Dazzling us with what's partly seen while abandoning the full reality of what's left unseen

Dazzling us with what's partly seen while abandoning the full reality of what's left unseen

Part 9 of 22, from Exiting the Wizard's Circle of Economics

Wait... what?! Replaced reality? Ok, I realize that may sound a wee bit extravagant, but humor me for a moment, after all, haven't we already seen an example of this occurring with how the popular understanding of the 'Common Good' has developed? The first thing we need to realize, is that in order to make what people mentally understand to be real and true, seem to disappear, is, as every magician knows, a fairly simple trick. And that while performing that trick may require the magician to use some physical aids, such as smoke and mirrors, and an attractive assistant, the most important part, the part where the real heavy lifting occurs to make even something as large as the Statue of Liberty seem to disappear before the eyes of his dazzled audience, is what takes place upon that stage between the audiences ears, through the willing assistance they give to the magician's theatrical distractions and mis-directions.

What we need to do to catch them in the act of pulling the joker from their sleeve, is to calmly work our way down through their stated positions, and the implications of them, into the results that they count on slipping past you unseen. Recognizing their reasons for them, and consequences of them, is what must be seen and understood by us, before we can understand what it is that's being passed off to us as 'economic thinking', so that we can get back to the reality they've made disappear from our awareness.

The most visible part of their stagecraft comes from the wand waving of the magician, that's Semantic Deception, and you need only look to terms such as 'racist', 'peaceful protest', 'woman' 'gender', and others recent verbal victims, to see how effective this pro-regressive magic trick has been upon those who don't pay attention to what's been done with the words we recognize by sound, but miss the new meanings that's being slipped into our minds unquestioned and unseen.

The physical 'smoke & mirrors' portion of the trick involves the 'rigorous' use of physical textbooks, tests, diplomas ("you sir, would you verify for the audience that this is just a hat"), and sets the stage of what's visible to the eye, and the performance begins as the flourishing movements and sleight of hand, together with the attractive assistant's attention getting outfits (from climate change to sex, greed, murder, Russian disinformation, and News at 11), enables their semantic deceptions to transfer the latest narrative into unquestionable beliefs, that gradually, progressively, become the popular assumptions of their evolving cultural baseline.

For 'reality' to be made to disappear, requires only taking those words we use for considering what is real and true, and utilizing the active participation of our schools and media to redirect our attention away from what those words used to refer to, into a new use and meaning, and in no time flat: viola`!, while the spelling of the words themselves remain the same, We The People's default ability to access the reality which those words had originally referred to - Liberty, Happiness, Property - has disappeared from popular understanding - it's been 'unburdened by what has been'.

With that in mind, I want to refer you to an essay of Frederic Bastiat's that was the inspiration for Henry Hazlitt's book "Economics in One Lesson", called "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen", and I encourage you to try and take notice of both what is unavoidably seen when discussing the 'economic' headlines of the day, and what is pointedly not seen in most discussions of them.

What is seen and cannot be missed, is of course the endless details that are hurled into our attention in tedious debates over whether this or that policy, ranging from Minimum Wage laws, to Tax Cuts, to Controlling Inflation, will cause this or that 'economic indicator' to rise or fall by a whole or fraction of a percentage point, and how that may or may not cause still other indicators of GDP, CPI, etc., to rise or fall. Those indicators will prompt discussions & debates over whether 'the FED should raise the discount rate', or to impose or repeal a ' Capital Gains rate hike', and heated discussions over still more economic policies and whether or not 'they' 'should increase monetary supply', etc., and eventually, those in government will follow which advice suits them best and take action to implement some or all of the recommended 'economic policies'.

Did you catch the sleight of hand being performed just beneath the surface of all such policy debates? Here's a few questions to help reveal the trick:

• Q: Are these policies clear & unambiguous to policy makers & the public? A: No, few things are more murky than 'economic' language.
• Q: Will people's jobs & lives be affected by these 'Economic Policies'? A: Yes, some for better, some for worse.
• Q: Do you have a choice in whether these 'Economic Policies' will affect your life? A: No, 'they' will choose what's 'better' for the greater good.

Those questions will tease out some of the more obvious points which are usually not seen in these discussions, though surely they'd come as no surprise to anyone, in that they justify these broad and far reaching (into your life) policies on the basis that they'll be 'good for the economy' (probably - depending upon which economist is listened to, and which type of response is wanted from the popular audience).

Less obviously, but no more surprising, is the fact that all such 'economic policies' enacted by government are imposed upon us through the force of law, and you & I would be punished and/or imprisoned for ignoring or violating them.

Now did you notice the card being slipped up the sleeve?

What mostly goes unseen, is that this means that our Rule of Law has been made to serve the interests of 'the economy', before the interests of those living within the economy.

Aristotle, Politics, Book III "...for desire is a wild beast, and passion perverts the minds of rulers, even when they are the best of men. The law is reason unaffected by desire."

Cicero, Republic:
"True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions"

When they perform this trick right, we find that the most prominent concerns that people had in our Founders' era - Liberty, Justice, Individual Rights/Property Rights - go unseen in the debates that fill the news, and that's because that entire reality has been made to disappear from public awareness.

And the Pro-Regressive magicians take a bow.

Also unseen and pointedly unconsidered, is what principle of Law is compatible with the government of We The People, showing such favoritism to some, while at the same time penalizing others, not as a rightful response to unlawful actions of some individuals, but towards those 'singled out' by their collective employment and financial status & standing. What remains unseen, is what standard of law supports such actions - the traditional standards that Thomas Jefferson found "...in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c..." to justify the Declaration of Independence, are incompatible with whatever these new standards of law that 'economic thinkers' have in mind are - so what standard is it that is now being used to determine whether our laws are to be viewed as being either good laws, or bad laws?

Also kept unseen is what 'Justice' must be twisted into meaning, so as to turn the force of law upon society, on the basis of calculated probabilities, rather than as 'just deserts' for individual actions.

What should be seen, is that this means that the very ideal of 'Justice' not only cannot involve impartiality, it must direct an expressed partiality towards those favored by those in power, and - 'Poof!' - Lady Justice's blindfold and our Founders' ideal of Justice for all, are made to disappear.

Justice wanders from Progress to Regress:
Thrasymachus: "Justice is what benefits the powerful"
Aristotle: "equality by merit"
Deuteronomy 1:17: "Do not show partiality in judging; hear both small and great alike."
Leviticus 19:15 "Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly."
Cicero: "justice renders to everyone his due", "hear the other side"
John 7:24 "Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.”
Economics: "We must act in the best interests of the economy."

What very obviously is there to be seen by those who're willing to look, is that 'economic thinkers' justify these alterations, both seen and unseen, so as to impose them upon us all for the 'common good'.

What else goes mostly unseen when engaging with the 'economically minded' over any of these questions of the economic 'common good', is that their justifications for the extensive intrusions of governmental and extra-governmental forces as being necessary for enforcing 'economic' policies into our lives (hi there FED), is that this not only stealthily presupposes extensive revisions to have already been made to our fundamental concepts of Justice and Law, but to our metaphysical, causal, logical, and ethical understandings of what we think 'Good' is, and means.

Such changes as these aren't typically discussed out in the open, but behind committee doors, and are then slipped into popular understanding as foregone conclusions (answers which abort your questions) through academia (hi there textbooks & testing!), often by pragmatically muddying the waters to make them appear shallow and 'safe enough' to be swept aside and left unseen (hi there modern 'epistemology').

Whose expectations are our elected representatives and appointed officials serving, by putting ideas like these into practice? It's certainly not in order to uphold our rights or to correct actual wrongs done to the public in common, but instead to further the expectations of the 'T.U.R.D.'s preferred economic indicators. Those indicators are used by them, for them to justify the creation of numerous & vaguely defined institutions & agencies, which we're told simply must be given the power to operate within our lives, administering daily doses of power being injected into and over every decision we might make, concerning every aspect of our lives & property. The affects that these indicator-serving actions have upon our day to day lives, is central to what's caused the ills and unrest that beset us today.

Our having conceded these fundamentally moral, legal, and political concerns and actions, to being 'economic concerns', has in a very real sense replaced - or at least overpowered - those decisions that should in reality be ours to make in our own lives. In everything from pasteurized milk, to medicines, and indicators of how educated you are or aren't, 'economic concerns' are used to replace an active part of your life, with someone else's decision for how you 'should' be living it. Putting the matter more starkly, our willingly engaging in 'economic thinking' has effectively transformed our understanding of the key phrase of our Declaration of Independence, from being 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness', to that of 'life, *liberty*, and maintaining the 'T.U.R.D.'s' 'GDP'' (Gross Domestic Product).

And all of this we're told by our T.U.R.D.'s, is fully justified by the necessity of improving 'the economy' for the greater good.

Do you see how significant a portion of the reality of being an American, has been made to disappear by this sleight of hand?

There are a great many things that we no longer give much serious thought to in our day to day lives, because 'economics' has become so central to the thinking that we order our lives around, even in less than obvious ways, as with the reason that most people give when asked why they send their kids to school:

'to get good grades so they can get a good job'

, not to benefit from the clearer understanding of themselves and of life that can come with a good education, but to acquire economically useful skills instead, which, as 'bad money drives out good', has made 'Education' disappear from our schools.

Those actions which 'Economic Thinking' advises, have entailed substantial alterations to our understanding of the nature and purpose of education, and of law, and of justice - and more importantly, to our own standing in regards to them - which has been accomplished with ease by way of our loosely accepting and affirming that 'something must be done to improve the economy'.

These are just some of the most obvious surface indications of how far reaching the mundane and tedious 'economic' policies of 'the dismal science' have gone, and how effectively our understanding of reality has been so easily altered and shifted out of our conscious attention and control, by means of 'economic thinking'.

But wait! There's more!

Have you noticed that if you attempt to question the wisdom of imposing 'economic policies' in place of questions of what is real and true and right and wrong, your concerns are going to be addressed by them from within the frame of 'economic thinking'? Meaning that concerns such as those I've raised concerning the primacy of metaphysical & ethical principles, over that of economic utility, will be reframed as if they were expressions of one or another economic thinker or school, such as Hazlitt, von Mises, Hayek, etc., or just plain ignorance of economics, which installs 'Economic Thinking' as the standard? And then of course if they do respond to my points any further, they will do so from within the frame of whichever economic school of thought, such as Marx, Keynes, Stiglitz, etc., it is that they support.

X-Twitterers say: "So thinkers that existed prior before the industrial revolution, correct? Lol Even Adam Smith advocated for taxing rentier privilege..."

The 'economic thinker' presumes that every aspect of your life, exists first & foremost within the interests and powers of their 'Economic' concerns - be it Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, etc., - which they presuppose society to be operating within, and they consider any other views as being outside of, or beneath, the 'valid' range of answers for the ills they care about.

Coincidentally (not) in service to the 'progressive' goal of getting 'good grades' to develop our workforce of 'human capital', our schooling has drilled into us the habit of scanning through meaningless worksheets and textbooks for the 'correct answer' to True/False & 'Fill in the blank' questions that we don't understand or care about, and which probably weren't worth asking in the first place ('What were the six causes of the Civil War?'), and so having been accustomed to such shallow thinking, most students are trained into never developing the habit of integrating what they learn, into the rest of what they know (get in the habit of noticing that Truth integrates your understanding all the way up & down, while lies disintegrate and stop it).

Generations of graduates who've been trained to seek answers rather than to pursue understanding, have become accustomed to accepting the several small daily wrongs that are part & parcel of 'economically minded' policies, each of which requires introducing thinly veiled forces into our communities, with the power to override anyone's claim to their own decisions or property, which will be justified with some version of:

'Property'... as in 'private property'? No, no, nOooo, you see, that property is publicly accessible, and so its use, be it 'wetlands', 'working conditions', or 'handicap access', must be made to serve 'the common good'...'

, and whether they do so explicitly as by means of something like eminent domain, or implicitly by regulation ('no smoking'), they do so in the name of a 'common good' that is not and cannot be good for all, through the force of laws which have been remade into rules that serve 'the economy', rather than providing justice for those living within 'the economy'.

Using the 'Common Good' to harm the good of all

Using the 'Common Good' to harm the good of all

Part 8 of 22, from Exiting the Wizard's Circle of Economics

When its pointed out that what 'economic thinkers' mean by the 'Common Good', is bestowing privileges & benefits to some, at the expense of others, for the 'good' of the economy, their response is not to make a new effort in thinking from first principles to determine whether or not they've gone astray (from what?), but to diminish and discard everything that makes such thinking possible (metaphysics, causality, ethics, etc.), so as to carry on with their calculations without any inconvenient 'interference' from morality & virtue.

No doubt some of my xTweeters would reply "Well, that's just like your opinion, man", but sorry, no, it's the thinking of those who've brought about calamitous disasters of modern times by thinking as they do. For example, as I've noted often (such as here, and here, and here) the opinion of the 'common good' and 'greater good' that 'economic thinking' holds, is what was expressed by this Supreme Court Justice in 1837, that:

"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."

Does that meaningfully differ from what my xTweeters espouse? It's very much worth noting that this wording comes from Justice Joseph Taney in his ruling opinion for the Charles River Bridge v. Proprietors of Warren Bridge (1837), and on hearing that opinion for the case he'd just lost, the famed senator and constitutional lawyer Daniel Webster, observed that:

"That's the death of property rights."

, which was an assessment that was shared by one of the deans of American jurisprudence, Chancellor Kent, who soon afterwards wrote in The New York Review:

"...A gathering gloom is cast over the future. We seem to have sunk suddenly below the horizon, to have lost the light of the sun..."

The reason why these two remaining Founders felt such a sense of gloom at the time of the actual culmination of the 'Classical Liberal' era, was because they understood that once the 'common good' was able to be used to justify infringing upon the individual rights of ANYone, then that principled understanding of Individual Rights and Property that America had been founded upon and protected by, would be stripped away, which would leave no one with any more claim to their actions and possessions than what force they could physically muster to cling to them, while simultaneously reducing their 'rights' to only those privileges that 'those who know best' might deem useful to grant to them, in service to their idea of the 'common good'.

To act against Property Rights is to support slavery and oppose individual rights, which is what made it the core of Democrat policy before & after our Civil War.

Some might reply "Come on now Van, you exaggerate!", but the fact is that it was again that very same sentiment that Judge Taney was expressing a few decades later, in his majority opinion for the Dred Scott case (the spark that lit the fuse to our Civil War), in which he held that it was right and proper to deprive a particular man or group of men of those privileges enjoyed by others, when 'those who know best' judged that they should be enslaved for their own good, and for the 'greater good' of the community.

And for those who'd say 'Come on now Van! The Civil War changed all of that!', I must sadly point out that while the outcome of the Civil War removed the possibility of men being labeled as actual slaves under our Constitution, the ideas that Justice Taney was expressing have dominated our colleges since the early 1800s. Those Pro-Regressive ideals easily survived our Civil War, and they handily fought off their last substantive opposition from 'The Right' back in Calvin Coolidge's administration. Those same ideals were also seen to be very much alive & thriving in FDR's administration, as with the infamous Gold Clause Cases which outlawed 'the privilege' of owning Gold in 1938. At the conclusion of those cases, a sentiment was again expressed that was very similar to that of a century earlier, when after the court's opinion was read that FDR's actions had prevailed, Supreme Court Justice McReynolds, gloomily stated that:

"...this is Nero at his worst. The Constitution is gone..."

And no, you can't say 'well we're still here, so obviously they must've been wrong!', as what we are left with here today, is little or nothing like the world that Daniel Webster warned was fading away.

Consider that at Daniel Webster's time, there was as yet:

• No State Mandated Compulsory Education (and America had the highest literacy rate in the West)
• No Federal Dept of Education (created by Republicans in 1863, and re-elevated by Carter in the 1970s)
• No Civil Service Act entrenching a federal bureaucracy into continuous power
• No Federal Regulatory Agencies
• No Income Tax
• No FED
• No FBI, FDA, SEC, or any of the other hundreds of agencies that make up the Administrative State
• ...etc., etc., etc.,

The sentiment of 'the common good' that Daniel Webster warned of and that Justice McReynolds saw realized, has progressively spiraled around into utilitarian & 'economic thinking' gaining ever more power over individual rights & property rights each time it's been employed over the last century and a half, which has been particularly apparent in just the last couple decades with George W. Bush's "..."I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system...", and in the rights-busting legislation of Obamacare, pushed through for the benefit of '"30% of Americans are not covered by healthcare, what about them! Are they just out of luck?! Would you leave them to die on the sidewalk?!"', both of which very clearly demonstrate something else that Webster had warned us of:

" It may be very possible that good intentions do really sometimes exist when constitutional restraints are disregarded. There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters."

One question we should ask ourselves now is what 'Good' - common, greater, or otherwise - could be served by the abridgement (and so the abandonment) of that principle of Property which our Founders understood to be so fundamental to the understanding of Individual Rights, which our American system of liberty was founded upon? They fully understood that granting and permitting the exercise of such powers over those principles and rights would mean throwing open the doors to a government of total and unlimited power over its people - in what world can that be thought of as being for the 'common good', or can somehow aid in maintaining 'a more perfect union' in any meaningful way?

Given the obvious interest that these 'economic experts' have in labeling (and mislabeling) others, it seems only fair that when their revisionist efforts are used to retrofit our understanding, that it warrants our identifying and turning the label maker back upon them... but with what labels?:

• , as neo-liberals?
• , as neo-Americans?
• , as old-fashioned Marxists?
• , as neo-Marxists?

Whichever of those above you might think fits best, each contains technical differences in their positions that contradict the reasoning for them (by design) so that the labeled can easily deny the label.  IMHO they are better described, than labeled, as being Pro-Regressive. Ignore the inconsistencies that the reversal of orbit and orbited creates, and note what they consistently believe in common, that they have the expertise to redefine the common meaning of the 'Common Good', into meaning something that cannot be common to all.

Another fitting term to describe how the Pro-Regressives goes about routinely generating answers to kill off uncomfortable questions before they spread, is what an online friend, @ClassicalLiberal12 (but in a good way 😎), devised for such arbiters of political correctness: The Umpires of Reasonable Discourse (TURD).

An exceedingly important point that we'll see develop throughout this post, is that what we're looking at here is not simply an 'economic' matter, or a debatable matter of political policies and preferences, but a manner of thinking that implicitly defines what you are able to view as being real and true, and of the highest ethical importance concerning what you recognize as being Good - which I mean that in the sense of Right & Wrong, Good and Evil - and reducing that to mere technicalities and political positions, is a means of reducing you, and surreptitiously depriving you, of your humanity.

Whatever the case may be, any 'thinker' proposing to 'manage' or 'know' what they can have no realistic means of even compiling, let alone adequately identifying, is not actually engaged in thinking (as an effort to understand what is real and true), they're simply using positions as pretexts for rationalizing a justification for a particular ideological use of political power. Such actions are necessarily arbitrary and require the breaching of fundamental principles, heedless of any unforeseen consequences that will follow from them, and they take them on the basis of their intentions & aspirations for what they've decided is *best* for your and everyone else's life.

While such behavior tends to leave me either cursing quietly or momentarily speechless, Bastiat managed a more measured response, in his 'Conflict of Principles':

"Now, what astonishes and confounds me is that a publicist, a statesman, who sincerely holds an economical doctrine that runs so violently counter to other principles that are incontestable, should be able to enjoy one moment of calm or peace of mind."

This is an issue that should not be passed by without considering it carefully, as doing so practically ensures that it will be imposed by default. Look at the questions their answers are meant to kill:

• How should the Market [which is what?] be 'corrected '?
• What knowledge & understanding do they claim to possess that is superior to that which our nation was founded upon, and which these theories are derived from, and so justifies their employing them upon us?
• As agreed upon & decided by who?

• By popular vote?
• By law?
• By the decisions of TURD's?

• Upon what criteria and authority do they give their 'ok' to such power?
• And what has happened to their habits of thought, that they are able to leave such questions unasked and unanswered?

To adequately address those questions, we'll need to interrupt this post in order to take a short(ish) diversion into pre-modern philosophy's understanding of metaphysics, causality, and ethics, in order to realize that 'Economics' wasn't simply advanced to replace Political Economy with a new name, but to replace reality itself.