Tag: mailvox

But I am starting to seriously dislike some of his fans, who apparently are determined to prevent me from returning to happily ignoring their favorite integrity-challenged psychologist. A Peterson fan by the name of Y is the worst culprit so far. His comments are in bold.

I agree in general with what you say (that people set up those unwinnable games), but I believe your problem is that you don’t really know who you are or why you do things you do.

No. Your problem with me is that you really don’t know who I am or why I do the things I do. I have various problems, but those two are not among them.

For example, from the CW perspective, it makes literally no sense to shit on Peterson. for your differences on Jewish question.

My perspective is not whatever the CW perspective is. That is irrelevant. I had previously demonstrated the myth of the 115 mean IQ. Peterson attempted, ineptly, to defend that myth. I tore down his arguments just as easily I will tear down the arguments of everyone else who attempts to perpetuate it, just as I have demolished the arguments of everyone who attempted to perpetuate the myth that religion causes war.

That’s the thing about myths. It is very foolish to attempt to defend them, because they are myths. You will be taken down, along with the myth, by any honest, competent investigator, and no amount of verbal or rhetorical facility will save you.

Don’t get me wrong, he has a lot of flaws, but saying what you said about him because you have some not-so-solid reasons to believe Jewish IQ is 105 instead of 113.

No. My reasons are absolutely solid in terms of logic and relatively solid in terms of statistics. The fact that you do not understand this, or grasp you are implying that the majority of the non-Arab Israeli population is less intelligent than African-Americans on average, is not a sign of your own intelligence.

It doesn’t make sense. You’re both in the same fight.

No, we are not. Jordan Peterson is not a friend of mine, he is not an ally of mine, he is not a co-religionist of mine, and he is not a nationalist of any kind. So, he is either a neutral or an enemy. I don’t know which, nor am I interested in doing the research necessary to determine his true status.

To me it seems the degree of your animosity and vitriol directed at Peterson is unwarranted from a rational perspective. He has his flaws, lack of cynicism being the chief one. Rationalwiki has helpfully collected most of his fuck-ups in one place if anyone is curious.

I haven’t directed any vitriol at him. I don’t have any animosity towards him, but I am certainly developing some towards his idiot fans. And I certainly don’t place any confidence in anything Rationalwiki says about anyone. If I were to direct vitriol at him, I would point out that he is a drug-addled, integrity-challenged depressive little bitch prone to crying in public, who is one of the last people any sane young man should look to as a role model. I would also point out that he has said that most Israelis of Jewish descent are less intelligent than African-Americans. But I haven’t done any of that.

He is justifiably massively more successful than you are. More charismatic, better spoken, probably somewhat more intelligent, infinitely better at public relations.

Maybe, but my wife is hotter and I don’t look like I’m borrowing George Will’s bowtie. But more importantly, NN Taleb is vastly more successful than Peterson by every measure. If I was prone to envying anyone on the grounds Y suggests, it would be Taleb. Do I exhibit any animosity for him? Am I seeking to tear him down? I note that Taleb has apparently reached much the same conclusion about Peterson as I have, which is that he’s a lightweight who is prone to stupid opining in ignorance.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb@nntaleb
I think I am completely done with @jordanbpeterson. Gave him the benefit of the doubt with Monsanto and other nonsense. This does it.

Sure, you get to be the Dread lord, he is a Sith whom you can’t really attack without making yourself look quite foolish.

Want to bet? Keep annoying me about the Canadian Crier and I will begin looking into dissecting Peterson as thoroughly as I’ve vivisected Harris, Dawkins, and others. My instincts already suggest that there will be no shortage of holes in his poorly-researched arguments. The fact that Taleb is now of a similar mind tends to confirm my suspicions.

So there is reasons why the part of your soul that has the Devil’s ear may want to make you hate him. You’re a Christian, why hate someone who is in the business of using evolutionary science for the purpose of making a rational case for christian virtues? Worst case, he converts some atheists into supporting socially conservative policies sympathetic to Christians.

Is there reasons? I don’t hate him. I don’t care about him. I merely harbor an amount of contempt for his demonstrated lack of intellectual integrity, as I do for all such creatures. But at this point, I am certainly beginning to dislike him – unfairly – due to the annoying behavior of his fans such as Y.

Those who are accusing me of wanting to tear down Peterson should probably consider what happened the last time I was falsely accused of something, namely, gaming a certain collection of literary awards. Do you really want me to conclusively demonstrate that I was not doing anything of the sort by showing you what the real thing looks like? Because, at this point, I am genuinely starting to feel the desire to see if my initial readings of the man are not merely correct, but can be conclusively proved to even the most die-hard Peterson fan.

Then again, it looks like a job better left to Taleb.

If you want to work together with people and spread your ideas as effectively as possible you don’t lash out to people like Peterson who has in the past congratulated @nntaleb for his book and cited his theories on his lectures.

The imbecile doesn’t get that

1) My judgment of pple has NOTHING to do with whether they like my book

2) Social life, where relationships are nurtured, is for PRIVATE citizens, nothing to do with intellectual life bound to rigor/truth

3) Follow inspirational charlatans not me

4) I do not derive my income from some philantropy or Paltreon where I have to act inspirational & suck up to a crowd of followers cutting me a charity check. I derive my income from financial & business activites in the real world.

I don’t owe nothing to nobody.

I know where I’d place my bets. Taleb is one of the very few people on my “if he disagrees with you, you had better take a close look at your assumptions, facts, syllogisms, and conclusions list.”

Kallmunz has been repeatedly demanding an answer.

This is interesting and it brings to mind your recent attack on Jordan Peterson’s stance on Jewish intelligence. Your tack is on the offense. There is no “Peterson is right, but on this issue” Peterson would of course be on the defensive in answering this charge. Peterson being a nominal ally is now ostracized. I am interested in your reasoning here.

My attack is not on Jordan Peterson’s stance on Jewish intelligence. My attack is a complete and conclusive demolition of the myth of Jewish intelligence. The fact that Jordan Peterson happened to to be foolish enough to again perpetuate the myth afterwards was mere coincidence. I don’t believe Peterson is right about anything, mostly because I do not know his positions about almost anything. He is most certainly not an ally of mine, nominal or otherwise. I have never had any contact with the man, I have never paid any attention to the man or his work, and more than a few of his connections and influences, such as Monsanto, Sam Harris, and Stephen Pinker, appear to merit deeper investigation.

In summary, I am beginning to suspect many of his fans are making the same mistake that their fathers and grandfathers made with the neoconservatives, and that they themselves made with NeverTrumpers like Jonah Goldberg and Ben Shapiro. You may not trust my powers of discernment, but I most definitely don’t trust those of Jordan Peterson’s fans.

UPDATE: This statement confirms that Jordan Peterson is not, and will never be, an ally of the West. Note that he has declared the need to separate from us. We are merely acknowledging that he is correct to do so.

Jordan B Peterson@jordanbpeterson
The true liberals need to separate themselves from the identity politics types. The doctrines are NOT commensurate…

It’s true. They are not commensurate. They are, in fact, diametrically opposing doctrines. On the one side is the West, with its Christian and European identities.

The fact that a globalist ideologue attacks elements or particular doctrines of the Left every now and then does not make him of the Right. It does not put him on our side, nor does it make him an ally of anything more than momentary convenience. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you will stop falling for the William F. Buckleys of the world.

Critical G flips the narrative entirely by observing that it is in the best interest of the Jews to be told the unvarnished truth rather than reassured by obvious falsehoods that have been perpetrated for decades.

High-IQ (140) full-blooded Ashkenazi here — long time lurker, occasional commenter —, and I can tell you that @VD is totally right. I’ve been thinking about these matters for a long time, and I can tell you @VD does us all a far greater favour by stating the unvarnished truth than JBP does by perpetuating a falsehood. I share the following thoughts and observations to back up what @VD has been saying.

(1) Jewish average IQ of anything higher than about 106 is a myth. I grew up amongst, and went to school and university with, both Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. Yes, a lot of us are smart, but we are nowhere near *that* smart. Maybe the neurotic Jewish emphasis on education results in higher than whites’, but that’s not solely a question of natural general intelligence.

(2) I ran the numbers on Israel’s IQ and came to Vox’s conclusion, i.e. the Ashkenazi average can’t be higher than the 102-106 range. I am skeptical of Israel’s national average being as low as 96, but even if it were as high as 105, Vox’s argument would still stand. Given the three variables — Ashkenazi IQ, non-Ashkenazi IQ, and Arab IQ (which can safely take as 83) — the higher the average Ashkenazi IQ, the lower the non-Ashkenazi IQ must be, and an average Ashkenazi IQ of 115 results in non-Ashkenazim having a lower IQ than Arabs.

As the vast majority of Jews outside of Israel are Ashkenazim, the rest of my comment pertains to Ashkenazim only — which actually supports Vox’s argument.

(3) Although our general IQ is only a couple points higher than whites’, I do think our verbal acuity is at least a standard deviation higher. I don’t have numbers to back it up, just my personal experience looking at it from within and without. That is (and this is a double-edged blade), we are extremely talented when it comes to language, debating, polemics… and propaganda, lying, and swindling. A fighter for truth has the same weapons as the most fork-tongued deceiver, the difference being in their respective commitments to Truth or the Message.

(4) The myth of Ashkenazi super-intelligence is as harmful to Jews as the myth of IQ equality between blacks and whites is to blacks. It gives rise to anti-semitic beliefs in the super-human evil cunning of Jews, and it also turns Jews into a philo-semitic fetish. I get very annoyed when a philo-semite tries to place me on a pedestal, and my admonitions to be proud of your own culture often fall on deaf ears.

(5) Owing to the myth of Ashkenazi super-intelligence, we labour under unrealistic expectations to be naturally gifted and clever in every which way, and I am convinced a lot of Jews in prominent positions suffer from imposter anxiety, much like those blacks who are undeservingly admitted to elite universities.

(6) I have a pet hypothesis that blacks in America are ultimately unhappy because they know they will always have low sexual market value no matter how prosperous they be. Telling a black woman that she has it better than her sisters in Africa, when 90{c2bf88dee429485d3b0f61325a10c26cb2e215274027e21905ef5aec05bbd0e7} of desirable men automatically downgrade her SMV, simply doesn’t speak to what really makes her unhappy. By the same token, I think we Jews, in our heart of hearts, feel the same way. We’re simply not as tall or good looking as the northern Europeans, and we know it. In Israel, the things we’re embarrassed about — big noses, frizzy hair, etc — are the norm, and Israelis, for all their obnoxious tendencies, at least do not suffer from the Diaspora Jew’s neurosis about looking Jewish.

If you know many Israelis, one thing you immediately notice is that they exhibit very little of the neuroses, the false bravado, and the prickly defensiveness so often evident among Diasporans. They tend to have a little swagger to them, a genuine self-assurance that I find quite likable. They love to talk about Israel, and you can barely speak with an Israeli for five minutes without him inviting you to come and visit it.

This often reminds me of Garrison Keillor writing about Lake Woebegon and the signs on the outskirts of town: A TOWN ON THE GROW! Israelis are rather like the Middle Eastern version of 19th century American town boosters, a little gauche for the tastes of the cultured individual, perhaps, and yet their enthusiasm for the country they are building is genuinely infectious.

They are, in a word, self-confident. They know they are not parasites. They know they have sweated, fought, and bled for what they have. They are proud of what they have built in the desert, and rightly so.

And as for the Palestinians, let me assure you that the Israelis I know have shown considerably more concern and compassion for the defeated people they have displaced than I have ever heard any American show for how the American Indians are treated today, never mind in the past.

What is the difference between these two halves of the same nation? The Israeli has skin in the game, he is fully committed, and he knows it. The Diasporan is a nomadic pillager, his commitment is conditional upon his perception of his momentary best interests, and he knows it. It’s the difference between being a bossy backseat driver on the weekly run to the supermarket and taking the pole at the Indy 500; which responsibility do you think is going to build more self-confidence. We often talk about the deleterious effect that parasitism has on the societal host, but the parasite pays a heavy price too, because his state of being shatters his psyche and erodes his soul. Have you ever met an individual who does not economically support himself who is self-confident, psychologically mature, and secure in his abilities? As with a person, so it is with peoples; one has only to visit an Indian reservation to observe as much.

A mere 8{c2bf88dee429485d3b0f61325a10c26cb2e215274027e21905ef5aec05bbd0e7} of Israeli Jews describe themselves as being on the left while 55{c2bf88dee429485d3b0f61325a10c26cb2e215274027e21905ef5aec05bbd0e7} describe themselves as centrist and 37{c2bf88dee429485d3b0f61325a10c26cb2e215274027e21905ef5aec05bbd0e7} as being on the right. This is radically different from Jewish opinion in any other nation.
– Pew Research Center

That’s the difference that skin in the game makes. It fundamentally changes one’s perspective, one’s time preferences, and one’s behavior. Critical G’s prediction is in line with this: “I make a prediction, which I hope to be tested one day: if the Western Jews migrated en masse to Israel, most of them would become right-wing nationalists. This is exactly what happened in Israel, and I bet you it would happen again.”

The Alt-Right is inevitable. Especially – not even – especially in Israel.

Critical G’s observation of imposter anxiety is a significant one. He believes that the only cure for this and the other psychological ailments of the Diasporans is for them to move on to Israel, and that such a mass exodus would be materially and spiritually better for everyone on all sides of the equation. Based on my observations and experiences, I think he is almost certainly correct. Diversity is no one’s strength and ultimately operates to the disadvantage, if not the actual destruction, of everyone it touches.

I was aware that more people are leaving Google because they don’t want to deal with the lunatic SJWs that are running the asylum any longer. The hapless Sundar Pikachu simply cannot control them, despite them being a very small, very vocal, very crazy minority of the employees. This email from a reader confirms what I’d already been hearing.

I had an interesting encounter with an ex-Googler this afternoon. A man overheard me and a colleague talking about Fortran at a coffee shop, and he started chatting with us about computer programming. Turns out, he’s an ex-Google developer.

My colleague asked him what he thought of the James Damore situation, and he surprised us a little by responding that that was the main reason he’d quit Google. He said he didn’t want to be part of an environment where people were not free to express reasonable opinions. When I asked him if there were others at Google who felt the same way, he said, yes, most of them. Most of them. It may look like all of Google has gone insane, but it’s really a minority of loud, obnoxious SJWs ruling things there.

It sounds crazy that a few mentally ill tyrants could dominate a place like Google, but this dovetails with something Jordan Peterson points out in a recent interview with Australian ex-deputy PM John Anderson. Peterson says that tyrants, whether petty or large, are not psychologically equipped to deal with resistance. I believe you’ve said something to this effect in your SJW books. If anyone needs more convincing, well, we have a man whose expertise is human behavior and who has extensively studied the great tyrannies of the 20th century telling us that tyrants will cave most of the time when they are resisted. But most people don’t resist, because they figure it will cost them too much. Peterson counters that resistance costs comparatively little when you consider what will happen if you don’t do anything.

This was underscored by my ex-Google acquaintance’s parting comment, that if even 10{a538f03b5e5ee5fdc03407ba0ca231ac78bf6d75a4715bce2458722af48b01e9} of people in the tech world actively resisted the SJWs, that nonsense would come to an end very quickly.

Of course, this is true of SJWs and the larger culture as well. Look at how the Alt-Right’s resistance has made significant inroads into the SJWs’ ability to intimidate and destroy their targets. The conservative strategy of retreat, complain, condemn, and cry does not and will never work; it is intrinsically and inevitably defeatist.

As with most bullies, a metaphorical punch or two in the mouth is sufficient to dissuade the average SJW. As evidence, I offer the observation that SJWs have tended to steer well clear of me ever since I published SJWAL.

Speaking of punching bullies in the mouth, three more men have joined the lawsuit against Google:

Three new plaintiffs have joined former Google employee James Damore’s lawsuit against the company, alleging gender, racial, and political discrimination. Manuel Amador, Stephen McPherson, and Michael Burns, who were all job applicants turned down by Google, have joined the lawsuit.

Given what we know about Microsoft and Pikachu’s background, the lawyers for the plaintiffs should dig deep for any potential unlawful favoritism being shown to applicants with Indian backgrounds.

I usually just delete and ignore my daily hate mail, but this was right up there with the classic Navy SEAL copypasta.

Dear Pale Nigger with a Tiny Head

After encountering you and being within the confines of your sniveling shithole called “vox popoli” I have attempted to give my own honest and humble opinions and recommendations to anyone willing to listen. In hindsight I cannot imagine why I even paid attention to a lowly fool who believes wholeheartedly in the lie of jebus chris. Being the ultimate seeker of history beyond anyone I have ever seen I judge such books as ‘Ecclesiastes’ ‘Luke’ ‘Deuteronomy’ ‘Genesis’ ‘Exodus’ and other filth to be paltry, petty gibberish totally unfit for future generations to read. Unlike yourself, I am a reader of ALL known ancient languages and scripts. There are but few who could beat me in this field and most of them are dead. I have read the ‘bible’ from beginning to end and in all its earliest iterations. I know ALL of its flaws and the crude excuses of translations in its intricate fallacies. I am also aware of the seemingly endless archeological evidence and alternative historical records that ultimately crush the [ill]legitimacy of the Tanakh/Old testament and its synthesised bastard spawn the greco-roman ‘new’ testament. In the area of ‘gawd’s word’ I am superior in knowledge to anything you ‘know’.

Being as high as I am, and you as low as a mite, your censure of my deductions and articulations is quite the appalling breach of natural law. In the purely truthful sense of law it is only fitting that ‘eye for an eye’ to be meted on those equal and in this particular scenario you are not an equal on any level. The logical conclusion of this is to have you banned from employment and your entire well-being seized for the benefit of your betters as well as any belonging you claim to possess. You can retaliate but in the end it shall mean nothing. The tiny-brained mulatto wogs that dwell in that shitpit known as Italy are absolutely incapable of halting your punishment and any call to stop my righteousness shall only end in their demise. Any police found aiding your escape shall be executed as the repugnant criminals that they are.

I have noticed for a while that you have consistently deleted my infinitely righteous messages of truth on your site. As this crime is utterly irredeemable, I am forced to conclude that you have joined the ranks of the various cockroaches who have denigrated and insulted me for no better reason than to hide your own weak, pathetic, life-unworthy-of-life selves. As such, you shall be executed without dignity and any and every wog cop you call upon to hide yourself with shall also be judged guilty of the crime of preventing justice and tortured to death for this transgression.

You have been condemned and there is no redemption. No cry of mercy, no display of repentance to me or my Lord shall be accepted. Your existence shall be nothing but pain, misery and eventually suicide. May the disgusting thing you call “faith in christ” be expunged from your very being and your assets of “castalia house” be seized for the benefit of your betters.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this gentleman has asymmetrical features, objectively bad skin, and does not go out on a lot of dates. Can you even imagine how he would respond to getting shot down by a woman? I used to wonder why girls are so cruel to gammas, but now I understand.

Of course, it’s so over the top that one tends to suspect it is one of the Dread Ilk trolling.

A reader has a scoop about DC’s Supergirl television show:

Inside info from the set of Supergirl.  It was already converged.  I didn’t think they could converge it any more.  But they found a way. In the upcoming season, the heroes and the “good guys” won’t have any assault weapons.  They are de-gunning them.  No projectile weapons.  No SWAT gear or tactical vests. They even have a special anti-bumpstock bit of business planned. 

This new approach on the part of DC is certainly going to have some interesting implications for The Punisher, to say the least, if Marvel follows suit.

ML is not exactly surprised by David Hogg’s rejection of Laura Ingraham’s apology:

David Hogg is predictably still calling for boycotts of Ingraham’s advertisers, calling her apology inadequate. It’s a shame she didn’t read your book.

At this point I can safely state, without any sense of exaggeration or modesty, that if you have anything to do with the media or politics and you do not read SJWAL, you will fully merit the treatment that you’re going to get from SJWs sooner or later. Conservative commentators continue to demonstrate that they never learn anything from the various defenestrations that preceded their own, as they insist on demonstrating every single time one of them comes in for targeted public criticism.

Laura Ingraham rightly made fun of David “Totally Not a Crisis Actor” Hogg because he’s been getting rejected from various universities, then promptly backed down and apologized when the media’s little darling affected to have gotten his feelings hurt. As you can imagine, her apology completely resolved the situation, because SJWs always refrain from taking advantage of an apologetic conservative rolling over and showing his yellow belly.

Advertisers – including TripAdvisor, Nestle, Wayfair and Hulu – are dumping Laura Ingraham after she slammed Parkland survivor

TripAdvisor will pull its advertisements from right-wing television host Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program.

In a tweet, Ingraham mocked a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting in February that left 17 students and adults dead. The survivor-turned-activist, David Hogg, responded on Twitter by calling on his followers to contact Ingraham’s top advertisers. Ingraham later tweeted her apologies “for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland.”

Any student should be proud of a 4.2 GPA —incl. @DavidHogg111.  On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland. For the record, I believe my show was the first to feature David immediately after that horrific shooting and even noted how “poised” he was given the tragedy. As always, he’s welcome to return to the show anytime for a productive discussion. 

What a brave opinion leader! The complete spinelessness and stupidity demonstrated by the hapless Ingraham aside, this episode demonstrates how fragile the Right is when it relies upon the Left’s infrastructure. Even a not-very-bright high school student can effectively take down a major conservative media figure with nothing more than a well-targeted tweet.

But there is a more important point here than the obvious question of “what part of ‘never apologize’ did you fail to understand?” If you live by advertising from converged corporations, then you can safely expect them to cut you off the moment someone complains that you are violating the current Narrative.

Ingraham’s cringing self-implosion demonstrates why it is so terminally short-sighted for conservatives to insist on continually maximizing their short-term interests in exposure over their long-term interests in a solid non-converged infrastructure. This is why I wouldn’t accept a television show on Fox News or CNN even if one was offered to me on a silver platter, as while such a show would be of significant benefit in the short term, it would vastly increase my fragility, whereas continuing to build up Infogalactic, Voxiversity, and other platforms will likely prove more beneficial to me and many others in the long run.

I have no sympathy for the talking heads who are shut down by their advertisers or the self-published authors who are shut down by Amazon. These are known risks and they cannot come as a surprise to anyone who has been conscious for the last four years. While you’re not necessarily part of the problem if you’re not helping build alternative platforms, you also are not part of the solution, and can’t expect much in the way of support or sympathy if you find yourself being deplatformed in the future.

MP explains why Smoot-Hawley is deemed to have been so important in the 1930s, and why tariffs cannot be a similar concern today even if we accept Jude Wanniski’s original case for its connection to the Great Depression:

I was reading some of your earlier threads and I noticed you had questions as to how the Smoot-Hawley Tariff came to be associated with causing the Great Depression.

The idea was first proposed by Jude Wanniski in his book “The Way the World Works.” Specifically, it is in Chapter 7, “The Stock Market and the Wedge.”

 I recently read the first 10 chapters of Jude’s book and I can say it is excellent overall and well worth reading, but the conclusions are vastly different from the normal interpretations of Smoot-Hawley. Basically, Jude was tracking the reportage of the Smoot-Hawley legislation as it was winding its way through Congress. Every time the legislation experienced a setback, the stock market would rally. Every time it experienced a success, the stock market would decline. When Hoover finally signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff into law, the market took a massive dive. Thus, you have the evidence of the Smoot-Hawley tariff causing the Great Depression.

This is good as far as it goes, but it begs the question as to why the market was so concerned about the tariff to begin with. Was the market really worried about reciprocal tariffs or a decline in economic activity? It turns out that the evidence in Jude’s chapter points to a different reason:

The stock market was tracking the tariff legislation because it was worried about a bond market dislocation. This is my analysis piecing together the evidence presented in chapter 7 of Jude’s book.

 Basically, before WWI, America was the world’s biggest debtor nation, importing capital from all over the world to build and invest in the United States. During and after WWI, America became the world’s biggest creditor. Out of the national income of $30 billion, Woodrow Wilson lent $11 billion to England and France to fight WWI. After the war, America lent an additional $14.7 billion for private and public investment, a lending boom that continued to grow throughout the roaring 20’s. This means that during probably the biggest boomtime in US history up to the period, where the economy grew to $100 billion before the crash, the United States was accumulating a massive bond portfolio where a sizeable percentage of assets were concentrated in foreign bonds.

 Because the US was on a gold standard where $20 bought an ounce of gold, the only way for foreign entities to pay for their dollar-denominated debts was to sell to the United States, exchange goods for cash, and then meet the terms of their bond agreements. To guarantee that they could sell goods, gain cash and pay debts, European firms were dumping product in the United States.

The dumping was at first concentrated in the agricultural sector and it was wreaking havoc on farmers. Because farmers accounted for 25{0e0118f8ae392893e7132af0e0c1b6af259b6ae2f64a392a36423d79bfd12d2b} of the population, they managed to push the Fordney-McCumber Act of 1922, a tariff of not only 34.8{0e0118f8ae392893e7132af0e0c1b6af259b6ae2f64a392a36423d79bfd12d2b}, but with a Tariff Commission whose duty was to equalize production costs as a condition for any tariff removal. Yet, throughout the 1920’s, not only did the dumping continue, it moved upmarket. Wisconsin Senators, by the late 1920’s, were complaining about Belgian cement undercutting Wisconsin cement companies.

Jude’s book provides great insight into what was going on in the 1920’s American economy. Warren Harding ran on a campaign of “returning to normalcy” by repealing the high income taxes of the war years. This caused the US economy to boom. By 1925, the top marginal tax rate was reduced to 25{0e0118f8ae392893e7132af0e0c1b6af259b6ae2f64a392a36423d79bfd12d2b} and the US economy was roaring along.

Unfortunately, the malfeasance of the Wilson administration led the United States to lend enormous amounts of money to the rest of the world, a practice that continued among private sector banks throughout the 1920’s. JP Morgan would lend money to Belgian cement makers that would then export government-subsidized cement to the US, sell it, and then service the bonds, which reflected in higher stock prices for JP Morgan and Belgian cement companies, but would wreak havoc on local businesses that then lobbied for tariff protection.  This process was repeated across hundreds of different industries.

The stock market was not worried that the drop in international trade would tank the US economy. International trade was small as a percentage of the US economy, roughly 4{0e0118f8ae392893e7132af0e0c1b6af259b6ae2f64a392a36423d79bfd12d2b} total. But, that 4{0e0118f8ae392893e7132af0e0c1b6af259b6ae2f64a392a36423d79bfd12d2b} of international trade was servicing the accumulated lending that amounted to anywhere from 30-50{0e0118f8ae392893e7132af0e0c1b6af259b6ae2f64a392a36423d79bfd12d2b} of the value of the entire US economy. The tariff meant that firms would not be able to service the money lent to them by Americans and, thus, lead to massive bond defaults.

What happens to the value of company stock if the company defaults on its bonds? The stock goes to zero.

That is what the market was paying attention to and why it was reacting the way it did to the Smoot-Hawley tariff.

We can see why today tariffs will not have the same effect that they did in 1929: the US is not the world’s biggest creditor. Our debtor status means that we are not vulnerable to a bond-market dislocation. Other nations are. We can safely go back to raising tariffs and building the United States.

Of course, this also explains why creditor nations such as Germany and South Korea are so inordinately terrified of what are, in reality, very small and modest tariffs. It’s not just their massive export sectors that are potentially at risk, but the huge financial Ponzi schemes that have been constructed on top of them. The various camels we call economies are overloaded with debt and there are an awful lot of things that look like straws these days.

I cannot verify any of this. I am merely passing it along from one of my sources.

The President signed the bill because the military needed to be funded. They’re going to have some big jobs this year: war with Iran, rounding up most of the Obama administration to stand trial in front of military tribunals, and keeping domestic order when the roundup happens. The midterms are going to be utterly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. That means the roundup will happen before then and the DNC will be struggling with things other than running for office.

My understanding is that the war with Iran will not be direct, but will be more of a massive support operation for the Gulf Cooperation Council. Which means that it is essentially the Israeli-Sunni alliance against the Shi’ites.

I don’t like hearing that, not one little bit, but another Gulf war would be immensely preferable to the war with Russia that the neocons have recently been pushing. Of course, given the Russo-Iranian alliance, it could easily expand into that.

Anyhow, as always, we will see what we will see.

Peter Thiel raised some questions about trade, capital flows, and tariffs at a recent talk at the Economic Club of New York. Specifically, why does capital flow in the opposite direction now than it did in 1900, when slow growing economies like the UK invested in fast growing economies like Russia and Argentina? 

There is something really odd going on in the trade relations… The way you’d expect things to be working in a healthily globalizing world is that capital would flow from the slow growing to the fast growing economies, from the developed to the developing world.  This was the way trade patterns looked in 1900, which was a relatively open, free trade world, where the UK had a current account surplus of 4{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} of GDP and the capital got exported to invest in Russian railroads or Argentina, or all sorts of other countries that had higher growth rates and promised a higher return on capital.  That’s the way globalization is supposed to look.

Today, it’s quite the opposite, where capital is flowing uphill from China to the US and is the other side of these enormous current account and trade deficits that the United States has. And so, we are exporting $100 billion a year to China, importing $450 billion a year from China. And China, an economy that’s growing at, say, 6.5{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} a year is investing in an economy that is maybe growing at 3{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} a year, when the flows should be the other way around.

And so I think that tells you that something is incredibly off. It pushes you to have to ask questions, why it is off?  Why does nobody in China want to buy anything from the US? Why are our goods so undesirable? Or, are there policies that skew things too much towards consumption in the US and more to investment in other places, and should we be rethinking that? Or, are there intellectual property things that are not being enforced? There are a lot of very granular questions that we need to be asking.

Even if free trade is good in theory, and that’s what you want to get to, I think the way you get there is, perhaps, by not being too dogmatic and too doctrinaire.  And if you have people negotiate trade treaties who are doctrinaire about free trade, I always get the sense they won’t do that much work because if you negotiate a good trade treaty, that’s a good thing, and if you negotiate a bad trade treaty that still a good thing because we know that all trade is always good for everybody, in all times, in all places. And so we have to always be careful that free trade orthodoxy not become just a euphemism for the sloppiness or the laziness of the people negotiating these treaties.

Capital chases profit. There is more profit to be made in the US financial sector, which eats up about one-third of all profit in the USA, than there is in the non-financial sectors of other, faster-growing economies. That’s my initial thought, anyhow.

Zaklog the Great poses a trivial objection:

So, Vox, what would you say to someone who hasn’t studied economics enough to seriously parse through these arguments, but has observed that, almost without exception, the government is a terrible way to get things done? There seem to be very few things the government is capable of doing effectively, and therefore, the idea that managing the economy is one of those very few seems doubtful.

1. Tariffs are no more “managing the economy” than any other form of taxes are. Falsely equate the two demonstrates that you are engaging in dishonest rhetoric rather than honest dialectic. 
2. Getting what done? Governments have historically done a better job of defending borders than any other form of organization, and are certainly a damned sight better at it than international corporations, which, by the way, are government-created entities. Tariffs are a form of border defense, in more ways than one.
3. Tariffs are considerably less intrusive, and cause less economic disruption, than any of their three primary alternatives, income taxes, consumption taxes, and wealth taxes. If you believe that government is a terrible way to get things done, why would you rather have it interfere on a holistic and daily basis with the economic activity of every single domestic citizen rather than on a far less frequent basis with the cross-border shipments of a limited number of foreign corporations?
4. Tariffs don’t require effectiveness, and domestic governments have proven to be far more susceptible to control by the will of the people than international corporations.
5. Even if one assumes government corruption and inefficiency, it is still preferable to convey legal advantage to manufacturing companies that employ large numbers of people in a tariff system than to financial companies that do not in a free trade system. (Courtesy of Jack Amok.)