Category Archives: Politics on the left

Adam Smith and the Free Market

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A friend sent this along for comment.

Have Adam Smith and his writings been hijacked by free market economics?

Yes. Smith was deeply suspicious of the business class. When I was teaching, I used to give quotes without attribution for students to comment on, and they regularly treated Smith quotes as being from Marx. Smith knew nothing of capitalism, which barely existed in his day, and would be appalled by the idea of an economy based on a class of workers without property. His insight that people’s selfishness might produce collectively beneficial results (“the invisible hand”) has been taken over by so-called free market economics, and debased into a “greed is good” mantra that is totally antithetical to Smith’s teaching.

Smith complemented The Wealth of Nations with The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which explained that the moral sentiments of trust and compassion were required, among other things, to make a market economy operate at all. This idea has no role in “free market economics,” which imagines that economic actors are soulless egoists. Smith also maintained the first modern version of the labor theory of value, on which the exchange value of a commodity is the labor embodied in it. “Free market” economics rejects this in favor of a subjective theory of value on which price is determined entirely by supply and effective demand, what people with money will pay for it, because labor value is deemed “Marxist,” because Marx developed the most sophisticated version of value theory. A theory without labor value is not Smithian.

The problem here begins with knowing what is meant by “Adam Smith and his writings” and following that what is meant by “free market economics”. And then with making sense of “economic actors are soulless egoists” and “a ‘greed is good’ mantra”. Then beyond all of that, there is this which makes his argument utterly vacuous: “Marx developed the most sophisticated version of value theory” which he rounds us to “a theory without labor value is not Smithian” which means in his hands that only Marxists with their labour theory of value can truly state that they are following in the genuine tradition of Adam Smith.

Adam Smith is best understood via the invisible hand, that an economy is driven by individual decision making through entrepreneurial activity. The quotation is attempting to argue that Karl Marx is the true descendent of Adam Smith. Every aspect of this argument is false, an attempt to appropriate Smith, who advocated free markets, on behalf of Marx, who advocated a centralised tyranny in which markets play no role in directing resources towards their highest valued uses.

The left is depraved and sickening to its very core

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There is no higher level of disgust I can conjure that might arise from something else. If this is how the left sees the world, their personal misery and self-hatred are so all-consuming of their inner being that they are oblivious to everything that surrounds them. It’s from The Guardian.

For the full sense of how out of their tree these people are, you should go to this link and read through the entire cartoon, if you can stomach it. They are filled with hate and venom. This is entirely beyond ignorance since it takes very little to understand the rudiments of how an entrepreneurially-driven economy works. You eat because someone runs a farm, other people transport farm produce to where it can be sold by retailers, with plenty of other steps along the way. And why do individuals run farms, transport companies, retail outlets? Because that is how they earn their living. Yet there are people all over Australia, all over the Western world, who are so filled with such forms of madness that they do not care if the entire structure of the world crashes down upon our heads, which includes themselves, because they want vengeance on a world that is not how they would have liked it to be.

And following the cartoon there is this:

News is under threat …

… just when we need it the most. Millions of readers around the world are flocking to the Guardian in search of honest, authoritative, fact-based reporting that can help them understand the biggest challenge we have faced in our lifetime. But at this crucial moment, news organisations are facing an unprecedented existential challenge. As businesses everywhere feel the pinch, the advertising revenue that has long helped sustain our journalism continues to plummet. We need your help to fill the gap.

You’ve read 37 articles in the last six months. We believe every one of us deserves equal access to quality news and measured explanation. So, unlike many others, we made a different choice: to keep Guardian journalism open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. This would not be possible without financial contributions from our readers, who now support our work from 180 countries around the world.

Aside from the heading about news being under threat, about which I could not agree more, the lack of self-awareness in their insane attack on business owners who depend on revenues exceeding costs if they are to continue, adds to the general repulsiveness of the people who can write such things. They see themselves as a business in need of revenue to cover their costs in producing screeds such as this to attack profit-earning businesses, such as themselves. It is a form of mental illness. I wonder if they despise their readers as much as I do.

“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency”

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Can you guess who said that?

Something that I have focused on in my Classical Economic Theory and the Modern Economy, but which is an otherwise unknown consequence of the Keynesian Revolution, was the shift in emphasis from the real side of the economy to the monetary side. If one is to understand the operation of an economy it is essential firstly to look at the actual real level of activity and only then look at the monetary side that lies above it and largely outside of it. Every classical economist understood the point. Virtually no modern economist does, and certainly no one without a serious study of economics ever does, which really does mean that near enough no one at all any longer understands this even slightly. Which leads me to this: Pandemic moves Modern Monetary Theory from the fringes to actual US policy.

[Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)] has received increased publicity over the past three years as politicians realized there was not a plausible plan to raise the funds necessary to fund “Healthcare for All,” the “Green New Deal,” free college and other initiatives through taxes alone.

The core principle of MMT is that sovereign governments with sovereign currencies can “print” or “coin” money to support full employment or essentially any government program that would benefit society in the here and now. Critics have labeled it the “Magic Money Tree Theory.” Those detractors include Keynesian and Monetarist economists, who cite Hungary in the 1840′s, Brazil in the 80′s, Mexico in the 90′s as examples of where easy money policies led to hyperinflation.

Warren Mosler was one of the founders of MMT, and what is known as `Mosler’s law’ states: “No financial crisis is so deep that a sufficiently large increase in public spending cannot deal with it.” These words fundamentally represent the actions our policy makers have taken in response to the virus. This pandemic has moved MMT from the fringes to the dead center as the actual monetary policy of the United States.

These are people with PhDs in economics who will comprehensively ruin us, and on this let me quote Keynes with absolute approval:

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth….

As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

It was Lenin who said it, but quoted by Keynes as a warning to us all. Are you that one in a million who sees the point? Well if you are, there are then the other 999,999 who do not, which includes every single political leader heading every single government across the Western world today, each one of whom is engaging “all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction”.

People on the left never disagree with each other

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As near as I can tell, people on the left never disagree with each other. They certainly disagree with people on the right, but other than in relation to to all the things they all agree about amongst themselves, where are the internal debates so that you can find examples of one person on the left saying something that another person, still on the left, disagrees with, and yet both remain on the same side of politics.

On the left there is a single acceptable position and after that, no deviation is permitted. That they believe themselves to be critical thinkers is only because they all collectively disagree with people who disagree with any element of the common set of beliefs.

One does not have to be on the left to believe that climate change is a problem. Or that gay marriage should be legal. Or that many aspects of the market economy are unacceptable. Or that Donald Trump is not a nice person. On the right, all these are open for debate. On the left, they are fixed positions, in no sense open for discussion.

This is a depiction of conservatism as I see it, written by Irving Kristol. Titled The right stuff, it explains the difference between the conservative perspective in the US and in the UK. Being from the New World myself, and Australians fit into this pattern as well, I find myself siding here with Kristol.

Conservatism in the US today is a movement, a popular movement, not a faction within any political party. Although most conservatives vote Republican, they are not party loyalists and the party has to woo them to win their votes. The movement is issue-oriented. It will happily combine with the Republicans if the party is “right” on the issues. If not, it will walk away. This troubled relationship between the conservative movement and the Republicans is a key to the understanding of American politics today. The conservative movement is a powerful force within the party, but it does not dominate. And there is no possibility of the party ever dominating the movement.

American conservatism after the second world war begins to take shape with the American publication of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in 1943 and the founding in 1955 of William F Buckley’s National Review. Previously, there had been a small circle who were admirers of the Jeffersonian, quasi-anarchist, teaching of the likes of Albert Jay Nock, but no one paid much attention to them. Hayek’s polemic against socialism did strike a chord, however, especially among members of the business community. There may have been people converted from statism to anti-statism by that book, but my impression is that most admirers of the book were already pro-free market. What Hayek did was to mobilise them intellectually, and to make their views more respectable.

I will take you to the final para which seems more relevant today than when it was first written in 1996.

The US today shares all of the evils, all of the problems, to be found among the western democracies, sometimes in an exaggerated form. But it is also the only western democracy that is witnessing a serious conservative revival that is an active response to these evils and problems. The fact that it is a populist conservatism dismays the conservative elites of Britain and western Europe, who prefer a more orderly and dignified kind of conservatism. It is true that populism can be a danger to our democratic orders. But it is also true that populism can be a corrective to the defects of democratic order, defects often arising from the intellectual influence and the entrepreneurial politics, of our democratic elites. Classical political thought was wary of democracy because it saw the people as fickle, envious and inherently turbulent. They had no knowledge of democracies where the people were conservative and the educated elites that governed them were ideological, always busy provoking disorder and discontent in the name of some utopian goal. Populist conservatism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, and conservative thinking has not yet caught up with it. That is why the “exceptional” kind of conservative politics we are now witnessing in the US is so important. It could turn out to represent the “last, best hope” of contemporary conservatism.

Whether it is the best hope or not is uncertain, but that it may be the last hope is looking all to possible all the time.

Politics as unusual

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Roger Kimball writing on John Brennan and the Plot to Subvert an American Election. The sub-head reads, “Tyranny is always more palatable when swaddled in the conviction of its own virtue.”

Let’s talk about John Brennan a bit. You remember John Brennan. He was Barack Obama’s director of the CIA. Once upon a time, he was an enthusiast for Gus Hall, the Communist candidate for president, for whom he voted in 1976. I can’t think of any better background for the head of the country’s premier intelligence service under Obama. In 2014, having put childish things behind him as St. Paul advised, Brennan spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He denied it indignantly. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn’t do that. That’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we’d do.”

But that was before irrefutable evidence of the CIA’s spying transpired. Then Brennan apologized, sort of. Senators were outraged. They shook their little fists. “What did he know? When did he know it? What did he order?” asked one of the Lilliputians.

Guess what happened to John Brennan for spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee?

If you said “Nothing,” go to the head of the class and collect your gold star.

Nothing happened to Brennan for spying on U.S. senators.

If he could get away with that, what else could he get away with?

How about starting the bogus investigation into fictional “collusion” or “coordination” between the Russians and the campaign, and then the administration, of Donald Trump? How about that?

In Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy offers a meticulously researched overview of the origins and character of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible links between Trump and the Russians. That began in May 2017, shortly after Trump fired James Comey from his post as Director of the FBI. McCarthy also looks carefully at the background to that investigation, operation “Crossfire Hurricane” and several tributary investigations into possible Russian collusion with various U.S. persons and entities. Crossfire Hurricane began on July 31, 2016, about three months before the presidential election.

Was that the beginning of the Obama Administration’s inquiry into Donald Trump’s possible connections with “the Russians”? No, the inquiries begin even earlier. You may remember the excited article in the New York Times, “How the Russia Inquiry Began,” from December 20, 2017. According to this story, it all started in London in May 2016. It was a dark-and-stormy night—or at least a night of “heavy drinking”—when “George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to [Alexander Downer] Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.” (In fact, the “heavy drinking” consisted of “a couple of gins and tonic,” but, hey this is the New York Times. Details are for the little people.)

What amazes me most is how little anyone seems to care.

What if this was just a practice run?

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This is taken from Instapundit.

HUBRIS AND MISCALCULATIONS ARE A GIVEN WITH THE LEFT. BUT EVEN I DIDN’T REALIZE THEY’D BE SO STUPID AND EVIL AS TO WANT TO DESTROY ALL OF ECONOMY AND STARVE PEOPLE JUST TO GET ORANGE MAN BAD:  Hubris and miscalculation: The left’s bid to exploit the virus to defeat Trump.

11Posted at 5:30 am by Sarah Hoyt 

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This is from the article cited:

Freedom is what we rightfully take for granted. There are too many on the left who want to see the Bill of Rights abrogated in the name of social justice or identity politics or whatever. They eschew the freedom to which we are all entitled and they cannot prevail. They’ve made inroads, but now is the time to fight back against the revealed despots who have attained high offices. The oft-quoted sentence of Ben Franklin is vital to remember at this moment in time:

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Humankind will never be free of viruses; they are a natural part of all life. The left cannot be allowed to oppress us, to restrict our freedoms, because of COVID-19. Vote them all out, every last one of them. They do not mean well.

We should truly be worried about the future, but not because of this virus which was a pushover. It’s the politics we have been exposed to that should truly worry us. Daniel Andrews is a sensational incompetent who has bankrupted Victoria, but he still believes he has been our saviour and knows what’s best. If our political leaders are not prepared, even now, to call off their viral dogs when there is now nothing at all to save us from, what defence really is there against the politics of the lockdown any time some political leader wants to call one on?

Why would they do this?

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From Instapundit.

ANDREW CUOMO’S reckless choices. “Bill de Blasio made terrible decisions as mayor of New York City. But as more reporting emerges about the catastrophic decisions made by New York’s governor, it’s possible Andrew Cuomo deserves even more blame than de Blasio for what the coronavirus has done to the tri-state area and consequently the nation. New York and New Jersey combined have suffered more COVID-19 deaths than any other country being tracked by researchers who run the Johns Hopkins crisis dashboard. Cuomo made three breathtakingly bad moves in March that in retrospect amounted to catastrophe. First, Cuomo failed to call for, and even actively discouraged, informal social-distancing measures in early March. Next was the delay in mid-March in ordering formal closures when the virus started rampaging through his state. Third was his March 25 edict to long-term care facilities that they must accept infected patients, which caused a mass deadly outbreak among helpless, trapped, elderly New Yorkers. Only in the last few days have some corners of the media begun to call attention to just how badly Cuomo has failed us.”

Related: NYC vs. San Francisco: the stark failure of Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio.

UPDATE: Cuomo refuses accountability in nursing home scandal, says vulnerable people were going to die anyway. Quoth Cuomo: “Older people, vulnerable people are going to die from this virus. That is going to happen despite whatever you do. Because with all our progress as a society, we can’t keep everyone alive. Despite what everything you do and older people are more vulnerable. And that is a fact. And that is not going to change.”

Maybe, but they die faster when you send infectious people into nursing homes full of older and vulnerable people.

There are also these from the same source.

WITH DOCTORATES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE AND MEDICAL BIOMETRY HE CAN’T POSSIBLY HAVE GREATER EXPERTISE THAN KAREN:  YouTube censors epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski for opposing lockdown.

THIS IS WHY THE CHINESE WANTED HIM, I GUESS: NYT 2017: Candidate to Lead the W.H.O. Accused of Covering Up Epidemics. “A leading candidate to head the World Health Organization was accused this week of covering up three cholera epidemics in his home country, Ethiopia, when he was health minister — a charge that could seriously undermine his campaign to run the agency. The accusation against Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was made by a prominent global health expert who is also an informal adviser to Dr. David Nabarro, a rival candidate in the race for W.H.O. director general.”

“I Told You So, You F’n Fools”

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I had a friend, as far to the left as they come, who was thrilled to see the Soviet Union fall in 1991 since there would no longer be the bad example of socialism in action to deter others from joining the cause. We manage now to dissuade people from joining the Nazi Party, although we do not seem to be able to warn anyone about the dangers of any authoritarian system which are always of the left, no matter what name we given them. After all, Nazi means National Socialist in German. What has brought all this to mind is this: Inhuman power of the lie: “The Great Terror” at 40. It’s now been around 90 years since the start of the Great Terror itself; the 40 years only refers to the date of the publication of Conquest’s book in 1968 while the commemorative article was written in 2008. The story itself never grows old although fewer and fewer see its relevance.

The Great Terror refers to the purges that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. To give this more statistical accuracy, between 1937 and 1938, about seven million Russians were arrested, one million executed, and two million more or less murdered by the inhuman conditions of the Gulag. Throughout the entire period—roughly 1934 to 1939—there were not fewer than 15 million victims, overall. These are conservative estimates, and it’s worth bearing in mind that this abattoir system was invented, operated, and maintained “in detail” from the top, as against revisionist claims that Stalin and his cadre were unaware of the death count of their gruesome mechanism of state repression.

The article is really about Robert Conquest whose books should be read by anyone who wants to understand why every obstacle to political power is essential if you want to preserve your freedom, your prosperity, and ultimately in far too many cases, your life.

This anecdote yields quite a lot, I think, about more than Conquest’s winning personality (Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin: “Bob just goes on as if nothing has happened”). It also speaks ably of what has made him, apart from his groundbreaking research, such a powerful historian: irony and a wry sense of humor have offset some of the most tragic passages committed to print in the last hundred years. (“The sequence Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev was like a chart illustrating the evolution of the hominids, read backward.”) As Amis plausibly, but inventively, tells it, when the publisher of The Great Terror asked Conquest what he’d like to re-title the book in its second edition, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and new archival material from Moscow vindicated almost all of its key judgments: “Well, perhaps, I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. How’s that?”

I hope you will forgive the title.

It’s just like politics

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It’s actually just like everything where someone can come in second. This is about Michael Jordan. And this is what Jordan said, and while you read it, think about all those people who oppose the American President because he’s not a nice man:

“Winning has a price. And leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates came after me.

“They didn’t endure all the things that I endured. Once you join the team, you live at a certain standard that I play the game, and I wasn’t going to take anything less. Now, if that means I have to go out there and get in your ass a little bit, then I did that. You ask all my teammates, the one thing about Michael Jordan was, he never asked me to do something that he didn’t f..kin’ do.”

He pauses as if he could not continue, and then he does: “When people see this, they’re going to say, ‘Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant’. Well, that’s you. Because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be a part of that as well … That’s how I played the game.

“That was my mentality. If you don’t want to play that, don’t play that way.”

Not just basketball, but everything is that way. Politics especially. Anyone who makes it to the top anywhere – even Miss Congeniality – has a ruthless streak that firstly seeks to learn the rules of the game and then to dominate and win. Most of us cannot do this ourselves and for our values to dominate leaders who can in-fight on our behalf are essential.

Their “last chance to destroy Trump and the economy”

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Limbaugh asks VP Pence about blue states with ‘political desire to inflict pain’ by not opening. Obvious beyond obvious, deniable as a serious possibility only among those who would like to see PDT lose the next election.

As for Democrats utilizing the pandemic to their political advantage, Limbaugh said in March it was their “last chance to destroy Trump and the economy.”

“That’s where we are right now because the Democrats, the bottom has fallen out of their presidential campaign,” he said, noting that the party has had to ‘settle’ on Joe Biden as their nominee.

“So … they’ve got the way they’re looking at this. They’re the ones talking about this could be an opening for the Democrats,” Limbaugh said. “And when you call them out on this, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, we’re not hoping people get sick. We’re talking about the economy.’

“OK, fine, chance to destroy the U.S. economy for the benefit of the Democratic Party,” Limbaugh added. “And this is what they’ve got going for them.”

Right on cue, Politico reported in early April the Democrats are planning to pin the tanking economy on Trump, even though, as is now evident, a number of blue-state governors and mayors continue to extend lockdown orders, keeping many businesses closed or opened only on a limited basis.

“We think the economy is central to what working people need to hear from candidates and elected officials up and down the ballot,” Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, told the news site.

The virus does not know the political affiliation of state leaders, but it still seems to make a difference. In the US especially, the more to the left the leader is, the harder the lockdown has been and the more deaths that have been recorded as due to the corona virus.