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.
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.
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.
"'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.
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| 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:
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.That nothing good has, can, or ever will, come from ideas that are derived from an opposition to private property.
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.Fruits: An unprecedented growth in freedom & prosperity
"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
"In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."Fruits: Over 100 million dead over just the 20th century alone
Karl Marx, 'Communist Manifesto'
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."
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:
— Yuri Bezmenov's Ghost (@Ne_pas_couvrir) September 14, 2024
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.
"...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.
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.
"...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.
"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.
'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.
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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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'
"... 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.
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