Friday, January 31, 2025

Transforming the Rule of Law into Rules for Ruling with

Transforming the Rule of Law into Rules for Ruling with
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.

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."
    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.

    Wednesday, January 01, 2025

    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! 

    Monday, December 30, 2024

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

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

    Wednesday, December 25, 2024

    The Gift of Christmas to the World

    (With a post from 2011, here's wishing you a very Merry Christmas!)
    What meaning is there to be found in Christmas, even by those who find no meaning in Christmas at all?

    First off, grant that the false alternative of 'Not all Christians are good, therefore Christianity is bad', is in fact a false alternative, one that you should not burden your thoughts further with. Don't look at how Christians often misbehave as badly or worse than non-Christians, or that Christianity has failed to make heaven on earth, look instead at what is here in our lives as a result of the birth which Christmas commemorates.

    Christianity has given us the ability to see that each person, peasant or prince, is as beloved of God as another, and that their choice is such a holy a thing that even God himself does not attempt to prevent it - not even with the choice of whether or not to accept God into their lives - Christianity declared that every man has the ability to accept God into their life - or to reject him - and that such godlike power is given to every man, the power to gainsay the will of All Mighty God - now there's a gift worth giving.

    And every man, Christian or Gentile, has profited from it.

    It has brought us the concept that the mistakes you make are of little value against what you eventually get right and true. Even if everyone of your choices were to reject God and what God wanted for you... your change of heart is enough to restore you to him... as if you who had persisted your whole life in adding two plus two and behaving as if the answer were three, or one, or any number of other numbers - the fact that you might finally see, and admit, that two plus two equals four, wipes your slate clean (note: it doesn't claim that the consequences of your errors will be wiped away, only that you would be accepted as finally whole and true).

    Western Civilization is inextricably a Greco/Roman Judeo/Christian One
    Through Christianity and the philosophy of the Greeks and Romans; the Good, the Beautiful and the True, are not just ideals, but principles of eternal Truths attainable by every person, birthrights, no matter their station in life. With this understanding comes the realization that every man, woman and child has the God given right to pursue them, and that the worldly power of government should be devoted to defending their choices in that pursuit. That is an ideal that would not exist, America would never, could never have been, without Christianity having come into the world first.

    Phenomenal.

    Has this realization made men better? Perhaps not entirely so. But it has made it possible for men to see that they can, and should, be better, and because of that the world is immensely better off than it was before the advent of Christianity.

    Prior to the Judeo-Christian views, the world was ruled by power without rival. Even on those rare occasions where truth and wisdom was sought, and an effort to see the scales of justice balanced was made - Greece and Rome - nowhere did the desire to do good have value in and of itself, so much so that people would expend great amounts of time, effort, blood and treasure in an attempt to improve the lot of others, to bring them not just goods but Goodness, nowhere else did this occur upon the globe (and I do not mean do-gooders, a mirror image, and often a rejection of doing good).

    Charities are something you will look in vain to see in pre or non-Christian cultures, and those few exceptions which you might find some semblance of them, simply prove the rule.

    Even Art - not as decoration or garish depiction, but as an idealization of truth and goodness and a means of mending and lifting the soul - that is not found outside the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian, world view (and no, do not attempt to compare an oriental gong or pipe to Gregorian Chants or Bach, do not attempt to equate a golden Buddha with the Sistine Chapel - do not).

    More than all of that, Christianity has brought with it the idea of 'you must be born again', or 'born from above' to a central position in every life; even to secular views this brought the conviction that your ideals and actions must come from and align with higher principles, rather than settling for greater quantities of measures and pleasures; that Quality is infinitely greater than Quantity. With the idea that God became Man, came the possibility of the idea that man could participate in the divine, and that even though you will never become perfect yourself (itself a monumental realization), you can strive to become more perfect through aligning your ideals with those of God - the meaning of progress itself is meaningless without that.

    And that is Good.

    And through this, there comes the possibility that men can, and should, strive for peace on earth and good will towards all. And whether or not you believe that Jesus was ever even born, let alone the Christ, the idea that he was, has opened the possibility of more meaningful lives for all in this world, than was ever possible before Christ.

    From our house to yours,

    Merry Christmas to all!

    Monday, December 23, 2024

    The Wizarding World's Tools of Economic Magic: 'LTV'/'Value', 'Consolidation'/'Growth', and 'Rules'/'Law'

    The Wizarding World's Tools of Economic Magic: 'LTV'/'Value', 'Consolidation'/'Growth', and 'Rules'/'Law'
    So as we turn to what it is that enables such behavior, and what it is that they feel gives them the authority to behave as their hearts desire, we see that it requires detaching you from reality and subduing you to its economic orders, through the manipulation of three key fixtures:
    1. LTV (Labor Theory of Value),
    2. (refuting) Say's Law,
    3. Law.
    #1 - LTV involves making use of an early and partial error in defining observations, which has subsequently been reinforced across time into an evasive lie, which is what it is. It's not a thing of value, it's a scheme for enslaving the values of others. As you might imagine, my xTwitterers disagree with me on this, and think those who're 'liberty minded', need to do better. Indeed.
    xTwitter'rs tell me:
    "Ambrosius Macrobius @weremight
    Arguing against LTV is a mug's game. Jes' Sayin'. Liberty minded individuals need to do better."


    We can look to LTV's origin as coming from a selective reading of John Locke, which was furthered in some ways by Adam Smith's pioneering effort to identify what Value is in the context of political economy, and from that end of history it was an understandable, if crude effort, but from this end of history, it doesn't stand up to thinking past two or three questions deep. Not that proponents of LTV can't make its calculations 'add up' by throwing one new epicycle after another upon it (notice the magicians wand waving of Inflation! Interest Rates!) - that hasn't changed much from Ptolemy's day to ours - but what it cannot stand up to, is a series of non-economic questions, which is why they aren't raised or acknowledged.

    The real value that LTV has for the field of 'economics' today, is that it enables the dismissal and even disparagement of the individual's right to put thought and effort into producing value, through its claim that Value is ultimately reduceable to a collective muscular effort of "socially necessary labour time", as Karl Marx termed it. Whether or not most supporters of LTV realize it, Marx clearly saw what value LTV would have for his deliberate assaults upon every aspect of the West, and ever since his efforts it has played an essential role in utilizing all of the dazzling machinery of economic indexes & measurements that 'economic thinkers', from the 'Classical Liberal's on down to today, have used in diverting attention away from the void that LTV injects into popular thinking.

    This is something that shouldn't be passed over lightly: Marx & Engles's purpose for advancing communism was always that communists should, in their words:
    '... openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions....'
    The same destructive purpose that drove Marx in writing the Communist Manifesto, was the same malevolent sentiment that drove his poetry, plays, and other writings, and is embodied in his favorite quotation from his favorite play, "Dr. Faust", which everyone who knew Marx brought up when recalling him, where the demon 'Mephistopholes' says:
    "Everything that exists deserves to perish"
    That's not the hallmark of a person who entered into anything for productive purposes. Marx didn't turn from writing the Communist Manifesto, to injecting 'Das Kapital' into 'Economics', in order to explain a theory of value best suited to improving the economy of any nation, but because he saw 'Economics' as the most effective means of bringing utter destruction to the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West.

    Thinking that Marx settled upon LTV (Labor Theory of Value) because it was 'true', and would be beneficial in improving people's understanding of markets... is less foolishly naive, than dangerously negligent.
    The calculative machinations that fill this paper:
    "...The alleged refutation of the labour theory of value was an integral part of the marginalist attack against Classical and Marxist analysis. However, statistical analysis of price-value relationships made possible by the data available since the later 20 th century suggest considerable empirical strength of the labour theory of value..."
    , are dazzling, but they are just that. Machinations. And like Ptolemy, though without his innocence, they're able to make their numbers match with what we see from our position on the surface of the economy, while at the same time concealing those aspects of reality that threaten their views.

    But just as no matter how well Ptolemy's epicycles got his numbers to add up, I'm not going to be buying that either Mars or the Sun are revolving around the Earth, I'm also not going to go along with the pretense that LTV is a legitimate 'economic tool' for monitoring, evaluating, and ultimately justifying the forceful governing of society through.

    I'm not opposed to LTV because I'm concerned that its numbers don't add up - though I'd be surprised if their various epicycles didn't have them adding up impressively well - even if their fellow economists of nominally opposing camps (see here and here) routinely counter them - I dismiss it out of hand as an invalid concept, because of the more important reality which it participates in evading.

    See if you can catch a glimpse of what I'm referring to here, in this explanation from a socialist supporter of LTV (which, BTW, gives a more accurate summary of Marx's positions than most of his economic opponents or supporters do):
    "...Moreover, it is unquestionably the case that Marx’s approach to the subject has made an impact even on mainstream economics itself. For example, his notion of the real price of labour power being the time it takes for an average worker to obtain the money to purchase a given basket of goods is widely seen to be a particularly useful measure of comparative living standards between countries. Similarly, his argument that the real price of commodities (as measured by their labour content) will tend to fall as a result of mechanisation. Progressively replacing living labour does seem to have been borne out by the facts. Technological innovation has indeed brought about a remarkable reduction in the real price of many commodities...."[emphasis mine]
    What I'm drawing your attention to here is less an issue of converting dollars to pesos, than to how the wording reveals a glimpse of what's being concealed.

    The contextual differences in 'comparative living standards' experienced with, "...a given basket of goods is widely seen to be a particularly useful measure of comparative living standards between countries...", are squeezed out consideration. What's not compared - what is left unseen - are such conditions as how a worker is able to work (by choice or forced, freely hired, or unionized), was that 'given basket of goods' filled by the worker's selections at a market that had some say over what they were offering, or were those the only goods supplied to them and so him, which excludes the most important factor of comparing markets out of the equation?

    What that reduces the 'comparison' to, is a purely material measurement of quantities of things 'between countries', which are then calculated for as if they represented only a mere matter of converting dollars to pesos.

    That is the wizardry of economics in action.

    It's up to us to poke at what we can glimpse is being left out of these claims, to question how it is that one country has more valuable "socially necessary labour time", than the other? Why are there any differences in standards? Does the musculature of the people of one country, differ so much from the muscles of those of the country they're being compared to? What guides those muscles, or is it muscle alone that powers 'a result of mechanization', or of 'Technological innovation'? Where do those 'powers' come from?

    I'm not asking those questions to get their answers, but to indicate what they won't acknowledge, or ask, but only explain their way around. Take for instance the LTV practice of FDR's 'workers' programs that paid one set of ditch diggers to dig a trench, and another to then fill it back in, which, after all, was rewarding them for performing a "socially necessary labour time" - the fact that nothing of VALUE was created by that, is ignored, and argued away by various statistically impressive calculations for those ends justifying their means.

    You need not doubt that they do have 'answers' of their own - lots of them - but their answers to such questions typically involve or depend upon the massaging of issues of Supply & Demand, Class warfare and considerations of Oppressor/Oppressed dynamics into their calculations. The sheer quantity of such 'answers' enables them to turn a blind eye to any honest (what is necessary for 'honesty'?) consideration of LTV's nature, until what they'll admit is 'seen', has been transformed into an inert 2D material thing that can be safely manipulated into the economic machinery of 'differences in standards'.

    If you can avoid being diverted into the usual issues of Supply & Demand and class consciousness, and instead poke around a bit deeper into the philosophic nature of the 'economic' front, you'll soon find one or more equivocations such as those involved in LTV.

    A ready example of there being far more than "socially necessary labour time" involved in determining values, is readily at hand in any movie you might choose to watch, decide what you think of it, and then watch the credits roll.

    Those several minutes' worth of credits that we now see scrolling by at the end of any big budget movie, comprise those who were determined to be of value by a decision maker (individual or corporate), to provide products & services that were deemed necessary to get the movie made. What is seen in the credits, are what reflect the producers view of what they'd judged to be worth paying for.
    • What is unseen, though assumed, in the credits, is how each of those credited for their services, had negotiated with the producers for the value of what they would or would not include in their services that were listed in the credits, and clearly an agreement over their value to the production was successfully made.
    • What goes unseen, are those choices and services that were passed over, either by those potential providers who decided that their services were worth more than the producers were offering, or because the movie's producers decided that their services were not valuable enough to the production to be secured.
    All of those factors and values that were negotiated, went into determining the cost (actual, opportunity cost, etc.,) of making that movie you're watching the credits of. But although each of those services gave value to the producer and (presumably) earned a profit for themselves, neither their nor the producer's efforts determine even the monetary value of that movie.

    How the monetary value of a movie is ultimately determined, is by what is or isn't successfully negotiated between movie goers such as yourself - customers - and what the theater box-offices asked for the privilege of viewing it. The results of all of those negotiations added together, go into determining whether that big budget movie is shown to have the monetary value of a blockbuster success, or of a box-office bomb. And of course there are many movies that bombed at the box-office, that many people have spent uncounted hours watching over and over again because, in their judgement, it adds value to their lives - 'It's a wonderful life!' comes to mind, considered a box office failure when released, has steadily grown in value since then to a great number of people worldwide.

    All of that involves 'value' being determined and used in several different contexts - as it should be - and none of those values add up to 'socially necessary labor time'.

    What the 'error'/judo-flip lies in, and relies upon, is you not engaging your judgement, so that LTV can maintain the pretense that 'socially necessary labor time' is the 'heart and soul' of Value.

    Bastiat clarified the issues involved in this, in these two essays from 150 years ago, from 'of Value':
    "...Hitherto the principle of Value has been sought for in one of those circumstances which augment or which diminish it, materiality, durableness, utility, scarcity, labour, difficulty of acquisition, judgment, etc., and hence a false direction has been given to the science from the beginning; for the accident which modifies the phenomenon is not the phenomenon itself. Moreover, each author has constituted himself the sponsor, so to speak, of some special circumstance which he thinks preponderates,—the constant result of generalizing; for all is in all, and there is nothing which we cannot comprehend under a term by means of extending its sense. Thus the principle of value, according to Adam Smith, resides in materiality and durability; according to Jean Baptiste Say, in utility; according to Ricardo, in labour; according to Senior, in rarity; according to Storch, in the judgment we form, etc.

    The consequence has been what might have been expected. These authors have unwittingly injured the authority and dignity of the science by appearing to contradict each other; while in reality each is right, as from his own point of view. Besides, they have involved the first principles of Political Economy in a labyrinth of inextricable difficulties; for the same words, as used by these authors, no longer represent the same ideas; and, moreover, although a circumstance may be proclaimed fundamental, other circumstances stand out too prominently to be neglected, and definitions are thus constantly enlarged..."
    , and 'Exchange':
    "...From this I conclude that value (as we shall afterwards more fully explain) does not reside in these substances themselves, but in the effort which intervenes in order to modify them, and which exchange brings into comparison with other analogous efforts. This is the reason why value is simply the appreciation of services exchanged, whether a material commodity does or does not intervene. As regards the notion of value, it is a matter of perfect indifference whether I render to another a direct service, as, for example, in performing for him a surgical operation, or an indirect service, in preparing for him a curative substance. In this last case the utility is in the substance, but the value is in the service, in the effort, intellectual and muscular, made by one man for the benefit of another. It is by a pure metonymy that we attribute value to the material substance itself, and here, as on many other occasions, metaphor leads science astray..."
    , and as Bastiat concludes later in the same essay:
    "I say, then, Value is the relation of two services exchanged."
    And if I might venture just a step beyond Bastiat's argument, I'll point out that the root of what is exchanged, grows from a person's thoughts being put into action, first in the formation of Property, and then as a value that is created from the mutually agreed upon actions from all parties to their exchange.

    It is thought put into action, that is the determiner of what property you have in the goods or services you produce. What is produced, is produced for the purposes of exchanging it for other goods & services, because in the context of that exchange, you place more value upon what you are exchanging your for - and vice versa for the other party - in order that each might gain what is of greater value to them, and so in the context of that exchange, an objective value is created.

    Pay especial attention to what the defenders of 'Economics' mean by rejecting the 'subjective theory of value' - they mean that your judgment of what is objectively prudent to you, is of no 'objective' (by which they mean an object, a thing, a factoid of empirical data) value, it isn't *real*, and so it needn't be considered or respected in the policies they advocate. That same underlying POV and justification is what's behind their enthusiasm for their curves of 'income distribution' and 'human capital', in that your judgement is dialectically rendered as being of no concern, as only material operations matter to them.

    Fundamentally they are rejecting the value of your judgement, to your life, in their economy.

    'Economic Factors' ranging from minimum wage, to cost of living, interest rates, etc., are used, and revised as needed, to elevate the needs of society as a whole, over the 'anecdotal needs' of any one member of it, and if the smooth running of the 'Greater Good' magic show requires ejecting some members of the audience, well, sorry, but 'Rentier' that you are, that's for the best too.

    As you see that for what it is, you'll soon notice that contrary to the ideological pretentions of the Marxist LTV, value is not some material thing that is being taken from one person, and given to another, through some 'systemic' transferring of materials or money from the oppressed to the oppressor, but is instead, by the very nature of what is actually being engaged in by those engaging in it, value is the benefit that is created by each party voluntarily exchanging something that is of more value to the other party than it is to them, in exchange for what they've judged will be of greater benefit to them and their interests, so that each is better off because of that exchange - that's the growth by which an 'economy' grows! That same growth is what a top-down command economy eliminates the possibility of, and so ensures the failure of socialist/communist systems.

    In a Free Market, Value is ultimately neither a thing nor an effort expended in generating it, but is what results from thought being put into mutually consensual action, and whether that thought in action originates from your own volition, as with the owner of a business that offers a product or service, or as the employee who carries out those thoughts and actions which were initiated by their employer, or as the potential customer's decision to act by purchasing what has been produced, the reality of Value in that exchange, is revealed through their all having agreed in the exchanging of it.

    There are very few things in society that are more magical than the plain reality of this.

    "But Van, what if they didn't get what they bargained for?!" That proves, rather than disproves, the nature of Value - if they misjudged the benefit to them of what they exchanged, the overall value of their property will have been diminished by that error, without a single additional item or effort having been engaged in. But if they truly didn't get what they'd agreed to in that exchange - if they were conned or otherwise defrauded - then a crime has been committed, and, assuming the exchange did occur within a Free Market, they'll have some recourse for that through their judicial system.

    'But Van! Don't you realize that government must step in and save us from market distortions, and stagnation, and inefficiencies...' Oh yes, do tell about the long and glorious history of government interventions that have eliminated market distortions, stagnations, and have generally made our lives more productive and efficient (see the UCLA Economics study of how FDR's 'recovery' extended the Great Depression by 7yrs)!

    xTwitter'rs tell me:

    '...Rentiers distort resource allocation by directing resources towards rent extraction rather than productive uses. This can lead to inefficiencies, stagnation, and increased economoc polarization as resources are misallocated and economic rents accrue to a few rather than being reinvested into the economy...."
    If you look into such claims of 'economics', you'll find impressively lengthy theories and calculations 'proving' their assertions & dire warnings, which we are supposed to accept as justifying their dismissing what we can see in our own lives is real and true. Just ignore the reality that we agree to pay rent for a property, because we agree that the landlord is providing a value to us in that property he's maintained, that we are renting from him, just ignore that we invest in a company because when our judgement of their competence is correct, we receive some monetary value from their having brought more value to their customers.

    'But Van! Don't you realize that rent-seeking behavior leads to underconsumption!', which the economically minded assert justifies overriding our puny individual interests and assessments - and the right to make them - in service to the common/greater good. I have some questions, such as according to who, and by what means, were they able to examine not only the needs, judgment, and interests, of the those individuals involved in renting, and those renting to them, but also those of the entire market? And how will they determine 'the best' decision that should be been made by government for all parties concerned?

    xTwitter'rs tell me:
    "...Ultimately, rent-seeking behavior leads to underconsumption, where insufficient aggregate demand.
    Imo rentiers have to be eliminated through policy so that productive investment, circulation and stability is promoted...."
    [emphasis mine - note it]
    How do they determine the unforeseen consequences that eliminating rentiers' through policies' will have, upon the rest of those involved in 'the economy'? They only want you to consider that which is seen, and to ignore that which is not seen. They want you to dismiss the reality you can clearly see (metaphysics), they want you to ignore what you understand will follow from that (causality & logic), and to disregard what you understand should be done about that (ethics), and to top it all off, they want you to forget Henry Hazlitt's One Lesson and the importance of considering not only the immediate results of the actions they propose, but what will result in the long run. That concern of Hazlitt's was perhaps most honestly addressed by the economic Wizard John Maynard Keynes, in his "The Quantity Theory of Money", as:
    "In the long run we are all dead"
    , and what they want most of all, is for you to dismiss what IS Good, over any period of time, for the 'Common/Greater Good'... which... truthfully amounts to the same thing.

    By what means does anyone attain to such asspoundingly colossal levels of arrogance? Oh yeah... through 'economic thinking'. Never forget that Communism slaughtered 100 million people across the 20th Century for 'The Common/Greater Good', and did so by simply lying - the pen is horrifically mightier than the sword.

    Given the nature of such theories, how are we to assess their actual value (and to who)?

    What is the value of any theory? Is it the impressive mathematical abilities demonstrated in the calculations and scope of projections that are made by it? Is a theory justified by how well it recognizes & describes reality while identifying and conforming to its limitations, so as to observe, understand, and employ valid principles in making factually verifiable and accurate predictions which follow from that theory?

    It's often useful to turn such questions around a bit, and ask ourselves: Why do we abandon a theory? Because it ceases to intrigue us or fails to flatter our current opinions? Or because we come to notice that reality isn't what is guiding, clarifying, or being revealed, by it?

    If you find yourself struggling with that, you should take to heart the example of a decent physicist, who, absent the introduction of a consequential new theory, wouldn't bother with spending another moment of his time on deciphering the elaborate calculations and predictions presented to him in a paper, once he realizes that the plans were for a perpetual motion machine. Once a physicist realizes that those calculations, however impressively elaborate they may be, are made in futile service to what in principle cannot be supported or achieved, then he'll dismiss it out of hand, just like that, tossing it away as utterly meaningless and worth less than the paper it was unfortunately printed upon.

    Once you can avoid focusing on the distracting numbers and dire oppressor/oppressed warnings of doom being waved before you, you begin to see what value LTV has to them, 'economically' speaking. LTV is the wand that the magician's waving before you in grand gestures, which, when combined with his pretty and efficient assistant, and his numerical sleight of hand that makes the rabbit (you) disappear from the hat (economy), you'll see how it enables them to portray Profit, Landlords, Rent, Business Owners, etc., as 'non values', and mere parasitical leaches and thieves - no Labor, no Value = the oppressors of the oppressed! - in a dialectic that has served for nearly two centuries now, as the fertile entry point for envy and evil to spread out into the various ideologies of popular public opinion.

    But there's a side effect from accepting LTV, that's even worse than the theory itself, which was and is an essential component of what Marx most sought to accomplish.

    Most people today are familiar with the relativistic claims that any claim to objective truth is nothing but your subjective preference. But the dialectics of 'Your truth isn't my truth', pale in comparison to the wrongs that are successfully smuggled into popular opinion, by claiming that what truly is a subjective process (all thought originates within a subject - AKA: you - whether or not, and how consistently a person seeks to objectively conform their thoughts to reality, is another matter), is nothing more than a deterministically 'objective' material process, i.e. 'You don't think, you don't choose, your consciousness is but a side effect of genes & chemistry'. Do you hear Hume & Kant in that?

    ...This is what the 'New Economic Thinking' is opposed to.
    What's accomplished there, is that first their philosophical views deny our ability to know reality as it is - deterministic or otherwise - then the materialistic ideas LTV drives forward, effectively eliminate your individual thoughts and concerns from their collective consideration, which becomes the primary means of laundering their most fantastic illusions, into a presentable approximation of reality ("...Janet Yellen said today that the latest GNP & Jobs Creation numbers indicate to the FED that the economy is continuing to improve..."), which ensures that the only 'real' decisions made, will be those that are made under its auspices, top down, from the T.U.R.D.'s of 'Economics', on downhill to you.

    That also ensures that what the Political Economy of Smith, Say, and Bastiat, had exposed as being fallacies, pretenses, and abuses, will be easily ignored by them, and so the confused and chaotic errors which those fallacious actions will continue to flood into the market, diluting, confusing, and worsening all available information, leaving people helpless before the sluggishness of its 'supply chain issues', inflation, and the market's increasing inability to respond to individual interests and needs, in a vicious cycle that can and will only ever make matters worse, while causing people to demand 'action!' to stop the bogeyman from tormenting them - AKA: a totalitarian's wet dream.