Two items:
1. Here is the crux of Bonner's "Daily Reckoning" post today: He would like to see the U.S. default on its debt, because he wants to see what happens to all the "zombies" when they "run out of meat." Who, you may ask, are the "zombies"? Why, they're all those millions upon millions among us who, spurred on by the banking "industry" and its minions in the federal government -- and driven to it by falling real wages over the decades as "industry" leaders in collaboration with those same "bankers" and federal officials outsourced American industry and its jobs -- have mortgage and/or consumer debt.
2. From the same source on which I found Bonner's latest charming piece [Lew Rockwell's libertarian site], I found this, which, if you have had trouble believing me about the core anti-democratic outlook of these people, should finally do it: Well, damn, this blog service won't let me "paste" what I want you to see, so please go to Amazon.com and in Books look for and read the customer review of one Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order. What, you may ask, does the fellow mean by "natural order"? Why, of course, "...[the] condition known by many other names too, including anarcho-capitalism and individualist or free-market capitalism." I have tried repeatedly to get people to see that fundamentally these "free market" types are in fact anarchists; now they are willing -- proud! -- to state it out loud.
F.A. Hayek, that pillar of "the Austrian School," was nothing like this. Some of you may recall that I have explained that the title of his best-known book (and his masterpiece), The Road to Serfdom, should actually have been A Road to Serfdom , because socialism --which is of course what Hayek had in mind -- is paralleled as a road to serfdom by the ideology of "free market" capitalism as it slides into anarchy and thus gives rise once again to out-and-out feudalism. Make no mistake about it: That is what these freaks want and lust for.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Goin' on two years later....
...I'd about given up the idea of "blogging" at all, and of course meanwhile we in the good old USA have been circling the drain at best. But as I've been reading more and more -- of course! -- I've found more and more instances of half-truths, deliberate and perhaps not deliberate, in what's out there.
To take an obvious though perhaps a bit obscure example, there's a fellow named Bill Bonner, who writes / edits an internet newsletter -- but who wrote a book, with a fellow named Addison Wiggins, called Empire of Debt. (Wiggins subsequently wrote one called I.O.U.S.A.) Empire of Debt has gained some, er...currency. Bonner is evidently very much of or at least greatly influenced by the "Austrian School" of economics, and there is much there as to debt -- both private and public -- that is fine.
But the man is blatantly anti-democratic and a "free market" type who views -- or at least portrays -- almost all forms of public "community" endeavor as disastrous. In Empire of Debt he portrays Abraham Lincoln as a "do gooder" in the company of the likes of Woodrow Wilson and, in doing so, he suggests that the American Civil War was undertaken to free the slaves -- which is utter nonsense. He likewise suggests strongly that the American involvement in WWII was a Rooseveltian exercise in imperialism. And overall he treats the entire topic of imperialism as some sort of macho bravado and professes not to know of any rational basis for it. This is where I have to question the man's honesty, because he is obviously very intelligent, he apparently reads quite a bit, and there are suggestions -- to me, at any rate -- that he has had some contact with the anti-imperialist writings of the late William Appleman Williams, if not with those of J.A. Hobson.
For example, he quotes at one point Oliver Cromwell's remark about having the integrity to consider whether one might be wrong. Ignoring for the moment the irony of this, that is a fairly obscure remark, and the only other place I have seen it is in one of Williams's books, perhaps Empire As a Way of Life.
But whether or not Bonner has read Williams, he should have. I find it both absurd and ridiculous that any writer should expend considerable time and effort on screeds attacking imperialism without having bothered to read both Williams and Hobson, and thus apparently having no basis other than the "Austrian School" for any sort of understanding of the central problem, for capitalism, of economic "busts and booms." Even prominent Libertarians featured on Lew Rockwell's fine site have acknowledged Williams's important contributions to anti-imperialist thought, though not specifically his updating of Hobson's central critique in Ch. 6 of his early-20th-century Imperialism. Without understanding the Hobson / Williams critique -- and Hobson's greatly informed Lord Keynes' efforts (and FDR's) to save capitalism from itself --one is pretty much left with only the "Austrian School" explanation of economic depressions, and while in my view that explanation is cogent and important, it is seriously incomplete. That is to say, the two explanations are not at all mutually exclusive, and it is essential to understand both of them.
Without that understanding, one cannot grasp the rational basis for economic imperialism, and would be left with no way of getting beyond (for example) Bonner's simplistic and thus dangerous views on what has gone wrong with America -- including his condemnations of democracy and everything that has been done, in Western democracies, in the public interest, apart from "national defence" and the like. This sort of thing has become commonplace, of course, among our extreme "right wing" "thinkers," including prominently the late Margaret Thatcher's notorious dictum that there is no such thing as community, only individuals. The Bonners of the world have as their goal the utter destruction of society itself, leaving only predatory individuals to stuff themselves as much as possible at the expense of all others, the others -- as Bonner himself repeatedly calls them, borrowing from Karl Marx -- being the "lumpen proletariat." The mob. We slobs who do not believe that the only legitimate goal of a human being is to become as wealthy as possible, regardless of the consequences to what the overwhelming majority of us ["lumpen proletariat"] have always felt was most important, our communities, from our villages and towns and cities and States to our country itself. Sentimental nonsense, according to the likes of Bonner and Wiggins et al.
-- Bill
To take an obvious though perhaps a bit obscure example, there's a fellow named Bill Bonner, who writes / edits an internet newsletter -- but who wrote a book, with a fellow named Addison Wiggins, called Empire of Debt. (Wiggins subsequently wrote one called I.O.U.S.A.) Empire of Debt has gained some, er...currency. Bonner is evidently very much of or at least greatly influenced by the "Austrian School" of economics, and there is much there as to debt -- both private and public -- that is fine.
But the man is blatantly anti-democratic and a "free market" type who views -- or at least portrays -- almost all forms of public "community" endeavor as disastrous. In Empire of Debt he portrays Abraham Lincoln as a "do gooder" in the company of the likes of Woodrow Wilson and, in doing so, he suggests that the American Civil War was undertaken to free the slaves -- which is utter nonsense. He likewise suggests strongly that the American involvement in WWII was a Rooseveltian exercise in imperialism. And overall he treats the entire topic of imperialism as some sort of macho bravado and professes not to know of any rational basis for it. This is where I have to question the man's honesty, because he is obviously very intelligent, he apparently reads quite a bit, and there are suggestions -- to me, at any rate -- that he has had some contact with the anti-imperialist writings of the late William Appleman Williams, if not with those of J.A. Hobson.
For example, he quotes at one point Oliver Cromwell's remark about having the integrity to consider whether one might be wrong. Ignoring for the moment the irony of this, that is a fairly obscure remark, and the only other place I have seen it is in one of Williams's books, perhaps Empire As a Way of Life.
But whether or not Bonner has read Williams, he should have. I find it both absurd and ridiculous that any writer should expend considerable time and effort on screeds attacking imperialism without having bothered to read both Williams and Hobson, and thus apparently having no basis other than the "Austrian School" for any sort of understanding of the central problem, for capitalism, of economic "busts and booms." Even prominent Libertarians featured on Lew Rockwell's fine site have acknowledged Williams's important contributions to anti-imperialist thought, though not specifically his updating of Hobson's central critique in Ch. 6 of his early-20th-century Imperialism. Without understanding the Hobson / Williams critique -- and Hobson's greatly informed Lord Keynes' efforts (and FDR's) to save capitalism from itself --one is pretty much left with only the "Austrian School" explanation of economic depressions, and while in my view that explanation is cogent and important, it is seriously incomplete. That is to say, the two explanations are not at all mutually exclusive, and it is essential to understand both of them.
Without that understanding, one cannot grasp the rational basis for economic imperialism, and would be left with no way of getting beyond (for example) Bonner's simplistic and thus dangerous views on what has gone wrong with America -- including his condemnations of democracy and everything that has been done, in Western democracies, in the public interest, apart from "national defence" and the like. This sort of thing has become commonplace, of course, among our extreme "right wing" "thinkers," including prominently the late Margaret Thatcher's notorious dictum that there is no such thing as community, only individuals. The Bonners of the world have as their goal the utter destruction of society itself, leaving only predatory individuals to stuff themselves as much as possible at the expense of all others, the others -- as Bonner himself repeatedly calls them, borrowing from Karl Marx -- being the "lumpen proletariat." The mob. We slobs who do not believe that the only legitimate goal of a human being is to become as wealthy as possible, regardless of the consequences to what the overwhelming majority of us ["lumpen proletariat"] have always felt was most important, our communities, from our villages and towns and cities and States to our country itself. Sentimental nonsense, according to the likes of Bonner and Wiggins et al.
-- Bill
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Opening thoughts
I have been told that I should start a "blog" for my ravings. I resisted until now, both because of the temerity of the thing and because I had no wish to invite untold numbers of folks to comment. It's not that I don't want comments -- I wish to learn both of my mistakes and of the thoughts, on the subject, of others at least equally concerned and I hope better informed. But a friend has just told me that I can set up a blog within some sorts of parameters perhaps cutting down on replies by those who actually know little or nothing in this field. It seems that while none of us who are not EEs would venture to hold forth on that field, for example, yet almost everyone thinks he or she qualified to hold forth on economics and politics.... But the very reason for my blog, if I actually go through with this, is to try to help others avoid the misinformation and misimpressions created and spread over, especially, the last forty years approximately, in the field of "political economy." These misunderstandings have become the common coin of most of the populace. I hope specifically to help provide better insights into the "banking" crisis and the current Depression, and thus into what might be done to help contain the damage and, at least equally importantly, prevent recurrence.
So why do I think myself at all qualified to do so? Only that I have seen gaps in the understanding of even some of the most highly-regarded commentators from the beginnings of at least the public perception of the crisis, and I believe I can help fill those gaps. But this will necessarily be a work in progress, because I too continue reading what I can to help me understand better, as well. I am a retired attorney, whose career was spent entirely in securities regulation. I watched the "problem" as it developed, and, for example, I saw the derivatives mess point directly to the problems with the "banks," beginning no later than late 1999. There is for example an insight lurking there that seems to have escaped the attention of the writer of an extremely helpful (for all of us) new book on all this by the scholar who wrote the magnificent three-volume biography of Lord Keynes. Both that gentleman (deliberately -- and for a good reason, as I see it) and a recent commentator on a superb television panel program on the subject (out of ignorance) have underplayed, for example, the role of calculated fraud in the near-toppling of the American financial "industry." Intrigued? Stay tuned.
-- Bill
So why do I think myself at all qualified to do so? Only that I have seen gaps in the understanding of even some of the most highly-regarded commentators from the beginnings of at least the public perception of the crisis, and I believe I can help fill those gaps. But this will necessarily be a work in progress, because I too continue reading what I can to help me understand better, as well. I am a retired attorney, whose career was spent entirely in securities regulation. I watched the "problem" as it developed, and, for example, I saw the derivatives mess point directly to the problems with the "banks," beginning no later than late 1999. There is for example an insight lurking there that seems to have escaped the attention of the writer of an extremely helpful (for all of us) new book on all this by the scholar who wrote the magnificent three-volume biography of Lord Keynes. Both that gentleman (deliberately -- and for a good reason, as I see it) and a recent commentator on a superb television panel program on the subject (out of ignorance) have underplayed, for example, the role of calculated fraud in the near-toppling of the American financial "industry." Intrigued? Stay tuned.
-- Bill
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)