Category Archives: Economics

Good short summary of Gary North’s theology

"which is anti-apocalyptic. It is in favor of slow, steady work in the fields, helping the poor, starting businesses, starting Christian schools, opposing foreign wars -- that sort of thing"

Article by Gary North of September 28, 2019:

Pope Francis was in Mozambique earlier this month. He was talking with Jesuit priests on September 5. What he said was published on September 26. This is my response.

The Pope was in Africa to promote his view of theology: liberation theology. It argues for wealth redistribution by the state.

A question came up.

Next came a question from Bendito Ngozzo, chaplain of the Santo Inácio Loyola High School: “Some Protestant sects use the promise of wealth and prosperity to make proselytes. The poor become fascinated and hope to become rich by adhering to these sects that use the name of the Gospel. That’s how they leave the Church. What recommendation can you give us so that our evangelization is not proselytism?”

What you say is very important. To start with, we must distinguish carefully between the different groups who are identified as “Protestants.” There are many with whom we can work very well, and who care about serious, open and positive ecumenism. But there are others who only try to proselytize and use a theological vision of prosperity. You were very specific in your question.

Two important articles in Civiltà Cattolica have been published in this regard. I recommend them to you. They were written by Father Spadaro and the Argentinean Presbyterian pastor, Marcelo Figueroa. The first article spoke of the “ecumenism of hatred.” The second was on the “theology of prosperity.”[3] Reading them you will see that there are sects that cannot really be defined as Christian. They preach Christ, yes, but their message is not Christian.

Specifically, he was talking about my father-in-law, but since I have always been the economist, he was talking about me. I followed his footnote. There were links to both articles in the footnote. I clicked on the first one. You can, too. Click here. We read the following:

Pastor Rousas John Rushdoony (1916-2001) is the father of so-called “Christian reconstructionism” (or “dominionist theology”) that had a great influence on the theopolitical vision of Christian fundamentalism. This is the doctrine that feeds political organizations and networks such as the Council for National Policy and the thoughts of their exponents such as Steve Bannon, currently chief strategist at the White House and supporter of an apocalyptic geopolitics.

“The first thing we have to do is give a voice to our Churches,” some say. The real meaning of this type of expression is the desire for some influence in the political and parliamentary sphere and in the juridical and educational areas so that public norms can be subjected to religious morals.

Rushdoony’s doctrine maintains a theocratic necessity: submit the state to the Bible with a logic that is no different from the one that inspires Islamic fundamentalism. At heart, the narrative of terror shapes the world-views of jihadists and the new crusaders and is imbibed from wells that are not too far apart. We must not forget that the theopolitics spread by Isis is based on the same cult of an apocalypse that needs to be brought about as soon as possible. So, it is not just accidental that George W. Bush was seen as a “great crusader” by Osama bin Laden.

Rusdoony and I started Christian Reconstruction in the late 1960’s. I was his recruit. Neither of us is remotely apocalyptic. We hold a view of eschatology called postmillennialism, which is anti-apocalyptic. It is in favor of slow, steady work in the fields, helping the poor, starting businesses, starting Christian schools, opposing foreign wars — that sort of thing. Our view has always been this: shrink the state.

The article is a hatchet job. The author clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But that didn’t stop the Pope from recommending the article. The author may not have known about me, but he knows about my position: Rushdoony’s. He has misrepresented this position.

Continue reading here.

US Presidential Candidate RFK jr. Denounces Lockdowns

Writes Tom Woods in his newsletter today:

Yesterday Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., officially announced his bid for president.

And his speech had some great bits in it.

Have I gone soft, and love politicians now?

Don’t worry about that.

What I do genuinely respect is a disruptor. Because if anything deserves to be disrupted, it’s the way what we laughingly call our national conversation is carried on.

RFK spent a chunk of time denouncing the lockdown regime — and of course it’s important to make minds explode by having a prominent Democrat do that.

He said:

Lockdown was the biggest shift in wealth in human history. And I blame President Trump for the lockdown…. President Trump gets blamed for a lot of things and he didn’t do and he gets blamed for some things that he did do. But the worst thing that he did to this country, to our civil rights, to our economy, to the middle class in this country, was the lockdown.

Now, President Trump, in fairness, let me just make this point. He’ll tell people, well, lockdown wasn’t my idea. My bureaucrats sold me on it. I was saying we shouldn’t do it. But that’s not a good enough excuse. He was the president of the United States. As Harry Truman said, the buck stops here.

On May 2nd, 2020, 600 doctors wrote a signed a letter to President Trump begging him not to allow the lockdowns. Because at that time, all of the pandemic protocols anywhere in the world, the WHO, CDC, everywhere, the European Health Agency, all say you never do mass lockdowns. It causes much worse havoc and deaths and injuries. You do the standard protocol, which is you lock down the sick, you protect the vulnerable, and you let everybody else go back to work. Otherwise, you are going to wreak havoc.

I wrote about it on Instagram. I was writing every day. I was citing these economic studies that showed that with every point in unemployment, you get you get 37,000 excess deaths: from heart attack, suicides, plus imprisonment. And they dumped me from Instagram. They said that’s misinformation. But it was not. But people were saying it. People knew it. It wasn’t just me.

And we now know, of course, that it’s true. There’s now study after study and every comparison between the states and nations that locked down compared to those who didn’t…. The more you locked down, the worse you got. Worse COVID deaths. Worse excess deaths.

Sweden’s numbers came out this week. Sweden was the only country in Europe that didn’t lock down. It had the lowest excess deaths in Europe….

The the IMF and Harvard study by Larry Summers says the cost of the lockdown to the United States was $16 trillion. 16 trillion for nothing. $16 trillion. We shifted $4 trillion from the middle class in this country to the super rich….

These lockdowns were a war on the poor and they were a war on American children. According to a Brown University study, toddlers lost 22 IQ points. A third of children throughout  their school careers are going to need remedial education. Children all over the country have missed their milestones.

What is CDC’s response? Here’s CDC’s response. The CDC five months ago revised its milestones so that now a child no longer is expected to walk at one year. They have it at 18 months. And a child now does not have to have 50 words at 24 months. It’s 30 months. So instead of fixing the problem, they are trying to cover it up….

As soon as they knew they could censor us they then went after the other part of the First Amendment, freedom of worship. They closed every church in this country, without any scientific citation, for a year….

They told us we had to social distance. They went after our property rights, the Fifth Amendment. They closed 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation.

He went on to talk about chronic disease and the strange conditions, including all the food allergies, that nobody his age remembers anyone having when they were growing up.

And then Ukraine: the authorities are lying about their intentions, he said, and the current policy is not in our interest.

There were some traditional Democratic talking points, too, particularly with regard to the environment. He spent a great deal of time on that.

I think the opinions of RFK, Jr., are fundamentally wrongheaded on a lot of things. But at this particular moment in history, the issues on which RFK is right are more critical than the ones on which he’s wrong, and they’re issues that no other prominent figure in the Democratic Party will raise.

He is saying things that need to be said, and I hope he keeps on doing it.

If you missed it, here is my interview with RFK, Jr., in which among other things I asked if he would describe Anthony Fauci as a sinister person.

(Hint: the answer wasn’t no.)

Link

The meaning of Trump’s indictment

It's the end of US politics

Writes Tom Luongo:

Civilization rests on the fantasy that there is a shared acceptance of the rules on which it operates. Americans are both immensely cynical and naïve about politics in this sense. We all know politicians are lying when their lips are moving but we also believe in the myth that the American system of justice will get the right answer often enough to keep the lights on.

Today that’s a very big assumption.

[…]

Davos is at war with humanity through undermining the institutions of civilization itself. They will not be stopped in their quest to secure global control over humanity. They have stoked an animus against Trump in the minds of people like Nancy Pelosi that can only end in fire and violence.

They know that the 2024 election is where all their dreams come together. They need another Davosian quisling in the White House to counter what’s happening with the Federal Reserve’s hawkish policy.

Davos has control over the political and monetary policies of Europe. It lost political control over the UK and got it back and will reverse Brexit. That’s brought the Bank of England back in line. However, it is very clear at this point they do not control the Fed.

So, they have political control until January 2025 in the US, but do not have monetary control over the Fed until 2026, when Powell’s second term is done. This is the window for US patriots to win this civil war before it even begins in earnest.

[…]

Davos knows this is it for them. 2024 in the US or bust. George Soros said as much at Munich this year. This is why Trump needs to be indicted even though the case is legally illiterate.

[…]

They [‘Davos’] will play this all the way out. They have no other choice if they want to win this war they’ve started to validate their view of themselves as gods among mere men.

The World Economic Forum is where the power-brokers negotiate the restructuring of the world

It has taken over this role from the United Nations, says Doug Casey

From a recent interview with Doug Casey (see his website here):

International Man: The World Economic Forum (WEF) has promoted 15-minute cities. Why are they interested in this topic?

Doug Casey: In the past, the United Nations provided the premier forum for governments to get together and palaver about how to restructure the world. But the UN—fortunately—is fading into obscurity. It’s now really no more than an expensive club for mid-level government officials to vacation in New York while playing big shot and connecting with other ambitious bureaucrats.

The World Economic Forum is for the real power people.

The WEF, however, needs a reason for existing. These people are into power and money. They naturally like to socialize with each other, scratching each other’s backs and seeing themselves as masters of the universe. Now that they’ve gotten to know each other at the WEF and have clearly taken the reigns over at least the Western world, they’re no longer there just to socialize. They have lots of big plans for the plebs.

The concept of the 15-minute city is one of the many prongs of attack that they’ve launched to essentially take over the world, as outrageous as that sounds.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

An exciting new project arising from Jordan Peterson's ideas, arguments and presentations

It’s called ARC, alluding to Noah’s Ark and the arc of a person’s life – and maybe even to the Ark of the Covenant.

Here is their launch announcement.

Quotes from that announcement:

“New International Alliance Announces Major Conference to Enhance Global Prosperity, Challenge Declinism and Revitalize our Understanding of Human Flourishing”

“The ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’ (ARC) will provide an alternative to “the claim that decline is inevitable.””

“The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) is being established as an international community with a vision for a better world where every citizen can prosper, contribute and flourish.”

The website is here. At the top, it says:

We are seeking answers to some of our day’s most fundamental questions, grounded in our core belief that everyone has intrinsic worth and something to contribute, and humanity has an extraordinary capacity for innovation and ingenuity.

Jordan Peterson presents the reason and ethos of this new organisation in a Youtube podcast. Here’s the main text of what he says in written form in full: My Vision for ARC.

Excerpts:

Despite all this good news, this undeniable progress, a shadow has emerged, an adversarial challenge to this state and process of expanding abundance; an emergent crisis of meaning and purpose. God is dead, or so the story goes, and the future is uncertain. Five centuries of ascendant reductionist Enlightenment rationality have revealed that this starkly objective world lacks all intrinsic meaning. A century and a half or more of corrosive cultural criticism has undermined our understanding of and faith in the traditions necessary to unite and guide us.

In the midst of this existential chaos, the false idol of apocalyptic ideology inevitably beckons.

We find ourselves, in consequence, inundated by a continual onslaught of ominous, demoralizing messages, most particularly in the form of environmental catastrophism; the insistence that we confront a severe and immediately pending emergency of biological destruction, causally associated with our degenerate social structures and their excess and destructive industrial production.

The narrative generating these messages, quasi-religious in its structure and intensity, paints a dismal existential picture: the individual is a rapacious, predatory, parasitical consumer; society—even the little society of the family—an oppressive, tyrannical despoiler; and nature, herself, a hapless, fragile, virginal victim.

[…]

A deep, worldwide, social, economic and environmental revolution is therefore allegedly at hand; those who dare suggest otherwise are blind, if not malevolent, and must be silenced.

The results of such theories? The consequences of such proclamations?

The increasing and increasingly compelled imposition of severe, involuntary limits to material abundance and growth; the resultant artificially-inflated prices, particularly for energy, that most truly punish the poor.

The fraying of our social fabric into a chaos of alienated polarization; simultaneously, and in predictable lockstep, the extension of reach and control over even the most private details of our lives by increasingly gigantic and centralized organizations, governmental and corporate alike.

The spread, particularly among the young, of a demoralizing and socially-divisive doubt and hopelessness.

[…]

We have therefore initiated the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new movement of hopeful vision, local, national and international in its aim and scope, aimed at the collective, voluntary establishment of a maximally attractive route forward. The ARC will open itself up to widespread public membership, as rapidly and extensively as is practically manageable, at as low a cost as is possible and desirable, so that everyone interested can aid in voluntarily formulating this story and strategy, and to discuss how its implementation might be encouraged.

[…]

The sheer complexity of the world, and the genuine diversity of individual ability and preference means that distributed decision-making is a necessity, not a luxury: no elite technocracy is capable of knowing best and then determining how we should all move forward as individuals and communities.

It follows from this that policy requiring compulsion, let alone force, rather than the voluntary assent of the participants, is bad policy.

We offer for the contemplation of those potentially interested in our invitation six fundamental questions, the answers to which might form the basis for a vision that is voluntarily compelling, motivating, stabilizing and uniting.

  • Vision and Story: What destiny might we envision and pursue, such that we are maximally fortified against anxiety and despair, motivated by faith and hope, and voluntarily united in our pursuit of a flourishing and abundant world?
  • Responsible Citizenship: How might we encourage individuals to reflect and to act so that they adopt full voluntary responsibility for themselves, present and future, as well as their families and communities?
  • Family and Social Fabric: How might we effectively conceptualize, value and reward the sacrificial, long-term, peaceful, child-centered intimate relationships upon which psychological integrity and social stability most fundamentally depend?
  • Free Exchange and Good Governance: How can we continue to gain from the genius of unbridled human innovation and the productive reciprocity of voluntary production and free exchange, while protecting ourselves against the tendency of successful organizations to degenerate into a state of wilfully blind and narrowly self-serving authoritarianism?
  • Energy and Resources: How do we ensure provision of the energy and other resources crucial to our shared security and opportunity in a manner that is inexpensive, reliable, safe, efficient and widely and universally accessible?
  • Environmental Stewardship: How might we properly pursue the environmental stewardship that most truly serves the needs and wants of all individuals today, tomorrow and into the foreseeable future?

Concluding words

We at ARC do not believe that humanity is necessarily and inevitably teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster. We do not believe that we are beings primarily motivated by lust for power and desire to dominate. We do not regard ourselves or our fellow citizens as destructive forces, living in an alien relationship to the pristine and pure natural world.

We posit, instead, that men and women of faith and decisiveness, made in the image of God, can arrange their affairs with care and attention so that abundance and opportunity could be available for all.

Those who present a vision of inevitable catastrophe in the absence of severely enforced material privation are not wise seers of the inevitable future, but forlorn prisoners of their own limited, faithless imaginations. Those who scheme to lead using terror as a motivator and force as a cudgel reveal themselves by definition unfit for the job.

We hope to encourage the development of an alternative pathway uphill, out of both tyranny and the desert, stabilizing, unifying and compelling to men and women of sound judgement and free will.

Welcome aboard the ARC.

I intent to formulate my own answers to the above questions, which I will post on the ARC website survey page and on this blog.

Pandemic Treaty Will Usher in Unelected One World Government

It's a two-pronged attack, says Joseph Mercola

Full text here.

Attack No 1 is “International Health Regulation Amendments”.

Under the new amendments, however, the WHO would be able to declare a PHEIC [Public Health Emergency of International Concern] in a member state over the objection of that state, and failure to adhere to the WHO’s dictates in such a situation could have severe economic consequences.

Attack No 2 is the “WHO Pandemic Treaty”.

Right now, it looks like the WHO Pandemic Treaty may also be ratified at the World Health Assembly in May 2024, if it gets the two-thirds majority it needs to pass.8,9 The WHO is seeking permanent and unilateral power to make pandemic decisions for the world, and the proposed treaty is the vehicle that would allow this.

It will grant the WHO the sole power to make decisions relating to global biosecurity, including but not limited to the implementation of a global vaccine passport/digital identity, mandatory vaccinations, travel restrictions and standardized medical care. Importantly, the treaty will supersede the laws of member states, including the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The WHO Is Corrupt and Inept

Even if centralizing biosecurity were a good idea, which it’s not, the WHO would not be at the top of the list of organizations to be charged with this task, seeing how its “curriculum vitae” is a long list of failures and scandalous conflicts of interest.

For example, the WHO didn’t publicly admit SARS-CoV-2 was airborne until the end of December 2021, yet scientists knew the virus was airborne within weeks of the pandemic being declared. The WHO also ignored early advice about airborne transmission.

The fact that the WHO has installed Dr. Jeremy Farrar, former head of the Wellcome Trust, as its chief scientist is yet another sign that the WHO’s health recommendations will be far from trustworthy. As previously reported, Farrar was one of the key figures in the coordinated cover-up of the origin of SARS-CoV-2, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Overall, the WHO is woefully unqualified to make health decisions for the whole world. But with this treaty in place, member nations will be subject to the WHO’s dictates even if citizens have rejected such plans using local democratic processes. In short, every country that signs onto the WHO’s pandemic treaty will voluntarily give up its sovereignty and the bodily autonomy of all its citizens to one of the most corrupt organizations on the planet.

[…]

The Pandemic Treaty Is Based on a Flawed Premise

Aside from the fact that this treaty will eradicate the national sovereignty of member states, a core problem is that it simply cannot work. The whole premise behind this pandemic treaty is that “shared threat requires shared response,” but a given threat is almost never equally shared across regions.

Take COVID-19 for example. Not only is the risk of COVID not the same for people in New York City and the outback of Australia, it’s not even the same for all the people in those areas, as COVID is highly dependent on age and underlying health conditions.The WHO intends to eliminate individualized medicine and provide blanket rulings for how a given threat is to be addressed, and this can only result in needless suffering and loss of individual freedom.

The WHO insists that the remedy is the same for everyone everywhere, yet the risks vary widely from nation to nation, region to region, person to person. They intend to eliminate individualized medicine and provide blanket rulings for how a given threat is to be addressed, and this can only result in needless suffering — not to mention the loss of individual freedom.

[…]

The Gateway to Global Totalitarianism

It’s important to realize that the WHO’s pandemic treaty will radically alter the global power structure and strip you of some of your most basic rights and freedoms. It’s a direct attack on the sovereignty of its member states, as well as a direct attack on your bodily autonomy.

The treaty is basically the gateway to a global, top-down totalitarian regime where human rights as we understand them will no longer exist. Biosecurity will be the justification for an international vaccine passport, which the G20 just signed on to, and that passport will also be your digital identification.

That digital ID, in turn, will be tied to your social credit score, personal carbon footprint tracker, medical records, educational records, work records, social media presence, purchase records, your bank accounts and a programmable central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Once all these pieces are fully connected, you’ll be in a digital prison, and the ruling cabal — whether officially a one world government by then or not — will have total control over your life from cradle to grave.

The WHO’s pandemic treaty is what sets off this chain of events, as it will have the power to implement vaccine passports globally once the treaty is signed. The WHO will also have the power to mandate vaccines, standardize medical care and issue travel restrictions.

Environmentalist Enemies of Human Civilization

Thomas DiLorenzo writes:

In the late 1980s the late Professor Murray Weidenbaum, who was the chairman of President Reagan’s council of economic advisors, invited me to spend a year at his Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis, which I did.  I had no teaching duties and published quite a lot that year, and continued my association with the Center for years afterwards.  Because of that association, and because the Center had published several articles of mine on environmental policy, I was invited to a big conference at the Sundance Institute in Sundance, Utah in January during the early ’90s that was attended by all the big D.C. environmental organizations on one hand, and by a collection of big corporation executives and academics on the other.  On the opening night the Sierra Club/Wilderness Society/etc. crowd presented a video that they said explained their philosophy and their way of thinking of environmental issues.  It was very well done because it was probably produced by Robert Redford’s production people.  It was his Institute, after all, and his pictures were all over the walls.

The most memorable part of the video was a scene of a pathetic looking young boy from the country of India walking barefoot and wearing rags, walking along a dirt road.  Huge dump trucks were blazing by, kicking up dust and stones and spewing pollution.  A deep, ominous voice announces (paraphrasing):  “If you think a billion impoverished Indians is bad, then a billion affluent Indians would be a disaster!”

Human beings are the enemy, in other words, especially “affluent” human beings.  The message of the video was that the solution to this “problem” is twofold:  First, eliminate as many human beings as possible; and second, destroy economic growth and prosperity and return us all to the good ole stone age standard of living.

This has been the primary agenda of the eugenisist American Left for at least the past century, and they have elected as president a senile old pervert and criminal to throw their Hail Mary pass for them.