Tag: economics

Ce ne sont pas l’économie

The global elite will fall in the end. The global elite can claim that l’économie est nous all they want, but it isn’t and it never has been.

The world is run by an international elite that lives in a rarified world of seemingly boundless power and luxury. Though the members of this elite consider their own power and luxury to be completely legitimate, it is not. It is the product of a system that’s rigged to benefit them while everybody else languishes in declining small cities and provincial towns, eking out a dreary existence, toiling away their lives in menial service-sector jobs or scraping by on disability checks while seeking out a modicum of fleeting joy in the dumbstruck haze of a painkiller high.

Unless something fundamental changes, the gap separating these worlds will only increase, economically, culturally, and psychologically. Republicans show every sign of continuing to pursue policies that actively make the economic problems worse. Centrist Democrats, meanwhile, appear to be both unwilling to propose a sweeping critique of the outlook and policies that got us to this point in the first place and inclined to dismiss the populist anger building all around us as an expression of atavistic prejudice.

This cannot last. At this rate, make no mistake: The global elite will fall.

Their parasite economy of finance-based ownership of real world property and produce rests entirely upon the false claims it generates upon the real economy. And all it takes to destroy the parasite economy is the mass refusal to recognize its claims, many of which are already known to be completely fictitious. See: the mortgage title scandal of 2008 onwards.

The parasite economy is already killing its host. It is like a drunken vampire who is too intoxicated to stop draining his victim. And once the host collapses, its component parts will turn on the parasites with a vengeance.

This isn’t a failure of capitalism, this is a tripartite failure of usury, fraud, and fundamental morality. The Alt-Right Revolution cometh.

She did the math

Nice to see that women are capable of grasping that feminism is bad for more women than it benefits economically:

Author Fay Weldon has risked infuriating fellow feminists by claiming their cause left two-thirds of British women worse off. In an interview in The Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine today, Weldon, 85, says the feminist revolution had adverse implications by ‘halving the male wage, so it no longer supported a family.’ That meant some women had to get jobs, even if they would rather have been at home with their children. ‘Women had to work to support the family. So for two in three women, it really was a problem.’

I first pointed this out back in 2007:

Anyhow, it’s interesting that people are finally beginning to pay some attention to the basic economics of the issue. I expect more than a few people on both sides of the feminist aisle are going to be very upset when the period from 1970 to the present is studied.

Feminists will be upset because it will make feminism look like a disaster for women. Working, married non-feminists will be upset because they’ll realize that they are essentially working for nothing. Men won’t like it either, since they’ll realize that they’re getting paid less for the same work that their fathers did.

It’s interesting how everyone understands that immigrants cause labor prices to fall, but most people don’t grasp that a substantial increase in domestic work force participation, by any group, has the same effect.

For the benefit of those who needed me to type more slowly, I spelled it out in more detail in 2013:

While immigration too plays a role here, the only significant effect native women have when they enter the labor force in greater numbers is to depress the price of labor.  Unlike immigrants, they don’t bring in new consumption to help mitigate their wage-depressing effects; the reason real hourly wages peaked in 1973 and have been falling ever since is because that was the year that the number of men younger than 20 and older than 65 leaving the labor force was surpassed by educated, middle-class women entering it.

One-third of working class women have always worked.  The change brought by feminism is that now middle class and upper middle class married women work as well.  And the more women that work, the more women have to work and the less time women who don’t work will have with their husbands who support them, because an INCREASE in the SUPPLY of labor necessitates a DECREASE in the PRICE of labor, demand remaining constant.

And to make matters worse, demand does not remain constant, but actually declines, because a woman who works is statistically much less likely to eventually become a wife and mother, and even when she does, she becomes one several years later and has fewer children.  This means that feminism is a structural economic failure as it creates a downward-spiraling vicious circle of three easily identifiable revolutions:

  1. The increase in the supply of labor causes wages to go down.  This is indisputable in either logical or empirical terms.
  2. Female hypergamy, female independence, and opportunity cost reduces the marriage rate and the average birth rate, while increased male work hours and work-related romantic opportunities increases the divorce rate.  These connections are all logically sound and readily observable.
  3. The reduced birth rate has a negative effect on consumption, and therefore the demand for labor, 20 years before the consequent negative effects on the supply of labor can help balance it out, putting further negative pressure on wage rates.  This is also indisputable, both logically and empirically. 

Mailvox: in feeble defense of Keynes

I don’t think Art Deco quite understands where he is.

What’s the point of slamming Keynes? Keynes is notable as a progenitor of a nexus of macroeconomic models. Macroeconomics has some trouble settling on a consensus model. It’s neither necessary nor proper to attack his integrity.

First, Art Deco is wrong. Second, he is WAY out of his league here. Keynes had zero integrity – he claimed to have abandoned his theory of money in between its publication and the published rebuttal by FA von Hayek in order to avoid having to answer the latter –  he was incredibly intellectually dishonest, and his General Theory was little more than rehashed Freudian nonsense dressed up in math-sounding economics.

The only reason it became popular is because it gave politicians an excuse to do what they wanted – spend money.

Socialism still doesn’t work

One of the many reasons I am so skeptical of “self-correcting” science is that humans quite observably learn absolutely nothing from history, even when logic, theory, evidence, and experience all line up conclusively in harmony:

Facing a bread shortage that is spawning massive lines and souring the national mood, the Venezuelan government is responding this week by detaining bakers and seizing establishments.

In a press release, the National Superintendent for the Defense of Socioeconomic Rights said it had charged four people and temporarily seized two bakeries as the socialist administration accused bakers of being part of a broad “economic war” aimed at destabilizing the country.

In a statement, the government said the bakers had been selling underweight bread and were using price-regulated flour to illegally make specialty items, like sweet rolls and croissants.

The government said bakeries are only allowed to produce French bread and white loaves, or pan canilla, with government-imported flour. However, in a tweet on Thursday, price control czar William Contreras said only 90 percent of baked goods had to be price-controlled products.

We shouldn’t be too contemptuous of the Venezuelans, though. They fell for socialism. We fell for feminism and civic nationalism. All three concepts are equally stupid, as all three fly completely in the face of our current understanding of the relevant sciences as well as thousands of years of written human history.

Will the God-Emperor cuck on trade?

Tyler Durden suspects the globalist faction is winning in an ideological trade battle being waged inside the Trump administration:

Earlier this week, when we discussed Peter Navarro’s jarring op-ed in the WSJ in which he alleged that the persistent US trade deficit “would put US national security in jeopardy”, we said that “a better question than what is Navarro’s purpose by writing it, is why he is writing it, and does his use of a public forum like the WSJ mean that there is friction between him and Trump camp, especially since in recent weeks it appears that a core pillar of Trump’s trade policies, namely the border adjustability, appear to no longer be on the docket of actionable items.”

As it turns out, that was precisely the correct question, because as the FT reports, “a civil war has broken out within the White House over trade, leading to what one official called “a fiery meeting” in the Oval Office pitting economic nationalists close to Donald Trump against pro-trade moderates from Wall Street.”

More notably, the person at the center of this “civil war” is none other than Navarro, who as we expected is now said to be losing influence, and as a result he resorted to using the WSJ as a means to appeal directly to the general public. It may have been a prudent gamble: the WSJ op-ed may have helped Navarro salvage some of his credibility with Trump, according to the FT:

The officials and people dealing with the White House said Mr Navarro appeared to be losing influence in recent weeks. But during the recent Oval Office fight, Mr Trump appeared to side with the economic nationalists, one official said.

Facing off the “hardline group” of Navarro, and other “nationalists” such as Steve Bannon, is a a “faction” led by former Goldman COO Gary Cohn, a career globalist, who leads Mr Trump’s National Economic Council.

But what is just as important, is that if the FT is right, then allegations that Trump has “sold out” to his Goldman advisors may be premature: in fact, if anything, Trump appears to be playing off one camp, the “nationalists”, against its polar opposite, the “Goldman globalists”:

The battle over trade is emblematic of a broader fight on economic policy within the Trump’s administration. It comes ahead of a visit to Washington next week by Ms Merkel, the German chancellor, and amid preparations for a meeting of G20 finance ministers in Germany next week at which allies’ concerns over protectionism are likely to be high on the agenda.

While the White House was non-committal, providing the FT with the following brief statement:


“Gary Cohn and Peter Navarro are both valued members of the president’s economic team. They are working together to enact the president’s economic agenda, protect American workers and grow American businesses.”

… the “globalists” led by Cohn and others “have seized on Mr Navarro’s public comments — and widespread criticism by economists of his stand on trade deficits and other matters — to try and sideline him.”


That has led to discussions over moving Mr Navarro and the new National Trade Council he leads out of the White House and to the Commerce Department, headed by another Wall Street veteran, Wilbur Ross.

And, if the FT is correct, it appears that the Goldman-led faction is winning.

Can you spot the potential flaw in Durden’s reasoning. There is an alternative explanation. Isn’t it at least possible that the Financial Times is spinning things in Cohn’s favor for precisely the same reason it claims Navarro published his Wall Street Journal op/ed? It’s not as if the FT isn’t openly on the side of the globalists and free traders, after all.

And what are two things we know SJWs always do? They lie and they project. Aside from academia, what field is more SJW-converged than the media? I would not consider the FT to be either a reliable or an impartial source in this matter. You’d think people would have learned by now. Don’t ever count the God-Emperor out until he is actually, confirmably, undeniably, out.

Labor mobility destroying nations

The map above demonstrates what has happened as a result of the European Union’s establishment of a free trade zone throughout Europe. Notice that despite the absence of the promised economic growth throughout the EU, the increase in the international mobility rate has increased considerably in the last decade, even in the wealthier countries such as Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. Incredibly, some of the Balkan states have seen more than one-third of their populations abandon the country!

This conclusively proves what I have concluded with regards to the way that free trade inevitably destroys nations. The freer the trade, the more endangered the nation. How can you have a nation when its people are scattered all throughout the world, trying to find employment? It is evidence that confirms what I’d first warned about in a free trade post back in 2012. As Dr. James Miller admitted in our debate, later published as On the Question of Free Trade, labor mobility, and its societal costs, are something that no free trade-advocating economist has ever taken into account

In the former EU15, only about 0.1% of the working age population changes its country of residence in a given year. Conversely, in the US, about 3% of the working age population moves to a different state every year, These institutional and cultural differences suggest comparing internal geographical mobility in the US with the situation within EU Member States rather than between Member States.

In doing so, the figures narrow the ‘mobility gap’ between Europe and the US. Between 2000 and 2005, about 1% of the working age population had changed residence each year from one region to another within the EU15 countries, compared to an overall interstate mobility rate of 2.8%-3.4% in the US during the same period of time.”

What this means is that US workers are about 3x more willing to change their state of residence than European workers are willing to change their region of residence within national borders, and 30x more inclined to change their state of residence than Europeans are inclined to change their country of residence, even though the US state-to-state change likely involves a bigger geographic move than the EU country-to-country one.

It should be noted that increasing this country-to-country labor mobility rate within the EU is not only a major goal of the EU economic advisers, but the explicitly stated reason for this goal is their belief that increased labor mobility is required in order to increase economic growth.

Now, let’s look at what that annual 3 percent intra-US mobility translates to in terms of the overall population. The statistics are as follows for Americans between the ages of 25 and 44:

  • East 54.3 percent
  • Midwest 65.0 percent 
  • South 47.3 percent
  • West 40.2 percent

This is why the Midwest has changed much less over the last 40 years than either the East Coast or the West Coast; more Midwesterners stay in the Midwest and maintain their laws and cultural traditions. But more importantly, note what this signifies for the USA if the apostles of free trade were ever able to achieve their goal of permitting international trade to take place on the same terms as American domestic trade in a manner that realized the anticipated economic benefits: very nearly half of all American workers would be expected to leave the USA by the average age of 35!

This vast exodus of young Americans would say nothing, of course, of the hundreds of millions of non-American workers who would be expected to enter the USA, with all of the various consequences to be expected as a result of immigration that is an order of magnitude larger than the current wave.

The logic of free trade is inescapable. It amounts to a choice between a steadily declining living standard if free trade is limited to goods and capital versus the total destruction of the nation and the replacement of a majority of its population within a single lifetime if it is pursued to the full “beneficial extent” of the concept.

The trough runs dry

The counterproductive drags on the economy are worried that their days of feeding at the federal rough are over:

Federal workers nationwide are bracing for reductions in head counts, civil service protections and salaries when President-elect Donald Trump and Congress turn their attention to government spending later this year.

Trump, who ran on a promise to “drain the swamp,” has identified hiring freezes at most federal agencies as a top priority for his early days in office. Republican lawmakers, many of whom have long advocated for reducing Washington’s workforce, are looking to cut benefits and make it easier to fire poor performers.

The threats and preliminary steps taken by Congress have created anxiety for many of the government’s 2.1 million employees.

“People don’t know what to believe, and they’re in a state of uneasiness,” said Witold Skwierczynski, a Catonsville, Md., who heads the American Federation of Government Employees council that oversees Social Security Administration field offices. “That’s the feeling I hear. People are unsettled.”

The God-Emperor Ascendant is coming and his axe is sharp indeed. For once, an increase in the number of unemployed Americans will be worth celebrating. But in the interest of fairness, every federal worker being put out to pasture should be offered an employment opportunity. After all, plenty of workers will be needed to BUILD THE WALL.

Build. The. Wall.

The House Republicans get on board with alacrity, after having the God-Emperor Ascendant put the fear of himself into them.

Republicans on Capitol Hill say they don’t need to wait for Mexico to make good on President-elect Donald Trump’s central campaign promise: building a southern border wall.

In fact, they are happy to underwrite the wall themselves, at a potential cost of many billions of dollars.

The GOP’s willingness to fund Trump’s border wall with taxpayer money could put the party’s deeply held desire to rein in government spending in conflict with its long-standing goal of cracking down on illegal immigration and toughening border security. Nonetheless, many Republicans do not see an inherent conflict.

“It would be a proposal that would cost billions of dollars to get done, but if it’s an appropriate priority for our country, it’s worth spending that kind of money,” said Rep. Luke Messer (R-Ind.), chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee.

It’s more pathetic than amusing to see the media affect to be concerned about the federal government spending between $8 and 20 billion on shutting down illegal immigration from Central and South America after they were cheerleading Obama’s $787 billion in economic stimulus.

The irony is that there will arguably be more genuine economic stimulus created by building the wall than there was from Obama’s vastly larger income redistribution efforts.

The party of Reagan is dead

The Republican party is a white populist Trump party now, so get used to it:

Donald Trump’s economic adviser Stephen Moore told a group of top Republicans last week that they now belong to a fundamentally different political party. Moore surprised some of the Republican lawmakers assembled at their closed-door whip meeting last Tuesday when he told them they should no longer think of themselves as belonging to the conservative party of Ronald Reagan.

They now belong to Trump’s populist working-class party, he said. A source briefed on the House GOP whip meeting — which Moore attended as a guest of Majority Whip Steve Scalise — said several lawmakers told him they were taken aback by the economist’s comments.

“For God’s sake, it’s Stephen Moore!” the source said, explaining some of the lawmakers’ reactions to Moore’s statement. “He’s the guy who started Club for Growth. He’s Mr. Supply Side economics. I think it’s going to take them a little time to process what does this all mean,” the source added of the lawmakers. “The vast majority of them were on the wrong side. They didn’t think this was going to happen.”

Asked about his comments to the GOP lawmakers, Moore told The Hill he was giving them a dose of reality.

“Just as Reagan converted the GOP into a conservative party, Trump has converted the GOP into a populist working-class party,” Moore said in an interview Wednesday. “In some ways this will be good for conservatives and in other ways possibly frustrating.”

Moore has spent much of his career advocating for huge tax and spending cuts and free trade. He’s been as close to a purist ideological conservative as they come, but he says the experience of traveling around Rust Belt states to support Trump has altered his politics.

“It turned me more into a populist,” he said, expressing frustration with the way some in the Beltway media dismissed the economic concerns of voters in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

“Having spent the last three or four months on the campaign trail, it opens your eyes to the everyday anxieties and financial stress people are facing,” Moore added. “I’m pro-immigration and pro-trade, but we better make sure as we pursue these policies we’re not creating economic undertow in these areas.”

This is good news. Even the hardcore economic-growth-at-all-costs conservatives are finally beginning to understand that their politics are a non-starter. Moore is smart enough that he’ll likely come around completely before long.

Conservatism and Constitutionalism are both dead because both completely failed in their primary duty of protecting the nation and securing the blessings of liberty for the posterity of the Founders. That is why Trump came to power, that is why the Alt-Right is on the rise, and that is why identity politics are now the order of the day.

This is something both conservatives and constitutionalists very much need to understand. You CANNOT and you WILL NOT avoid domestic conflict, quite possibly on a civil war-scale level, by clinging to ideals that have already failed in almost every possible way. You have ONE CHANCE to avoid the balkanization scenario, and that is by adopting the Alt-Right program and aggressively pushing the God-Emperor Ascendant to adopt it. There is absolutely NOTHING about the conservative and constitutional programs that will relieve the internal stresses that are already pushing the USA to the snapping point.

Some of you whine that there are Nazis and ultras and neos and extremists in the Alt-Right. That’s right. There are. And those are precisely the radicals who will rapidly come to the fore if Trump, the nationalist elite, and the Alt-Right fail to reduce the internal stress, the globalists return to power, and the balkanization scenario begins to play out. Look at Ukraine. Look at Hungary. Look at Yugoslavia. Which of those three political entities is in the best shape, and why?

Free trade kills

As if the costs of free trade weren’t already high enough, some researchers have determined that free trade, specifically with China, is literally killing more white working-class Americans than guns and traffic combined.

Increasing competition with China for trade has been blamed for soaring death rates among white, middle aged Americans. A silent ‘epidemic’ of deaths from suicides, drug and alcohol poisoning within that faction was first highlighted last year. But scientists were baffled as to why white, middle aged Americans were bucking the national trend of decreasing death rates. Now two economists believe they have found the answer.

Justin Pierce and Peter Schott believe they can trace back the uptick in suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths to 2000, when President Bill Clinton decided to relax the rules on major imports.

Between 1978 and 1998, the study reveals the mortality rate for US whites aged 45 to 54 fell by an average of two per cent each year. This was reflected in other rich countries, including France, Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia, and Sweden. After 1998, these nations saw mortality rates for this group steadily continue to fall, by two per cent every year.

But, in the US, mortality rates rose by half a per cent a year. The authors wrote: ‘No other rich country saw a similar turnaround.’ They estimate that had the white mortality in the US rate held at its 1998 value, 96,000 lives would have been saved between 1998 and 2013. And had it continued to fall as it had between 1978 and 1998, 488,500 deaths would have been avoided from 1999 to 2013.

This figure is comparable to the number of deaths caused by the Aids epidemic in the US.

While death rates related to drugs, alcohol and suicides have risen for middle-aged whites across the board, the largest surge are seen among those with the least education. A shock rise in mortality rates for middle-aged, white Americans has been driven by a rise in suicides, drug and alcohol poisonings and liver disease. In 2011, poisonings overtook lung cancer as a leading cause of death in this group and suicides is poised to do so, Princeton researchers said For those with a high school degree or less, deaths caused by drug and alcohol poisoning rose four fold, suicides increased by 81 per cent, and deaths caused by liver disease and cirrhosis jumped 50 per cent.

All-cause mortality rose by 22 per cent for this least-educated group. Among those with some college education, researchers noted little change in overall death rates. While among those people who achieved a bachelor’s degree or higher, death rates fell.

Free trade was already dead from an economic and nationalist perspective. This should make it clear that there is no longer a moral case for free trade. It is both deeply inequitable and deplorably immoral; it is simply another form of the historical predation of the elite upon the peasantry. And it is, therefore, a significant and growing factor in the cliodynamical stresses that are leading towards the ultimate dissolution of the United States.