'Free Trade!'s Begging the Question of Economic Causes - Economic Politics vs Political Economy pt7

If you wonder why I'm skeptical of 'Libertarians' as defenders of Individual Rights and Liberty, it might help to keep in mind that these are many of the same folks who, 1), equate Individual Rights with 'Economic Rights!', and 2), have been eager to - even now - engage in 'Free Trade!' with the captive peoples of Communist China, while knowing that Communism permits no manner of private property, freedom, or liberty, to the very people that they foolishly expect to be engaging in a meaningful form of 'Free Trade!' with. The nature of 'liberty' which such 'libertarians' speak of, is and can extend no deeper into their convictions than a pragmatic interest in 'what works' to their momentary gain, and as the very 'principles!' which they utilize to promote & justify 'Free Trade!' with Communist China, involve 'Economic Rights!' that could just as easily be used to justify both the mobster fencing stolen goods and the customer bargaining for goods they know to be stolen, IMHO their conception of 'rights!' and 'principles!' are visibly divorced from any substantive understanding of, or regard for, either individual rights or for the rule of law, which are necessary pre-requisites for Liberty. Hence my skepticism.

If you think that your own individual rights and liberty to exercise them, would be any more secure with such Libertarian's than would the rights of those people in China and Hong Kong which they so casually disregard and discard in pursuit of a 'free trade!' buck with Communist China (who is a silent 'partner' in every such transaction) - you really should ask yourself why.

Why do I say such a thing as that? Because they exemplify an approach to life that begins with economic thinking, as does Communist China, who finds it useful to permit some possessions & privileges to some of its people, at the moment, and likewise they too see 'property' as a matter of possessions, and 'markets' as but a means of getting what they want because they want it. Sure, 'Free Trade!'rs may differ with Communist China on how to apply their 'economic principles!', but their 'principles!' have the same roots in that strawman which Marx used to sideline the system of natural liberty & judiciary underlying the Free Market which Adam Smith spoke of, and then rebranded that entire system with the materialistic and near meaningless term for a financial strategy: 'Capitalism'. That same economic thinking was also employed in much the same way by the (socialist) J.S. Mill, as he redefined our Founder's vision of Liberty out of existence in the popular mind, in favor of that thoughtless adolescent urge to 'do what you want without restraint!', by means of a steady assault of works best known today from his popular (and contemptible) essay, 'On Liberty'.

One imagines that they tell themselves that their generous willingness to make a buck at the expense of other people's liberty, will bring those people a more prosperous slavery, which will somehow lead their slaveholders to loosen their chains upon them. They do so by ignoring the fact that nowhere in history, has economic prosperity alone succeeded in transforming political systems and tyrannies, into systems which respected the individual rights (or any semblance of the concept) of their own people, or of any other's, and no amount of begging of questions or forgiveness will produce what it lacks.

The bottom line is that people who lack an understanding of what America resulted from, should not be entrusted to care about your individual rights, any further than they can be counted upon to consider the rights of those who're utterly deprived of all individual rights, for that percentage of profits which qualifies in their mind as being 'a good deal'.

Fundamental to the form of 'Free Trade!' espoused by most libertarians, and especially those of the Murray Rothbard ilk (more on that below), is that 'Free Trade!' trades upon the false notion that business & prosperity are what America was founded upon, implicitly trading away the real causes of those effects, essentially arguing in a classic case of 'Begging the Question', that:

"'Free Trade!' has made America prosperous, because America was founded upon 'Free Trade!'"

, a claim which tells you nothing, as it "assumes the initial point", offering it's conclusion, as proof of that conclusion, while actively ignoring the broader cultural causes - a widespread respect for truth, virtue and knowledge within which individual rights could be served & preserved under a rule of law (which is liberty) - which is what preceded and enabled that America, and its prosperity, to result from. One danger of this approach, is that it leads us to presume that we can expect to continue enjoying those effects, without seriously attending to the essential causes of them.

What most Libertarians, and a great many Conservatives, fail to understand, is that an Economy is what follows from the policies that a nation has, and from why it has them. In the end, political thinking that begins with economic thinking, leads a people to forego what is prudent (the best possible application of principle to reality), for what will work pragmatically, at the moment, for the moment. In seeing our economy as something that can somehow exist apart from the Rule of Law - which is what all of our liberty depends upon for being upheld and defended - we've deluded ourselves into seeing 'economic rights' as being equivalent to, and even somehow separate from, those essential individual rights such as are protected under our Bill of Rights, and that one-eyed thinking has been influencing our elections since long before it oozed out into the open with Bill Clinton's 'It's the economy stupid!'.

Our Founder's familiarity with the long track of recorded history in the development of Western Civilization, led them to the revolutionary idea of putting government in service to the liberty of its citizenry, and from that system for upholding and defending the Individual Rights of all of their citizens, prosperity and economic abundance followed in the first imperfect stirrings of a Free Market. Attempting to support or defend that full system based upon economic analysis - whether Left, Right or Libertarian matters little - is doomed to result in... what we are facing right now.

My position, again, is not one of supporting tariffs as economic measures, and in no way do I dispute the merits of Laissez Faire or the Free Market, nor do I in anyway seek to legitimize either economic protectionism or the equally bogus twin concepts of 'Trade Surpluses' & 'Trade Deficits' (I've gone into the details of Individual Rights, the Rule of Law, Free Market & Economics too often before, to rehash again here, see my post on the differences between 'Free Trade!' & Free Market, from last year), I'm simply pointing out that it's only after the proper context of ethical, political, and legal frameworks are firmly in place, that the preconditions of liberty can be met, so that markets can and will be able to experience and enjoy economic prosperity. Once that context is met, there can be no legitimate and informed doubt as to whether a Free Market - whether within a nation, or between nations - will be the most productive and beneficial conditions that can exist. None - not since being informed by the inquiries and theories of Adam Smith, Jean Baptiste Say, and Frédéric Bastiat, followed by the real world results stretching across the 18th, 19th & 20th centuries, soundly demonstrated the truth of their theories in fact (This article thumbnails the issues well). There is not, and cannot be, any beneficial economic justification for tariffs (which, BTW, is not why Trump's threatened to deploy them). None.

My position instead, is that 'Free Trade!' and the Utilitarian philosophy used to justify it, bargains away the ideas which our Founding Father's formed this nation's ideals & government from, in pursuit of the thin appearances of prosperity that are unsustainable without them. In preceding posts I've illustrated how the dropping of important contexts from your consideration through an abbreviated area of focus, transforms once solid principles, into ideological bullet-points, a distortion which leads otherwise intelligent people to argue that the differences between trading with a Westernized ally, and Communist China, is a difference in name only. If the outrageousness of that doesn't hit you, I'll repeat once again that Marx himself asserted that the entirety of his ideology of Communism could be reduced to a single sentence: 'The elimination of Private Property' - how do you 'trade freely' with those who are permitted no private property? Why would you seek to profit by engaging with a nation that is dedicated to eliminating everyone's property and their ability to earn any profit from it at all? How is that not recognized as the complete betrayal of Liberty that it is? That they dare clothe themselves in the name of 'Libertarian', is either a confession of abysmal ignorance, or duplicitousness. Again, hence my skepticism of their ability to defend (let alone identify) liberty.

Such self delusion is only possible to intelligent people by their doing the business of thinking with flawed, if not broken, or even corrupt 'Principles!', thanks to the bad philosophy, or (supposedly) no philosophy at all, which form the seductive ideologies they utilize in place of a philosophy. The active use of such thinking as that, has butchered the remains of what had been the field of Political Economy, into the questionable sausage now known as modern Economics, with the presumption being that we needn't think about matters of philosophy at all, when it comes to 'ordering society' (and there are few things which the Economically minded love to do more than ordering your society), is surprisingly dangerous. According to their calculations, all we need to do is start with the actions and transactions that men act upon in daily life. For the proponents of oppressive govt power, positions such as these are understandable, but for those who think that their aims will enhance and further the cause of liberty, it is just sad. It was bad enough when one of the best of Libertarian economists, Ludwig von Mises, took 'Human Action' as his starting point, but he at least, for the most part confined his thoughts to the realm of economic transactions. Not so with one of his early followers, Murray Rothbard, who took that already abbreviated thought as being sufficient to replace the entirety of ethics and political philosophy with, a statement that he adorably refers to as being a 'principle' or 'axiom', usually referred to as the Non-Aggression Principle,

"THE LIBERTARIAN CREED rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.”"

I'll leave it to a future post to go into detail on the enormity of what is ignored in that statement, but it's worth making a mental note that he begins his thinking on how man should live - which is a statement of ethics which he makes without having first established or identified any system of Ethics at all (!), and without benefit of any of those more fundamental systems of metaphysics, epistemology, etc, which a system of ethics is necessarily derived from, and which would tell you (warn you!) what their proponents will feel very virtuous in doing to you. This takes Begging the Question to a whole new level, one that must drop the jaws of the carboard sign beggars at freeway exits. Rothbard quickly moves downhill from there, denying that Intellectual Property is a defensible right (a position which is incompatible with our Founder's understanding of Property) - a right which IMHO, is the necessary and indispensable root for the recognition and defense of all of our Individual Rights & Property - which freed him to sketch out the ideal of Anarcho-Capitalism, the notion that we don't need laws or government at all, only ever more elaborate business models. Even von Mises called that idiocy out, as being:

"...A shallow-minded school of social philosophers, the anarchists, chose to ignore the matter by suggesting a stateless organization of mankind. They simply passed over the fact that men are not angels. They were too dull to realize that in the short run an individual or a group of individuals can certainly further their own interests at the expense of their own and all other peoples' long-run interests. A society that is not prepared to thwart the attacks of such asocial and short-sighted aggressors is helpless and at the mercy of its least intelligent and most brutal members… They failed to conceive that no system of social cooperation can remove the dilemma between a man's or a group's interests in the short run and those in the long run.."

All of which is to say, that those who speak and behave as if 'Economic Realities' should be the starting point for all political thought and action, are spouting nonsense. One of Rothbard's popular quotations, is

"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."

Which, as usual, is true... as far as it goes... but in not going far enough while presuming that it does, it's application distorts the larger truth into falsehood. Hopefully I'm not the first to reply to that, in that:

"It's no crime to be ignorant of philosophy, it is, after all, concerned with everything which most people think of as being 'boring'. But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion upon philosophical issues such as Ethics, Law, Individual Rights and the like while remaining ignorant to the fact that economic theories sprang from the depths of philosophy, and not the other way around."

All of that is important to keep in mind when considering the 'Free Trade!''rs positions on international trade, where a large number of their 'thought leaders' believe that there should be no governments at all (though many do bizarrely desire an international body of a WTO), and so, with economic transactions being the starting point for their thinking - that mythical idea of a stateless world is the Utopia they seek.

In a similarly rootless fashion, most of the Truisms that are thrown out by defenders of 'Free Trade!' as if they were 'Principles!' (Liberty, Trade, Say's Law of Markets, Money), are but an uprooted string of words that they arbitrarily designate as 'principles' (rather than generalized truths derived from and validated by contextual experience, they assert in the spirit of Kantian Imperatives, that what they can't imagine as not being so, must be so). They pluck terms from the pioneering figures of Smith, Say, Bastiat, and more, who were formative in developing the understanding of what Political Economy (note the inclusion of both words) was, and use them without regard for the context that they were derived from, effectively castrating them of their actual meaning - a factor which is essential for their being mouthed and applied in the modern enthusiasms of 'Economics' (usefully reduced to only one word).

The real world consequences of this, is that they behave as if the pre-conditions for a Free Market have been met simply by acting on the desire to trade, which they see as justification and permission enough for trading with a nation that is devoted to the elimination of Private Property, along with all of the Individual Rights which are secured by that property, and which can only serve to undermine Liberty, and the Free Market, and Free Trade, and it will do so for all concerned ( and if you're considering casting a vote for the 'Libertarian Party' this November, please, give more consideration to that first).

Liberty In Name Only
Further illustrating (IMHO) the contexts that are being dropped in these issues, my Libertarian friend Duane, replied to my comments on the shortcomings of 'Free Trade!', with a link to a post in which an editor had taken an old Milton Friedman post from the 1980's, on trade issues between America & Japan, and concluded that in order to equalize the difference between that issue with an ally, and our current situation with a cold enemy today, requires only replacing a few random words:

"...I’ve taken the liberty of modifying and updating Friedman’s op-ed slightly by substituting China for Japan in order to reflect the “favorite whipping boy” of today’s protectionists. And I’ve also updated the last paragraph to reflect today’s favored domestic industries being artificially protected from competition with Trump’s tariffs..."

Demonstrating an astounding naivete, this author felt that the most essential and relevant differences to be found between the rival allies of America & Japan interacting within a shared (semi) Free Market, and our dealings with the lethal enemy to any form of a Free Market that Communism by definition is, and always has been, amount to nothing more than differences in name only.

That left me speechless, and I let the thread go cold. But it's been on my mind ever since... and led to this series of posts.

For someone to imagine that the relations between 20th Century Japan & America, or even those of the19th Century France & England in which Bastiat & Cobden first exposed the fallacies of economic protectionism (which were, military rivalries aside, still being conducted between broadly culturally and ethically likeminded nations), to imagine that either of those conflicts could bear any truly meaningful resemblance to the truly insurmountable differences - culturally, ethically, politically, legally, economically - which most definitely do exist and define the current conflicts between Communist China & America, is at best an example of philosophical & political Dunning–Kruger'ism

That doesn't describe Milton Friedman, as although he gave much economic advice to communists and dictators - including Communist China - he did so mostly on what the failings of their systems were, and why, and how, they should aim towards liberalizing (in the good sense of expanding the liberty of their peoples) their society's economies. And as I noted in the previous post, Friedman, page 57 (pg. 49 in the original paperback) of his book "Free to choose"', thought that the notion that market forces could triumph over the forces of a Communist government, were foolishly optimistic, and on top of that, even between trading partners, the root requirement of a Free Market economy requires that, as he wrote in reference to his book "Capitalism and Freedom" (1962), for a New York Times Magazine article in 1970, was:

"...There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."[emphasis mine]

One thing that most definitely cannot be said about Communist China, is that they engage 'in open and free competition without deception or fraud', and those lesser figures who've followed after him have largely lacked that sensibility. Given that and all else that it takes no notice of, this 'updated' post cannot directly answer questions about the 'economic realities' we currently face - too much of reality has been filtered out from the very start - but... by way of noting what it doesn't say, it may still manage to convey something of the dangerously naïve evaluations which Libertarian 'Free Trade!'rs view our 'relationship' with Communist China as being today. Just try to remember to keep in mind what they are not considering in statements such as (Milton, avert your eyes) this:

"...The proponents of protectionism say,

“Free trade is fine in theory but it must be reciprocal. We cannot open our markets to foreign products if foreigners close their markets to us.” China, they argue, to use their favorite whipping boy, “keeps her vast internal market for the private domain of Chinese industry but then pushes her products into the U.S. market and complains when we try to prevent this unfair tactic.”

The argument sounds reasonable. It is, in fact, utter nonsense. Exports are the cost of trade, imports the return from trade, not the other way around...."

The sort of protectionism which Friedman himself was actually rightfully criticizing Japan and America about at the time, were for the most part the foolish policies of both parties, and without merit. But to Trump's credit, as noted previously, that isn't what he's been practicing, and (making allowances for his mercenary use & abuse of soundbite language), what he's been doing has been to use the political threat of tariffs and the like, not as Economic Measures meant to produce economic benefits - which is what actual Protectionism aims at - but as a Political Means of inducing other nations to reduce or drop their tariffs, with Trump's promise to follow in like fashion so long as they 'make a deal' with him, for the purpose of creating at least a somewhat freer market for all, from which economic benefits will follow from - but as effects, not causes.

That is not making an argument that protectionism is a valid economic policy, but only that tariffs can be selectively deployed as an effective political means of bringing about freer economic conditions, and while we'll need to wait for the future to know how successfully they turn out, for the present that's not the point.

Again, Free Trade, conducted within the structures of a Free Market is the best economic policy, but actual Free Trade requires the legal infrastructure of a Free Market to operate within, and a Free Market is the result of a government's political policies which form a strong Rule of Law oriented around the defense of the individual rights and property of that nation's citizens (which is what 'Free Trade!'rs ignore). If you say that economic concerns should take priority over those political and ethical philosophies which are what an economy results from, you do so by undermining both the Free Market and Liberty, in an insane pursuit of a nebulous 'Free Trade!', and to that begging of the question, I say again... no sale.

If, however, in response to the unjustified injection of power into the market, you propose to respond with tariffs as a political means of persuading the other nation to curb their unjustifiably abusive policies, knowing that it will likely incur some damage and risk to your own people (as any confrontation or war necessarily entails), for the wider purpose of ending, or reducing, those unjustified measures, then that is a policy that a justifiable political argument can be made for.

Protectionist policies of the 1980's were the particular point of friction in the original matter that Milton Friedman himself was actually writing about, but to think that those are the defining points of contention between America and China today, is... embarrassingly ignorant, and is an oversight of the magnitude that I'd like to think (perhaps mistakenly) that Milton Friedman himself wouldn't have committed.

When Japan in the 1980's sought to keep 'her vast internal market for the private domain', it harmed only its own people. Japan was unwisely subsidizing its markets at the time (steel for instance), thinking that that was the path to economic success. The proper response then, as now, in similar contexts, should be to engage with them where they may, and let them freely choose the loss of wealth their convictions seem to them to warrant. And as Japan eventually discovered, those policies were unwise, unproductive, and they ultimately economically cost them to such a degree that they have still yet to fully recover from.

But those economic conflicts were conducted between nations that were allied within a shared political context of Western (or at least Westernized) systems.

That is in no way the case in our current situation with Communist China today, and as such we are not pursuing the same 'bankrupt protectionist arguments' that were being pursued between Western allies in the 1980's. To apply Friedman's points which were made with those contexts in mind, to our situation in dealing with a hostile communist nation which is actively committed to our collapse and elimination from the world stage today, reveals the fantasy world of Libertarianism, and their own procrustean commitment to forcing economic thinking into the safe space of their own ideological box.

Taking those arguments out of the context of the 1980's, as this re-writer does, evades and hides what Communist China is doing today with the wealth which the rest of the world has so foolishly allowed them to 'compete' for, and which it has further criminally extracted from their own people. To those ends Communist China is and has been actively pursuing the theft of intellectual property, it blatantly engages in corporate and governmental espionage, their profits from 'free trade!' have enabled the abuse of their own people's lives and rights, have empowered its military encroachment and economic sabotage of those it engages in 'trade' with, and has directed their plunder into markets in competition with American industry, not in a misguided attempt to improve processes and quality so to achieve economic supremacy through actual competition, but for the purposes of achieving military and political supremacy over America and the West. Aims which, if successful, will have dire consequences not only for America, but for the existence of any Free Markets anywhere in the world. To treat that as being nothing more than an 'economic issue', is insanity on the level of lobbying to sell the proverbial hangmen the rope to hang you with.

In the quote above from the faux 'Friedman' post, the author casually repositions the comment that (Communist) 'China' "...pushes her products into the U.S. market...", what do you suppose is meant here by 'pushes'? It's finally a good choice of words, in that it at least implies using force. In Milton's original formulation, it referred to something more like someone pushing you in line outside of a store, to offer you a product for less "Psst! Hey bud, wanna sweet deal on this authentic Rolex watch?", whereas in this reformulation it seeks to avoid acknowledging that it means something more like the action of a thug pushing their way into your store to undersell your clients, at your own counter, with products made from designs stolen from you, and made with money stolen from your own cash register, with the intention of physically pushing your store out of the market and out of business altogether.

Is that latter description of being 'pushed', in any way compatible with trading freely in any market? Ask yourself,

• Would you view such actions as economic actions?
• Would you think such actions were being taken only for monetary gain?
• If you were subjected to such treatment, would you be more likely to attempt resolving that by calling an economics professor, or the police?

To assume that the actions of a state, especially one as lawless as Communist China, whose policies of societal injustice denies and abuses the individual rights of its own people as a matter of course in its pursuit of geo-political dominance, to assume that they are being driven by economic motives alone, rather than by malicious political and geo-political ones, is an assumption which, being that it is naïve beyond belief, should cause us to have more than a few doubts and cautions about those who give them the benefit of the doubt.

The Protectionist Nature of 'Free Trade!'
Should a nation such as ours, ignore the actions of such a nation as Communist China, as it targets some of our citizens, or the industries which some of our citizens are employed in? Should our nation's first concern be with the secondary economic results of it being what it is, or should we instead be concerned with its primary purpose of upholding and defending the Individual Rights and Property of its citizens (which is what shapes and makes its economy possible)?

Oddly enough for 'Free Trade!' libertarians who fancy themselves as being uber-individualists, there's more than a tinge of collectivism in the thinking behind their preferred response of '...unilateral, unrestricted, free trade...'. Take note that in response to the direct criminal actions taken by a foreign power against individual Americans and their businesses, the 'Free Trade!'.rs impulse isn't to defend the property in their rights of those being wronged, but is instead to ignore those wrongs in order to protect the collective national output (GDP).

Note: These supposedly 'liberty' minded folk are not defending the productive rights of another nation's people, but are instead defending actions that have been orchestrated by an abusive foreign power that is targeting productive individuals in another nation, so as to cause real harm to the entire nation (and indeed to the world), by a power that is dedicated to the eradication of the individual rights and property of all peoples.

The call to do nothing in response to such deliberately provocative actions, in the name of 'free trade!', is not a means of promoting the right of individuals to trade in a Free Market, it is itself an exceedingly craven form of protectionism, protecting the flow of money into the collective economy (GDP), at the expense of the rights and property of those individuals who make up that economy. That, my dear Libertarian friends, is collectivism and protectionism, all wrapped up in garish bows of gilded 'Principles!' and 'Free Trade!'. Though no doubt they do so, for the 'greater good'.

In Friedman's "Free to Choose", he had a proposed amendment in it:

"Amendment on Free Trade – The right of individuals to acquire and sell legitimate goods and services on mutually acceptable terms shall not be infringed by Congress or any of the states."

Whatever it was that Milton Friedman originally had in mind as 'legitimate', do you consider such actions by a Communist government, to be offering 'Legitimate goods and services' for trade? IMHO, just as the police take measures to limit and shutdown the 'free trade' in stolen goods in their own cities, so too should our government act in regards to 'deals' proposed by a government such as that of Communist China.

A just Govt must first look to upholding and defending the individual rights and property of its own people, as individuals, and not sacrifice them, or pretend not to notice their being abused by external powers. We do not have a shared judicial system between nation states, there cannot be one at the level of such state actors, but we do have the power to penalize identifiable transgressions against us, and we should at the very least do so by political means such as targeted tariffs (though I'd prefer severing any and all engagement with any and all communist nations), and by very publicly submitting such causes 'to a candid world'.

For any group, let alone one which claims to care about Liberty, to oppose the prudent use of power by a legitimate nation (one that upholds and defends individuals rights and property in their rights) to defend its citizens from the deliberate and criminal targeting of them, or some portion of them by any political power, foreign or domestic, is unconscionable. To advocate for doing nothing in the face of such actions, in order to enjoy a statistical increase of economic wealth for 'all' (excepting of course those who are being targeted by that foreign power(s)), is a false, foolish, and fragrantly corrupt motive, which betrays a tendency towards fiscal collectivism, economic protectionism, and craven acquiescence to appeasement on a massive scale. Such notions can be called 'principled' only by those who've never learned what Principles are.

So long as economic competition is conducted within the range of a just regard to individual rights, then all is well. But when force is inserted into the market on a national scale, it cannot be ignored without making matters worse, economically, and politically. A legitimate nation exists to serve its primary purpose - upholding and defending its people's individual rights & property - and a nation that is great, does not sacrifice its primary purpose, to the pleasures and conveniences of some secondary financial benefits of the passing moment, benefits which can only result in the first place, from that nation effectively carrying out its primary purpose. To advocate doing so is nothing but disgraceful... hence my skepticism towards advocates of 'Free Trade!'.

Virtue Signalling and the viral Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt was a political philosopher in 1930's Germany, was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo, released and fled, eventually, to America, where in 1961 she was reporting for the New Yorker magazine on the Nazi war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann. Eichmann had helped in devising and ordering the enslavement and slaughter of millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and others, yet as the trial progressed, she found herself perplexed. She'd come expecting to witness the unmasking and comeuppance of a monster, but he didn't look like a monster, and he didn't act or speak like a monster, and his defense wasn't that of a zealously demonic Nazi, but only "I was just following orders." The most frightening thing about him, was that he looked and spoke like an everyday average person, and a boring one at that. Eventually Arendt hit on a phrase to describe what she was witnessing, and it rang shockingly true: "the banality of evil'.

Along those lines, what worries me about our world today, is similar to what's struck me as being a central flaw in the last 65 years of our efforts to ensure that something like the rise of Nazism & the Holocaust is 'Never Again!' allowed to happen, and that flaw is that we assume that to battle that form of evil, we need to steel ourselves for physical battle. We publicly occupy ourselves with looking high & low for menacing monsters to expose and do heroic battle with, and so are missing out on the darkest lesson of recent history, which is that the monsters we need to look for, are those that are lurking within the mundane ideas that people unthinkingly populate their everyday thoughts with. Thoughts we tend to think of either as not being worth our time to give much thought to, or more likely, thoughts whose catchphrases we thoughtlessly nod along to as being normal, boring even, and we do so because they provide us with a Politically Comfortable signal for dealing with controversial issues that we really don't want to trouble ourselves over. So we repeat, or nod along with these thoughts, memes and comments, in order to avoid being drawn into the everyday controversies that threaten to disturb our daily distractions. The popular words, slogans & rhythmic phrases, attitudes & postures, slip so easily into our minds and provide us cover by nodding along with them, and we take not a little bit of pleasure in basking in the pretense that they are 'the right thing!' to believe and support, and in echoing them, we get to feel 'admirable' on the cheap.

The problem is, that these posturings are like the facades of old movie sets. There's nothing of what they appear to be, behind them, only poles & wires propping them up for appearances sake. There's no there there - except... in the popularity which we contribute to, and enhance the banality's authority over our approval each time we absentmindedly nod along with them on  subjects we are too bored by to give any real thought to.

Our dictionaries define Banality as:

"the fact or condition of being banal; unoriginality.
"there is an essential banality to the story he tells"
synonyms:
triteness · platitudinousness · vapidity · pedestrianism · conventionality · predictability · staleness · unimaginativeness · lack of originality · lack of inspiration · prosaicness · dullness · ordinariness · corniness
something that is banal.
"the banalities of contemporary celebrity culture""

Another more modern synonym I'd suggest for Banality, would be those predictable, trite repetitions of vapid platitudes that are so lacking in inspiration, yet they unfailingly rally our communal recognition of their 'rightness' and provide pedestrian cover for a stale escape from dealing with issues that we'd rather not think too much about, AKA: Virtue Signaling, and like the actual virus plaguing us at the moment, those who are entirely unaware of the infection they carry, spread it to everyone within range of their mindless signaling.

The really frightening thing about the 'banality of evil', and what it reveals about ourselves and the history of totalitarianism that has claimed 100 million lives over the last century, is how easy it is to get people to cheaply nod their heads in agreement to its phrases, even getting us to contribute a posturing 'Yeah!' when we're amongst a crowd listening to a speaker (and watching each other for signs of ideological purity). And under the cover of being someone who really cares about the banal phrases of: "All lives matter!", "#MeToo!", "A living wage!", "Save the Planet!", "Free Trade!" "Women's rights!", "in liberty!", it is precisely the absence of thought which such phrases promote, that permits real evil to travel amongst and between us, lets it seep into the air, into the airwaves, and into us, and does so with our enthusiastic and Politically Comfortable approval.

A friend, a really nice, kind, helpful guy, is, in his politics, a hard Leftist. He recently sent me and a number of others a video which apparently had gotten his head to nodding, perhaps even with a 'Yeah!', or maybe an 'Ooh! Burn!'. I don't know what he was thinking about it for sure, you see, because he doesn't really remember listening to the video, and when I asked if he agreed with its message, he said "Well if I forwarded it, I must have, but I don't really remember". Almost as if it was too banal to recall.

My friend may not remember much about the video, however from the discussions we've had in the past, I've little doubt that he thought this videogram of 'Virtue Signaling, titled "A message to Republicans", was just the sorta zinger that, like a late-night comedian's punchline, would be sure to put 'The Right' in their place.

This 'Message' comes from a documentary director & TedX speaker, named Matthew Cooke. I'm going to quote the entire message in full in this post, and will try to limit my responses so as to fit between its paragraphs. It's been tough to do. It is packed full of the banality of evil (much of it indistinguishable from what Adolph Eichmann himself endorsed and promoted - the ideas, not the actions - as part of doing his job & following orders), and I've no doubt that my friend suspects nothing of that... but I also have no doubt that his memory is notched with comfortably correct reactions to its predictable posturings, so that he can effortlessly and delightedly peddle and promote its messages & digs, while having to do little more than smile and nod as the keywords skate across a surface whose deeper meanings go untouched and unexplored.

What that amounts to in fact, IMHO, is a kind of moral negligence, of the sort that I pray that no one ever has to answer for in a future courtroom, for future court observers to puzzle over.

Replying to 'A Message...'
Something particularly ironic, is that in every discussion my friend & I have had in the past, where he was willing to discuss a point in enough depth to get into the details, has always ended in revealing a number of flawed assumptions he'd held, and exposed contradictions in his stated beliefs (though as far as I know, without his ever modifying those beliefs). With that in mind, this 'Message's opening lines, are hugely ironic:

A 'Message' that's jam packed with the banality of evil

"This is a message to Republicans. You keep saying 'we want free stuff', and that government can't do anything right. So you need an education."

He seems so earnest, doesn't he? And personally, as Education at root means "To lead out", to free from the chains of falsehood and ignorance, I'm all ears. Unfortunately, after giving his message a thorough listening to, it turns out to be full of fine sounding ideological statements which are '...held for reasons which are not purely epistemic"'... meaning that he supports the positions he supports, because he likes those positions, and not because they are true (see my previous post on 'Ideology'). His words have no roots in reality and truth, signaling that his 'virtues' are little more than decorations for his feelings to emote around. I'll avoid going too deeply into most of this supposed 'education', and will simply try to point towards those roots in reality which his own words leave his message severed from. Of course, as always, if anyone would like to pursue any or all points further, I'll be more than happy to oblige in the comments.

"The microchip, the internet, GPS, Touchscreens, Space Travel - those are a few examples of world changing technology created by our government, or required massive financial support from our government. Now I paid for that with a third of my money in the form of taxes, but I didn't get a return, because all of our tech was just given away to private industries, then it was sold back to us so someone else could profit."

First of all, the govt is not an investment house, and what it purchases in products or services, doesn't in any way become the property of its non-existent investors (AKA: You). When you, or the Govt, hires someone to solve a problem for you, you don't own their service, and you don't own the products they produced in order to solve your problem for you. Second, as the rest of his 'message' will make clear, Matthew is deeply opposed to private for profit businesses, and especially to financiers - so where does he get off with complaining over not receiving the financial and property ownership benefits, which a private investor might expect to receive from risking their investment in a potential product or service? Third, the urge to lay claim to what you have no right to, is fundamentally a tyrannical one, and Matthew is nakedly advocating for brute force being used to punish good deeds.

Finally, his line about the microchip, the internet, GPS, Touchscreens, Space Travel, coming from government, is lifted almost verbatim from an economist (go figure) named Mariana Mazzucato. I'll spare you a deep dive into the details (if you're interested, more detailed rebuttals can be found in: an interview with her here, a commentary on that here & here, and an in-depth analysis here), but there are a couple key points that need to be made. One, the development of those technologies came about as government was pursuing one of its legitimate purposes, defending the nation during the Cold War. The technologies in question were developed by private researchers (in and out of research colleges) which the govt contracted their services from, and to the extent it was controlled by the govt, for instance with the Arpanet, it was made to meet the limited purposes which Govt had asked for, and then promptly stagnated at that level. It was only as those 'products' were declassified, and private industry was permitted to utilize its concepts more freely, that their wider potential began to be realized in additional services and finally in the Internet and World Wide Web that we know and love today, a point which even Mazzucato acknowledges, as she attempts the economic holy grail of having her cake and eating it too. Additionally, the technology and the industry of 'space travel' had also stagnated under the control of NASA, and it was only once President Obama withdrew Govt from that occupation (yay!), that an actual market could be created and the *private sector* was finally able to enter it and attempt to innovate, especially visible with Scaled Composite's winning the XPrize, and even in the less ideal public/private usage of SpaceX & Bigelow Aerospace, etc., that it is finally beginning to take wings.

"That's what free stuff looks like."

No, that's what the benefits and profits that come from recognizing and protecting private property looks like, and none of it is, or was, free. In short, Govt didn't produce those items itself, and in those cases where any 'investment' was provided by it, neither it, nor you, have any claim on those innovations & patents, and to demand it after the fact is pure thuggery. The envious attempt to lay claim to their products, is the same mindset we see in rioters who break into stores during times of unrest to take all of the 'free stuff!' they see sitting there on the store owners shelves. That mindset of "Free Stuff! Take it!" is how socialists, communists, and other criminals think, and that is what criminality looks like.

"Am I supposed to pay money to breathe? Or access water or community or civilization or is that my natural right being born on the planet, because that's what economic rights mean. They mean I have a right to participate in the economy without having to be born into the Trump family or some other social predator's bloodline."

The air you breathe while walking around in this nation or any other, is naturally available to you without any assistance, and so it is free for the taking, and you, having the "inalienable" individual right as a human being to think and act, are free to breathe it in. The air you would need, OTOH, to breathe when diving a hundred feet under water, would have to be compressed into a canister, and fitted out in such a way that you could dive with it on your back, all of which requires the efforts and industry of others to produce and provide, and so, assuming that you respect their "inalienable" individual right as human beings, to think and act, then and only then are they free to produce it for you, and you are free to purchase it from them, should you wish to enjoy scuba diving.

Similarly, the water you drink from a stream out in the wilderness, isn't produced or packaged by others, and so it is free for you to drink (best to pray that a dead animal isn't lying in the water just up stream from you). BTW, should you choose to act and fill your canteen with that free water, by your thought & actions, you've transformed that water from a think of nature, and it becomes your property. The water that you receive filtered, cleaned, put into pipes and transmitted to your faucet, requires the efforts and industry of others, and that water is not free, and should be paid for. For you to demand that their services must be given to you for 'free', is to demand that other people are to be forced to serve you, which, of course, is best described by a word that Democrats have historically been very familiar with: Slavery.

Those, BTW, are not 'economic rights' - there is no such thing as that stolen concept - those are individual rights, which are inherent in the nature of being human. Before there can be a Free Market, and before there can be an Economy worthy of the name, there must first come a widespread respect for each person's right to think and act, and a respect for the property that is subsequently created from that, which is what the Rule of Law is properly meant to serve. When the people formally agree to devise and abide by a fair system of rules, Law, to uphold and defend everyone's rights, while providing a means for reasonably resolving any apparent conflicts & disputes between each other's claims, then "...to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...", that is how a people comes to live in a state of Liberty, a state where men can reasonably expect to deal with their fellows, even in the midst of heated disagreements, by means of known rules of methodical reasoning, rather than by intimidation and brute force. Participating in the formulating of those laws and the administration of them; laws that are dedicated to upholding and preserving the individual rights of every citizen equally before the law, regardless of whether a person is rich or poor, of one color or another, popular or unpopular, in the majority or minority, that is what a Constitutional Representative Republican Government is, and means. How well or poorly such a system as that is put into rational practice, is what an economy results from - and never the other way around. There is no 'economic right' that precedes such a system as that, and there is no 'economic right' that can be added to such a system, without detracting from it, and every effort, whether Socialistic, or Libertarian 'anarcho-capitalist', which denies such a system as that, is promoting a system for the enslavement of its people, by sealing them off from those rights and the means of securing them.

So now I'm going to teach you another word: Democracy.

If you read ahead, you'll discover that Matthew never actually bothers with defining what he means by that word (which would be the first step he'd take, if 'teaching' was of more interest to him than posturing for appearance's sake) - he only brays about the goodies he'd like to see being seized through it - so I suppose it's left to me to teach you what the word 'Democracy' actually means.

Demócracy:
1a: government by the people
especially : rule of the majority

, and as Dr. Johnson's 1755 dictionary noted for our Founder's time, Democracy meant that:

The majority having the whole power of the community, may employ all that power in making laws, and executing those laws; and there the form of the government is a perfect democracy. Locke.

Democracy means the rule of the majority. A Democracy cares nothing for individual rights, or for property, or for what is Right or Wrong, it cares only for pleasing what most excites the passions of the majority, today, which may very well change on the next day. In Thucydides "The Peloponnesian War", which once was a central book in any American's education, the reality of what Democracy actually means was clearly understood through lessons of history on the original Democracy of Athens, where in Imperial Athens (oh, yeah, in case your textbooks left that out, Democracy historically - from its very start - tends towards Imperialism), on one day 'The People!' democratically condemned the male population of the entire city of Mytilene to death, and then on the next day they changed their minds and sent another ship to try and stop them from being slaughtered, which, fortunately, arrived just in time (no lesson learned though, as a few years latter they followed through on that with another city). That's true Democracy in action. What Democracy means in practice, without the additional representative and constitutional restrictions of Constitutional Republican government, true Democracy means authorized violence, theft and murder on the scale of entire populations, and our Founding Fathers thankfully did everything in their power to ensure that we would never become a true Democracy.

Wannabe mobsters, they love saying the government is bad at everything. When the government is ruled by the people, it's called our voice, so it's not bad, and you're not going to silence our voice, and whether it's the oil industry, or the criminal justice system, or the International Monetary Fund, or Facebook or Congress, or the presidency; if any organization becomes oppressive, and unaccountable, that's tyranny, and then when we make them accountable, that's Democracy.

Actually, mobsters do not care much for efficiency, because they thrive in murky, inefficient and unjust conditions; it's only honest people who do. Govt is bad at what it isn't fit to do, just as a screwdriver makes a poor hammer, and of course when using the wrong tool to do a job, the job is done poorly and inefficiently, which is exactly the sort of scenario where mobsters thrive - see Prohibition (that darling of progressivism, whose constitutional amendment was soon after repealed) for reference. To say that those in power have decreed what 'You The Woke' have 'voiced', that makes what was voiced, good? What if what their Democratic voice demanded, was that Socrates should be put to death because his questions annoyed 'You The Woke' (and lacking those protections in our Constitution, they could, and did, and will again if allowed to)... did that 'voice!' of Democracy make his murder 'good'? Even eight year old's see the problem with that, Matthew's an adult, what is wrong with you? Unfortunately the problem is that banality doesn't promote thoughtfulness, it promotes posturing, aka: Virtue Signaling, and in the long run that costs lives.

As just mentioned, when power is wielded by the numbers of the majority alone, and without the restraints of reasoned thought whose judgments are limited under systems of good law, that is bad, and as history has shown over and over, it quickly becomes extremely bad as it gains more power from from the loud chorus of banal voices, and as Matthew's passionate desire to enforce his... sorry 'The People's' will, on any person or industry that 'they' find displeasing, because they displease them - if successful, they would condemn us all to repeat the bloodiest lessons of history from France, Russia, Italy, Germany, Communist China, Cuba, Cambodia, and so on, in all of their miserably gory detail.

BTW, there are a couple words that Matthew's using here, that you'd do well to learn a little more about: "oppressive", "unaccountable", and "tyranny". Should you bother to give actual thought to the words he's cobbled together into this video of Virtue Signaling, you'll find that the word 'oppressive' has no meaning unless you first define what behavior is right and what is wrong, and which also can have no meaning without first defining why someone should be held accountable for their actions and how to fairly do so (AKA: Justice), and that tyranny involves the use of power to satisfy the passions voiced by the ruler or rulers, without regard to the individual rights of others, and without a constitutional system of justice which would make respecting their rights and property, possible. These word salads of his are little more than fascist fodder to lure the unwary and uninformed.

"Republican leadership today, they're against democracy [oh, how I wish that were true], and they're not even trying to hide it. They're only in power because of an undemocratic Electoral College, created by slaveholders. They're only in power because we have an undemocratic institution called the senate, that gives a single resident of Wyoming, as much voting power as 68 people in California, because every state gets two senators. Doesn't matter how many people live in them, and Republicans love that. They love how millions more Americans vote for Democrats, but don't get any representation."

As just noted, these weren't 'undemocratic' bugs in our Constitution, they are its anti-democracy features. And if you've never heard of the debates over the matter (and if, like Matthew, you're a college graduate, it's highly likely that you were never exposed to what is so thoughtlessly being denounced here), the House, the Senate, and the Electoral College, were revolutionary breakthroughs in the development of representative govt. Such statements as Matthew's indicate that he is either ignorant or disdainful of factors such as "The Connecticut Compromise", brilliantly - through lengthy, reasonable discussion and debate focused upon how best to represent the people's interests in local, state and federal government, struck a principled compromise to balance the means of representation between small and large states, in the federal government, which entailed having the House of Representatives be proportionate to each state's population (which satisfied the large states concerns over fairness), while each state was to be equally represented by having two members in the Senate (which reassured the smaller states fears of being oppressed by the larger states). As to the Electoral College, it provides the means for the people of the states to have those the people have directly elected, usually their State Representatives & State Senate (each state decides that for themselves), to select delegates as electors in the Electoral College from their localities, to best represent the interests and sentiments of their districts, and reducing the influence of the federal government or national movements, in the election of the President of the United States. These were hardly the actions that served the interests of tyrants, or represented the values of 'slave holders', but were the actions of free men who were wisely wary of the tactics of demagogues of both 'Democracy' and/or unlimited 'Statist' powers. That this fool's ideological rant is tone deaf to the Electoral College's real purpose and benefits, should in itself be extremely telling.

The fact that this "Message" misrepresents these features, and actually seeks measures which our Founder's wisely feared, displays Matthew's own lack of understanding of the nature and perils of carelessly placing power into the hands of interested men. Go figure. If he wishes to deride our Constitution as being a slave document, there's someone who has far more credibility on the subject than either Matthew or me, someone who once pointedly examined the question of "The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?", and that's the great essayist, and escaped slave, Frederick Douglass. Look into what he had to say, and get back to me on that, umkay?

"They love Free Stuff. Just like the Founding Fathers."

The Founding Fathers loved Liberty, and as they both knew Liberty, and the lack of it, they well understood that liberty wasn't free, and they knew that propositions of 'free things' and 'privileges', were the tyrants preferred means of seducing and depriving a people of their liberty. You, who seek to empower those of your ilk (whether that be the passions of the minority you wish to give dictatorial power over a majority, or to a majority who wishes to impose their desires over those of the minority, should make no difference whatsoever - that is, if Justice was Matthew's goal. But the underlying meaning of his every comment makes it manifestly clear that Justice is not his goal. Power is.

Well guess what: Slavery is over. States are not people, Corporations are not people, concentrated power and wealth, and a master race, and master culture; none of that is Democracy, and your sacred constitution is long overdue for a rewrite. As holy of a document as you've been thinking it is, conditionally of course, because even the Empire-Hungry Colonists would have been disgusted by your handing over everything 'Sir, yes Sir', to the Lords & Ladies of Big Box Stores, Oil, and Money, that Republicans are worshiping today.

Slavery is over (in America) because Americans refused to allow the Democrat Party to not only continue its 'peculiar institution' (an early exercise in Politically Correct phrasing. Some things never change) past the period the Constitution intended for it to cease (see Article 1, Section 9, and/or refer back to Douglass's essay above), but to expand and spread slavery across the nation. Slavery ended, because Americans who understood the concepts behind the words of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, demanded that the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, be fully realized, despite the Democrat's desire to follow the 'voice of Democracy'.

Frederick Douglass on Dred Scott decision

Matthew is correct in saying that States are not people, but he appears to be oblivious to the implications of that. States have powers but not rights (see 9th & 10th Amendments), which is one of many reasons why states do not vote as people do in presidential elections, but only through those features of the Electoral College (see above) which still, thankfully, remain. Corporations, also, are not people, but corporations are made up of people, and oppressing their powers directly oppresses those who work for, and/or hold stock in them - many of whom are union retirement pensioners - is those people's status as employees and shareholders of corporations, supposed to cost them 'their voice' in your Democracy (Answer: Yes, it is)? I'd ask who it is that Matthew envisions himself to be, to presume to 'speak for' the 'acceptable' people's voice, but there's not really a need to, is there, as imagining themselves to be the Experts and Betters, is just the sort of 'Master Race' image that Progressive Democrats have always seen themselves as being.

The Democrat Party, especially under the influence of 'Progressives' (Left & Right), are most responsible for concentrating power into the hands of administrative agency bureaucrats who are entirely unanswerable to the people, and for writing laws which give preference to the wealthy and powerful, over those who cannot afford the expensive lawyers required to navigate their loopholes. And of course, it was the Democrat Party and its Progressive wing, see especially their SCOTUS darling in Oliver Wendell Holmes, who sought to insert eugenics into the nations laws through from the Bench, with the aim of protecting a master race (them), and a master culture (made by their elite experts). One very clear lesson of history that we dare not forget, is that Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebels wrote fan mail to American 'Progressive Democrats', and it was the 'Progressive Democrats' of FDR who rounded up Americans of Japanese descent, and threw them into concentration camps, during WWII. You might want to educate yourself on that matter, Matthew. And of course 'Democracy!' has been their favorite means and justification for every tyrannically abusive step they've ever taken.

If the Constitution needs to be amended, it will be done by We The People and in accordance with the rules We The People established, and not by the hysterical demands of the You The Woke (see Article V for hints on how that works).

I wonder if you've noticed how the #MeToo!, #BLM & #antifa!, are used by You The Woke to impose an identity politics of "'Sir, yes Sir'" submission upon the rest of your fellow Americans who still have some interest in a system of Justice? I also wonder if you are aware of how sensationalist agitation against "Big Box Stores, Oil, and Money" were the chosen notes (against 'Capitalists', Property Rights and Department Stores, among others) to arouse 'the voice of the people!' by Fascists in 1930's Germany? Again, perhaps you ought to educate yourself on that score as well.

The American Dream made us famous, all over the world; we gave people hope, but Republicans love it so much more, now that people have the worst chance at making it there than any other rich nation.

Despite the anti-American measures of the Administrative State, 1st outlined by racist 'Progressive' (D) Woodrow Wilson, 1st implemented under 'Progressive' (R) Teddy Roosevelt, and solidified under 'Progressive' (D) FDR, 'Progressive' (D) LBJ, and expanded under 'Progressive' (R)Nixon and perfected under 'Progressive' (D) BHO (noticing a trend there?), all of which have painfully undermined our individual rights, and made our laws ever more oppressive, America is still high on the list of destinations of people's around the world who wish to escape those states which most closely reflect Matthew's own ideals (Cuba, Venezuela, Communist China, etc), and immigrate to our shores in hopes of living in Liberty, even at great personal effort and expense. Perhaps you should investigate why that is, Matthew?

They prefer The Class System, The Caste System, extreme inequality, and poverty, because keeping other people down - the Communist, the Mexican, the Scary Pronoun, whatever word they want to give them, it makes them feel superior, like the old days, scared and demonizing whatever's out in the woods outside of the colony. Doesn't matter that their lives aren't much better, they're living through the achievements of their gods, icons of money, power, cruelty, and dripping arrogance, and that's why they love a fabric flag, more than the human flesh and blood that live and die under it: Because they're idol worshipers. And that is exactly what Jesus, and muhammad(pbuh), and Moses, told you not to do.

Reminding you once again, that the 'Class System' and the 'Caste System' were goals of the Democrat Party prior to the Civil War, and as the Jim Crow laws evidenced long after the Civil War, I'm reasonably sure that you cannot point to one major admission of, or change of 'principles', by the Democrat Party, the Progressives, or any of the Marxist variants that Matthew favors, which have substantively disavowed the power based beliefs which those systems are derived from and depend upon. And what is the Left's attacks upon conservatives (particularly, as befitting racists & bigots, against Whites, Christians & Conservatives), and even nuclear families, but an effort to empower a new caste system of 'the right kind of people', while forcibly imposing upon 'the wrong sort', via 'Democracy'?. The only disagreement which Matthew Cooke has with them, is who will be in power, over others. That some should have oppressive and tyrannical power to enforce their wishes, has nowhere been disavowed in any meaningful way by any of them, on the contrary, the various strains of Leftist 'intellectuals', from Derida, to Alinsky, to AOC, have consistently declared that individual rights are myths & fancies, and that all that matters is power for those classes & castes that Leftist's declare to be 'The People!' (who matter) and so are 'more equal' than others, for wanting what their 'leaders' say they should.

As to Matthew's fear of pronouns, 'Communist', should be understood to be not only a 'scary pronoun', but a clear and present danger of epically murderous dimensions, being responsible for the 100 million deaths across the 20th Century. The mouthing of its tenets and propaganda is, and should be considered, shameful. Being a Mexican, or any other nationality, is unworthy of being used, as Matthew does, to try and divide us, and his attempt to use it as if being of any nationality, should give anyone, preference or power over our laws that are to be applied equally to all, is disgusting. The fact that he does so, with such self-felating, no cost, virtue signaling rhetoric, and with such arrogant proclamations as he does, without a (any) 'decent respect to the opinions of mankind', bares the empty and vile nature of his beliefs.

As to examples of "living through the achievements of their gods, icons of money, power, cruelty, and dripping arrogance", I'd direct everyone's attention to Matthew's own profession's many and unending self congratulatory awards shows, their conspicuous displays of wealth, and their willing toleration for the raw desire for unlimited power over others, their cruelty towards any who dare to disagree, and the arrogance of such blanket statements.

BTW, while it may be difficult for someone of such a hidebound materialist mindset to grasp the importance and significance of symbols to invoke and convey the power of intellectual concepts, the importance of the American Flag is not lost upon those who do. Matthew's remarks display his own conceptual nakedness. The importance of such symbols were also not lost upon Jesus (see his own use of parables and his followers's use of the Cross), or of Moses (see the Torah & Ten Commandments), and the inability to distinguish between meaningful symbolism, and idol worship, once more shows Matthew's own leanings towards idolatry.

How dare you invoke the name of the Almighty and his messengers against the weak, the meek and the poor. The prophets led movements of the persecuted before they were overtaken by the persecutors who allied themselves with totalitarians like you're doing now, with modern day Saudi Arabia, and Israel under Netanyahu, and this radical Christian cult, all for a dirty oil empire, that is soaked in the blood of men and women and children and all the creatures of the earth

You who seek to empower the mob of democracy, over what is the first instance in human history of Liberty being secured, under a republican form of government, in order to hold the rights of each individual as being its primary purpose for existing, you dare say 'how dare you!'?! Irony abounds. Every murderous totalitarian of the 20th Century, from Mussolini, to Hitler, to Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, etc., they ALL espoused Matthew's beliefs, and they did so in order to stir the mob of 'Democracy!' into action, and then to enslave them with it. And this 'Message' is what he is Virtue Signaling out into the internet, as if the 20th Century's rivers of blood had not been shed for these same hollow shams. Shameful. That he derides a 'radical Christian cult' (without which the concept of 'individual rights' would not exist), while mouthing 'muhammad(pbuh)' untempered by any reference to the plagues of murderous islamists who terrorize people in the world here & now today, is once again, showing his own blind ideological nakedness and negligent disregard for reality, reason and truth.

And as to equating a tyranny like Saudi Arabia, with the nation of Israel, which provides the most liberty available in the entire region of the Middle East, is a breathtaking exercise in thoughtlessness and irresponsibility. And that Matthew does so, while espousing those very ideals that fascists & socialists & communists have used again, and again, and again, in order to enslave their own peoples under totalitarian dictatorships, displays his own unwillingness and inability to think through the meaning of the words that he's wrapping himself so tightly up in - the banality of evil, incarnate.

Now when Republican leaders say they love freedom, they love the freedom of unchecked domination, and they're followers, they love the freedom to live out some paranoid revenge-fantasy, of needing a firearm in case their superiority gets challenged in a WalMart or on some street in Portland.

This coming from the likes of those who endorse 'free speech is violence', 'punch a nazi!', '#MeToo!', whose rhetoric has stirred Berni Bro's to attempt to assassinate a park full of Republicans practicing for a baseball game, and attempted firebombing of an ICE facility on the streets of Tacoma, WA. Does no one possess mirrors to see themselves in? Are you so blinded by your own Virtue Signaling, that you cannot see the contradictory emptiness of your own words? And you seriously expect the rest of us to leave ourselves defenseless before you?! Stunning.

If you're wondering what set me off, I just saw how the Right-Wing PR Machine is uplifting war criminal soldiers that the Navy condemned, and their Dear Leader pardoned, and I guess some people on the Right want these savages to campaign with their master as heroes, and they think a Navy Seal calling out War Crimes, is somehow Political Correctness. Well my Grandfather would disagree with you.

Yes, when Political Correctness is used to condemn military members acting in a time of war, as war criminals, exposing and overturning such judgments, is carrying out justice, and that should be done publicly, and the politically correct ideology which drove that injustice, should be publicly called out and condemned, again, and again, and again.

This Republican Goon Squad worships the government when it gives them illegitimate authority over the people, then they march in their lock-step, drunk with their abuse of power.

Again, you who are seeking to overturn the Rule of Law, demanding to impose the will of the mob upon the rest of us, because you want it, is the very image of illegitimate authority being chased in pursuit of power over your fellows.

No. You can't have our Democracy. You can't make it a Great Republic for Slaveholders and Wage Slavery. Not again, not now, not ever. We beat you, and your masters, in the Civil War; we beat you on the beaches of Normandy; we beat you in Birmingham, and we're going to beat you again, because the truth wins. And you can stand by while all our communications networks get drowned with some Russian psychological warfare, you can redraw all our maps, you can keep suppressing the voting rights of our Black, Brown, and First Nation brothers and sisters, and go ahead, keep using the old slave laws to False-Multiply your votes; keep tricking all your scared, angry, ignorant old White People into supplication before your Orange-Golden Calf, but we're going to beat you, we're going to replace you, and we're going to change the culture - if not this election, then out in the streets, because you cannot have this land, you cannot have this country, it was never yours in the first place.

No, you do not have, and cannot have, a Democracy. Not here, not now, not ever. Because America is a great Republic, she was able to overthrow your like minded Democrat forebears who were the slaveholders who refused to allow their 'peculiar institution' of slavery to die. The Right, led by the Republican Party, whatever its current ills may be, was founded for the purpose of ending slavery, and The Right beat you and your slave masters in the Civil War, and it was that same Jim Crow Democrat Party that The Right defeated in Birmingham, and 'we' are going to beat you again, because you stand against and in opposition to what is true and just. Your Democrat Party apparatchiks attempted a legislative coup through 'Russian Collusion' impeachment, you and your ilk have tarred the names of good men, from Clarence Thomas to Brett Kavanaugh, to schoolboys wearing the 'wrong' hats, and you have called them racists, rapists and fascists, and have actually demanded that rules of evidence be cast aside to declare them guilty without trial, for no other reason than the fact that they disagree with your pro-regressive ideology.

You, Matthew, by your own unreasonable words and actions, show yourselves to be the modern day fascists - those who urge violence to suppress dissent and force compliance with an ideology - and despite your filthy marxist propaganda for actual slavery, we are defeating you, because as purveyors of lies and hatred, you are in substance, nothing, nihil, you and your ideals are less than chaff in the wind, and the winds of history is going to blow you into the nothingness that your banal Virtue Signaling truly is. You deserve to be forgotten by posterity, except as a cautionary tale to be told so that your ideas will prevail, never again.

Two Liberties and the Futility of Utility - Economic Politics vs Political Economy pt3

To hear the proponents of 'Free Trade!' tell it, America's national policy should be guided by economic interests, and government should never interfere with international trade. Odd then, that the power to "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations" is one of the enumerated powers in the constitution, while 'Free Trade!' isn't even mentioned - and not just because the 19th century term 'Economics' wasn't yet a thing (though Adam Smith assuredly was). The then well known issues which Economics now claims to speak for, and which 'Free Trade!''rs claim the sole right to speak for, weren't even hinted at in the Preamble of our Constitution, because other concerns were understood to take precedence in its 'mission statement':

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

To be sure, a robust and prosperous economy was expected to follow from securing the 'Blessings of Liberty', and it did follow, once a Rule of Law had been established to govern upon the framework of our constitution, but that followed as an effect of our form of government and not as either a cause of it, or as a purpose for it.

"... liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty,
as well as by the abuses of power..."
James Madison, Federalist, no. 63

Am I trying to make a case for Govt intervention into business? Absolutely not. The case that I am trying to make, is that a sound Rule of Law is a necessary precondition for liberty and that is the government's primary concern, and from which secondary issues such as a Free Market can and will then follow upon and within that system, because those primary issues were attended to first. Once a government has established the framework for liberty, which includes providing adjudication of contracts and legal consequences for negligence, fraud, injury to persons & property, then that Govt has no further business involving itself in the operations of businesses within that or compatible external frameworks - but neither do businesses, or those 'economic experts' who claim to speak for them, have any business dictating how such secondary concerns should govern how government ought to handle its primary concerns.

The tendency to promote economic matters as a primary driver of national policy (whether that be pro 'Free Trade!' or pro 'Regulatory State' matters little, both are flip sides of the same counterfeit coin), is to adopt, at best, a Utilitarian view of the purpose of a nation's govt (and of its people), a view which is very much contrary to the understanding that our nation was derived from and founded upon. You'll often see this sentiment cheerfully expressed by Libertarians and Conservatives alike, through misleading lines such as this:

"There cannot be political freedom without economic freedom. This argument is not controversial, even on the left"

Each time I hear such statements, I want to grab someone by the lapels and ask: Why in the world would such a statement be controversial on the Left? If taken seriously, or simply accepted on the face of it, it induces you to put the effect (Economics) before its cause (Political Philosophy), in reverse of the requirements of liberty - hello, guess what Karl Marx himself proposed? In making or going along with such statements as that, you've agreed to play their game by their rules, at which point which 'team' you play for in their league is really of very little consequence or controversy for the Pro-Regressives of the Left (or Right). There are no 'economic rights' that aren't but features of the Individual Rights which give rise to them. To produce or purchase or contract to do either, are but a sliver of the actions which derive from the individual right to speak, associate and act, as well as the right to property which serves to anchor them into the laws of that society. To disregard that and fixate upon such abbreviated 'economic rights', severs them from their roots and props up a fragile and superficial facade in their place, which are then easily buffeted about by the winds of policies and popularity, while the roots that gave rise to them wither and become forgotten. Why in the world would that be controversial on the 'Left' - is that not their constant aim and pursuit?!

Secondary economic issues should not be advanced as if they were the highest priority, and especially not in our relations with foreign governments such as Communist China, which engage in widespread fraud & theft in their dealings with us, not to mention subjecting their own people to the rampant and oppressive denial and abuse of individual rights, enslavement and murder. Such issues are and should be the primary concerns of our government and its policies should be driven by them, while secondary concerns such as trade should come in at a distant second place. To prattle on about unrestricted and even unilateral 'Free Trade!' with such nations as Communist China, to demand the 'liberty' to aid & abet and enrich such nations as that in order to 'make a buck', displays such an appallingly disordered set of priorities that it is necessary to ask: What is it that they mean by 'Liberty'?

Taking liberties with Liberty
When people proclaim that they are 'for Liberty!', it is important to ask them what it is that they mean by that word. Case in point, you've probably heard of the book that is much admired by Libertarians and many Conservatives alike, "On Liberty", written in 1859 by John Stuart Mill - have you read it? If not, you should, if only to discover that there are a great many reasons to not be a fan of either the