This is a precise statement of the endless modern battle between free people and statist pricks:
The EU, and political class of the western world, has driven up energy costs, and the cost of everything with more government taxation and spending. Those factories won’t be temporarily closing to save on energy costs, they’ll be closing because the high taxes and regulations there make their businesses uncompetitive compared to China where they use cheap coal, and have lots of cheap or slave labor.
The EU could be much more prosperous, with free markets instead of the socialist/mercantilist/authoritarian governments masquerading as democracies. Their markets are so screwed up, Biden had a say in whether a pipeline could be built from Russia to Germany. Free markets always outperform government controlled markets, but free markets are a barrier to politicians’ power and wealth. When the government picks winners/losers in commerce, we’re always the losers.[1]
Sociopathic politicians want power and when they get it they think they’ve acquire the ability to manipulate and direct something as complex as an economy.
Murray Rothbard described the inputs necessary for a wife to make a ham sandwich for her husband (an example of the correct relationship in the universe between men and women). Milton Friedman did the same thing by showing all the things and people who are necessary to produce a simple pencil. Yet morons masquerading as omniscient beings presume to create command economies where various Sergeis, Helmuts, Pierres, Conchitas, Lashondras, and Astrids — selected for political reliability — maintain spreadsheets wherewith they calculate the number of can openers, ultrasound devices, saddles, thongs, oranges, electric backhoes, and axe handles to be produced and at what prices and with what delivery charges.
In the Soviet Union this was really tried but increasingly in the West this is being tried surreptitiously, not by trying to control the production of oranges or selenium directly but by placing a heavy thumb on the scale to favor the SJW/oligarch agenda items such as fossil fuel demonization, cruise missile production, a huge military establishment equal to our self delusions, underclass babies, tiny homes, injectable poisons, and preparations for building it back “better,” a/k/a the Great Reset, the details of which are close hold for the moment.
The result in the United States now that you have a small group of people in the Eccles Building deciding what the price of money is to be in an multi-trillion dollar economy. The interference of the Congress and the Fed is massive and the horrendous bubble economy we have now is the result because of the manipulation or ignoring of the fundamentals. The wisest people in the country have similarly managed to work it out so that people who actually engage in productive activities have lost a huge share of the GDP that their wages once represented while debt skyrockets, billionaires prosper, and pension funds vainly struggle to slay the actuarial and return dragons.
But so much for the familiar free markets (combined with light state regulation) are self-organizing and plainly wonderful truism.
I particularly like the text I highlighted in Mr. Kemp’s comment as it highlights the triumph of the ongoing propaganda effort to conceal the horrible deformation of the Western world that has taken place. The language of public debate has been debased and the notion of Western freedoms long since left in the dust of the progressive juggernaut. It’s crucial in our times to call out the liars and call a spade a bloody shovel, as my dear mother liked to say. She liked people who did that and we’re soon reaching a point when the [nonsense] will reach a critical mass. Then there will be a realignment.
I like to write of the applicability of the Chinese concept of the loss of the Mandate of Heaven. Without leadership and despite illiteracy and barbarous repression available to the emperor, the entire nation spontaneously decides for a multitude of individual reasons that you can stick a fork in it, “it” being the reigning dynasty. Western country cousins here = house of cards, too clever by half, build your house on sand, bad karma, wrath of God, and smarty pants. No need to complexify things.
There’s another aspect of oriental history that I think is applicable to our times, namely the Tokugawa Shogunate where the shogun ruled Japan from 1603-1868 and the emperor was only a figurehead encouraged to write poetry and be a scholar. Substance ruled form until the emperor began to acquire such increasing political influence that there was a restoration of the Meiji emperor as ruler in fact.
It strikes me we are living through a similar time where the lies of the Western nations, their pretense of rationalism, benevolence, and elite competence, are wearing thin. The abomination of open borders, multiculturalism, and diversity are perhaps the last straw, the giant middle finger salute to the people who never for one moment consented to the worship of foreign invaders and their own political and racial replacement.
Furthermore, the heady days of year one of the Social Security system — itself utterly unconstitutional like any and all subsequent federal “health” programs and agencies — are long gone, as are the times that older people in certain industries or sectors could expect to receive the pensions they were promised and on which they intended to live in their retirement. The iron laws of arithmetic increasingly apply with a vengeance.
The foreign policy of the United States has caused a blood bath and untold destruction wherever our leaders have chosen to involve us, all in supposed vindication of and defense of “our democratic values” while those values went by the board. Foreigners diluted the franchise and the concept of citizenship and vote fraud reached such proportions that it was possible for the ultra left party to steal elections right before God and man and pay no penalty.
Add in gross economic mismanagement (off-shoring, massive debt, currency debasement), ruinous regulation and taxation, lunatic notions of world government and globalism, complete debasement of the constitutional scheme, a putrid, ridiculous culture, complete anarchy in the streets and lecture halls, massive monopoly, a corrupt press, and propaganda to put the master Joseph Goebbels to shame and you get to the point where Dr. Phil liked to ask, “And how’s that working out for you?”
There aren’t too many Dr. Phils out there just now and I think “the Constitution” is not likely to be a realistic standard to rally around. At least the Japanese had a cultural icon and figurehead to turn to (“that other guy”) rather then the Chinese “dynasty or complete collapse” alternative. Still, our present predicament of utter, complete, total, unalloyed, 100% vitamin-enriched stupidity and mindless rejection of all that’s workable, time-tested, decent, or holy is so putrid that perhaps a simple demand that the political class just cut the crap will suffice. Pardon my language but you must admit it has more punch than “stop trying to immanentize the eschaton.”
Alas, not one bar association in the country, and certainly not the Supreme Court, lifts a finger to restore the clear federal-state scheme of the original Constitution. Even a polite cough about Obongo and Harris not being natural born citizens was too risky for these tireless proponents of the rule of law, diversity, inclusion, and pro bono service. And, even if there are any Joan of Arc type of transformative leaders among us (possible candidates = Marjorie Taylor Greene, Bronx Tina, Laura Loomer, Jordan Peterson, LTC Stuart Scheller, Alex Jones, LTC Allen West, Gov. Ron DeSantis) they’re certain to fall victim to the ad hominem killing machine that reduces all patriots to the level of sexual predator, rightist maniac, serial killer, or capitalist tool. Or the thug scum action arm of the Democrat Party can be summoned to supply other means of persuasion. Still the Ceaușescus ended up against the wall, literally, despite their control of frightful powers of repression. Not part of my agenda, that sort of thing, but illustrative of the twists and turns of human history that surprise everyone.
I suspect that, ultimately, chaos will be our friend and enable the reestablishment of virile, no nonsense leadership capable of pursuing common sense (as much as human governments can) not to mention antiquated concepts of sedition and subversion with vigor, unlike what passes for leadership now with its fawning obeisance to depravity, feminist lunacy, racial rejectionism, foreign invasion, and sexual “identity” lunacy, inter alia, and its worship of The Lie in the service of the victory of sacred state power above all.
This period of feeble, arrogant, meritless, lawless rule by cretins is an aberration on human history. For a while there it was good but now it is time for a certain, um, illiberalism. Endless treatises, cries, and entreaties have had zero effect. The outcome will be impossible to predict, not least because all landmarks and traditional controls and cautions have been tossed out the window. It’s leftist lunacy ad astra for now and then, after a little wrath of God action, maybe we can come up with something that doesn’t involve the words “progress,” “identify,” or “structural.” It won’t be Western Civ 101 I’m pretty sure but who knows? Living under rational governments and not being beholden to complete toads have an enduring appeal if you know anything about human history. “Smile when you call me a white supremacist, padnuh” could be like a sort of new motto.
Notes
[1] Comment by MoreFreedom on “Kemp: Europe’s Rising Energy Prices Will Force Factory Closures.” By John Kemp, ZeroHedge, 10/3/21 (emphasis added).
Edited 10/4/21.
