This is the Great Depression 2.0

On the plus side, it appears the Keynesian interventions have managed to successfully “smooth out” the business cycle.

The following are U.S. GDP growth rates for every year during the 1930s…

1930: -8.5%
1931: -6.4%
1932: -12.9%
1933: -1.3%
1934: 10.8%
1935: 8.9%
1936: 12.9%
1937: 5.1%
1938: -3.3%
1939: 8.0%

When you average all of those years together, you get an average rate of economic growth of 1.33 percent.

That is really bad, but it is the kind of number that one would expect from “the Great Depression”.

So then I looked up the numbers for the last ten years…

2007: 1.8%
2008: -0.3%
2009: -2.8%
2010: 2.5%
2011: 1.6%
2012: 2.2%
2013: 1.7%
2014: 2.4%
2015: 2.6%
2016: 1.6%

When you average these years together, you get an average rate of economic growth of 1.33 percent.

This isn’t quite right. I ran the numbers and the average for the 1930s is 0.53 percent, whereas the 2010s average is 1.17 percent. So, it’s both better and worse than the author wrote. Meanwhile, despite the anemic GDP “growth”, the stock market has hit new peaks and optimism is high.

And that sound you hear is everyone familiar with socionomics rooting around in their closets looking for their crash helmets.

Over the target

Castalia House author Ivan Throne is catching major flak from antifa as a result of his effective efforts against them. He’s not exactly what one would call upset about it.

If you want to support Ivan in his ongoing war against antifa, I strongly recommend buying his book, THE NINE LAWS. Because we’re not going to win the cultural war for Western civilization by playing defense.

National Review deserves to die

Kevin Williamson was out hustling for donors on behalf of National Review today. Apparently it has not made money since 1955. Strange, that a magazine should feature so many great defenders of capitalism who nevertheless cannot figure out what that means concerning the market for their product.

In any event, in tonight’s Darkstream I explain why National Review is both inappropriately named and why it deserves to be tossed into the dustbin of history.

Soiled! Soiled, I say!

George Will’s bow tie is aflutter with indignation at the rise of the vulgarians:

In 1950, the year before William F. Buckley burst into the national conversation, the literary critic Lionel Trilling revealed why the nation was ripe for Buckley’s high-spirited romp through its political and cultural controversies. Liberalism, Trilling declared, was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in mid-century America because conservatism was expressed merely in “irritable mental gestures.” Buckley would change that by infusing conservatism with brio, bringing elegance to its advocacy and altering the nation’s trajectory while having a grand time.

Today, conservatism is soiled by scowling primitives whose irritable gestures lack mental ingredients. America needs a reminder of conservatism before vulgarians hijacked it, and a hint of how it became susceptible to hijacking….

Buckley famously said he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by Harvard’s faculty, but he briskly defended the Council on Foreign Relations from “those American right-wingers who specialize in ignorance.”

When the Alt-Right comes to power, one of its first acts should be to dig up the corpse of William F. Buckley and burn it. He was, without question, a significant part of the problem; he was no true soldier of the Right, but rather, the treacherous captain of the Left’s Cuckservative Guard.

As for George Will, I’ve only got one thing to say: your day is done. We have moved beyond you, not just politically, but intellectually. We may be vulgar, we may be impolite and declasse, but we are considerably smarter and more perceptive than you are.

And we’re not soiling conservativism. We’re rejecting it for the useless defensive and defeatist bullshit that it has always been.

Alt-Retard economics

Having seen and heard a few economically illiterate morons pop up and advocate NATIONAL SOCIALISM as some sort of answer to globalism and free trade, I decided that I would take the five minutes required to demonstrate that national socialism is A) not a coherent economic theory or program, B) not a viable economic system, and C) structurally doomed to fail even faster than the current US system is today.

A) National socialism is not a coherent economic theory.

“The basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all.”
– Adolf Hitler

B) National socialism is not a viable economic practice.

USA 6-year budget deficit to revenue, 2010-2016
26.8 percent

National Socialist Germany 6-year budget deficit to revenue, 1933-1939
62.9 percent

C) National Socialism was structurally doomed to fail even faster than the current US system is today.

Both the current US system and the historical Nazi systems were dependent upon credit booms. But the Nazi debt-spending was 135 percent worse than the USA’s insanely profligate ways. The ad hoc National Socialist economics meant that the Nazis either had to surrender to the bankers on whom they had declared metaphorical war or engage in material imperialist war to acquire the resources to pay off their rapidly growing debts.

Anyone who advocates national socialism as an economic solution is either totally ignorant or literally retarded. It is even less credible than libertarianism, free trade, or globalism. Frankly, to call it “retarded” is probably a little too generous.

Mailvox: disproof vs positive claim

RS asked about tariffs and wages:

In your second presentation on Free Trade you said that Hazlitt was erroneous in claiming that tariffs would reduce wages in America and you pointed to the fact that wages have reduced since 1973 event though tariffs have largely been eliminated. In any event, I think that the reduction in wages for American workers since that time is due to the large scale importation of foreign workers which seems orthogonal to tariffs.

It is false to claim that tariffs reduce wages. While it is true that the two primary reasons for reduced American wages are a) twice as many women working than before and b) the importation of foreign workers, the fact is that reduction of tariffs has not increased wages. Perhaps more to the point, wages in China have risen from 445 CNY to 67569, most of this prior to the relaxation of tariff rates in 2010.

It is difficult to separate the various effects, but the point is that we do not see the inverse tariff/wage relationship upon which Hazlitt in part bases his case.

Meanwhile, DH found himself troubled by the thoughts my previous Darkstream raised:

Your recent dark-stream is quite thought provoking. I had difficulty putting my mind at rest enough to fall asleep until way past my usual bedtime. The points you made resonate with me as true, however the argument is left begging for more.

Your reaction to comments stood out as thought provoking as well. While I do not consider myself to be particularly bright on an absolute scale, I have no idea what my I.Q. is. I find it does not require a great deal of intelligence to be frustrated with and isolated from most of those around me.  I relate to your frustration, though I wish it didn’t keep you from completing your thoughts.

Even if we could distill all the best aspects of every “ism” into one best of all “isms”, it would not be accepted upon pain of death either by the elites or their devoted subjects.

The point that I am making is not that communism is good or desirable. It is merely that global free markets and individual sovereignty is incompatible with the survival of both nation and family. It is not an accident that so many globalists are childless individuals with unusual family situations; even the modestly successful expat communities tend to be mostly populated by rootless transients upon whom one can hardly expect to successfully build a society, let alone a civilization.

What passes for global society is intrinsically parasitical, if not downright predatory, and therefore cannot possibly serve as a sound foundation in itself. Globalism requires that cows first transform themselves into wolves, and then, after that impossibility is successfully accomplished, learn to eat grass.

Darkstream: Free Trade part 2

Finally got around to addressing this in tonight’s Darkstream. Hit 13 of Henry Hazlitt’s 23 errors on free trade, which longtime readers already know. I also slapped down a Nazi larper who suggested “national socialism” as an alternative to free trade; one of these days I’m going to have to do an analysis of the Nazi economic program to make the absurdity of it clear to those who can’t move beyond the binary world of “communism bad, ergo expansionary Teutonic supremacy good.”

Adieu, Paris

Trump rejects “another scheme to redistribute wealth out of America” in pulling out of the 2015 Paris Accord on unicorns.

I mean, “climate change”.

“Our withdrawal from the agreement represents a restoration of America’s sovereignty.”

Bilderberg targets Trump

One wonders if the God-Emperor intends to return the favor if the globalists genuinely move against him.

Sources close to the elitist Bilderberg Group conference tell Infowars that globalists see their agenda as being in “deep trouble” and that Donald Trump poses a “dangerous” risk to the international order and must be brought to heel or turfed out of office.

Over the years, Infowars has developed sources close to the conference who feed us information ahead of time as to the real agenda behind the confab, not just the vague list of topics released officially by Bilderberg.

Given that this is the first year since both Brexit and Trump came to pass, the effort to derail both is very much the primary focus of discussion amongst globalists in attendance this week.

The reason that three members of the Trump administration – HR McMaster, Wilbur Ross and Chris Liddell have been invited to attend this year’s meeting in Chantilly, Virginia is that Bilderberg thinks there is still a chance to put pressure on Trump to force him to back down on his America-first agenda.

With the U.S. about to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump is “dangerously obsessed” with derailing the current world order, according to one Bilderberger, a fear that has intensified since Trump chided world leaders at the G7 summit last week.

Globalists are baffled as to Trump’s “erratic” style of governance and are panicked that he could undo decades of work they put in to build the new world order.

The globalist elitists STILL haven’t figured out that their agenda isn’t in deep trouble due to Trump, or Duterte, or Babymetal, but because it simply isn’t viable and does not function the way they believed it does.

And if they are seriously conspiring to overthrow the legally elected President of the United States, well, that’s literal treason.

Immigration and taxation

Interesting to observe that immigration has not only harmed the USA by making it less wealthy by lowering per capita wages, but also by significantly increasing per capita taxes.

By 1965, the fiscal year Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater, the federal government collected about $116.817 billion in taxes from a population of about 194,302,963. That year federal taxes equaled about $601 per capita — or $4,578 in 2016 dollars.

In fiscal 2016, according to OMB, the federal government collected about $3.268 trillion in taxes. That equaled about $10,114 for each of the 323,127,513 people in the country.

There can no longer be any doubt that mass immigration is not only an economic negative for a nation, but is severely destructive in multiple senses.