Exiting 'Economic Thinking' and re-entering into the Reality of what is real and true

Exiting 'Economic Thinking' and re-entering into the Reality of what is real and true

Part 21 of 22, from Exiting the Wizard's Circle of Economics

So what do we do to escape the Wizard's Circle of the 'new economics' of J.S. Mill, Marx, and Lord Keynes? We start where we always should: at the beginning.

The first step in considering the legitimacy of any theory, economic or otherwise, is to look into its principles; examine its metaphysical standing, its causal connections, and ethical coherence. If a theory doesn't conform to, or even violates what you know to be real and true, there's no need to test it further, let alone show any deference or respect to the theory or theorizer because of the predictions they assert will justify it - those arbitrary claims are without actual causes, and so are meaningless. It's important that we understand this, not as a 'debating tip', but as a survival tip, because failing to do so will deaden your own ability to assess what is real and true, and that failure will draw you further into alignment with still worse theories and assertions, as time goes on.

It's instructive what a Physicist does when presented with what purports to be a shiny new theory for a Perpetual Motion machine, without its theorizer having first refuted or significantly amended the laws of thermodynamics which rules such a scheme out. A good physicist isn't going to parse its formulas, crunch its numbers, or debate its predictions - no matter how elegant or grand its promises may be - they'll simply throw it into the trash where it belongs. If the principles that a claim is based upon are clearly unsound, then it cannot be of value. Likewise, any theories presented by 'Economic Thinkers', that propose violating property rights or 'managing markets' (a distinction without a difference), or otherwise limiting freedom of speech and action, should be thrown directly into the trash without a second thought - no matter how fine its promises to improve the 'Common Good' are, and it would be unethical to not do so.

If we ever expect to escape the downward spiral of 'Economic Thinking', we have to recognize that its nature is not confined to obviously economic issues, but is equally reflected in its fellow 'Social Sciences' of Positivist Law, Progressive Education, Social Studies, and so on. Together they envision experts utilizing the Rule of Rules to 'manage' an economy (meaning the lives of all of those living within it) to produce outcomes which they deem favorable to the 'Common Good', which are ultimately supported by those aspirations alone.

'Economic Thinking' formed the substance of the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, and was signed by everyone from professors of Economics & Law, to church Ministers and 'Progressive' educators like John Dewey, and all endorsed its demands, such as its 14th plank:

"…A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible. The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good. Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world."

Against political economy's understanding of Value as the product of uncoerced exchange, and of Say's Law of Markets, or against the philosophical realism that underlies the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West's history and literature, 'Economic Thinkers' have and can have no good arguments. Even if their 'Epistemology' permitted them to believe that objective truth was possible (which it kant do), their lack of, or rejection of metaphysics, means that they are unable to prove their claims to be *true*, or to prove Classical American Liberalism and Political Economy to be *false*. Where that leaves them, is, with no other recourse but to use old-fashioned sophistries to deride, dismiss, and ignore those principles of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West that might lead people into a deeper understanding of the world and their place within it.

Men like Frederic Bastiat were among the last leading figures to understand that a sound economy has far more to do with morality, and laws that comport with Natural Law and Justice, than with the machinations of finance. Those fundamental principles are what a society must understand in order to establish a Rule of Law where Liberty - meaning that you are at liberty to make those decisions you choose to make in living your life, and understand how vital it is that your neighbor is able to do so as well - can be enjoyed, upheld, and defended.

Once those fundamental principles are respected, then the magic of the marketplace (meaning we can't see how it happens, only that it does) transmits something of each interested person's judgment of value and expectation into the wider market to an extent which no 'expert' has or ever will fully comprehend, let alone manage (see 'I, Pencil', and "That Which Is Seen and that Which Is Not Seen").The result of those principles in action are what reverberate in the observable effects of a Free Market, such as the 'mechanisms' of Pricing and Supply & Demand, and the attempt to manipulate those effects into causes - Price Controls, 'Caps' on profits, etc. - floods the market with corrupted information which impedes the operations of the market, and eventually kills it.

Liberty is an effect, not a cause. The Free Market is an effect, not a cause. Both are what result from respecting fundamental principles, and neither can long survive their violation.

The reality then, is that when you adopt positions which stray from or discard those underlying principles, and justify doing so on the basis of the promise that going against what you know to be real and true will somehow benefit the 'common good', as Bastiat pointed out the 'capitalists', utilitarians, socialists, and communists were doing in their false & misleading claims about what Value is (in his "IX Landed Property of The Harmonies of Political Economy, book one"), then as those principles predicted, and history has since confirmed, what you can be sure of is that what all of their numbers, promises, and broken principles will commonly 'add up' to, will be massive amounts of waste, confusion, and misery that will be felt by all.

Bastiat's clear and accessible writing embodied everything that 'Economic Thinkers' have been desperate to dialectically 'evolve' mankind out of, and like the alchemists he once compared them to, their positions are often made in willful ignorance & utter contempt of those who have firsthand knowledge of what is of value in their lives (that'd be you & me), as they unhesitatingly seek the power to impose their own decisions over what the market - you & I - might otherwise have decided, despite the fact that their ignorance of that and more, can only result in depleting and destroying real value from within our lives, and *their* economy.

Recognize this: If the principles that a theory has based its promises upon are unsound it is and can be of no value to you or your society, and its use will deplete what value you do have.

Don't fail to learn the lessons of intellectual history
Ask yourself this, if you don't start from the position afforded by the high ground of principles rooted in reality through common sense, how long might you otherwise continue listening with an interest that ensnares you in its details, unaware of the faulty intellectual ground that you've begun standing upon, and unsure of where it's leading (you) to? If you don't identify its principles first and check both your position, and the direction you're being led in, you'll soon find yourself having stepped into the Wizards Circle, and its dialectical funhouse mirrors will make it seem like there is no escape for you.

Recognize that the 'Economic Thinker's standard reaction to any mention of principles is to deride, dismiss, and ignore them (bring up 'Free Speech' or 'Property Rights' to see a free demo), which is an expression of the modernist ideas that 'Economic Thinking' evolved from. Their aggressively surface level thinking urges you to resist applying what we might call the 'perpetual motion principle', because principled thinking is an inherent threat to their positions.

TURD's (The Umpires of Reasonable Discourse) spin honeyed falsehoods to ease their popular consumption.

For the 'Economic Thinker', by nature, is less concerned with what might result from his theories, than with how best to utilize your desires towards their ends, and to do so they need for you to follow them down the same path that they travelled, which begins with appealing to your pride with the power to causelessly doubt what is real and true" which Descartes' Method of Doubt urges you to indulge in. The next big step is into the Pragmatic assertion that '*Truth* is whatever works', and from there it's but a short step to the Post-Modernist "Your *Truth* isn't my truth", and 1-2-3 you've been led into an interior world of untethered ideas, where you'll be unable to fully resist whatever the TURD's say is '*true* enough'.

The rationalism that began with Descartes, and developed into Rousseau's latter 'General Will', 'Noble Savage', and 'child centered' education of 'Emile' (which one day Marx, Dewey, and Mussolini would find so useful), made it relatively easy for the skeptic David Hume's radical 'empiricism' to make the claim that only measurable 'empirical facts' are credible, and therefore people should gather up their metaphysical and moral claims, and:

"...Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion..."

What most don't realize, is that the consequence of a person putting Hume's supposedly 'Scientific Empiricism' into practice, is that they'll become demoralized (see previous post), not because they're being 'Scientific', but because they're not - without due regard to what is real and true (metaphysics), what follows from that (causality & logic), and what should be done in regards to that (ethics), Science cannot be meaningfully practiced, it can only be 'empirically' deconstructed.

To *counter* Hume's skepticism, Immanuel Kant declared that "I found it necessary to destroy reason [which of course is the very same faculty he used to formulate the words he used to do so] in order to save religion" [which is a condemnation of both religion and reason], which left his followers defenseless against the ultimate in arbitrary assertions, Kant's claim that reality isn't knowable at all,

"You cannot know the thing as it is" [if true, by what means could either he or you know that?]

, and so Kant claims that the only 'good' that you can do (what 'good' can be Good, without regard to what is real & true?), is to do your duty by obeying the Categorical Imperatives of experts which demand that we:

"...act in accordance with a maxim of ends that it can be a universal law for everyone to have..." [sorry, but within a reality that cannot be known, what could in 'accordance with', and 'universal', possibly mean?]

, whose commands are formulated as *reasonable* rules for behavior in a *reality* where there can be no context for arguing either for or against them - 'Just do it!' Obey!

Those form the basis for legitimizing the thin-as-ice surface appearances, as the *foundation* of modern thinking, and serve as the warp & woof of all of the later Hegelian, Marxist, Pragmatist, and Post-Modern expectations that the TURDs of modern life have spun from them, which keep popular attention efficiently skidding across the surface level of events, too distracted to even think of looking any deeper.

But to begin cracking that ice often requires nothing more than asking a question. For instance, when they advise you that:

"You cannot know what is objectively true!'

, instead of nodding along or looking awkwardly away, ask them how they can know that is 'true'? And if it is *true*, what could that possibly mean?! Raising even trifling questions like that, reveal a glimpse of what their words are so desperate for you to remain unaware of, that their words don't really have any meaning - not even to them - they are only nominal tools for manipulating popular opinion with. Their powers of mystification depend upon your thinking no further than the surface appearances of what they're verbal presenting for you to accept without question.

The health of your society hinges upon your asking what they expect you to fear will sound like 'stupid questions'. Ask them!

As Thomas Sowell observed, there are few ideas that are too ridiculous to be accepted by an Intellectual, so long as they feel it will improve their position.

It is urgent that we realize that what they mean by 'improve their position', is not what you & I would mean by that, as our sense of 'working' that achieves what was planned, isn't the point of their theories, having the power to take action is - say hello to the meaning of "*Truth* is what works", actually means. 'Economic Thinkers' are 'unprincipled on principle', so to speak, and they expect that any position can be 'improved' upon by tossing another arbitrary epicycle onto whatever objections are raised against them:

'You don't like that Idea? Then try this one, argue it against that one, and we'll see something more useful come out of it.'

, that is the nature of the dialectical dance they perform, and to whichever scheme evolves out of that process, they will confidently proclaim that this time they've foreseen everything, and so "This time it will work!"

Explaining to them the fact that an economy cannot be managed from the top down, it can only be destroyed from there, is not a lesson that will teach the TURD & 'Economic Thinker' a new respect for principles, it will only make them more committed to formulating a craftier and more stringent Rule of Rules to get around what you've pointed out is real and true. Their idea of success is injecting the decisions that they've made at a great distance in time and place from those who are actually involved in any exchange (you & I), even though their ignorance of the realities which those actually involved in an exchange (you & I) are concerned with, and the fact that real Value will be depleted from *their* economy, and from our lives, they'll greet that as an opportunity for another turn at the Wizards' dialectical dance.

As Yuri Bezmenov said, the demoralized person will not see (or care) that the exceedingly predictable results of such 'Economic Thinking' as theirs has already been attested to in the wrecked economies and tens of millions of dead across the 20th Century. You can show them in graphic detail what such 'Economic Thinking' as theirs produced in Nazi Germany, the USSR, Red China, Cuba, Venezuela, but they will not be affected by it, it simply does not make sense to them.

The question to ask yourself, as you come to realize the nature of their 'theories', is how much of their self-refuting nonsense that direct people's attention to the shallowest details of surface appearances, do you think that you should continue to read?

Engaging with arbitrary assertions as if they were worthy of consideration, serves to weaken the Common Sense of expert and novice alike, and lowers those defenses that the literary, philosophical, and moral center that the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian tradition provides. Agreeing to 'think it over', rather than rejecting it outright as you should, is how they utilize your pride and less savory desires, to progressively separate your interests from what is real and true, which will quickly enclose you within their ideas of it.

Be aware that it was by being artificially 'reasonable' in thinking their ideas over, that We The People's common sense understanding of the self-evident truths that America was founded upon, became so quickly distanced from popular opinion that the regression from the Political Economy of Classical American Liberalism, into 'Economics', workforce training, and Positivist Law, took little over a half-century to accomplish.

If we want our lives back, an understanding of what is real and true (metaphysics), what follows from that (causality & logic), and what should be done in regards to that (ethics), is what We The People must recover for ourselves.

Back to the real future
To get back to the reality that 'Economic Thinking' separates us from, requires our thinking past the surface image that they present us with as being 'the big picture', and we'd best realize that the dirty little secret of 'Economic Thinking', is that its real currency is the power to oppress, and that their ploys and policies could have no power over us, if we didn't imagine some value in our agreeing to that exchange.

Neither of us should look too innocent at that. How closely do you listen to the promises that the TURD's on your side of the political aisle, are continually making and advising you to support? Do you look for reasons and principles that do or don't support them? Or do you look no further than how it appears on the surface to support what you think of as being for the 'Common Good', and nod up-down or side-to-side accordingly? We are all susceptible to the temptation of blaming 'THEY' and 'THEM' to justify our gaining a benefit for ourselves, especially when 'everyone agrees' it is 'for the Common Good'.

Have 'THEY ever succeeded in riling you up into supporting or opposing the raising or lowering of H1B Visas, Test Scores, boosting Human Capital, 'School Choice', interest rates, capital gains taxes, or the minimum wage? Have you argued for government implementing more or less of any of those?

If so, then I'd be curious what your argument was for the limited government of a constitutional republic, having any role in is something such as how you choose to educate your child? Or how and why should Govt's responsibility to ensure that visitors and immigrants are capable of abiding by our laws, be in any way subordinated to helping some corporations secures specialized Visas to hire some number of aliens that still other corporations will benefit from their hiring? Etc., etc., etc.?! If so, you need to admit that you've agreed to engage in the currency of oppressive power, in exchange for participating in the Rule of Rules to rule over We The People with.

Those who are demoralized are those that can be manipulated by their own ill-considered notions of 'Justice!' that've been reduced to benefits, and our own conceit that we wouldn't do anything wrong, is easily used to involve ourselves in concealing the consequences of our own thinking. Willfully blind to our own faults, we see only that what's being done 'to me', is being done to you by those others - Democrats, Republicans, The Rich, The Poor, Da Joos - which we of course don't have anything to do with, noOooo no, no, no, it's not you, it's all 'THEY'!

It is a confidence game, and you have to 'think' that way for it to work, because as every conman knows: 'You can't cheat an honest man'.

The Cold War dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, saw all too clearly how 'THEY' is used to hide us from ourselves, noting:

"...If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

Our getting past dealing in the currency of oppression, begins with our being able to see if we're engaging in it. Only then will we be able to realize that 'THEIR' utilitarian affordance traps aren't just designed to get their way, but that they are specifically designed to involve We The People in them, so as to sever ourselves from what is real and true.

Those systems of 'Economic Thinking' that we agree to participate in daily, are what ensures that 'We' become an active part of 'THEY', and by involving ourselves in that perspective, 'THEY' know that we will resist cutting off that 'beneficial' part of ourselves with all of our strength, because it appeals to those incentives and sensibilities which we've accepted as part of 'an economy' that we give too little thought to.

When you see that someone's ideas and plans are inviting you to blindly enter into the matrix of their ideas, so as to destroy your ability to think anything other than those ideas, what more do you need to know before dropping those ideas like a hot potato? Take the plank out of your own eye, before worrying about the mote in another's, and look for what is of actual substance. As Solzhenitsyn noted, 'THEY' is a picture that is too easily distorted in our favor, and oh how much easier it would all be if we could just isolate who "THEY" are, and "...remove them from our presence!" (Where would 'THEY' go to? How?).

America was the result of the best of the West, which developed into the Classical American Liberalism of our Founders' era, and the Political Economy that was able to develop from Adam Smith, through Jean Baptiste Say, to Frederic Bastiat. The Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West is what formed the foundation of their understanding, and is what is able to provide the Red Pill that you need to be able to reject modernity's Matrix of Ideas.

Gradually, progressively, over the course of over 150 years, We The People have allowed that foundation to be eroded from our own understanding, which we've duped ourselves into allowing to continue for 'The Common Good!', and We The People have to recognize that the system we're engaging with, has been constructed to appeal to our basest desires, to fulfill the evil fantasy that it is.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance in defense of what is real and true (metaphysics), what follows from that (causality & logic), and what we should do in regards to that (ethics). If we want our lives back, that understanding is the price that We The People must pay.

Transforming the Rule of Law into Rules for Ruling with

Transforming the Rule of Law into Rules for Ruling with

Part 20 of 22, from Exiting the Wizard's Circle of Economics

With three posts remaining in this series on how 'Economic Thinking' has transformed our common sense into a bitter-fruitful chaos of conflicting ideological positions, this post sees many of the consequences of what we've covered in the preceding posts, taking shape through this, the 3rd of three key methods by which 'Economic Thinking' severs our thinking from reality, and uses our cooperation with it to transform the Rule of Law, into a Rule of Rules for our rulers to rule over society with.

Recapping what we mean by the Rule of Law, it begins with that understanding of Law which Aristotle described as being "... law is reason unaffected by desire...", and developing an orderly system of such laws that are capable of upholding justice, first has to begin with the metaphysical understanding that it is possible to know what is real and true, followed by the epistemological acknowledgement that while any party to a dispute, including the state, can be in error, an understanding of what actually occurred is best arrived at through the reasonable consideration of testimony, evidence, and arguments which exclude the arbitrary, and which supports the ethical imperative of pursuing the best understanding of events possible, so as to provide reasonable consequences and redress for any actions that are determined to have taken place.

All three aspects of that - the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical - comprise what Cicero expressed as the law being "...right reason in agreement with nature...", and all are required to be able to derive and implement a clear system of laws which are what first led men away from taking matters into their own hands to exact bloody retribution, and gave rise to the popular expectation that Justice can and should be sought through a court of law (see Aeschylus's The Furies (Eumenides)).

Such a system of justice requires popular support. The fundamental legal truism of Edward Coke that "A man's home is his castle", can only be meaningful when the members of a society commit to serve as the virtual battlements of each other's property, through the Rule of Law. Anything less than that system and the broad understanding of it, will induce both man and society to regress back to the savage's rule of force where 'might makes right' under a tyranny in which no man is or can expect to be free to live in liberty.

Into those fundamentals of the Rule of Law, the Classical American Liberal understanding added the assurance that all who came before the law were to have equal standing before the court in which Lady Justice is blindfolded to any conditions and social status that might encourage favoritism, because their government - the popular sovereignty of We The People - was established for the purpose of upholding and defending the individual rights of all, so that liberty is possible to be enjoyed by all.

It is worth noting that while the pro-regressive 'Woke Right' attack individual rights as being empty claims of 'muh rights!' that are mysteriously discovered with each new grievance - which coincidentally (not) is how the pro-regressive 'Woke Left' approaches fabricating 'new rights' to serve each new grievance - the Classical American Liberal understanding of individual rights holds that they are innumerable (see the 9th & 10th amendments), and that their origins are neither mysterious nor arbitrary, but the self-evident consequence of human nature, which follows from the common sense understanding that men have to use their minds in accordance with what is real and true, in order to take those actions they judge to be best for living lives worth living. They saw that as being the basis for obtaining knowledge, and the basis for developing virtue, as well as the basis for determining what, how, and whether, you worship and give thanks to God; it is the basis for obtaining food, clothing and shelter, it is the basis for developing and maintaining worthwhile relationships, for exchanging your goods & services with others, and for defending all of the above against predators (four legged & two), and all other adverse conditions.

What that understanding also made clear, was that the forcible violation of an individual's judgement in such matters, is the basis for what we identify as being criminal acts. And of course it was still fresh in our Founders' living memory, how the many violations of that understanding were the basis for the drumbeat of "He has..."'s that were submitted against King George III's government, to a candid world, in our Declaration of Independence.

With that understanding at the time of America's founding (what Jefferson called "...the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c...""), We The People understood that the need to take such actions was a self-evident truth of human nature which came from "nature and nature's god", and they understood that it would be fundamentally wrong for those laws which a people governed themselves with, to infringe upon their ability to take those actions that they judged best, and therefore they demanded that our Constitution be amended with a Bill of Rights to identify those most fundamental individual rights that are common to all, and to forbid their government - that understanding of Popular Sovereignty' which animates the first three words of our Constitution: "We The People..." - from infringing upon their individual rights and liberty. The Preamble to the proposed Bill of Rights put that as:

"...The conventions of a number of the states having, at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added; and as extending the ground of public confidence in the government will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution;..."

You don't need to be a scholar to understand our Declaration of Independence, or a constitutional scholar to understand what it is that our Constitution was written and ratified to do, or to have more than familiarity with human nature to grasp why We The People felt it necessary to amend the constitution they had so recently ratified, but that general understanding is what forms a minimum baseline of understanding that a person must have, IMHO, in order to credibly identify yourself as being an American, and anyone - Left, Right, or ambiWokestrous - who minimizes, dismisses, or ridicules that understanding and the need for it, has identified themselves as being both un- and anti-American.

• TLDR: A reasonable attention to what is real and true is necessary for establishing those laws & consequences that make justice and liberty possible for all.
• Warning:A reasonable understanding is fractured by the admission of the arbitrary - what seems to have no more cause than crude desires, pretentions, or spite - which is the common entry point of falsehood & chaos that feeds the urge to power for power's sake.

It was with good reason that John Adams, and most others of our Founders' era, who had a common sense understanding of what one is real and true and how one should conduct themselves in relation to that, repeated maxims such as this one, that cautioned against the arbitrary:

"'Obsta principiis', nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards..."

, which is as true for the individual, as it is for the society they live within.

Thought in action that's conformed to what is real and true and right to do, forms the roots of both individual rights and of private property. It is the basis for establishing those reasonable rules & consequences that justice requires, and which make living in liberty, in society together, possible. When we arbitrarily justify discarding an integrated regard for reality, to get an 'economic benefit' which supposedly serves the 'common good', we not only engage in denying the fundamental requirement of justice, we begin severing our own minds from what is real and true, and begin participating in the spread of injustice by transforming the Rule of Law into a Rule of Rules for Rulers to rule over We The People with.

TURD's (The Umpires of Reasonable Discourse) spin honeyed falsehoods to ease their popular consumption.

To the extent that our TURD's justify using the force of law and regulation to impose their utilitarian ideas upon us for the 'common good' - which is what "The Ends justify the Means" means - your own property, and indeed your own active presence in your own life, has in principle been taken from you. The extent to which that has occurred in your society, is the extent to which your society and those living within it, have been made into tools of 'Economic Thinking', in the hands of those who claim the power to speak for your society. For instance: when you see the likes of Bill Gates and the WEF pushing measures to suppress car emissions & cow farts, which your federal, state, and local governments use their alphabet agencies to cite as cause for adjusting their regulatory controls over your society, at your expense, for 'the common good' - that is the fruit of 'Economic Thinking' in action.

That is a critical problem.

The Common Economic Problem
Karl Marx's 'Economic Interpretation of History' is what has been the most visible means of elevating 'Economics' into having a central position in our lives, and critical to how he justified his thinking, was the single line which he said the whole of his philosophy could be distilled down into: 'the abolition of private property'. Marx believed that it was foolish for earlier philosophers to have only tried to understand the world, when he believed that "... the point, however, is to change it.", and perhaps with Archimedes' statement of "Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world" in mind, Marx set about using 'Economic Thinking' as his lever, along with his Idea that 'Private Property alienates us from ourselves' (a notion that he largely lifted from Rousseau) as his fulcrum, he intended to unleash its dialectical power upon the world, to move it into a global state of revolutionary change.

Phill Magness: Marx is less than zero.

On that account at least, and precious little else, he was proven right. Beware, however, attempting to engage with his 'reasoning' as if he had 'some good ideas', as doing so without having a firm grounding in an understanding of what is real and true, is to take a potentially fatal step into the dialectic which Marx had purposefully designed for mystifying his readers with.

Let me be perfectly clear: Karl Marx had no good ideas. He had ideas that were effective in mystifying people, but none that reflected what was, should, or ever could be, real and true.

And of course Marx's ideas about Property don't just conflict with the Classical American Liberal's common sense understanding that private property is what enables an individual to become more secure and confident in their life and pursuits, it is a full blown attack upon the entire understanding of how our lives and individual rights are morally and legally secured to each of us, through our respecting what each other has property in (see James Madison's essay on "Property").

In an irony that I doubt was lost upon Marx - you'll recall that those who knew him best often cited his passion for repeating the line of the demon Mephistopheles: "Everything that exists deserves to perish!" - when a person believes that there is nothing that we can expect to have property in, including our own life, then the commitment that each person has to each other through their society's institutions of Law, and Justice, and civil customs, will vanish along with their property. The irony here is that the consequence of denying the validity and justice of private property and of property owners, is that all persons and their possessions, are then at one and the same time effectively nationalized into becoming faceless chattel possessed by the state - if you don't have power over what is yours, then it is not your property, and your life is not yours to live - and what could be more alienating than a system such as that?

And then there's the ideology of Fascism, which was developed by Italian socialists under the heavy influence of American Pragmatism (especially from the father of American psychology, William James, as Mussolini said: "Hence the pragmatic strain in Fascism, it’s will to power, its will to live, its attitude toward violence, and its value"), to produce a more 'practical' means of producing the same results of personal alienation by transforming 'property' into mere possessions that were to be authorized by, overseen by, and managed as needed by, the approval of 'expert' govt administrators, who would have ultimate control over who would be permitted to possess what (the alienating of people from their property, creates: "...The resulting sense of powerlessness increased the lure of cynicism and demagoguery...", which is the necessary fuel for those pursuing revolutionary power, whether Marxist/Leninist, Fascist, or via a 'third way'). And though fascism permits a favored few to possess 'things' and collect 'money' as if it were 'theirs' - and even to force others to patronize 'their' products & services - those are surface appearances that continue for only so long as those government administrators continued to permit them - which typically is not for long, as what such a system excels most at producing, is a demand for new scapegoats to blame for the wealth which such transactions produce ever less of. And again, if someone else controls what you possess, then what you possess isn't yours, and neither is your life.

But before you shake your head too quickly at the Marxists & Fascists, it may come as a surprise (sadly) that the very same essentials of 'Economic Thinking' that drove the Marxists & Fascists, is what lies behind the pragmatic regulatory laws that have been practiced by the alphabet bureaucracies of our Administrative State. Those regulatory agencies were *ironically* first implemented here by our first 'Progressive' presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR, so as to provide a 'third way' alternative to the extremes of communism/socialism/marxism, and Fascism, and it is that ideology that has constrained our 'judicial system', for well over a century.

The sad fact is that whether such actions against private property and individual rights are taken in the revolutionary manner that Marx proposed, or in the bombastic 'everything in the state, nothing outside of the state' style of Mussolini, or through the more 'pragmatic' means of progressive regulatory powers & takings used by our Administrative State, they all use the State's power to make decisions in your own life, for you, in everything from how much water you flush your toilet with, to the food you eat, and what your children will be taught to believe for twelve years of their lives within their state approved schools. The distasteful truth is that each of those approaches fully embody an opposition to private property as being central to their ideologies, and enacting them alienates the people from their property, from their individual rights, and from their own lives.

see Phillip K. Howard's classic: "The Death of Common Sense - How Law is Suffocating America"

Whether Private Property is abridged in the name of the 'common good' by way of 'Progressivism', or Leftism (the pro-regressive Left's corruption of Liberalism), or 'Conservativism' (which is too often the pro-regressive Right's corruption of Liberalism), or 'Socialism', or 'Fascism', or 'Communism', is ultimately a matter of making ideological distinctions without any meaningful differences, so as to mask what they all have in common: that they are all variations of 'Economic Thinking', and peeling back the surface layers of these collectivist ideologies reveals that each utilizes The State to permit some - whether few or many - people to have official title to the appearances of property, while The State has the ultimate power to limit and permit what actions those people - few or many - are to be allowed to 'decide' what they can use it for, in an economy - which they understand to mean everything that anyone does within it - that is ultimately to be controlled and managed by the State. In each and every one of their ideologies, it is The State whose laws are not bound to upholding and defending the individual rights and property rights of its people, that has the power to withdraw what had once been recognized as 'property' from the possession of its people - any and all - at the whim of whichever bureaucrat is involved in overseeing it.

What developing the habit of looking beneath the surface positions and their given answers reveals, is that the apparent differences that exist between, are but the shallow and mostly cosmetic differences of clever ideological marketing campaigns. But no matter how cleverly the differing ideologies of 'Economic Thinking' are marketed to you, those ideas can only lead to what is objectively bad and always markedly worse, which is what the history of the 20th Century has attested to in the oceans of blood that have flowed out from a hundred of million+ dead around the world:

That nothing good has, can, or ever will, come from ideas that are derived from an opposition to private property.

What just a little foresight from principled thinking (which recognizes what is, what must follow, and what should be) reveals, is that if 'Economic Thinkers' are ever permitted to fully achieve their central goal of abolishing Private Property, it would force society to regress back 2,500 years into that B.C. era when the ideal of 'justice' was at best that of the Sophist Thrasymachus', who held that 'justice' was nothing more than a tool of power for serving the interests of the stronger. That is the nature of their ideals, which is the reason why I describe them all, no matter whether they purport to be on the Left, or the Right, as being Pro-Regressives.

By the fruits of these very different Founding Fathers, you should know them:

"Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist."
John Adams, 'Discourses on Davila', following his 'A Defense of the Constitutions of the Governments of the United States of America'

"...Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own...."
James Madison, 'Property', 29 Mar. 1792

"Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know.

"This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together; and in those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own."
Ben Franklin, one of his 'Silence Dogood' essays,1772

Fruits: An unprecedented growth in freedom & prosperity

"In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."
Karl Marx, 'Communist Manifesto'

Fruits: Over 100 million dead over just the 20th century alone

I know of no goals of the latter 'Classical Liberals' of the period following the close of our Founders' era, from J.S. Mill, to Comte, and on down to John Maynard Keynes, that did not seek to serve just a set of pro-regressive goals as those, under the banner of 'Economic Thinking'. It was through the treason of The West's philosophers, academics, and not a few of its clerics, who knowingly subverted their institutions to form new 'norms' of Education, Law, and Economics around them, that they advanced those pro-regressive goals through means such as semantic deception and propaganda, to progressively insinuate their altered meanings, into popular understanding, and although few dared to state their meaning openly, let alone attempt to carry them out without the cover of false pretenses, their private letters and writings reveal that their intentions were to undo ( which they say is to *improve*) the real historic progress that had been achieved through the Classical American Liberalism of our Founders.

It's important to remember that despite 'Economics' getting most of the headlines, 'Economic Thinkers' do not work alone or exclusively with financial considerations, they rely heavily upon their key allies in Education and Law, as all three were reformed through their shared roots in the new 'Social Sciences', which stretched out into America as the 'Progressives', and across the United Kingdom as the Fabian Socialists. And though the most far reaching and dramatic changes in Western society were brought about through education - which I'll remind you of in just a moment - the most immediate and practical effects came about through the new theories of Positivist Law, which, like it's American cousins, the Pragmatists, contemptuously disregarded reality and principled reasoning, in favor of whatever its TURD's arbitrarily asserted 'will work' in their place, for the 'Common Good'. Those aims were aided and abetted by the latter 'Classical Liberals', which made it easy for the new 'Economic Thinkers' to utilize the power of government policies as law, while openly contradicting the established practices and wisdom of those Classical American Liberals ("'Obsta principiis', nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud..." held no sway amongst the 'New Economics'), who had preceded them.

The concept of Private Property is not an economic concept, it's a concept of philosophy, law, and human relations. Whether it is respected or violated produces economic consequences, but the the concept itself reaches back in time even to the Bible ( 'Thou shalt not steal', has little meaning without some concept of private property).

'Economics', Law, and Education, work together best by mystifying popular opinion through the Semantic Deception of terms (see especially Post #5 in this series) that people are too familiar with to question (until too late), such as how 'Economic Thinkers' use the concept of 'Good', when speaking of a common or greater 'good'.

Unfortunately, what most people presume 'Good' to mean, then and even now, as the sense of:

"conforming to a high standard of moral virtues; admirable or favorable"

, is, and was, not what the 'Social Sciences' intended towards the individuals within 'their' economy, or even in any meaningful way for the economy itself. Their use of the term 'Good', follows from how it has developed through a long line of thinkers from Descartes to Bentham to Hume, and of course J.S. Mill, who explicitly did not value that sense of what is Good, but seek only what would be of utility to their plans for *their* economy, and that requires that they evade what is meant by the quality of good, by misrepresenting it as some greater quantity of utility (some degree of pleasure, pain, or power), which puts them in fundamental opposition to what is good.

That misrepresentation - Semantic Deception - is how so many of us are lured into thoughtlessly giving our assent to violating (usually by ignoring) the principle of individual rights & property in regards to both ourselves and our fellows (do you actively object to your children's mandatory attendance in public schools? Do you object to the Income Tax in principle, or just hope for a better percentage rate? See what I mean?), under the excuse that we would be serving the greater good of the 'Common Good'.

The lure to us to ignore/violate the principle of private property, is the dialectical two-step of cause & effect, that is at the center of 'Economic Thinking', and it is the key means by which we participate in demoralizing ourselves.

"A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. … he will refuse to believe it… That's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization."

pic.twitter.com/u7GYyDUS93

— Yuri Bezmenov's Ghost (@Ne_pas_couvrir) September 14, 2024

If you're not yet seeing the link between 'Economic Thinking' and our becoming demoralized, you may be mistaking being 'demoralized', for meaning something like feeling 'down in the dumps', but that's not the case, as Demoralized means:

1: to cause to turn aside or away from what is good or true or morally right : to corrupt the morals of

, so that being demoralized means that you are no longer in the habit of thinking about what is real and true as being a moral concern. If you pay close attention, you'll see that the condition of being demoralized is what the utilitarian/pragmatic/progressive/'Economic Thinker's promote as being one of their highest ideals, and it's a mistake to look for how that happens by focusing too closely on economic factors of supply & demand, or laws spun to support them, while forgetting about their 'Social Science's partner in 'progressive education' which is what has taught us their ideal that how we think, and what we think of as being real and true, have little or no connection to each other, and it is that ideal that has been the chief means of teaching us to play an active role in demoralizing ourselves, through our own beliefs, passions, and decisions.

One of the clearest examples of that being their ideal, and that it has been, and still is being taught to us, in this phrase from "Bloom's Taxonomy", which has guided the teaching of our teachers since the 1950s (Note: the inset pic is one I found in 2021 on a school district site in Santa Clara county, CA), that:

"...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong..."

The purpose of that ideal is to dismantle a student's moral capacity and habit of caring about right & wrong - for both the new teachers, and the youths they'll soon be teaching - and to think instead in terms of material costs & benefits - AKA: 'higher order thinking'.

The Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, said that Western society was protected from the lure of Marxism by what he called the West's 'Cultural Hegemony' - the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture and the liberal tradition of self-governance, as was exemplified by the Classical American Liberalism of our Founders' era. They understood that to break that protection, the people had to be demoralized, and coincidentally (not) that ideal from "Bloom's Taxonomy" - which is incorporated into everything from 'self-management' to 'conflict resolution theory', to 'critical thinking' - has been a lesson they're taught to proudly employ in everything they (you) would think and do, in all aspects of life.

We should not forget, not even for a moment, that 'Economic Thinking', implicitly & explicitly, considers an 'economy' to include (and control) everything that happens within *their* economy, and what that means is that the dirty little secret of modernity is that 'Economic Thinking', is totalitarian in nature. As such, whether that is used to transform a western society outright through Marxist or Fascist revolutions, or more slowly by means of either Fabian socialism or 'Progressive' Regulatory Law, to do so without the use of overwhelming military force, they only need the people of that society to break themselves from the western understanding of morality and philosophical realism - 'Western Cultural Hegemony" - that was protecting them. As it turns out, putting 'Economic Thinking' into the thinking that people habitually think with, in economics, law, and education, has proven indispensable to 'peacefully' transforming that society's Rule of Law, into a Rule of Rules, which those in power can then rule over that society with.

How to get a good and moral people to demoralize themselves
A good people won't knowingly do that to themselves, of course, but by injecting 'Economic Thinking' into education, law, and commerce, and by having greased the skids with a false idea of 'Good', that people will progressively sail down the slippery slope of self-corruption, with very little friction.

Education - The people's understanding of education has to be 'reformed' first. In America, the understanding of education that we began with in our Founders' era, was focused upon educating for the wisdom, knowledge, and virtue which their understanding of Classical American Liberalism rested upon. That view is what was reflected in this letter from Samuel Adams to his cousin John Adams, in 1790,

"...a gratefull remembrance of our pious and benevolent Ancestors, who early laid plans of Education; by which means Wisdom, Knowledge, and Virtue have been generally diffused among the body of the people, and they have been enabled to form and establish a civil constitution calculated for the preservation of their rights, and liberties..."

, and our downward slide from that solid moral high ground, began with our willingly 'adding' economic goals of "improving the workforce" to the nature and purpose of what education was for, such as was urged by Noah Webster, who gave us his thoughts on the purpose and faults of that education which had made his era possible:

"...it appears to me that what is now called a liberal Education, disqualifies a man for business. ... An academic Education, which should furnish the youth with some ideas of men and things, and leave time for an apprenticeship..."

, and with the telos of education thus confused, what soon followed from the Adams' appreciation for the wisdom & courage that their liberal education had brought them, was a descent into the popular expectation that kids should "pay attention in school to get good grades and get a good job", and we've progressively fallen from there in barely a century's time, to dispensing the economically driven advice that Woodrow Wilson gave to high school teachers in 1909,

"...We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks..."

, and in the blink of an eye we plummeted down from the heights of our Founders' era, to the full on anti-American educational ideals of Blooms taxonomy, and further down to ESSA, SEL & CRT.

Law - Likewise, injecting 'Economic Thinking' into the purpose of the law, soon turns the telos of the law from its purpose and duty of upholding and defending individual rights as was understood in our Founders' era, to manipulating rights for 'the common good' as first began to be seen here in the SCOTUS case of the Charles River Bridge v. Proprietors of Warren Bridge, by 1837,

"While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and wellbeing of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation."

Soon afterwards, that same judge, then Chief justice Roger B. Taney, authored the Supreme Court's shameful Dred Scott decision that justified slavery 'for the common good' as well, and it was a free fall from there to SCOTUS justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wishing that "every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether", and the growth of regulatory agencies and favorable opinions on eugenics by 1927.

Economy - It might be expected that 'Economic Thinking' would be good for commerce, but with its opposition to Private Property (if you don't control your property, it's not your property and your life is not yours either), it instead has the effect of removing morality and virtue from exchanges, which reduces commerce to seeking after any amoral gain at the cost of everything that is of real value, and set a trajectory towards government getting into bed with corporations in regulatory law, and their corrupting of free markets. As the American people were being hit with the new 'Economic Thinking' from all sides by those they'd looked to for guidance in Education, Law, and Commerce, they were progressively demoralized and distracted into trivialities, and increasingly lost the ability to care about, or even to recognize what is right and wrong, or why it mattered.

Being taught to doubt or even to just ignore whatever value that *the truth* 'might' have for them, leads the demoralized person away from thinking about how to do what is right, and into simply caving in to 'Why don't we just be pragmatic about this?' instead, which enables and encourages the most predatory of ideologues ('they're not 'bad'(!), they're just effective!') to elevate themselves into power by appealing to the growing enviousness of 'the people' ("More of this! and more of that! None of them or those!"), to willingly assent to a Rule of Rules, that'll 'take action!' for the 'Common Good'.

'Economic Thinking' obscures our understanding of what is real and true by means of a pragmatic and utilitarian attack upon the unity of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and it's in that role that 'Economic Thinking' is and always has been, the 'respectable' establishment face of 'Social Justice', which is and always has entailed the actual sacrifice of what the Good is, to what seems useful (AKA: Evil).

To stop ourselves from participating in doing mental, moral, and spiritual damage to ourselves, we need to recognize that the 'Economic Thinker's offers of dialectical 'Change!', are but the surface level changes of an Affordance Trap which ensures that their power to control what matters most to '*their* economy', will be unopposed, and so remain unchanged.

In the end, the best way to resist 'Economic Thinker's efforts to separate us from reality, is to take the time to notice what it is that you're seeing, and to not resist knowing what you see, so as to be able to do what the Cold War dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, advised: 'live not by lies'. If we can realize that 'THEY' rely upon our being too demoralized to recognize what they are doing, then when they're utilizing the three key methods of 'Economic Thinking', we can take the cheese from their Affordance Traps and leave them unsprung, so that when they mention one, we can bat their definitions aside, and reaffirm what it really and truly is, and why they fear it enough to reframe reality through the three key methods of 'Economic Thinking':

1. Value - To those involved in an exchange, Value is what results from their judgement of what is of value to their own interests, which is what the LTV (Labor Theory of Value) seeks to obscure behind calculations of various external material forces, in order to disrupt your metaphysical understanding of what is real and true.
2. Markets - "Say's Law of Markets" describes the reality that in order to exchange anything, something must first be produced, and it is people's judgement (AKA: Markets) which 'Economic Thinking' undermines and attacks through strawman refutations and ridicule, to disrupt those consequences that logically follow from actual causes, to disrupt an Epistemology of causality & logic
3. Law - The Rule of Law enables the individuals in a society to live in liberty together by upholding & defending individual rights and property rights, which 'Economic Thinking' must replace with a Rule of Rules, so as to force people to live by the *expert* decisions of others - disrupting what should follow from our actions, through Ethics & Justice, is priority #1 for the 'Economic Thinker'

It doesn't require any grand demonstrations on your part to do that, it only requires that we, ourselves, simply pay attention to what is real and true, and to stop participating in the lies that surround us.

"... the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, we will be obstinate in this smallest of matters: Let them embrace everything, but not with any help from me..."

Live not by lies. Make the effort to recognize what is (Metaphysics ), how you know it (through an epistemology of Causality and Logic), and so be able to clarify what we should do in response to that (Ethics), to get yourself firmly back on the side of what is real and true, which is what Classical American Liberalism is founded upon.

A Questionably Happy New Year for 2025!

While I still have zero interest in making New Year's Resolutions, I do wonder about those of you who do make New Year's Resolutions, and I wonder if you wonder whether or not your resolution will be one of the 81% - 92 % of New Year's Resolutions that fail?

To help with that, I'll again suggest that you begin the novel notion of getting comfortable with your own thoughts, by, wait for it: Thinking upon things worth thinking about, and beginning with some old questions, newly asked. Not only will these resolutions not tie you to any membership fees if you fail to answer them, if you get in the habit of just asking them, you might also get to the point of being comfortable with the answers they'll lead you to, if you let them.

Start off with some basics:

"...Western Civilization didn't catch on because of its answers... those are still being argued about more than 3,000 years on... but because of its questions, and its method of comparing your answers to reality, and pursuing the questions which those answers lead to. Questions such as:

• What is real and how do we know it?
• What is Good? Why should we care?
• How can we recognize what is not Good?
• What is a Good life?
• What is Happiness?
• Should what is Right and Wrong, guide our actions?
• What is Beauty?...What is Truth?...What is Justice?
• What does it benefit a man to gain the whole world, yet lose his soul?

Ask the right questions, and your listeners [even if that listener is you] will question their own answers, and reality will do the rest...."

Most of all, question what you assume to be true.

There is of course also another very practical, and very important reason, to get comfortable with asking yourself these questions, and for questioning what answers you might first come to, and that is that they are consequential to your life, and to the future of this nation in the year 2025, and for the coming decade of the 20's. The immediate impact of considering such questions is in fact very likely to be far more compelling to our new present, than when I first suggested asking yourself them eight years ago:

"...As the old year slips out and the New Year opens up, it's a particularly good time to ask questions that have to do with what is timeless... lest auld acquaintance with them should be forgot. And while it might not seem so, on the surface, these questions we've been asking most definitely involve issues that are timeless - see if you can see how. For instance: Where do you think you fit in, in today's world, are you Pro-Progress, or Pro-Regress? Are you for the Rule of Law, or the Rule of Rules? Are the 'Big Ideas' of Western Civilization something you think much about, or do you mostly shrug them off and just kinda make a snap judgment on various news stories that happen to flit into your view, now and then... and then forget about 'em? Or are you one of the many of us who don't see the point of considering such questions at all, especially not in the midst of the current events raging around us today - ''I'm not getting sucked into THAT mess!'? I hate to cast a pall upon the coming New Year, but I have a sad suspicion that what most people think doesn't matter, isn't going to matter much longer.

Can anyone really think that the precious snowflakes on our college campuses, or the SJW (Social Justice Warriors) brigades in our streets who are openly advocating to eliminate the Freedom of Speech, or 'unbiased' newscasters talking openly of how those they violently disagree with are 'enemies of the state', can anyone really think that these types are going to be tolerant towards those who say 'Oh, I don't pay attention to that stuff' for much longer? How much longer? And when that vocal 'majority' refuses to allow others the choice to either disagree or evade deciding, what do you suppose is going to be the reaction of those who do disagree with them, and what options will they have to do so?

Will the one side have any option left open to them, but to take the other side at their own words, as being their enemies?

No, the time is coming where all will have to decide, one way or the other, where they stand on these issues, because they are what is driving our current events, and your place within them, and brushing them off cannot remain an option much longer. Each person is going to have to choose what they support, and what they will reject. But for those who haven't been paying attention, those - Left, Right, Libertarian and the target rich Moderate center - who've been coasting along on the strength of their snap judgments on this and that - what are they going to base those decisions upon?..."

Again, don't worry so much about whether the answers that come to your mind are correct, just focus on questioning them. Even questioning just one or two of those questions, is likely to carry you through at least fifteen minutes of time. And at the very least, the results are likely to be less shocking than being left alone with nothing to distract you from them.

And remember, as the 'studies show' showed,

"Try to notice: Right before you reach for the habit you want to break, do you experience an uncomfortable feeling that you are trying to distract yourself from?

You won’t break a habit if you are not comfortable with being uncomfortable...."

Break the habit. Ask a few questions, see where they lead you, one step at a time... and even if it's to Mordor and back again, that'll be a tale worth telling. 

Happy New Year 2025! 

Totalitarian Opposition to individual decisions: Breaking the Say's Law

Totalitarian Opposition to individual decisions: Breaking the Say's Law

Part 19 of 22, from Exiting the Wizard's Circle of Economics

The 2nd of the 'Economic Thinkers' 3-part strategy for separating you from reality, relies upon refuting Jean Baptiste Say's The Law of Markets, or Say's Law.

There's something curious about how 'economic thinkers' like John Maynard Keynes have gone about opposing Say's Law, in that they typically attack it upon points it doesn't make. Not surprisingly that's what my xTwitter's did as well, when I pointed out that the theories they proposed violated Say's Law, they promptly replied that if Say's Law were valid "...there would be no business cycles or depressions...", which is something it neither claims nor implies. It turns out that since Say first introduced his Law of Markets, other economists have either tried and failed to find flaws in it, or they've tried ignoring it (which not even J.S. Mill could manage to do), or they simply went about lying about and mischaracterizing what Say said in formulating his Law of Markets, which is what our buddy Keynes chose to do, in order to strawman it to death.

Henry Hazlitt demolished Keynes' attempt at that, in an excellent chapter that's available online "Keynes vs. Say's Law" , pointing out that:

"...No important economist, to my knowledge, ever made the absurd assumption (of which Keynes by implication accuses the whole classical school) that thanks to Say's Law depressions and unemployment were impossible, and that everything produced would automatically find a ready market at a profitable price...."

, and that,

"...Keynes 'refuted' Say's Law only in a sense in which no important economist ever held it."

What's most curious for the casual reader, is that what Say's Law claims, is a truth which is seemingly so obvious that there seems to be no need for it, in that it provides a simple and clear indicator of the inescapable connection between products, services, value, and reality. But of course that simple truth is what Keynes understood to be most detrimental to those dazzling tools of 'Economic' magic, which he wanted to control 'the economy' (which you shouldn't forget refers to you, to everyone you know, and to all that any of you do) with. And so instead of actually refuting it, he lied.

You might well ask:

"But Van, if Hazlitt refuted Keynes, why does Keynesianism still operate?"

, and the simple answer to that, is because we've allowed it to. Just as we've allowed the Common Sense Realism of our Founders' era to be ignored and become forgotten. We - you - have to bother to notice that what Hazlitt (and Say) showed us, was real and true, and that the Pro-Regressives have denied and ignored that, and that we should either care about that, or accept to be ruled by it.

The fact that so many are tempted to shrug that opportunity off, shows the power of the dialectical spell that they've cast over popular opinion today.

"Come on now Van, that's ridiculous!"

Really? Have you read what Say said? Or what Keynes said about it? Or how Hazlitt exposed his and their duplicity?

Despite the fact that nearly everything that most people routinely complain about with 'the economy' today, traces back to the obfuscations that Keynes made about it then, most people have not bothered to read what those same issues result from. They'd rather complain about the positions that other people take, and those of us who point out the history, facts, and principles that they've missed, are typically met with insults about hiding answers behind 'walls of text', and worse.

Even so, the fact remains that the problems we're experiencing today, are because of the errors and lies of yesterday, which 'We The People' routinely allow to go unchallenged today. If we - you - want to correct them, we have to take notice of them, we have to try to understand what is understandable about them, talk about them, and perhaps most importantly, laugh at them and at those who continue to propose them as 'serious thinking'.

Make no mistake, the 'Economic Thinkers' claims are laughable. Which is a fact that's easily seen for yourself by reading Say, Keynes, Hazlitt, and most of all Bastiat. What else you'll notice by doing so, is that the 'economically minded' prove nothing about either Say's Law or their own claims, instead they only equivocate upon this and that term, while dropping important contexts here and there, to create the impression that Say's Law made a false claim, and then they reach into their top hat and pull out a rabbit which they claim proves it (what was never actually claimed) to be false.

And then confident that they've dazzled & disarmed you with their magician's sleight of mind, they continue on with their fanciful economic theories of the market, which simply don't apply to the real world.

It is perilous to forget that all forms of Pro-Regressive thinking, Left or Right, 'Economic Thinking', included, requires thinking about their ideas as something separate from reality, because thinking objectively about reality anywhere, is a threat to totalitarian thinking everywhere, and the ideology of 'economic thinking' is nothing if not totalitarian in nature (reminder: see Wickard v Filburn for reference).

With that in mind, what Henry Hazlitt says about Say's Law is more important now, than ever before:

"... there is still need and place to assert Say's Law whenever anybody is foolish enough to deny it. It is itself, to repeat, essentially a negative rather than a positive proposition. It is essentially a rejection of a fallacy..."

Say's Law is not a complex theory which other 'schools of economic thought' can argue over or discredit, it's barely even a formal Rule. Say's Law is simply the observation that it production comes first, that "supply constitutes demand", or IOW:

You produce a product or service in order to offer it in exchange for some other product or service that you value more than it.

, meaning that you can have all of the demand you want, you can even designate anything as money you want - gold, paper, bitcoin, clamshells - and have all of that you could ever want, but unless someone actually produces something, nothing will exist to be purchased or traded for.

Is that so terrifying? Well, it is if you're an economic sophist who's seeking to con your way past the constraints of reality, as Keynes and those who followed after him have been. It is always the simple truths that modern philosophy most abhors (hello: What is a woman?).

Ok Van, fine, but so what? What does it matter to me if economists lie?

Good question. And the answer is that what happens when 'economic thinkers' lie about what is real and true, is that you are forced into paying for their lies.

How? Perhaps you've heard of Inflation? Inflation is one of the key consequences of denying and violating "Say's Law", and the reason why Keynes denied it.

This is even and especially true of those who say "I'm not a supporter of Keynes!", as they typically propose something that builds on what he, or other follower's "... intellectual influences..." will transform their listeners into "... the slaves of some defunct economist...." whose dialectical tactics are typically less about admitting or correcting the errors of the renowned wizard, than with carrying the useful parts of the old scheme forward through what the new TURD's bless as being "only reasonable", nudging them further and further away from the terrifying (to them) reality, which both the old and the new lie want so much to not have to face up to.

If 'Economics' is the popular gateway into the dialectical Wizards Circle, and it is, then Say's Law and Political Economy are the keys to escaping from it. Recognizing the reality of causality in 'economics', is only a very short philosophical step away from recognizing how unreasonable it is to not reject all claims that are incompatible with what we can understand to be objectively real and true. And recognizing that is a very real threat to the dazzling political and economic machinery, that the dialectical wizards count upon operating your day-to-day life, from behind their curtain.

However minor it may seem to be at first glance, allowing 'economic thinkers' to get away with denying "Say's Law", is authorizing them to fabricate false realities, and to lie to your face about it.

Torpedoing Say's Law was a key factor in Keynes scheme for gaining power over 'an economy' (AKA: Your life), because it enables 'economic thinkers' to devise buffers of distractions to keep reality at a safe distance from 'their' markets, while at the same time it throws open wide the gates to the power of unlimited totalitarian government. That is the reality that lays behind Lord Keynes' quip:

"...Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist...."