organization with great financial resources and wide contacts with the legal profession. This was the committee which organized communist participation in the Scottsboro and Herndon cases, and in the Gastonia and other labor strikes.

A friend took me one evening to her home on East Sixteenth Street and I remember my amazement that a Communist Party member should be living in such a lavish apartment, with fine paintings and a terrace that looked out over the city and the East River. Marcantonio, over whom she also had great influence and whom she had trained in left-wing politics, was there that evening; and so were Robert Minor and his wife. Everyone except Marc wore evening clothes. When we left, I said a little thoughtfully to the friend who had brought me, “This could be the new aristocracy of our country.”

-Bella Dodd, School of Darkness, chap 12
http://genus.cogia.net/chap12.php

Social dysfunction is most evident below the earning power of $50,000 a year, not above it.

Evident or not, there’s plenty of social dysfunction above $50,000 too, at least that’s the view from my perch.

If you were older I would call you a Reagan Democrat. Or maybe you are.

Communism requires a centralized government and the state governments prevent this. Jews themselves, who apparently wield disproportionate power in the US, seem to be having a grand old time with capitalism. Somehow most of them find a way to make money.

Socialism cannot really work and was not going to work under Obama because it requires a homogeneous population that sees society as a family.

This would mean an enormous burden upon whites and Asians whose wages are already stagnated. The 1% would never want regulation.

Socialists would want gun control. No white prole wants his gun taken away who lives in Section 8 and you would be surprised how many liberals in the cities have a handgun in their closet. People turn gun lovers as fast as Charles Bronson did in the Death Wish film.

More articles like this.

Non-public sector pension funds have steadily been phased out since the 1980s and replaced with tax-deferred savings accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs. We are facing a huge senior poverty crisis among the baby boomers as the average person approaching retirement has only a fraction or what it is going to take to support his or herself in even a downscaled lifestyle.

Social Security is facing a solvency crisis.

The student debt crisis among millenials is out of control.

Our vassal states in Europe and Asia have affordable government healthcare, while the bulk of every dollar invested in healthcare in the US is skimmed off by insurance companies, rigged drug prices and brokers.

There is plenty of money for weapons, strategically unimportant wars in the Middle East and hall monitors on the Internet, but very little for infrastructure improvement in our crumbling cities.

The nation is over 20 trillion dollars in debt and it is bound to spiral higher as interest rates rise.

Nobody notices the lawyer who develops a $1500 a week cocaine habit. He simply goes into rehab. He doesn’t steal cars to pay for his habit and his dealer delivers to his house so cops never see him in a bad neighborhood trying to cop dope on the corner. He doesn’t have it in his car because he is not a moron. Like Whitney Houston, he simply whiffs coke until his septum collapses or quits.

The poor pedophile hits the trailer parks where he knows parents will be inattentive, or other poor areas. The wealthy dentist who is a pedophile goes to Russia or Cambodia. He can afford the plane fare. He does not molest kids next door.

The gang-banger on the street kills one or two people and is caught and locked up at 22. A Tony Soprano-type usually ends 20 lives before he is finally taken down in middle age. His lawyer is not a public defendant. He lives far from the crime that pays his mortgage.

Wealthy women who want to sell their bodies do not hit the local truck stop. They go to Dubai. I’ve been propositioned in Dubai clubs by American ER nurses. They can make $1000 a night there.

Most middle-class college kids, and I was one of them, are wildly promiscuous in college. There are blowjobs at frat parties and threesomes in dorms. The poor get knocked-up at 18 by their high school boyfriend. They cannot afford pills or an IUD and are too ignorant to know about them. The 20 year old sorority girl screws her head off but does not get pregnant.

An interesting “MAGA bomber� false flag analysis.

This video covers quite a bit, including the van and its suspicious decals.

Video Link

said:
“I foresee that if this continue in the next 20 years millions and millions of people will die of marginalization , of hunger , misery and grief .”

Especially true when low IQ idiots produce more low IQ idiots than they can provide for.

It’s on them, no one else.

said:
“Most important task of the governments is to control the economy that the extent of the swings are small as possible.”

Nonsense. It’s ‘government control of the economy’ that creates the problems in the first place.

If you were older I would call you a Reagan Democrat. Or maybe you are.

I give up. Me, a Democrat???

I never voted for a Democrat in my life. Never even considered it even after I gave up casting ballots for scum, I mean politicians.

Your comment is proof that Ecclesiastes was correct.

Western society is dying of ” succes ”

Too much big globalized firms and finances that crash the small and medium firms ,creating massive qualified subemployement and unemployement .

Too much ” education ” . Too expensive , turns the people into idiots unable to think for themselves ( Ivan Illich foresaw it in the 70`s ) .

Too much medicine , too expensive , produces weak , affraid , sick individuals ( Ivan Illich also foresaw it in the 70`s , read ” Medical Nemesis ” ).

Too much ” social benefits ” unearned , too expensive , turn big layers of society into lazy , parasitic , ever complaining people .

Plus in the USA too much military , too expensive , too expansive , too destructive , too lethal for foreigners and nationals .

Plus the natural side effects of the system , big god like Government , mesianic politicians , massive all powerful bureaucracy , massive propaganda , social engeniering , growing masses of zombies .

No solution . The system will crash . It will be terrible . May God hepl us .

… and another excellent “MAGA bomber” false flag analysis.

Video Link

General to the point of incoherence.
The most brilliant tactic was not moblizing the religious right, whatever that assiduous nonsense means, but, rather, poisoning the well of left labor friendly parties with mass faggotry, and then doing away with support for labor altogether and simultaneously infesting the right with mass jingoism, essentially leaving the basic choice of:
Sodomy or War.

Aug 30, 2011 CORPORATE FASCISM: The Destruction of America’s Middle Class

A new kind of fascism has taken over America: the merger of corporations and government whereby corporate power dominates. With the emergence of ever-larger multinational corporations — due to consolidation facilitated by the Federal Reserve’s endless FIAT money — the corporatocracy has been in a position to literally purchase the U.S. Congress.

Video Link

“People become Evangelical Protestants for the same reason Muslims in poor countries go to the mosque 5 times a day”

This is false. A Muslim believes he can work his way into heaven and Allah’s good graces and eternal rewards if he just follows “the rules”. That is, the man himself and his actions is the basis.

The Christian on the other hand knows that he is deserving of the wrath and punishment of a perfectly just God who graciously extends His forgiveness through Christ’s sacrifice to those who accept it. The Christian recognizes this is love and that it is through Gods grace that they are saved, not by any amount of their own self-righteousness and works.

A very important distinction that must be noted.

I will not be going off-topic with this.

The Christian on the other hand knows that he is deserving of the wrath and punishment of a perfectly just God who graciously extends His forgiveness through Christ’s sacrifice to those who accept it.

“Original Sin” and this kind of BS is great for controlling people thru shame and guilt

Tell that to Hitler. Worked like a charm. Were USA attacked same way on her own soil she would collapse in short order. USSR outmanufactured the whole of Europe with about half population and half of European territory destroyed and under nazi’s. Basically you have no clue what you are talking about. Central planning g might have created some issues in trivial matters but wa hen it came to things th that truly mattered it worked wonders.

The process of which the author is talking started right after Soviet union disintegration and contrrevolution of 1991 there. The moment USSR seized to exist the attack on working people rights, that were earned only thanks to Soviet union existence , started and has not stopped ever since. USSR existence benefited not only Soviet people but the whole of the world. Now working people and middle class is on their own. Eventually I hope those elites and their whole families will be gently led to the wall and machinegunned as it is what they richly deserve. They are vampires and parasites.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

It depends if it is independent government, or controlled government.

I’m not a fan of communism, but there is some truth to what you have written.

The Soviet Union was the first country to give working class children and ethnic minorities equal access to top universities. The US did not follow suit until several decades later. Social Security, pension plans, civil rights, healthcare subsidies and many other programs were helped along by the desire of the elites to win the hearts and minds of working people in the struggle against communism.

Right on!!!!

What is interesting an puzzling that Germans did not get unhinged!

Central planning g might have created some issues in trivial matters but when hen it came to things th that truly mattered it worked wonders.

Trivial. Sure….
Like the collapse of all that not so long ago.

Now, as for this

…USSR existence benefited not only Soviet people but the whole of the world..

Hehe…I guess you could be onto something here…..

When I was in university there was no Leftist programming. People were there to become engineers, IT specialists, doctors, nurses, businessmen, accounting.

wow, how old are you?

what you’re blaming on the middle class and “consumerist idiots” is mostly the result of TV and advertising

America defeated the Soviet command economy with an equitable distribution of profits across the classes. Now the nation state in order to remain secure against all rival states has to tame the capitalists After the cold war was won, Globalization did indeed mean class war was waged, but it is already becoming clear that China (a sort of command economy, but with Chinese workers) will prove a far more formidable challenger that the Soviet Union could have been. Trump is the representative of the working people (the nation), yet he is also called forth by the state, which has to wage class war against the capitalist conspiracy’s collusion with Chinese economic aggression.

“America defeated the Soviet command economy with an equitable distribution of profits across the classes”.

1) So, if America did not have an ‘equitable distribution of profits across the classes’ the Soviet command economy (central-planning) would not have been defeated?

2) The Soviet command economy (central-planning) was already collapsing under it’s own weight and did not need “defeated” by anyone. The failure of all command economies (central-planning) is the failure of them to use prices as signals.

3) America has never had ‘equitable distribution of profits across the classes’.

4) With all due respect, you do not know what you’re talking about.

“Schools have long been known as part of the process.”

If by this you mean government-run/financed (public) schools I emphatically agree.

Any works of NYC “Teacher Of The Year” John Taylor Gatto should suffice for most people of the idea that their schools are not, and never have been or will be, what they believe them to be.

America always had a big advantage over the Soviet Union because it ended up with the industrial three fourths of Germany and Japan under its control. The world’s second and third largest economies until China moved past them. When we brought China into our economic orbit, the writing was on the wall.

From what I can gather about Soviet history, there was fresh enthusiasm about the liberation of the working class under Stalin that resulted in tremendous growth. Not that the whip wasn’t cracked as well, but people were working hard out of a sense of idealism. By the 70s, there were a lot of slackers.

Capitalism is good at making people work hard during the upside of a growth cycle. It comes with periodic busts when the middle and lower classes lose everything as a result of bank failures and have to start over. Disillusionment sets in for a while until the cycle repeats itself. Somehow the US has avoided such a crash since the 1930s.

The basic problem is that a corporation is a person.

The Soviet Union did not collapse. Sure, it’s sprawling economy was inefficient but there was no economic necessity for collapse:

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 did mark the end of the longest experiment in Communism in recent history. Many saw this event as the proof that Communism (or Marxism-Leninism, I use these interchangeably here) was not a viable ideology. After all, if in Russia Communism was formally ended in 1991, the Chinese quietly shifted away from it too, replacing it with a uniquely Chinese brand of capitalism. Finally, none of the ex-Soviet “allies� chose to stick to the Communist ideology as soon as they recovered their freedom. Even Chavez’ brand of Communism resulted in a completely bankrupt Venezuela. So what’s there to argue about?

Actually, a great deal, beginning with every single word in the paragraph above.

Communism – the past:

For one thing, the Soviet Union never collapsed. It was dismantled from above by the CPSU party leaders who decided that the Soviet nomenklatura would split up the Soviet “pie� into 15 smaller slices. What happened after that was nothing more than the result of in infighting between these factions. Since nobody ever empowered these gangs of Party apparatchiks to dissolve the USSR or, in fact, to reform it in any way, their actions can only be qualified as a totally illegal coup. All of them, beginning with the Gorbachev and Eltsin gangs were traitors to their Party, to their people and to their country. As for the people, they were only given the right to speak their opinion once, on March 17, 1991, when a whopping 77.85% voted to preserve the “the USSR as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom of an individual of any nationality will be fully guaranteed� (see here for a good discussion of this now long-forgotten vote).

https://thesaker.is/is-communism-really-dead/

3) America has never had ‘equitable distribution of profits across the classes’.

doubtful anyone else has either

They allowed it to happen because they didn’t want to rock the boat. They had a “fuck you, got mine” attitude and while those lower than them were being ground into the dirt they just kept their heads down and pretended it wasn’t happening. It’s a lot more jarring in a place like South Africa where the government straight-up disemployed middle-class people who then nearly immediately ended up in squatter camps with shacks made of corrugated metal. No plausible deniability was possible like in America where when people ended up in things like trailer parks which didn’t even really exist previously, it was just chalked up to some kind of personal failing.

Ok, I have just given this article a cursory reading and unless I missed it the author never mentions exactly HOW these institutions/entities are able to carry out what the author is asserting. In other words, there must be a mechanism. What exactly is this mechanism then? Until this is answered satisfactorily the rest of the article is highly suspect of specious reasoning.

I’ll get back to this point and more later. It’s Saturday and I intend to spend time with my wife.

p.s. Will someone tell me how to get the Bold and Italics buttons to function, please? The buttons highlight when I click them but my keyboard disappears. Then, when I click to retrieve the keyboard, the button I previously chose is no longer highlighted and non-functional. Thanks.

Great read. Dumb Mericans caught in their left vs. right uniparty cult, while the rich rob them blind. Some will even defend the parasites currently raping them.
Think Trump is any different, research Trump-Clinton friendship, Ivanka and Chealsea are BFF’s, the big meanie George Soros also close to the Trumps and Kushners.
Its a big club slaves, you ain’t in it, at the very least stop defending and voting for the scum.

Jesus knew how to handle the Wall St of his time.

Video Link

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 did mark the end of the longest experiment in Communism in recent history.

cute how people like to call it an “experiment”

i suspect the Russian people didn’t ask for this “experiment”, outsiders foisted it upon them

SAXON

White ethnic correlation.

In South Africa the middle-class English South Africans got out of South Africa and I met some in London. They had the qualifications, money and citizenship to leave.

In Detroit, the same was true of the middle-class whites (Jews, Irish, WASPS) and the Southern transplants. The former moved out of state; the latter returned to their birthplaces.

Polish-Americans were stuck. Many were too old to move and their property was not worth anything. The same goes for the Boers in South Africa. They do not have the dual-citizenship of English South Africans or the disposable income to simply move to UK or Australian.

It is a similar pattern everywhere. The liberals with money will leave first. They don’t have much fight in them and their skill-set is usually fluid. It is easy to move. All arrangements can be made in a week.

Please elaborate.

What are you saying?

1 and 3) It was more equitable then that it has since become because the people were no longer needed to fight the cold war.
2) Russia had been backward for half a millennium before it adopted a command economy. Kyle Bass has shorted China because he says if command economies worked we would all be speaking Russian.
4) Of late it has become obvious to everyone except those who like to retreat into economic technical language smokescreens that the Chinese are a very different kettle of fish to Russians.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/701026/russians-life-better-soviet-union-ussr-sixty-four-percent

“A stunning 64 per cent of Russians who were aged ten or over in the totalitarian one party state rated the quality of life higher than under the current rule of Vladimir Putin.”

“A quarter of a century after the fall of the Red flag from the Kremlin in 1991, the same pattern is shown in nine out of 11 ex-Soviet states, according to a new poll.”

Sean, please stop, you are only digging yourself a deeper hole here. Let’s stick to the assertions you made in this post, please:

“America defeated the Soviet command economy with an equitable distribution of profits across the classes. Now the nation state”.

Where is your evidence that this is true or, more probably true than not? That’s all I want to know. Not about Kyle Bass, not about China.

Labor has been eliminated from politics? The writer clearly does not live in Illinois. More generally, I’m now in my eighth decade and I’ve been hearing this drivel all my adult life. Da people will make da revolution and then we’ll have a workers’ paradise. Right. Has this guy paid no attention whatever to the history of the last century, where we’ve had a number of examples of “actually existing socialism�. I find it difficult to imagine how anyone who has the intelligence to constuct a grammatical English sentence can spout this hackneyed rubbish.

Sidenote: Earl Browder was the father of Bill Browder, who gave us the Magnitsky Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Browder

Afghanistan really wore the Soviet Union down as well as the wars in vassal states.

Considering that in historical terms USA is but a baby everything is ahead of you. That includes collapse, disintegration and suffering. This happened to almost every state that existed long enough. Soviet collapse had nothing to do with socialism system but with quality of elites by 1985, plain foolishness and virus of desire to be like the west that was introduced probably since Peter the great times. Nations like persons tend to make mistakes. Majority of Russian people feel sorrow that USSR is no more but now they stuck. Usa has made a lot of mistakes and made some foolish choices over last few decades. You are going to pay for that too.

True. What was amazing is that all socially directed laws and guarantees were introduced immediately upon bolsheviks coming to power. Considering measurable state of Russia in 1917 and far worse in 1921 much of that cou look d not be backed at the time by real actions like free housing for all but intent was there and eventually everything that was intended was realised. Modern Russia is far more prosperous than Soviet Russia in 197-1921 but there is no that intent. Russia is capitalistic state with few vestiges left from Soviet past much of which was removed and what’s left is being removed gradually. Pension reform is another indicator of this. My opinion on Putin is that he in historical terms while saving Russia from total collapse he is still creating long term problems by not resolving problems caused after 1991. Only time will tell

…Soviet collapse had nothing to do with socialism system but with quality of elites by 1985, plain foolishness and virus of desire to be like the west that was introduced probably since Peter the great times….

You are getting there.
Quality of elites was the result of the system that produced them.

….now they stuck…

They are. How about being proactive a bit?Any suggestion as how to get unstuck, perhaps?
Let’s say you, by some miracle, become an adviser to the current Tsar. What exactly would you tell him?

…You are going to pay for that too.,,

Not yet.

Sergey,

I hope you appreciate just how hard it is for an American to sift through the propaganda in order to determine that that the Soviet Union was out in front of the West in providing such things and that its citizens were working hard out of a sense of idealism.

Decades later, only a few of us who were not diehard Communists get it.

Now take this lesson and apply it to the media message and attitudes of the present age. In the US and everywhere.

“USSR outmanufactured the whole of Europe with about half population and half of European territory destroyed and under nazi’s. Basically you have no clue what you are talking about. Central planning g might have created some issues in trivial matters but wa hen it came to things th that truly mattered it worked wonders.”

One has to be slack jawed at the historical ineptitude on display in this post.

Central planning worked perfectly well for large scale military production, the military being a top down command and control organization. The Soviets also didn’t have the endemic corruption of western armament manufacturers to contend with.

Anyone who believes that centralized planning only fails in ‘trivial matters’ is an idiot, to be honest. You need to go read some complex systems science (e.g., Donella Meadows) or economics (e.g., Hayek).

A case in point is that the Soviet Union was basically a pathetic, empty shell of production outside of a few areas like weaponry. (Even then, they required massive infusions of cash from overseas investors to keep their factories going, as Anthony Sutton and others have pointed out).

Computers? Consumer goods? Medical devices? The Soviets were completely useless.

Anyone who has been to Russia, Ukraine or other post-Soviet states can see the poor quality of construction in most areas. Sure, there are special buildings that have received lavish attention, but for the most part Soviet era hotels, apartments (etc) are squalid and poor.

“Majority of Russian people feel sorrow that USSR is no more but now they stuck.”

Evidence please. I go to Russia all the time and I have never met anyone who lamented the demise of the Soviet Union. Perhaps a few doddering dedushkas and babushkas, which gives me a bit of evidence as to your age.

Sure, people are not happy with the pension reforms, but that is quite a different thing from wanting full scale communism back again.

Disagree about socialist system but would agree about one party system. originally the goal was all power to Soviets… basically one party system lacked checks and balances and after Stalin death started increasingly putting downright fools at the top. Brezhnev was exception. Party played her role and should have gradually give all power to democratically elected Soviets of all levels with Suprem Soviet being at the top and government in tow. Lenin after all was a head of the Soviet government not General secretary. How to get unstuck? Well. Unless it happened from the top and Putin clearly is not moving in this direction while he had chance hence it will happen eventually via same way as in France 1989 and Russia 1917. I hope it will happen peacefully.

“Computers? Consumer goods? Medical devices? The Soviets were completely useless.”

Let’s not forget empty food shelves, razors and a host of other basic amenities.

When I read some of the comments on what life was really like under communist rule and socialism, I can’t help but wonder who some people have been reading/studying and how much scrutiny they have subjected their sources to.

A civil reply …..

As in everything in this Universe, it’s all about balance and shades of gray.
The same principle applies to Russia, Soviet Union…and the rest there.

The problem, no, reality is, that majority doesn’t want shades but certainty. So….Communism bad ..or Capitalism…or whatever.
Boring sermon, I know.

My take is obvious: there were some exceptionally good things about the system in Russia/Soviet Union during Communism and some exceptionally bad things, with everything in between. The catch is defining those.

Anyway…..that’s history. What matters is now and the future.

So, maybe:

….it will happen eventually via same way as in France 1789 and Russia 1917.

Maybe not.

As for

….it will happen peacefully.

Haha….yeah. As in those examples above.

USSR was manufacturing everything. Were it not for partners who continuously tried to destroy the country the re e would li d be no need in large scale weapons production. But USSR was doing it easily. USSR was breakthrough forward. Consumerism is step backward. I am not interested in your western economists.

Big Business Strikes Back.

My take is obvious: there were some exceptionally good things about the system in Russia/Soviet Union during Communism…..

like what?

like what?

Terse.

As:
Decree on the Eight-Hour Day.

In Russian:

Так, � окт�бр� по декабрь 1917 г. были прин�ты:

Декрет о введении во�ьмича�ового рабочего дн�;
Декрет о печати;
Декрет об уничтожении �о�ловий и граждан�ких чинов;
Положение о рабочем контроле;
Декрет об образовании ВС�Х (Вы�шего Совета народного хоз�й�тва);
Декрет о демократизации армии;
Декрет о граждан�ком браке, о дет�х и введении книг-актов �о�то�ни�;
Декрет о национализации банков;
Создание В�еро��ий�кой чрезвычайной коми��ии (ВЧК) во главе � Ф.Э. Дзержин�ким;
Декрет о �оздании народных �удов и революционных трибуналов.

В �нваре 1918 г. по�вили�ь декреты:

О �вободе �ове�ти, церковных и религиозных обще�твах;
Об аннулировании го�удар�твенных займов;
О национализации торгового флота;
О введении западноевропей�кого календар� и др.

So, from October to December 1917 were taken:

Decree on the introduction of the eight-hour working day;
Decree on the seal;
Decree on the destruction of estates and civil officials;
Regulation on working control;
Decree on the formation of the Supreme Economic Council (Supreme Council of the National Economy);
Decree on the democratization of the army;
Decree on civil marriage, on children and the introduction of books-acts of the state;
Decree on the nationalization of banks;
The creation of the All-Russian Emergency Commission (VChK), headed by F.E. Dzerzhinsky;
Decree on the creation of people’s courts and revolutionary tribunals.

In January 1918, decrees appeared:

On freedom of conscience, church and religious societies;
On the cancellation of government loans;
On the nationalization of the merchant fleet;
On the introduction of the Western European calendar, etc.

Later. Free education, healthcare, guaranteed right to work, retirement, practically free accommodation.

My God. They were true monsters.

You are just confusing Westerners here, Americans in particular.

Speaking of which, well, Constitution comes to mind.
Or, better…it’s one thing what’s written and proclaimed…..quite another what’s being REALLY done.

Social changes always start with lofty proclamations……and then…..bump.

Devil is in details. In keeping balance between ideals and reality. Human nature in particular.

Say…. guaranteed right to work. Or, practically, an employee can’t be fired. Sounds great.
Unless the employee is a dumb lazy fuck. And somebody has to do the work. So, while he’s lounging around other people have to pick up the slack. Not good, a?
That idea resides on a false premise that employees, given a proper chance, will be smart, hard working, law obeying…blah..blah..They won’t.

At the other side..did I say “balance”…. a boss can fire an employee in a heartbeat. Downsize, restructure, offshore, whatever. Not good too.
That idea resides on a false premise that bosses, given a proper chance, will think a bit more than just about their profit etc. They won’t.

Bored myself typing above.

People…simply people.

How to address that, ah, well…..one day in a distant future…..

2) The Soviet command economy (central-planning) was already collapsing under it’s own weight and did not need “defeated� by anyone. The failure of all command economies (central-planning) is the failure of them to use prices as signals.

The collapse (if it really was one) had more to do with a country wasting so much of it’s resources on defense and propping up other countries in the communist sphere. Of course, they had leadership problems like Stalin but when he died and smarter people took over they would have done a lot better if they hadn’t put so much effort into their Cold War paranoia.

Every tank built could have easily been replaced by 20 cars available to the civilian economy.

Central planning has been used successfully by all emerging economies to make efficient use of the limited resources. Japan’s MITI was directly responsible for Japan becoming the world leader in many industries – even ones where American companies were the first and had the initial patents.

The quality of Russian consumer goods was not good at all. Russian engineers have told me that almost all R&D was gobbled up by the military and the advances were not released to the civilian economy for about 10 years. This is why they were behind in every product in the civilian economy.

The cars were crap – even the dated phony FIAT 124s. The TV equipment was crap (part of NBCs deal to cover the Olympics included TV production equipment) and the computers were garbage reverse engineered from what they could steal from the west.

On freedom of conscience, church and religious societies;

are you sure this worked out right?

also, if the Soviet Union was so wonderful how did so many end up murdered, starved, or in the gulags?

Every tank built could have easily been replaced by 20 cars available to the civilian economy.

how many tanks do you think they had?

Bass appears to be the classic example of someone who gets lucky with one trade and is subsequently feted and attracts lots of attention and money, but is not very successful after their lucky score. There are economic theories that suggest that most successful investors in the market are going to be of this variety, that the nature of the trading game and probability is such that there will be some winners, who are then assumed to have some special talent or knack rather than just being lucky. The same theories suggest that based on probability, there will also be a smaller minority that is very lucky and consequently successful over an extended period, even an entire career:

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/03/warren_buffett_1.html

Another argument was that people like Warren Buffett would persistently outperform the market. This was supposed to violate the EMH. It doesn’t—the EMH predicts that out of every 50 million stock investors, about 49 will beat the market in 20 consecutive years. Buffet never came close to that, but he had some years with huge outperformance, and thus his overall record is amazing. But did it violate the EMH? Maybe, but I was skeptical. In economics we often do “out of sample tests�. That is, when someone published a theory years ago, we return to the data to see how it held up using more recent data.

This article lists the annual return for Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, ever since 1965, as well as the annual return on the S&P 500. Over the past 51 years, Buffett averaged a 20.8% rate of return while the S&P 500 only averaged 9.7%. But how about since the beginning of 2009, when I started blogging?

Warren Buffett: 10.8%

S&P 500: 14.8%

In the 8 years following the subprime crash, Bass returned just 1.56 percent during one of the greatest bull market runs in history:

https://nypost.com/2015/08/22/hedge-fund-manager-peaked-at-predicting-mortgage-meltdown/

He’s made a lot of bad predictions and trades over the past decade. He predicted the imminent default and collapse of Japan based on a flawed analogy with heavily indebted Euro states like Greece, failing to realize that Japan issued its own currency, unlike Euro states which borrow in currency issued by the ECB. It’s remarkable that people managing loads of money and skimming huge fees and making huge personal fortunes in the process can make such elementary errors, but in finance confidence and bluster can go a long way. He also promoted Argentine bonds as good investments, shortly before Argentina defaulted in 2014. Argentina has defaulted basically once every generation since its independence in the early 19th century.

Since his predictions haven’t been very successful, Bass appears to have changed his strategy towards a more activist type, whereby he tries to influence policies in ways that will make his trades profitable:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-10/how-patent-trolls-sparked-a-failed-assault-on-high-drug-prices

If you think being consumer and producing consumer goods is the most important you are mistaken.
As one pointed USSR was rusty and not perfectly built but nevertheless spaceship while the West was just Lamborghini. First attempt. Check capitalism first stages and you will be in shock.
It was mistake by Khrushchev and later continued that pitted USSR vs the west only in material field.

Everything that was intended was realized eventually. You gotta understand Russia was destroyed by wars twice and had to rebuilt and still by 70’s all that was intended was there. The problem was that later Soviet generation did not know the suffering and hunger that the first generations knew and were watching too much Western movies. They did not value what they had and thus lost everything.
The worst was that people at the top were totally inadequate to the task of leading the country by that time. Anyway, I was not among those who did not value. For me the life there was the best ever. Because my interest do not revolve around stomach and things alone.

Their command economy gave the Soviets (a historically backward country of drunken wife beaters) increasing conventional preponderance in Europe. The realization that the threat of an incredible action (America would blowing their brains by going Nuclear to prevent a Soviet conquest of Europe) is not a credible deterrent made it seem necessary to massively increase conventional arms and even introduce conscription into the military or other national service (as one time Dem front runner Gary Hart proposed). It was once the Soviet war machine began to run down that the people, no longer needed to fight, had serious class war waged against them ostensible to bring inflation down. Interest rates are low despite high government spending, proof that the money supply argument was but a pretext. Yet the challenge of China has made the overarching entity called the nation- state call time on neo liberal policies.

In olden days testicles were no use to poor Chinese men, they were volunteering to be castrated so they could become eunuchs-servants of the rich. If you consider their socially Darwinian selected population and unbeatable economies-of-scale factory complexes with tens of thousands of workers, China’s ability to leverage is anyone guess. It also has a command economy. Trump has been called forth to try and slow China’s growth down. Kyle Bass thinks Trump may be unexpectedly effective because China is weaker than it looks.

Watch how China has fooled the world into believing their economy is strong by printing RMB. GDP on top, money printing in middle.#facade pic.twitter.com/AeK9D6tDpm

— Kyle Bass (@Jkylebass) October 13, 2018

Maybe Trump will have a lot of success, but China is well into the lift off stage now and probably cannot be stopped from bulling through and becoming the most powerful country in the world unless military pressure is used to overheat their economy.

Agree with the economic parts of the article. It’s obvious, however, that the neo-liberals are pushing identity politics not suppressing them. Trans-mania is supposed to distract us from our dismal prospects. Immigration, of course, is one of the major ways of keeping our wages down and destroying social cohesion, making us easier to rule.

The problem was that later Soviet generation did not know the suffering….

i see, we all need to suffer more, then Communism will seem like a fantastic option

…..even introduce conscription into the military or other national service (as one time Dem front runner Gary Hart proposed)

oddly enough, Hart never served

Consumer goods ARE important because most of the populace is part of the civilian economy and have nothing to do with the military. They are the people whos wealth is drained off to support the military. If their lives are not made better after a reasonable period of time, the system starts to degrade like it did in the USSR where people just stop putting in any effort.

The people of the USSR also had to watch as the people in some of the vassal states like East Germany and Czechoslovakia lived better than them.

Did you ever leave the USSR or Russia? If so why?

It is irrelevant. They weren’t making consumer goods just military. Maybe you forgot that they bought an old decrepit FIAT factory making 124s and moved it to Russia to produce crappy out of date cars for the public.

The Soviet Union was the first country to give working class children and ethnic minorities equal access to top universities.

This is ridiculous as the University of California was free for anybody who could qualify until the 70s when they started instituting nominal “student fees”. Now they have tuition. This was probably similar to all state universities, many who are equally world class, like Michigan. These universities were founded long before the USSR existed.

Trying to compare US private institutions like Harvard and Yale to Russian state institutions is like apples to oranges.

Social Security was the direct result of the Great Depression and people losing their pensions, savings, and jobs when the companies they worked for when bankrupt and the banks were insolvent. The USSR and communism had nothing to do with it. The current ERISA laws were also in response to issues related only to the US labor market. Companies routinely fired people just before they were eligible for their pensions so the law gave them a guaranteed 5 year vesting period, which companies still abuse when they can.

it is relevant because its a drop in the bucket

I was referring mainly to the Ivy League. I’m not familiar with the history of the University of California (I assume you mean Berkeley, a fine school to be sure), but I suspect that you would find that most of the students there in the 1910-1940 period were from the upper middle class and mostly white. The Ivy League students were almost all WASP children of the very wealthy.

The Soviets made a conscious effort to advance the education of the children of the peasantry and minorities from the beginning of the state.

In the US, the middle and lower classes weren’t represented at the top schools until implementation of the standardized tests, well after the war.

If their lives are not made better after a reasonable period of time, the system starts to degrade like it did in the USSR where people just stop putting in any effort.

Worse.
They watch their lives degrade while lives of those who tell them it’s O.K. keep improving.
The ruling caste their had quite decent lives. “Some animals are more equal….”.

Thinking of which, we can see similar dynamics in West now. “Deplorables” and such.

Easy to fix.

Prevent people from watching Western movies and make them suffer even more.

Ah, well….maybe next time, a?

To my knowledge there are no public institutions in the Ivy League or the more western equals like Stanford, Chicago, and Northwestern. So you are comparing apples to oranges. There were black students at the public institutions (even the private ones), there just weren’t many because there was no affirmative action.

What kept the lower classes out of the Ivy league was mostly money as the schools did not have the large endowments they have today where the interest on their endowment could pay the tuition of every student.

The Bell Curve described some early intelligence testing that was done at various universities before the war. It found that the average IQ at many state universities (IIRC Oregon State was mentioned) exceeded that of Harvard.

Harvard and the other Ivies were for rich WASP kids. There were a few token blacks, Jews and Catholics, but most of the latter went to state schools if they went to college at all. Higher education was pretty rare back then. A lot of new colleges sprang up during the Vietnam war because of the exemption.

Even at state schools, without SAT type tests the admission process weighed the location of the high school and social class of the application more heavily than is the case today.

Regarding Social Security, there were at least two depressions in America before the 1930s without institution of a government pension program. There’s no doubt that the development of socialism spurred the elites to enact a basic national pension. Nazi Germany also granted new benefits to working people as an effort to inoculate against Communism.

Regarding Social Security, there were at least two depressions in America before the 1930s without institution of a government pension program.

Yes, but nothing like Great Depression where approximately 10,000 banks failed and people lost everything. If your company failed it most likely took all the companies money as the owner fought to save it. There was no money put aside for employees pensions.

The idea of Social Security started in Pre WWI Germany not the USSR.

https://www.ssa.gov/history/ottob.html

Most people did’t go to college because you didn’t need to. How many people actually went in the USSR as a percentage of the population. I doubt it was even close to the percentage in the US. The US has had public institutions for a long time through the land-grant university legislation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land-grant_university

In the early 80s, interest rates did need to be raised and class war was needed in order to bring inflation down. The inflation of the 70s benefited the poor and wage earners, as wages were inflated and inflated away their debts. While the wealthy, being creditors who held those debts as assets, saw the value of their assets decline. Other assets of the wealthy, like the stock market, also declined during the 1970s. As a result, the Reagan administration raised interest rates to usurious levels in the early 80s, when the Cold War was still going on, which prevented ordinary people from buying cars and homes and other consumer goods. Consumer price inflation, which had benefited the poor and wage earners during the 70s at the expense of the wealthy, was whipped during the 80s, but inflation altogether didn’t disappear but was merely directed towards asset price inflation and the inflation of higher end and luxury consumer goods that the wealthy purchased. The dilemma faced by US policymakers was that economic policy favorable towards wage earners produced consumer inflation and asset depression which hurt the wealthy, whereas anti-inflationary policies benefited the wealthy at the expense of ordinary people. They decided to resolve this dilemma with offshoring, which enabled both the wealthy to be satisfied with asset price inflation and the poor to have cheaper consumer goods so they wouldn’t be driven to violent revolt and resistance. Since then, offshoring is why inflation and interest rates have been able to be low, and government spending high. Without offshoring, something would have to give.

I believe Chinese eunuchs were mainly used in the ruling dynastic households as servants and a check on the Mandarins. I don’t know if they were used much elsewhere. China’s patriarchal, Confucian culture and ancestor worship meant that eunuchs had the lowest status and becoming a eunuch was basically sacrilege.

Bass’s argument is basically the same one he made several years ago for the default and collapse of Japan, Europe, and the US. China, like the others, issues its own currency. Moreover, unlike the others, it has tight capital controls and doesn’t float its currency, which makes it hard for international capital to trade. And its money printing can be absorbed by expansion of productive capacity. I think Bass is hoping that Trump’s trade war will limit China’s expansion of production and thus increase inflation and lower the yuan, and/or cause China to make concessions such as relaxing capital controls and floating its currency, thus making his bet against the yuan profitable.

You are correct my friend. Or rather should l say the Bible says it’s so.

But after all these eons the people perish for lack of knowledge and become sycophants of State churches.. Whether Roman, Episcopalians, Russian orthodox etc…

Jumping through the Pontifs hoops to earn salvation…

What concord does Christ have with belial?

These is no policymaker with dilemmas, there is organised labour using inflation as a weapon to destroy business, and the business class trying to destroy organised labour by offshoring, which is in effect a gigantic lock-out.

In the early 80s, interest rates did need to be raised and class war was needed in order to bring inflation down

It was supposed to be tight control of the money supply that caused inflation , and yet there is there is low inflation now and the values of assets is going through the roof.

The inflation of the 70s benefited the poor and wage earners, as wages were inflated and inflated away their debts.

Organised labour is class war by inflation against business, so the business class struck back by destroying organised labour and thereby solved inflation. Unfortunately they were just as bad.

Consumer price inflation, which had benefited the poor and wage earners during the 70s at the expense of the wealthy, was whipped during the 80s, but inflation altogether didn’t disappear but was merely directed towards asset price inflation and the inflation of higher end and luxury consumer goods that the wealthy purchased.

The value of assets went up fastest (ie the rich got relatively richer quicker) after 2008 when the business class had an excuse to create more money and asset price inflation. Trump identified that and the political establishment were patsies for the business class

I saw a study of West Point graduates in which the higher the rank they reached the more children they had, except at the very top of the army where fewer children or none at all became common.

I believe Chinese eunuchs were mainly used in the ruling dynastic households as servants and a check on the Mandarins. I don’t know if they were used much elsewhere. China’s patriarchal, Confucian culture and ancestor worship meant that eunuchs had the lowest status and becoming a eunuch was basically sacrilege.

https://www.ancient.eu/article/1109/eunuchs-in-ancient-china/
Eunuchs were powerful political players in ancient Chinese government. Originating as trusted slaves in the royal household they were ambitious to use their favoured position to gain political power. Advising the emperor from within the palace and blocking the access of officials to their ruler, the eunuchs were eventually able to acquire noble titles themselves, form a bureaucracy to rival the state’s and even select and remove emperors of their choosing. Their influence on government would result in the falling of dynasties and last right up to the 17th century CE.

Eunuchs were the ultimate status symbol and because wealthy aped the emperor, poor men ) were queuing up to say goodbye to their family jewels and get a position in a wealthy household. Anyway,cruel social Darwinist competition bred a race of global economic termites called Chinese who were useful for breaking organised labour.

The Chinese denounce Bass (and Soros) for betting against them. Bass’s thinks Chinese are the same as the Greeks (or Russians), the size of China in the international economy does not alter that and a command economy solution ultimately won’t work for them. He started down this road by thinking Japan was must decline because their population is declining in numbers. He misunderstands the efficacy of East Asian society in which as Lee Kwan Yu once said the individual is not a child of god but an ant. South Korea had the death penalty for capital flight. Bass called Trump a clown and said Clinton was the only candidate to vote for. Then he cleaned up on election night.

Trump is a nightmare for the Chinese, and I expect China will have to recap their banks (whatever that means) and Bass will be somewhat vindicated.
https://dealbreaker.com/2018/08/kyle-bass-joins-the-circus/

KOREAN CAPITAL FLIGHT

Nonsense, I lived around South Koreans in the Philippines. Half were pensioners.

That is absolutely false.

None of you people have spent much time overseas.

http://prospect.org/article/east-asias-challenge

Illegal capital flight has been punishable in South Korea with a minimum of ten years’ imprisonment and a maximum of the death penalty

Below is the 1974 assassination attempt on South Korean President Park Chung-hee in which his wife was shot in the head.,

After his fatally wounded wife was carried away, President Park Chung-hee calmly continued with the speech he had been making, and then as he left the podium, picked up his spouse’s handbag and shoes of the floor of the stage. Like I said, they regard the individual as an ant.

Koreans are jackasses but they can spend their money outside the country. Korean pensioners live in the Philippines. It is ridiculous to say that they cannot take capitol outside of the country.

I’ve been in Asia my entire adult life from 25 on.

Jeff Stryker,

He was talking about 1960s-1980s South Korea, when the country had a very tight foreign reserve regulation. But that has been abolished under the tender love of IMF in the 90s.

What he doesn’t know is that, South Korea actually prove that “command economy” works, as the country was built on Soviet style “5 year plan” and state-owned corporations in that period. South Korea only started to privatize its 100 something state-owned corporations in the end of 80s.

Similar story with Taiwan – 5 year plan, state owned companies, and privatization.

China is different than most economy in the world in that neither IMF nor the US can force it to abolish capital control.

Sure Trump is not good news, but the war has just begun, let’s see how it turn out… China doesn’t seem in a hurry to talk with Washington. The government has been preparing the public for a long economic war with the US.

Policymakers do face this dilemma. Even the Federal Reserve has an explicit “dual mandate” to “maximize employment” and “stabilize prices”. This is not to say that there is no corruption or partisanship among politicians and policymakers that make them favor one side in the dilemma. But in theory policymakers are supposed to stay above the fray and work to solving the dilemma in a way that adequately satisfies both sides. In practice, things may be different, but that is the mission and there are policymakers who genuinely strive for that goal. This is why the economics profession has to invent concepts like “NAIRU” or the “non-accelerating inflation rate of employment” in order to pretend that they’re concerned with both sides of the “dual mandate” equally.

It was supposed to be tight control of the money supply that caused inflation , and yet there is there is low inflation now and the values of assets is going through the roof.

This is because of offshoring. The Cold War was still going on in the 80s and there wasn’t much offshoring. Offshoring has allowed consumer price inflation to stay low with cheap consumer good imports, while allowing at the same time low interest rates to push up asset prices.

Eunuchs in China were dynastic household servants and became powerful and influential in dynastic intrigues and politics. They became wealthy and powerful because of their closeness to the royal family. They did not have high status and are among the most despised figures in Chinese history:

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Top-5-Most-Despised-Chinese-Eunuchs-in-Imperial-Chinese-History

Chinese eunuchs occupy a curious position throughout Imperial Chinese history. They were pitied for the mutilation they had to suffer in order to work in the palace. They were also scorned for their inability to procreate, a sin considered as one of the worst acts of filial impiety under Confucian values.

At the same time, Chinese eunuchs were feared and despised as conniving schemers with a stranglehold on imperial power, to the extent that the term Tai Jian (太监) continues to imply a devious sycophant in modern spoken Mandarin. This is unsurprising, given eunuchs have repeatedly usurped power throughout Chinese history. Here are the five most despised Chinese eunuchs in Imperial Chinese history. In all but one case, these castrated lords amassed so much power, even their reigning emperors lived in fear of them.

Traders like Bass don’t make money on slow developing trades predicated on population decline over decades. Bass predicted an imminent default in Japan based on debt to GDP ratio. He was wrong because states that print their own money don’t default like member states of the EU or US states and municipalities, which can’t print their own money, can.

Bass isn’t a big player and able to move markets like Soros is. Soros was able to start the 1997 Asian financial crisis which started in SE Asia and spread to South Korea by shorting the Thai baht. Soros and others were able to withdraw massive amounts of money out of South Korea when the crisis began and then swoop in as vultures afterwards. Following the crisis, South Korea’s economy was “restructured” and made more amenable to international finance capital than it had been before. South Korean industry and labor have been in decline in the 20 years since then.

“Asia: Soros Lends A Hand In The Asian Crisis”

https://www.rferl.org/a/1087681.html

During that time, Soros also tried a speculative attack on Hong Kong, but was stopped by China’s government:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/1906325/how-beijing-and-hong-kong-sent-billionaire-george-soros-packing

In 1998, Soros, whose aggressive currency trades were blamed for destroying the Thai and Malaysian economies in the Asian financial crisis a year earlier, turned his attention to attacking Hong Kong markets. On that occasion, Hong Kong, backed by Beijing, faced him with an unprecedented HK$118 billion stock-buying spree to prop up stock prices and defend the currency peg in August 1998.

“the Bible says it’s so.”

Amen, my friend.

“The collapse (if it really was one) had more to do with a country wasting so much of it’s resources”.

“The country” (the individuals who comprise it) did not waste so much of its resources (fail to save/build capital).

This is a thinly veiled admission that the communist socialist central-planners, a command economy, failed due to their not using prices as signals as I stated in the quote you used.

So, we are in agreement then? Or, did you inadvertently make my point for me?

Marvin the Mindreader

Sure Trump is not good news, but the war has just begun, let’s see how it turn out… China doesn’t seem in a hurry to talk with Washington. The government has been preparing the public for a long economic war with the US.

its good to see China get back on their feet but if they’re going to be a major competitor or maybe even the largest economy on the planet, there’s no reason for U.S. consumers to continue to buy from them. Would make much more sense for U.S. to cut “defense” spending to ~$400 billion/year and move $300 billion/year to infrastructure to encourage business to relocate back to U.S. – increased tariffs are fine too

What kept the lower classes out of the Ivy league was mostly money as the schools did not have the large endowments they have today where the interest on their endowment could pay the tuition of every student.

is that your dream?

ANON

Go off and live overseas and hold a job there before you start spouting off about the place.

Being from what would be considered a shit hole US state I can tell you that there are many Americans who think South Korea is a paradise. They like it. They live there for 10 years.

The average Brahmin or Indian merchant is living better in Mumbai than anyone I know in Flint, let me tell you. There is nowhere in Dubai with the barrio slums of Phoenix.

These people who have been living in their little Podunk towns or lower middle class suburbs talk all this stuff without having much of a clue.

Even the ones who served overseas know little-a reminder that the US keeps its base perimeter fairly tight so that soldiers don’t lose morale realizing how much better the average Asian has it than they do.

I love how people from second-world cities and towns where the infrastructure is going say “such and such a place is a shit hole”.

They are not the ones worried about taking a wrong exit on a freeway or riding public transport or going into a fast food joint in any US city and risking a “chimp out”.

It is a reminder how socially and economically stranded the average white prole is. Of course they have never been overseas. They cannot even afford to move to another city. Much less spend two or three weeks in Asia where they would come to realize the degree to which life truly sucks for the average US white prole.

If 90% of them went to South Korea or Tokyo, they would not want to leave.

YEE

That’ll never happen. Bridges will continue to collapse and airport runways will have potholes in them while the US debates whether abortion is legal or gays should be allowed to marry.

China and Asia will continue to leave the US miles behind.

All the while, some Americans will go on about what a great country the US is because of all of the things it invented (Though the internet was probably the last one of any significance).

Here’s an odd thing. China is more like the US was 20 years ago and the US is more like China was 20 years ago. America has simply regressed into vast urban/rural divides with all the money on thin slivers of coastline. In the middle of the country are internal third worlds.

https://www.unz.com/pfrost/two-paths/

In East Asians, pro-social behavior is supported not so much by empathy as by notions of duty toward the community (Frost, 2014b). This trajectory of gene-culture co-evolution seems to have its own biological markers, notably certain changes to the dopamine signaling system. In a recent study, a sample of Euro-Americans was compared with a sample of East Asians born in China, Korea, or Japan. The participants were genotyped for the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) and then administered a test on their social orientation. The test showed that the East Asians were less individualistic than the Euro-Americans, but this psychological difference was limited to carriers of DRD4 variants that increase dopamine signalling, i.e., 7- or 2-repeat alleles. Non-carrier East Asians were just as individualistic as non-carrier Euro-Americans (Kitayama et al., 2014). It seems that the East Asian cultural environment can reduce individualism only among individuals who carry these variants.

This finding is puzzling in one sense. Previous work has shown that the same DRD4 variants are associated with risk seeking and heavy drinking. The authors suggest that these variants make people more willing to imitate their peers, be they drinking buddies or ma and pa:

They are termites who will force themselves in by the sheer value for money they offer and destroy the West.

The Cold War was still going on in the 80s and there wasn’t much offshoring.

The origin of offshoring was already there. China was aided because it was seen as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. Jimmy Carter issued a presidential decree that China was to be given every assistance and it is only with Trump that China stopped getting that access all areas economic pass. With Japan, Bass was trying to cause as much as trying to predict. The Japanese printed money bought back their debt and canceled it.

Offshoring has allowed consumer price inflation to stay low with cheap consumer good imports, while allowing at the same time low interest rates to push up asset prices.

Offshoring of what could be off-shored, and for what could not (construction, agriculture ect), replacement of workers with immigrants, which was all very profitable for business. It also meant a lot of people could only get jobs working in Walmart stacking shelves. However those people had a vote and the political effect was Trumps got elected. With a democratic system the high paying jobs are eliminated and wages are held down, but not for long. I do not see the putative policymakers as being very astute because China was for centuries considered a sleeping giant.

Go off and live overseas and hold a job there before you start spouting off about the place.

what have i said about it? nothing

you, otoh have lots of opinions on many subjects

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-4697-agreement-trade-relations-between-the-united-states-america-and-the

JIMMY CARTER
39th President of the United States: 1977 � 1981
Proclamation 4697—Agreement on Trade Relations Between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China
October 23, 1979

3. the Contracting Parties note, and shall take into consideration in the handling of their bilateral trade relations, that, at its current state of economic development, China is a developing country

Like Britain subsidizing Prussia. Again and again in history a country builds up a state to counterbalance regionally, but instead of a proxy they end up creating their own nemesis.

That is why the US is in Afghanistan. It helped Russia lose and bankrolled Bin Laden.

The US paid out the ass for Afghanistan since Russia invaded in 1979.

That is 40 years, nearly.

anon[134] ,

“… to encourage business to relocate back to U.S. – increased tariffs are fine too”

China is a developing country. It’s important to have overseas markets for a developing economy. The US was very enthusiastic about access to overseas markets in the 19th century, too. So enthusiastic that they enlisted military helps.

Increased tariffs don’t necessarily mean business relocate back to US, it might just mean goods become more expensive while all the rest remain the same. You can find plenty of countries in the world doing just that.

Industrialization is a very expensive and difficult process, so will be the re-industrialization, I guess. I’m not sure you can find enough capitalists willing to re-build the whole industrial system.

Unless you get the state to do it. Military budget sure can have a better use. But, there aren’t many things the rich and the poor in the US can agree on, “no state-owned corporations” seems to be one of the few…

Western media and academic lead their people to focus on the suffering during Soviet’s industrialization, but people of the West suffered just as much, perhaps even more, during the West’s own industrialization. Ask Charles Dickens. Ask the child labour of the immigrants, ask the blood and tears of the railroad builders…

Those holding capita decide whether to industrialize or de-industrialize, according to their self-interest. The masses can’t do nothing but bear the consequences.

China is a developing country. It’s important to have overseas markets for a developing economy.

so? i’m supposed to feel sorry for them?

or should i care about the Americans who lost most of their manufacturing jobs in the last 2-3 decades?

anon[271],

“so? i’m supposed to feel sorry for them?”

Well, it’s not important whom you feel sorry for…

Every emerging economy took market share from the existing ones. It’s just the way things run. It didn’t start with the Chinese, nor would it end with the Chinese.

Yes, I’m aware that the origins were already there, going back to Nixon going to China in the early 70s. But the deflationary pressures really came through post Cold War when Chinese production and imports were really ramped up. In the 80s, US manufacturing and labor were still a force, although on the defensive and in retreat. Reagan and Wall St. and the corporate raiders still had to demolish what was left of domestic industry and labor during the 80s before offshoring could really be ramped up.

The policymakers were obviously corrupt. The deflation was used to stave off violent riots in the near term while the wealthy benefited. Consumer goods inflation, especially food prices, leads to violent riots and social breakdown. That is what kicked off Egypt’s riots and Syria’s civil war. The plan was to stave off violent revolt in the US with consumer goods deflation while the populace was bled dry and over time lowered expectations would settle in gradually, mitigating the risk of upheaval.

China is a developing country. It’s important to have overseas markets for a developing economy.

you write it like i’m supposed to go along with their game – “well we have a $500 billion deficit but its ok, they’re a developing country”

who cares?

What is your opinion on China’s currency?

Trump and other politicians have often said that China manipulates its currency lower, in order to export more.

Bass and other financial types argue the opposite: that China props up its currency and that it would collapse without government intervention. A collapse in its currency would Chinese exports even cheaper and more competitive, no?

Not in agreement. The USSR failed because the vast majority of it’s intellectual talent was socked away in secret defense facilities and not being used to develop a competitive civilian economy such that the average Russian benefitted. Prices had nothing to do with it. People had plenty of rubles, there just wasn’t anything worth spending them on. What was available was scarce because of the governments prioritizing of military hardware and technology.

That was one of the big castatrophe’s of the so-called big-bang, people who previously had significnt amounts in their savings accounts found they were essentially broke in a short period of time.

People just simply couldn’t start a business without the government’s approval. I don’t know but would assume if you developed anything that might be militarily useful, the government would swallow you up into the military black hole and your products would not be available to the public.

What some people don’t realize is how much of the western military equipment has parallel civilian devlopement where they both complement each other. Obviously this doesn’t apply to strictly military stuff like rocket launchers but for lower level stuff like sniper equipment, sky diving wing suits, all terrain vehicles, and so on it very much does.

I am not sure what your point is. It is true that the Harvard endowment is so big that they could eliminate tuition if they wanted to but I doubt that was the case in 1890 (if they had any endowment at all). Back then really rich guys just started their own universities (Stanford, Rice, Vanderbilt).

“it’s intellectual talent was socked away in secret defense facilities and not being used to develop a competitive civilian economy such that the average Russian benefitted. Prices had nothing to do with it. People had plenty of rubles, there just wasn’t anything worth spending them on.”

Mark, with all due respect, I don’t believe you understand economics as well as you believe you do. Let me explain: in your above quote you assume the word “prices” to be a narrowly define word, but, “prices” do not necessarily have to be limited something with a $ in front of it. So, when you say “it’s intellectual talent…to develop a competitive civilian economy” this is an admission on your part that the central-planners did not recognize the “price” being paid to another segment of the economy to attain that which the central-planners valued more. If they did, they simply deemed it as worth that “price” and I believe history shows well how tragic and evil and unnecessary that price was.

Further still, a $ price was paid whether you realize it or not as your example reveals. I just don’t believe you’ve really thought through what is involved here.

When the central-planners decided to carry out their plans, they also unnaturally distorted the value (up in some segments of the marketplace, down in others) of the capital/savings of those who held/owned said capital/savings because central-planners, by definition, do not use prices as signals (just brute force). And the owner/holder of those resources is now subject to devaluations or depletions of their capital/savings (e.g.food and commodity shortages, etc.) than they otherwise would be since only individuals freely transacting can determine the $ price of anything without unnatural inflation or deflation levels occurring.

In short, I believe you are incorrect and that the Austrian school has correctly explained the phenomena under discussion extensively and thoroughly.

Put another, simpler way, if I take, say, your mortgage payment and instead pay your neighbor Joe’s truck payment, I have significantly altered and distorted your economy and prices. If I do this to millions or billions of people I have distorted and altered those things exponentially.

In the case of central-planning/command economies/State capitalism, people forcefully go without, pay higher prices than necessary for some things, pay lower prices than what may be otherwise, even die prematurely.

eh, for a minute i thought you were one of those “everything needs to be free free free” types

free schooling

free housing

etc etc

Mark,

Is Mises correct here or not?

https://mises.org/library/source-prices

https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

And Hayek:

https://mises.org/library/prices-and-production

I understand enough to know that your are taking a bunch of economic gibberish and trying to shoehorn it into an argument that has nothing to do with economics. The people running the USSR weren’t worried about the cost to society of extensive military spending any more than the US was worried about it during WWII. That is something to worry about AFTER the war is over because if you don’t win, it is irrelevant what it cost.

This is the idiocy of economists and libertarians. There is more to life and society than economics and it’s stupid theories.

Mark, with all due respect, I don’t believe you understand economics as well as you believe you do.
So, when you say “it’s intellectual talent…to develop a competitive civilian economy� this is an admission on your part that the central-planners did not recognize the “price� being paid to another segment of the economy to attain that which the central-planners valued more.

This is the stupidity of looking at everything through the lens of economics, assuming these people cared about this so-called price. Their main concern was keeping themselves in power and defending their county. Like every ruling class, they assumed they could keep the people scared long enough and then finally get out of this spiral – which the Chinese seemed to have done.

As I pointed out, this drivel is irrelevant to the economic problems of the USSR.

Let’s just agree to disagree.

There is more to life and society than economics …..

…the stupidity of looking at everything through the lens of economics …

Pretty much.

As a Christian, I would say that the development of ones spiritual life is of the utmost importance, but, the lack of self-awareness and irony in your quote is simply breath-taking considering the fact that we live in a world of scarce resources and it is imperative that we peacefully figure out the best way of allocating them without violence and destruction.

…it is imperative that we peacefully figure out the best way of allocating them without violence and destruction.

Sounds as a plan. You do that.

I’ll focus on the part when “violence and destruction” phase kicks in.
Division of labor and such.

Should your grand plans fail, well…maybe I’ll be able to help.
If not, even better.

I mean….playing a “war game” every now and then is not a bad fun. At least for some of us, comparing to Facebook, Twitter, shopping, watching ball games and such.

Ah, one more thing: you sound as a “nice civilian”, but….have you ever been in a serious fight? You know…of the type “both guys to hospital, just one much worse” ?
Because, if I learnt just one thing in my life it is: people who don’t have the fight in them….just can’t get some hard facts of life. You won’t find that in all those books of yours, I know.

I am sure you, and your types, can, with ease, win any related debate here.
Means nothing to me. I’ve seen your types in real when things were gone bad. Everything between miserable and dead.Not keen on debating fine points of economy and philosophy. Cold, hunger and physical fear tend to be detrimental to such activity.

But, you see, we both win actually.
Hopefully, you’ll keep winning debates in Internet pubs, hence, all good. I keep looking ….Neanderthal….but all good in real life.

Now…should things go bad, as I feel they will, and I get proven correct, I won’t feel good about it. True, your types will probably feel worse, but, that really won’t help me and people I care for.
Actually…when we are on that part of the topic, I know something else.
When your types feel really threatened most of you, with ease, became worse than guys like me. Seen that too. Not read, seen.

Bu, let’s be positive and proactive:
Would you be so kind as to give us a brief outline of your plan for a positive change? I am sure you have at least a vague idea about it.

I’ll keep working on low intensity urban combat, but I am sure you aren’t interested in that.

“Not keen on debating fine points of economy and philosophy.”

Then why do you act as if you are?

“When your types feel really threatened most of you, with ease, became worse than guys like me.”

My “type”? You don’t know me.

“Would you be so kind as to give us a brief outline of your plan for a positive change?”

Do what’s right, act justly. Plan for survival, there are no victors.

I am going to politely bow out at this point as I believe it to be an act of irrationality on my part to continue this discussion.

God bless you, Peter.

btw, Peter, just to satisfy your morbid curiosity, there was a time in my life that seems not so long ago when I would have made the perfect killing machine and soldier. I would have killed you or anyone else required without questioning or tinge of guilt on my conscience. Thankfully, for reasons that should be clear, I have never had to exercise introspection on this.

Uhm….you know…that

“Not keen on debating fine points of economy and philosophy.�

Then why do you act as if you are?

was, actually, about those very educated, sophisticated urbanites suddenly finding themselves in a deep shit.

You don’t know me.

Yeah….

Do what’s right, act justly. Plan for survival, there are no victors.

That’s it?
I wasn’t expecting much, but this is rather disappointing.

I am going to politely bow out at this point as I believe it to be an act of irrationality on my part to continue this discussion.

Makes sense.

Not yet “bowing out”. That’s O.K.

btw, Peter, just to satisfy your morbid curiosity, there was a time in my life that seems not so long ago when I would have made the perfect killing machine and soldier.

Hahaha….sure…

I would have killed you or anyone else required without questioning or tinge of guilt on my conscience.

Aha…..

Thankfully, for reasons that should be clear, I have never had to exercise introspection on this.

Obviously.

That isn’t going to reach Oz. You live on a fortified island of sorts and the Sudanese don’t have the numbers to really represent a threat to society on that level.

In your country’s case, it is Asian economic invasion.

Any American could reassure you of that.

we live in a world of scarce resources and it is imperative that we peacefully figure out the best way of allocating them without violence and destruction

not really

aside from whites and NE Asians do any other groups actually produce anything?

africans? nothing
central and south americans?
MENA – take away their oil and they’re back to riding camels

Social Security is facing a solvency crisis.

No, it’s always had an honesty crisis. Actually, its defenders had– the SSA is honest enough to put Flemming v Nestor right on its home page.

Social Security in the US is purely a welfare program, like unemployment insurance and Aid to Families With Dependent Children. Only the means test differs.

It has no assets to lose, by definition. So how can it be “insolvent”?

Where they get their faith I’ll never know.

((( Jesus )))

Years of brainwashing starting when they are two or thereabouts. It takes a strong rebellious streak to overcome.
The ability to think bullsh*t when something obviously violates natures laws. Then, ideally, to fake it, as so many do. Take advantage of the system.

No, it’s always had an honesty crisis.

Yes. It’s controlling entity has access to a printing machine that can churn out all the money needed. The fact that it is federal counterfeit is irrelevant.

The result is another increase in something called the national debt, but in reality it’s an across the board tax on every dollar of savings and other dollar denominated elements and causes a delayed inflation in the price of everything.

The recent Democratic Administration is a perfect example. In eight years, due to “borrowed” money, the federal deficit doubled. Oops.

also, if the Soviet Union was so wonderful how did so many end up murdered, starved, or in the gulags?

Or in the West.

The left has abandoned labor issues because of womb-privileged, feminist, dual-high-earner households with dynastic ambitions, making bank by consolidating two, above-firing, absenteeism-friendly, family-friendly, household-supporting jobs under one roof.

This has halved the size of the college-educated middle class, creating a bigger upper middle class that borders on rich while also raising the standards of a middle-class lifestyle out of reach, lowering social mobility and even taking it backwards.

As rent (and all other major expenses) skyrocket out of control, the remaining job seekers competing for household-supporting jobs are out of luck, particularly if they are not in a handful of professions that guarantee a decent wage. Many are out of the crony-parent job network, resulting in less independent household formation among those raised in the middle and upper-middle class households—the group with strong social pressure to support themselves on earned-only income.

The well-vacationed dual earner parents in their posh zip-code Barbie-princess palaces are aided in retaining jobs despite tons of family-friendly absenteeism by computers that do more of their work, NannyCam-surveilled low-wage babysitters and grovelling grandparents that sacrifice their retirement years to keep their kids during the dual earners’ frequent trips around the globe.

They advocate for globalism, using their copious extra money to place bets in the global stock market casino. It’s all for the babies—for the DNA dynasties of these womb-privileged feminists—so it cannot be critiqued.

They distract from this cronyist, womb-privileged oligarchy by adding a bottom tier of womb-privilege, leading to the highest employment of females in US history, plus the highest number of part-time workers in US history (half of all “employed� persons in the USA, in fact).

Nothing is said about the reason for this: a blanket of welfare offerings for single-breadwinner households with US-born kids, including reduced-cost rent, free groceries, monthly cash assistance, free electricity and up to $6,431 in refundable child tax credits.

All of this is given to single moms (and legal / illegal immigrants in single-breadwinner households with US-born kids) when they work part time, staying under the earned-income limits for welfare programs from A to Z. Or, they work temp jobs, giving up the womb-productivity-based welfare during months when their income from slightly higher paying, full-time, temp jobs exceeds the programs’ earned income limits.

This Womb Productvity Spoils System, like the absenteeism-friendly hoarding of household-supporting jobs under fewer roofs, is sold as “feminism.�

And there are lot of married moms, working in low-wage jobs to add keeping-up-with-the-Jones’ income to a big spousal income, enjoying voted-best-for-moms jobs that are sometimes officially part time and often nothing but unofficial part-time jobs, with a “diversity� of 98 — 100% mom employees, watching each other’s ’ backs while taking off a ton of time for kid emergencies, like lengthy travel-soccer jaunts and mornings, afternoons and days off in addition to PTO and preggie leave.

Then for the men, we have 40 years of offshoring of manufacturing jobs and displacement by wave after wave of legal / illegal immigrants who are able to undercut citizens due to the layers of welfare for US-born kids that hoist up their traceable, earned income. The immigrants, like the welfare mommies, can afford to work cheaply due to their welfare access, and you do not hear a peep from the left because these are the cheap servants that aid the top-20%er dual high earners in doing their chores for them.

Cheap illegal alien roofers, with welfare-augmented wages for US-born kids, make Barbie-princess palaces more affordable for the dual-earner parents, freeing up more extra money for European trips and fine dining out for the kiddos. Cheap maids mean that feminist mommas don’t have to do their household chores any more than they raise their kids in the era of daycare-raised kids.

This wanton, materialistic self indulgence can by sold by the “left� as progressive due to the handiness of racial identity politics. Siding with the immigrants isn’t a matter of siding against American workers in an era when 95 million US citizens of working age are completely out of the labor force after 40 years of falling wages and mass displacement by welfare-aided foreign nationals, with around 7 million more citizens actually counted as unemployed each month only due to recent applications for Unemployment Compensation.

Siding with the immigrants is a matter of racial justice—50 years after the civil rights act, in the wake of a two-term Black POTUS, at a time in US history when racial injustice (against minorites) has never been lower. It is complete BS, this racial-justice crusading on the left. Like the womb-privileged crony feminism, it is nothing but a cover up for what’s really going on.