Inquisition 2.0

Apparently, some people literally never learn:

For years, whenever Jews and Muslims engaged in dialogue and activism together, it usually concerned — or foundered — on one issue: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency, that appears to be changing. Regardless of what’s happening across the ocean, Jews and Muslims in the United States are joining together to fight for shared domestic concerns.

“It is a perhaps growing recognition that [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] cannot define how American Jews and American Muslims relate to one another,” said Rabbi David Fox Sandmel, the Anti-Defamation League’s director of interreligious engagement. “The shared concerns we have about prejudice, about bias, about threats of violence, about disenfranchisement — these are the kinds of things that can bring us together.”

On Monday, the American Jewish Committee and the Islamic Society of North America launched the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council, a group of religious and business leaders from both communities who will help draft domestic policy legislation and advocate on issues of shared concern.

From Infogalactic:  For the most part, the invasion of the Moors was welcomed by the Jews of Iberia. Both Muslim and Catholic sources tell us that Jews provided valuable aid to the invaders. Once captured, the defense of Córdoba was left in the hands of Jews, and Granada, Málaga, Seville, and Toledo were left to a mixed army of Jews and Moors. The Chronicle of Lucas de Tuy records that “when the Catholics left Toledo on Sunday before Easter to go to the Church of the Holy Laodicea to listen to the divine sermon, the Jews acted treacherously and informed the Saracens. Then they closed the gates of the city before the Catholics and opened them for the Moors.”

White Christian Americans helped establish and fund and defend Israel. And this is the gratitude they receive? This is the thanks they get? ANOTHER Jewish-Muslim alliance against them in their own country? It’s not as if Americans don’t know who opened the gates in 1965.

Guess what’s likely to come of this sort of behavior. Come on, just one guess. And what sort of bizarre, ahistorical logic do people whose single metric is “is it good for the Jews” use to conclude that this behavior is, somehow, going to be good for the Jews? Epic stupidity doesn’t even begin to describe this.

How GG crowned the God-Emperor

And saved the free world:

By now, you’ve read countless presidential election post-mortems that have struggled to rationalize how Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton when it was “her turn” to be president. Many of them predictably avoid placing any blame on the candidate herself (first female president!) and instead blame James Comey, or Russia, or Jill Stein. In reality, the president-elect trumped Hillary because of Gamergate and the vast internet army that the movement created.

That’s right: Trump was literally memed into the White House. Trump and his supporters dominated social media from day one, pumping out weaponized memes at a rate that Hillary’s campaign never could have anticipated. When the email scandal broke, the internet detectives who were just rookies at the peak of Gamergate used their experience to sniff out each and every damaging WikiLeaks revelation. Hillary supporters blame a “silent majority” of backwoods hillbillies for Trump’s victory, but they could have realized the tide was turning if only they looked online….

Like clockwork, the prominent figures who backed Gamergate also began jumping onto the God-Emperor bandwagon.

Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart journalist whose very existence as an openly gay Trump supporter continues to cause cognitive dissonance in SJWs everywhere, was also the first person to break the news about the gaming journalist elites’ secret mailing list. While he was virtually unknown back in those days, Milo has now become one of the movement’s key figures. His rise to fame has been met with a predictable character assassination on the part of the mainstream media, but Milo doesn’t seem to mind, especially now that people are genuinely pushing for him to become the White House press secretary.

Gamergate may have also led to Trump picking Steve Bannon to serve as the White House chief strategist. Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News, which was the only prominent media outlet to cover Gamergate as it unfolded. Sure enough, the media has been quick to scaremonger about the decision, depicting Bannon as an anti-Semitic white nationalist. The New York Times even called him a “voice of racism,” which should sound like a familiar aspersion.

There’s also Vox Day, the author and Rabid Puppies founder who penned the book SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police as a “guide to understanding, anticipating, and surviving SJW attacks.” He was among the first wave of a Gamergate supporters, hosting the GGinParis meetup in July 2015 along with Milo and Mike Cernovich, yet another Gamergate figure who emerged as one of the most famous pro-Trump memeologists.

Read the whole thing. Well done, #GamerGaters. Salud to the #GGinParis gang. It’s an honor to stand with you all. And remember, it never ends.

An election metaphor

Sic semper stupidis. Question: did anyone happen to see a UT parking sticker on the bumper? Asking for a friend.

If you ever find yourself in a position where people are screaming at you, “get off the fucking highway”, you really should take it as a sign to seriously reconsider your life choices.

Hillary in the bunker

Rumors out of CNN that Hillary didn’t give her concession speech on Election Night because she had gone “straight-up Hitler-in-the-bunker”:

The few honest MSM reporters have been reduced to leaking info to new media people because their corporate bosses won’t let them report it. A friend at CNN says Clintonland reports Hillary was in a “psychotic, drunken rage” election night; needed hardcore meds to speak Wednesday. CNN reporter tells me Hillary became physically violent towards Robby Mook and John Podesta around midnight; had to be briefly restrained.  Hillary on election night was straight-up Hitler-in-the-bunker shit.  It even included psychotic screaming about “the Russians.” The doctor helped restrain Hillary when she violently attacked Mook and Podesta at midnight. Gave sedatives, then amphetamines next morning.  CNN reporter says Hillary needed so many amphetamines Wed morning she had unexpected nosebleeds all day.  Fear was she’d bleed at concession. And we seem to have separate sources corroborating her drunknedness:

Federal Spy Guy @FederalSpyGuy
0100hrs
podesta told her she had to address her followers
she (drunk as a skunk) (allegedly) said: “fuck them – you do it”

I have no idea if these rumors are true or not, but it certainly fits with descriptions of her past behavior, and explains why her campaign manager gave her not-concession speech that night. And it’s interesting that these rumors are coming out of CNN; apparently the reporters are done with whitewashing her behavior.

At this point, the Nobel Committee should go ahead and give the Peace Prize to WikiLeaks. If Trump hadn’t won the election, Russian troops would already be halfway to Kiev by now.

Mailvox: but what about MEEEEE?

One thing that I’ve found interesting is the intrinsic solipsism possessed by many stranieri resident in the USA, some of whom actually think that pointing out the fact that their lack of an American heritage, or their children’s lack of an American heritage, comprises a coherent argument against my various observations and expectations for the future rather than underlining it. This email from an Englishman married to a Filippino is fairly par for the course.

I’m English and I moved to the States more than 20 years ago, as a young man. I’m a naturalized citizen. I voted for Obama twice and, this time around, I voted for Clinton, but I can understand why people recoil from the worst parts of her candidacy. Regardless, to me, as a European liberal, she was going to protect things that believe in. Not as much as Bernie might have, and I voted for him in the primaries. Anyway, this is all incidental and background. I wanted to ask you about the language of race ebing used by the alt-right and by Trump both during the election and afterward. And whether it makes you feel at all queasy.

As an empathetic person I’m always trying to understand both sides: I can see why someone in Virginia, or Pennsylvania, or Florida, or wherever, is upset that illegal immigrants have taken their jobs. And I understand, and have been outspoken in my way, about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism here, and everywhere. I understand it all. These are real threats, not imagined. But here’s my problem: how do we become unified as a country if some groups have been singled out to be treated differently? My wife was born here in the States, but her family is Filipino. Both her parents are doctors who came to the States in the 1970s. They have lived the American dream. They worked like dogs for years and now they own a big house in the middle of the country, and a house in California, and a house in the Philippines. They have their Audis and there Mercedes and their Porsches. Clearly, they deserve what they have worked for. We disagree politically. They voted for Trump, I think.

My wife is American. Speaks like an American. Went to school and got a master’s degree in America. Highly educated. And we’re waiting for the moment that someone who doesn’t know her walks up to her in a grocery store and tells her to go home. Where is home? She doesn’t speak Tagalog. She can’t go to the Philippines. And why should she. She’s American. Our children, we have three boys. I’m waiting for them to come home from school to tell me a classmate told them they’re different, not American enough, not good enough. That they are what’s wrong with America.

So I’m wondering, does the alt-right have any reservations at all about framing the discussion in this way. Identity politics is only okay if you can know for certain you’re getting the identities right. Isn’t diversity good? Right now, we’re wondering if we should take our American kids and try to get jobs in my native England instead. I’m not being egotistical but I think we have so much to offer America. We can’t do it if people look at my brown children and assume they have no place in shaping it. Do you have any concerns that demonizing the groups that people belong to instead of the bad actors within them will have negative results?

Taken to its logical conclusion: if Trump’s candidacy ignites a race war, would you be happy, or sad, or indifferent?

In answer to the questions:

  1. No, “the language of race” being used by the Alt-Right and by Trump doesn’t make me at all queasy. I think it has been remarkably restrained, considering the seriousness of the situation.
  2. Why would the Englishman be concerned about “the rise of Islamic fundamentalism” here and in England but reject the obvious American concerns about the invasion by people like him and his wife? Don’t Muslims have the same right to invade other countries and settle in them en masse that Englishmen and Filippinos do?
  3. The man’s wife and her parents should consider going home. Because it is home. They even have a home there! They’re not American. They are Filippino. That’s why they’re waiting for someone to tell her to go home. She knows she’s not at home in America and he knows it as well. It is no one else’s fault that she didn’t learn her native language and it is no one else’s problem either. His kids are not part of what is wrong with America because they are not American. They are invaders and settlers, just as the second-generation Muslims who have driven the native English out of Bradford are invaders and settlers.
  4. The Alt-Right has no reservations at all about framing the discussion this way. The Alt-Right does not hide from reality, whether we like it or not.
  5. Identity politics do not need to be “okay” any more than gravity or sunlight do. Identity politics are normal, historical human behavior that always dominate multiracial societies. And history shows that an angry invaded people fighting displacement in their own homeland tend not to be very careful about identities; the lines usually end up being drawn in a rather crude and binary fashion.
  6. No, diversity is not good. Diversity is very, very bad. Diversity destroys community. Diversity + Proximity = War.
  7. America neither wants nor needs what the Englishman is offering. Tens of millions of Americans would probably like to deport him on the basis of him being a foreigner who voted for Obama and Clinton alone. He and his children would have even more to offer the less-developed Philippines, but the truth is that he doesn’t give a damn about Americans, what they want, or what they need, he’s merely intent on living wherever he thinks it would be most beneficial to his family. He’s concerned now because he’s beginning to sense that the ground is shifting underneath his feet and it may not prove to be the most beneficial place in the future.
  8. Why should his brown children have any place in shaping America to their liking? They are not American and what they want is not what native Americans want. Geographic location is not nationality. I didn’t become Japanese because I lived in Tokyo, and I’m not Italian just because I reside in Italy and speak Italian. Nationality is not a difficult concept, it is not an abstract concept, and it consists of considerably more than official government paperwork.
  9. No one is “demonizing” anyone. To observe that the man, his wife, her parents, or his children have zero American heritage between them is not demonization, it is accurate observation. We can also observe that their behavior is very much in line with the Alt-Right’s predictive model for it. He’s not concerned that the Alt-Right is wrong, or evil, he’s concerned that we are correct.
  10. It is not Trump, his candidacy, his presidency, or the Alt-Right that will ignite a race war. What will ignite ethnic conflict in the USA is the same thing that has always ignited it everywhere around the world since the dawn of Man; the presence of different ethnicities in the same geographical location. This outcome has been the most likely one since 1965, and no amount of solipsism, handwringing, appeals to emotion, and searching for a Nazi bad guy is going to avert it.

BN has a rather different perspective:

Read your article today. On the train I dug out The Fate of Empires by John Glubb as it reminded me of what you were saying. It still amazes me the reaction one gets when it is shared with liberals. If they can move beyond coarsely dismissing the author they sputter and say “America is different. We are different.” Is there any scenario you see the identity politics and brewing ethnic tensions in the US de-escalates? I think if Trump utterly fails as president maybe it defers it. But just do not see him failing.

The fact is that only Donald Trump can significantly delay the inevitable strife, and he can only do so by accepting a lot more of it than most Americans are presently willing to accept. If Trump somehow managed to return the US demographics to 80-85 percent white in the next eight years through immigration restrictions and repatriations, that would buy the USA at least another generation, and possibly two, of relative domestic tranquility.

Even a return to the pre-1986 amnesty demographic balance would be a de-escalation scenario. But I find it very hard to believe that the God-Emperor Ascendant has the vision, or the nerve, to push that far ahead of the conceptual curve. The best we can probably hope for is that he will keep the situation from actually getting worse, and thereby stave off serious domestic conflict until an eventual financial collapse, which I anticipate in the early 2030s.

And finally, a reader from Bradford adds a somber note:

The community of my street doesn’t exist anymore. The social organizations don’t exist any more. It’s all been erased except that the stone, brick and mortar still stands.

Devastating. That is what the Englishman and his family have to offer America. Social destruction. And that is why all sane Americans should want them to go home, whether that is Manila or Bradford. It’s not about the quality of the immigrants, the scale of the mass migration has rendered that irrelevant now. It’s a simple and straightforward matter of quantity.

That is what the Alt-Right is standing against. That is why the Alt-Right exists.

“Republicans are now the White Party”

It’s interesting to see that the ethno-strategy that both I and Steve Sailer have recognized for quite some time now is being recognized. Steve, of course, recommended the conscious adoption of it as a political strategy. I, on the other hand, viewed it as an inevitability that some politician, whether Republican or not, was bound to figure out eventually:

Trump adopted the Sailer Strategy—whether he knew it I have no idea—and won handsomely. It would be wrong to impute huge numbers of down-market whites voting for Trump simply to racism, as many on the left predictably are doing. Quite a few Trump voters in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio turn out to have voted for Obama—twice. They wanted change, Obama didn’t deliver, so they gave Trump a chance to be the change-agent in Washington they have long sought. The roots of their dissatisfaction are social and economic more than racial, and bien-pensant efforts to portray their legitimate grievances as “hate” reflect the worst of post-modern progressive intolerance.

All the same, it cannot be denied that ethno-racial concerns played a role here—and that it was the Democrats who opened that can of worms. Since the beginning of the century, liberals have been crowing about the “emerging Democratic majority” being delivered by changing demographics, heavily fueled by immigration (legal or not). President Obama’s reelection four years ago seemed to conclusively prove that the “new” America—morally superior to the old, white-dominated one—had arrived, and the Republicans were on life support, waiting for GOP voters to go the way of the dinosaur. As one of Obama’s media acolytes hailed the 2012 victory:

President Barack Obama did not just win reelection tonight. His victory signaled the irreversible triumph of a new, 21st-century America: multiracial, multi-ethnic, global in outlook and moving beyond centuries of racial, sexual, marital and religious tradition.

This was more of the Marxistoid “right side of History” blather that Team Obama has indulged in for the last eight years—and it was utterly wrong. To the surprise of no one who understands human nature, many whites didn’t appreciate being told that they had to die off for “progress” to be achieved. They didn’t like being derided by their betters as “bitter clingers” with their guns and Bibles, and they especially didn’t like being termed “deplorables” unworthy of compassion or consideration. In the last days of Hillary’s doomed campaign, its contempt for a huge chunk of the American population had become so blatant that one of her top celebrity surrogates publicly hailed the “extinction” of straight white men as a step in the right direction.

Trump is no political genius. He made an appeal to working-class whites, who correctly felt that the Democrats viewed them with undisguised contempt and didn’t want their vote. The “emerging Democratic majority” thesis included the need to get some of those whites, a legacy Democratic voting bloc, to win national elections; under Obama, his party decided they didn’t need them at all, which was a terrible, almost incomprehensible mistake. It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that running against working-class whites—at almost 40 percent of the electorate, the biggest voting bloc in America—is the definition of political insanity.

Yet progressives somehow managed not to see the nose right on their face. Hence President Trump. What commentators term “identity politics” has now become normative, thanks to the Democrats indulging in it, and Trump is now aping them. It would be more correct to term this what it actually is: nationalism. Ethno-racial nationalism is an enormously potent political force; wise politicians know this and employ it cautiously. Nationalism arouses genuine passion and is a political motivator like no other, which it explains why a majority of white women voted for Trump, to the bitter consternation of outraged feminists.

Moreover, once nationalism becomes the main political factor, there’s no putting that troublesome genie back in the bottle. Politics become tribal, ethnic conflicts waged at the ballot box rather than on the battlefield. Having done most of my scholarly work on multiethnic societies like the Habsburg Empire and Yugoslavia, I can attest that the fires of nationalism, once stoked, are only put out with great difficulty—and that ethnically diverse societies that play games with nationalism are living dangerously.

Nationalism transforms politics from ideology to tribe. As Lee Kwan Yew, whose founding and prosperous running of multiethnic Singapore for three decades made him one of the most successful politicians of the 20th century, expressed it concisely, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”

The Republicans are now the White party, de facto, whether they want to be or not. American politics will never be the same, and 2016 looks like a landmark election in the manner of 1980, 1932, or 1860, each of which transformed the United States. Buckle up, it looks to be a bumpy ride ahead in the emerging era of competing American ethno-nationalisms.

The key phrase there is “whether they want to be or not”. Cuckservatives will cuck. Conservatives will wax passionately about men being created equal. Jews will fret about anti-semitism. Mexicans and Asians and mixed-race people will posture about being called names. Liberals will cry racist, SJWs will cry fascist, and Nazi, and white supremacist, and every other name they can dream up. None of this matters. 


Why not? Why was it inevitable that Republicans would become the White American Party while Democrats become the Not American Party? Lee Kwan Yew explained it very clearly many years ago. (I am, you may recall, not only a student of economics, but an East Asian Studies major as well.) “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”

Ideology is dead. The USA is no longer the Anglo-American society described by de Tocqueville. It is now a multiracial society, and as unexceptional in this regard as all of its various predecessors in that regard. Therefore, all US citizens will increasingly vote in accordance with race and religion, just like the rest of the world tends to do. Liberals wanted the USA to be more like the rest of the world. Well, congratulations, liberals, but perhaps you probably should have been a little more careful about what you wished for.

And if you’re thinking that mudsharking and race-mixing is the answer to multiracial conflict, think again. That particular outcome is considerably worse than you might think. You see, one of the things that leads to is the likes of me.

Populism vs Democracy

Nassim Taleb asks a question:


I am still looking for someone to give a rigorous explanation/explanation of difference between populism & democracy. Nothing yet.

My response:

  • Democracy: liberal-imposed structural limits on the will of the people. 
  • Populism: when the will of the people exceeds those limits.
This applies to the real-world definitions of the concepts observed, not the dictionary definitions of the conceptual ideals, of course.

In other news, if you’re in the mood to trigger cucks and SJWs and other heretics upset by the incipient Ascension of the God-Emperor to the Cherry Blossom Throne, CryptoFashion now has red TRUMPSL!DE shirts inspired by the recent Day-by-Day cartoon. They also have a new shirt for Europeans who want to Make Europe Great Again.

WANTS to burn it down?

What do they think happened on November 8th? I would say that we are well on the way toward burning American politics as we knew it to the ground, as the ongoing conservative freak-out over the Alt-Right’s rise, as most recently signified by Steve Bannon’s assignation as Chief White House Strategist.

The Alt-Right wants to burn American politics to the ground.

The Alt-Right most immediately opposes conservatism, as Youth for Western Civilization founder Kevin Deanna explained in his Taki’s Magazine and AlternativeRight.com piece titled “The Impossibility of Conservatism.” The Alt-Right contains a who’s-who of right-wing voices that have been “purged” from the conservative movement by William F. Buckley and National Review, like Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire, and Alt-Right leaders like Vox Day described the movement in an interview as “the heirs to those like the John Birch Society who were read out of the conservative movement.” Steve Bannon, who refashioned the website of conservative icon Andrew Breitbart into “the platform for the Alt-Right,” has encouraged activists to “turn on the hate” and “burn this bitch down.”

But while conservatism is its most immediate target, the Alt-Right seeks to destroy a far older, more central American idea referenced frequently by Ronald Reagan and dating back beyond Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy In America to John Winthrop’s “City On A Hill” sermon: America as a proposition nation.

As John Red Eagle and I chronicled in detail in Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America, conservatism has not only failed, it was always doomed to eventual failure by virtue of its very nature. It was an attitude and a defensive posture, not a coherent ideology or an identity, and it lacked positive objectives, so it never had any hope of resisting the relentless ideological onslaught of the Left.

And the concept of America as a proposition nation is not only historically false, it is logically and empirically untrue. It’s trivially easy to demonstrate with a number of different logical syllogisms. For example:

  1. X agrees with, and subscribes to, the proposition that defines America.
  2. X is not an American citizen.
  3. Therefore, X’s American citizenship does not rely upon the proposition.
  4. Y disagrees with, and rejects, the proposition that defines America.
  5. Y is an American citizen.
  6. Therefore, Y’s American citizenship does not rely upon the proposition.
  7. Neither an American’s citizenship, nor a non-citizen’s lack of citizenship depends upon his acceptance, or rejection, of the proposition.
  8. Therefore America is not a proposition nation.

Notice that this all-important proposition is never actually defined. The proposition is hinted at, alluded to, and various names are dropped, but the proposition itself remains nebulous. It’s not a coincidence that this lack of definition is precisely the same as the way the Left fails to define what is, and what is not, politically correct, or morally right, because in all three cases, there is a void at the center that allows the non-definer to play the role as subjective judge rather than permit any objective observer to do so on the basis of a specific, identifiable definition.

There is no proposition. There is no such thing as a nation based on a proposition. And there is no such thing as a nation based on a nonexistent proposition. All the concept of “the proposition nation” was intended to do was to destroy the actual, material, cultural, Christian, ethnic American nation on behalf of the second-wave immigrants to the United States, who did not belong to the nation, but wanted to be able to claim that they did.

On a tangential note, the author of The Nine Laws, Ivan Throne, did an interview entitled Your Future Under the God-Emperor with Troublesome Radio.

Identity politics

Like war, it only takes one side to practice identity politics for them to become the operational rules of the game. The reason the Left is reacting with such fear and outrage to the election of the God-Emperor Ascendant is because they understand that the breaking of the so-called Blue Wall and the shift of the white woman vote to the Republican Party means that a majority of whites now effectively subscribe to the same identity politics to which Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, Jews, Muslims, and Africans all subscribe.

The Trump administration need pay no more heed to the anti-White identity interests than the Obama administration paid to the White identity interests. In fact, it should not, because Donald Trump’s second term depends upon continuing to ride the transformation of the Republican Party into the White Party.

It is very hard for those with strong ideological principles to accept this transformation. It was, and is, difficult for me to do so. But the fact, the logic, and the observable reality is that you can no more successfully appeal to ideology in an age of identity politics than you can successfully argue dialectic before an audience limited to rhetoric.

Steve Keen on the fallacy of free trade

Brainstormers will remember Steve Keen, the brilliant iconoclast who is breaking new ground in the field of economics. In Forbes, he points out that Trump’s heretical anti-globalism is actually more economically sound than the fallacy of Ricardian free trade:

Globalization and Free Trade are good.

This belief is shared by almost all politicians in both parties, and it’s an article of faith for the economics profession.

You are right to reject it.

It’s a fallacy based on a fantasy, and it has been ever since David Ricardo dreamed up the idea of “Comparative Advantage and the Gains from Trade” two centuries ago. The best way to prove that (apart from looking at the bitter experience of the millions of once-were-factory-workers who voted for you) is to apply real-world scepticism to the original argument in favour of free trade.

When Ricardo wrote, England was the global economic superpower, and Portugal was its main rival. Ricardo was in favour of abolishing the “Corn Laws” that placed tariffs on grain imported from Europe. His opponents argued that, if the tariffs were abolished, Portugal would undercut England in all industries. Ricardo came up with an example that accepted that Portugal was better at producing everything than England was, but still “proved” that free trade was better than protection for both countries.

He assumed that England would need 100 workers to produce a given amount of cloth in one year, and 120 workers to produce a given amount of wine in a year. Portugal could produce the same amount of cloth in a year with just 90 workers, and the same amount of wine in a year with just 80 workers. So Portugal (read China for today) was absolutely better at producing everything than England (read the USA), but relatively better at producing wine.

Ricardo argued that free trade could nonetheless benefit both countries, if England devoted all of its workers to producing cloth, while Portugal turned all its workers into wine makers, because the total amount of wine and cloth produced by the two countries would be higher. They could trade the two commodities, and everyone would be better off than if trade didn’t occur. So specialization allows “gains from trade”. Drop the tariff barriers, and everyone will win—even the inhabitants of the weaker economy.

The argument might sound convincing, until you ask a simple question: “So how do you turn a wine press into a spinning jenny?”. Answer? You don’t.

Ricardo’s model assumed that you could produce wine or cloth with only labour, but of course you can’t. You need machines as well, and machinery is specific to each industry. The essential machinery for making wine can’t be used to make anything else, if its use becomes unprofitable. It is either scrapped, sold at a large loss, or shipped overseas. Ditto a spinning jenny, or a steel mill: if making steel becomes unprofitable, the capital involved in its production is effectively destroyed.

Ricardo ignored this little detail in his example, pretending that goods could be produced using labour alone. Later economists have made Ricardo’s example more complicated, and included the need to have machines as well as labour to make output. But they have been even worse than Ricardo, because they pretend that you can shift a machine (they call it “capital”) from one industry to another without loss.

That is simply nonsense.

The theory ignores the reality that, when foreign competition undercuts the profitability of a domestic industry, the capital in it can’t be “transformed” into an equal amount of capital in another industry. Sometimes it’s sold at a fire-sale price, often to overseas buyers. Most of the time, as ex-steel-mill workers throughout the Midwest know, it simply turns to rust.

Ricardo’s little shell and pea trick is therefore like most conventional economic theory: it’s neat, plausible, and wrong. It’s the product of armchair thinking by people who never put foot in the factories that their economic theories turned into rust buckets.

So the gains from trade for everyone and for every country that could supposedly be shared more fairly simply aren’t there in the first place. Specialization is a con job—but one that the Washington elite fell for (to its benefit, of course). Rather than making a country better off, specialization makes it worse off, with scrapped machinery that’s no longer useful for anything, and with less ways to invent new industries from which growth actually comes.

Excellent real-world research by Harvard University’s “Atlas of Economic Complexity” has found diversity, not specialization, is the “magic ingredient” that actually generates growth. Successful countries have a diversified set of industries, and they grow more rapidly than more specialized economies because they can invent new industries by melding existing ones.

So, globalization isn’t merely a societally destructive infringement on national sovereignties, and entirely dependent on substituting debt for economic growth, it builds huge economic inefficiencies into the global trade system.

If you’re still a free trader after everything you’ve seen, after everything you’ve read from Ian Fletcher, Steve Keen, and me, it is apparent that at this point, you’re simply clinging to economic dogma you don’t really understand.