Peter Paul Rubens' Saturn Devouring His Son (1636)

The Greatest Generation defeated fascism so that their children, the Boomers, could become the most selfish generation in history, drown their descendents in debt, and plunge their nation into state dependency and … fascism. (Today we use more polite words such as crony capitalism, corporatism, public/private partnerships, et cetera, but they are technically the same.) A nation that devours its young will not survive.

People are now losing faith in the Me Generation. They brought it on themselves. Now it is up to their progeny to be better than they were in order to clean up their numerous messes. The hardest one to fix — and also the most devastating — will be the entitlement state they created which will be bankrupt by the time the Boomer’s progeny take their turn in the collection queue. They will have burned through all societal wealth and will leave nothing for future generations except a broken system teetering on war.

John Lennon (1940 - 1980)

“Ask them to show you one revolution that turned out to be what it promised militantly … The thing is to protest — but protest nonviolently.

They’ve got all the weapons, they’ve got all the money and they know how to fight violence because they’ve been doing it for thousands of years — suppressing us. And the only thing they don’t know about is nonviolence and humor …

Do everything for peace.”

The irony of the song Imagine is that to achieve all the things imagined in its lyrics would require extreme amounts of violence, especially the part about no possessions. Of course, never in his life did John Lennon himself ever practice the philosophy of no possessions.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

“War is the gambling table of governments, and citizens the dupes of the game.”

– Thomas Paine

Contrary to Popular Belief, Broken Windows do not Cause Prosperity

In the movie The Fifth Element, protagonist Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg perfectly explains The Broken Window Fallacy (see below), first described by Frédéric Bastiat in his 1850 essay Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas (That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen). Zorg demonstrates how tyrants use this misunderstanding to justify all types of destruction, including the killing of innocent people. As colossally stupid as such logic appears (at least to those who are not already colossally stupid), with every new war, any and every natural disaster, terrorist attack, or even make believe alien attack, there will be editorialists tripping over themselves to claim that everyone is overlooking the silver lining adorning the most recent dark cloud.

Governments love this fallacy

The logical extreme of this line of thinking is that the Broken Window Fallacy will inevitably be used as a primary justification for war. Tragically, most people still believe the colossally flawed mythology that WWII ended the Great Depression. The most dangerous aspect of these false beliefs is that they justify all the worst tendencies of governments. All governments seek to destroy wealth and war is one of the most efficient ways to do it. Trodding out this economic fallacy to justify increasingly absurd endeavors serves to deeply ingrain this myth into the people’s psyche to the point where people now seem to accept it without question. Once the Broken Window Fallacy becomes a way of thinking, it is a very small step to use the this fallacy as one of the primary justifications for warfare, since warfare is the next logical step in levels of possible destruction, and a people who believe that destroying cars can revive the car market will have much less difficulty believing that destroying cities full of people could be similarly stimulating. Indeed, those pundits who argue the most for stimulus struggle with the idea that war is the next logical step of their argument and if the people are already deceived into believing that destruction is stimulus then governments can more easily engage in warfare with the blessing of the people. The logic of this is so simple minded that it sounds absurd when said out loud (destruction is stimulus, war is the most destructive, therefore war is the best stimulus). Those who advocate this line of thinking will go to great lengths to hide their basic argument in an attempt to say stupid things without sounding stupid. Indeed, such arguments are already being made. Expect more of this.

– John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching

Of course, this is not nearly so baffling once you understand the true nature of the political spectrum.

Business Reply Mail -- Return to Sender

A recent YouTube video (below) suggests that Occupy Wall Street protesters can take their grievances to the banks directly by resurrecting the old idea of sending back the postage paid envelopes in credit card solicitations with political messages enclosed along with stuff to make the postage more expensive — like wood shims or roofing shingles. Sounds like a great idea, right? It would be, except for a few facts that got overlooked. A previous post outlined how these protesters tend to shoot themselves in the face by advocating for things that are directly harmful to themselves. This is no different. Unfortunately, OWS types continually ignore root causes which renders their actions self defeating.

Post Office's Rescue Plan: Junk Mail -- WSJ

First, the reason the banks are able to send so much junk mail is because the Post Office is a perfect example of a government enabled monopoly that does not need to provide value to customers to stay in business. The Post Office today is merely a bloated jobs program that provides less value to customers at ever increasing cost. But OWS doesn’t understand this. From the video comments:

“And it helps out our troubled Post Office! Sir, you are a hero.”

A huge percentage of their business is now junk mail that no one wants and for which they undercharge companies because taxpayers will have to pay the rest (eventually). If the Post Office were private, this type of junk mail would be much less attractive to businesses, chiefly because customers don’t want it (only a government supported agency can continuously give people services that they don’t want and stay in business), but also because there would no longer be the bottomless hole of tax dollars — they would have to charge a sustainable price which would force companies to find cheaper ways to advertise. The Post Office is already asking for multi-billion dollar bailouts at least as big as was given to Bear Sterns or AIG. The answer is the same as the answer for the banks and car companies, sever the public/private partnerships which shield them from competition and force them to provide value or fail.

Second, the video assumes that generating large postage bills will hurt these companies. This is false. The banks and other junk mailers are not feeling the direct costs of their postage because their junk mail is being subsidized by the taxpayers, otherwise they couldn’t afford to advertise in this way in the first place. Whatever the Post Office doesn’t subsidize with taxpayer money is transferred to bank customers. Understandably, this is of no concern for people who are not customers of their junk mailers, but because our government now has the persistent habit of bailing out the banks when they make bad decisions, this means that taxpayers are again paying for this postage whether they are customers of the banks or not. By increasing mailing costs, OWS is in essence just increasing the size of the bailout that the Post Office or the banks will eventually ask for. This means that everyone pays either directly through taxes or indirectly through the opportunity costs of propping up yet another failed business. (OWS claims not to want any more bailouts, but I could be wrong on that point).

A better solution? Just call the mailer directly and tell them to stop sending junk mail. This way, you get a direct benefit of not receiving so much junk mail and the Post Office no longer gets the benefit of the business and can no longer inflate their numbers with a losing business model that will ultimately lead to a bailout. The banks couldn’t care less either way, since they’re not paying for it in the first place. You are. Then focus on privatizing the Post Office and severing public/private partnerships that corrupt the free choices of consumers — that is, if preventing future bailouts is really a goal of the movement. As for how to get back at the banks, pay off all your debt and don’t buy stuff you cannot afford. Seriously, they hate it when you do that!

Society's Greatest Asset is its People

Governments destroy wealth. It’s what they do. This is why it is always mildly amusing (and sad) to watch people protest for the reduction or elimination of “Waste, Fraud and Abuse.” These three things are a permanent feature of government. They will grow or shrink in direct proportion to the size of government. The people who spend their time trying to get governments to stop buying $16 muffins are missing the point entirely. It is not possible to remove waste, fraud and abuse. And it isn’t because the government needs your money to pay for all the great stuff they do for you. As Milton Friedman has said:

“In the long run government will spend whatever the tax system will raise, plus as much more as it can get away with.”

Of course, some of this is diverted into their own pockets, but the graft isn’t even the most important part for them. Sure, politicians and bureaucrats love it when they can siphon off a few hundred thousand dollars here and there, but the most important thing is that the wealth is destroyed. Private wealth is the single biggest threat to governments. They will do anything within their power to destroy as much of it as possible. But it is very inefficient to just tax people, however wasteful they are with the proceeds. Entire bureaucracies must be created and it takes many patient years for people to accept ever higher tax rates and the acceptance of higher taxes is always slower than the need to extract ever more wealth. Keynesian stimulus measures may be very effective at destroying vast sums of wealth quickly, but they become increasingly hard to justify to a public that is constantly being burned by them. Naturally, militarism provides the answer. Killing people is the most efficient way to destroy untold amounts of wealth very quickly. Through killing, governments not only destroy all that a man has, they have also destroyed all that would have been. But governments do not at first kill their own people outright. They must condition their people for this, just as they must condition them to ever higher tax rates. The first step is to engage in foreign wars. They have the dual advantages of killing only a few citizens and of being extremely expensive. All governments will engage in war if possible. War also creates many opportunities for the State to seize ever increasing power. War, as Randolph Bourne has warned, is the “health of the state.” As Tom Clancy once said in an interview on Kudlow and Cramer on 9/2/03:

“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people.  It’s not good at much else.”

Eventually, even this type of wealth destruction proves too slow and it is only a matter of time before all governments will turn to the direct destruction of the most valuable asset that society possesses — its own people. The reasons may ostensibly be to eradicate a perceived threat to power, but ultimately the fact remains that all current and future wealth of those killed is also destroyed or seized (an outcome which the State has surely not overlooked). Slaughter then becomes the new stimulus. R. J. Rummel termed this Democide, and noted in Death by Government:

“as the arbitrary power of a regime increases, that is, as we move from democratic through authoritarian to totalitarian regimes, the amount of killing jumps by huge multiples.”

William Graham Sumner (1840 – 1910)

“All history is only one long story to this effect: Men have struggled for power over their fellow men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others, and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others.”

– William Graham Sumner

h/t lawrence reed

One of the most important attributes of a free society is the ability to make binding contracts with whomever you wish. This ensures that both sides have agreed on what each is getting in a transaction, and neither side is being manipulated. If both sides don’t get what they want they simply wouldn’t sign the contract. As the saying goes, you don’t get what you want, you get what you negotiate. Without contracts, it becomes very difficult to conduct business at all since there is no guarantee that one side or the other won’t change the terms before doing what was contracted. This was one of the chief rights that former slaves in America demanded, and was ultimately recognized for all people in writing as part of the 14th Amendment.

These days, some people are proffering a theory that everyone, by nature of their existence within the confines of the State, have implicitly agreed to something they are calling a “social contract” (a term that they have borrowed from classical thought and whose meaning they have bastardized for their own purposes). As they understand it, this is essentially a theoretical “contract” that you have never signed nor agreed to — nor could it be produced by those who argue for it — but somehow it is supposed to bind your actions in ways that are unclear and subject to change depending on the whims of those who feel they are in a position to define what this social contract is. Under this contract you are required to give up a certain percentage — how much is never certain and always changing — of your wealth and freedom in exchange for state provided goods that you may or may not need or use, and which are probably better left to the free market anyway. If these goods are not useful to you personally, it is argued that they are for other or for the “greater good.” It is never addressed that this may not be the best way to provide for those in need. This involuntary action — for the sake of being provocative — we can call slavery.

In 1854, George Fitzhugh wrote, Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of the Free Society, in which he argued for a form of the social contract to justify the enslavement of blacks. In this work he states that,

“Slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism.”

He postulated that blacks were better off as slaves because their treatment by their masters was better than it would be in their native Africa. Today people argue that people are better off being ruled by a benevolent state (if such a thing really exists), because — they postulate — the alternatives would be less desirable, since various things that people have become accustomed to receiving from the state would presumably be unavailable to them otherwise. So it is essentially the same argument applied to today’s world. Instead of being directed towards one race of people, the cross-hairs of the argument have now expanded to include everyone.

Simply put, freedom is not possible without the ability of self-ownership. Contracts define how people will trade their most valued property — themselves — with each other in ways that they deem are of benefit to them. This idea of a “social contract” turns the concept of contracts on it’s head. It is a vehicle for manipulation. Its terms are nowhere to be found, so a person who labors under such a construct can never show that the terms of the contract are being violated. Indeed the argument becomes circular. As soon as one complains that the social contract is asking too much, they are told that they have already agreed to the social contract and these terms, however onerous or unexpected, are required. In this way, the social contract can be whatever the State feels it needs from the people at that time. The State will always be the most powerful under-signer of such a contract and so will always be in the position to manipulate the people through it (which is why the concept of a social contract is so appealing to States).

The social contract is therefore antithetical to freedom. If one does not own oneself, it is difficult to argue that one owns anything else. Essentially, we have “advanced” from a long ago period where the right of contract was recognized for all people after the fall of slavery in the United States, to now, where we are all presumed to have agreed to a social contract that no one has ever seen and whose terms are improvised as needed by the ruling elite. In essence, the social contract means the death of the right of contract. As the incomparable Frederick Douglass has said:

“Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”