Category Archives: Gary North

Who are “They”?

And why "They" will eventually lose power.

Gary North gives his answer here, in an essay from 2013.

Excerpts:

The power elite’s members do not sit in the cigar smoke-filled rooms of the history textbooks. Most of them do not smoke these days. Indeed, their non-smoking status is one mark of their superior status. But, just like the old political bosses, they depend on politics for their position. That is their Achilles heel. By becoming dependent on politics to protect themselves from free market competition, they will eventually overplay their hand. They will bet the farm — and ours — on a busted flush. Imploding debt will remove them from the scene.

Why do I believe this?

To answer this, I begin with North’s three laws of bureaucracy.

1. Some bureaucrat will inevitably enforce an official rule to the point of imbecility.

2. To fix the mess which this causes, the bureaucracy will write at least two new rules.

3. Law #1 applies to each of the new rules.

This is a convenient way to express the principle set forth by Ludwig von Mises in his essay, “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism.” Each attempt to fix the problems caused by a previous government intervention creates new problems.

Mises also argued that socialism is inherently irrational, because it destroys the market for capital goods. It destroys market pricing. He wrote that in 1920.

Conclusion: all socialist systems must collapse.

Semi-socialist systems move in the direction of bureaucracy. They fall under North’s three laws.

Conclusion: The power elite will blow it. Give them time.

Their great temptation is private debt. Their salvation is the federal government. But the government depends on three things: low-interest debt, central banking, and bureaucracy. None of the three is trustworthy. The free market will displace them all. I call this event the Great Default.

[. . .]

The idea that conspirators in the American banking world engineered the crisis of 2008, which took down one of their largest organizations, is ludicrous. It assumes that the Keynesians who are in control understand Austrian School economics. Nobody else was predicting a crisis in 2007 except the Austrians. The Austrians were predicting it because they had an analytical system that enabled them to make the forecast. I was one of them.

Austrians are a fringe group. Nobody paid any attention to them in 2008. We are pariahs in the academic community, and we are equally pariahs in the banking community. So, why does anyone believe that the people who were running the system, who were dedicated to the economics of Keynes, Paul Samuelson, and Paul Krugman, were able to figure out that they could precisely manipulate the world economy, taking it to the brink of failure, and then escape at the very end, coming out far wealthier? The suggestion is ludicrous. Yet it is widely believed among conspiracy theorists.

[. . .]

Then how should we explain what happened? By first abandoning that form on conspiracy theory that declares that nice guys finish last. I hold to the anti-Durocher view of long-term social causation: nice guys finish first. Eventually.

[. . .]

Widespread education is never free of charge, and widespread education is controlled in every country by the government. If the conspiracies control all of the governments, then how can widespread education ever roll back the conspirators?

So, there are two views, sometimes held by the same people: (1) the power elite is collectively God walking on earth; (2) mass education can unseat the power elite, and then never let other evil insiders replace them. We are either to believe in the immovable object of conspiracy or the irresistible force of democracy.

I’m not buying it. I never have.

[. . .]

The main idea behind most conspiracy theories is this: the bad guys behind the scenes are fooling the masses, thwarting the good hearts of the masses.

This is an intensely anti-biblical view of social cause and effect. The biblical view is that people get what they deserve politically. Moses warned that evil hearts in the masses would bring corrupt rulers (Leviticus 26; Deuteronomy 28). This was the message of the prophets. In short, ethics has consequences.

So, what are we to make of the power of the conspirators? This: the conspirators share most of the beliefs of the masses. If this were not true, a conspiracy could never be successful.

[. . .]

Conspirators invoke the language and the beliefs of the masses. They tell the masses what the masses want to hear. For instance, they say that the government will protect the people from an economic collapse. The government has the power to eliminate economic crises, we are told, if the politicians will pass new laws. The government will continue to fulfill its promises regarding Social Security and Medicare.

Do the conspirators believe this? Yes. Of the 6,600 richest or most influential people on earth, insider David Rothkopf writes in Superclass, something like 30% attended one of 20 universities (p. 290). The ideology of salvation through legislation is basic to the social science departments of all of those universities. The faculties are overwhelmingly Keynesian in outlook.

[. . .]

The cost of educating the masses to believe in even the rudiments of a conspiracy theory are vastly more than any private individual or group possesses. The vast majority of the American academic establishment in the social sciences and humanities are officially opposed to conspiracy theories, which is why they have become the pawns of the conspirators. It is a nice arrangement.

Then what can ever change the system? Simple: a change of heart among the masses. There has to be a rethinking of the fundamental presuppositions of the social order, especially the moral presuppositions. In other words, there has to be some kind of religious transformation. Under such conditions, people will re-think what they regard as morally legitimate. In that time of transition, it will be possible to undermine the existing institutional arrangements, because these institutional arrangements are built on the prevailing system of religion, ethics, and presuppositions. The economic doctrine of this religion is Keynesianism.

As long as things are muddling through, nothing fundamental is going to change. Why not? The economist will tell you: because it costs too much to change people’s opinions about the present social order when the present social order seems to be delivering the goods. It is only in a time of widespread crisis, when the present social order fails to deliver the goods, that there is an outside possibility of changing the opinions of the public.

[. . .]

Conclusion: don’t spend much time exposing conspiracies. Spend time showing why the prevailing outlook favoring the savior state is wrong. The solution is not one more revelation about this or that conspiracy. The solution is to prepare an educational program for a breakdown in the establishment’s cherished worldview. We must be able to show why this worldview priduced [sic] the disaster.

First things first.

The secret of success of any conspiracy is its ability to leverage the fundamental beliefs of the decision-makers in a society. They extend the influence of a worldview that is already operational. The conspiracy has power only because it is in fundamental agreement with the moral order that presently exists. When that moral order changes, in response to a monumental economic crisis, a different group of decision-makers will come into power, and there will be completely new terms of success for any conspiracy to gain control within this limited group of decision-makers.

[. . .]

The centralized levers of federal government power over the economy offer tremendous opportunities for insiders to get very rich. They can extend their private power through government privilege. They can and do leverage the existing political and regulatory system, which is a centralized economic system, and in doing so, they maintain their positions.

But what if Keynesianism is theoretically inaccurate? Then the power elite has created an economic system which is like a kind of bomb with a lit fuse. If the Keynesian system is analytically accurate, the rigged game of wealth-redistribution to the largest banks can go on indefinitely. But the Keynesian system is inaccurate. There is going to be a day of reckoning. On that day of reckoning, the entire system of leverage that the conspirators have used to benefit themselves will be shaken to the core. I mean leverage in all senses: financial, intellectual, political, and institutional. It will be like the state dinner of the Babylonian rulers to which Daniel was invited. They will be weighed in the balance and found wanting.

[. . .]

The people who are in control today defend the fiat money position of how prosperity is possible. Those of us who are on the side of the gold standard, especially the gold coin standard, argue that the fiat money position leads to booms and busts. The position of the fiat money people is that they can use fiat money to defer the day of reckoning. They believe that they can achieve something like a full-time economic boom by way of monetary expansion. The Austrian school opposes this.

[. . .]

The conspirators are not God. They do not predestinate the world. They are temporary possessors of influence, power, and money because they have adopted a particular view of economic intervention which the general public also believes. They believe the state is the Savior in history. The state is the healer. They believe that the state is the closest thing there is to God walking on earth.

So do most of the voters. The voters also believe that the state can intervene to protect them. They are beginning to lose this faith, for good reason, but this is what they still believe. This is what they have been taught in public schools for over 100 years. Why should we expect and believe anything different?

[. . .]

CONCLUSION

Then what is to be done? Individuals must work to develop and master a comprehensive critique of the prevailing establishment’s worldview: salvation by legislation.

The correct goal is to shrink the state to where it won’t matter much who controls it.

Shrink the power of the power elite by shrinking the establishment’s lever: the state. Any other program is a waste of effort. Any program to expose a conspiracy without a program to de-fund it only adds to the prestige of the conspiracy. It makes the conspiracy look smarter than it is.

Never forget this: a conspiracy is no smarter than the tenured bureaucrats who administer the government’s legislation. In short, not all that smart.

Final note: If you remain skeptical, please read Numbers 14:1-25. There are always giants. They are always vulnerable.

How 1936 Consolidated the Progressives’ Triumph in 1913

Article by Gary North.

Excerpts:

Until the myth of Keynes and the myth of Franklin Roosevelt, which are closely entwined, are refuted in a series of comprehensive, scholarly materials, and then translated into materials accessible to the general public, and rhetorically effective among bright high school students who are in homeschool programs, we will remain on the receiving end of the Establishment’s overwhelming control of the media and academia. The World Wide Web offers a way to get around both of these Establishment operations, but in these two fundamental areas of American history — the New Deal and Keynes’s original introduction to Keynesianism — we have not yet begun to fight.

The intellectual battles over the New Deal and Keynes were part of a continuing war. Conservatives and libertarians lost both in 1936, but not because of their lack of theory. Mises had provided the basis of the answer in 1912 with The Theory of Money and Credit. Hayek also had the foundation: Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933). But neither of them sat down in 1936 to write definitive answers to Keynes. Neither of them ever did. Mises wrote a major book in 1957: Theory and History. By then, Keynes was triumphant in Western academia. Hayek’s final book was in 1988: The Fatal Conceit.

You have to fight when the battle comes to you. It is not good enough to be well armed. You have to stand your ground and fight.

Loss of Faith: The Coming Break-Up of the Nation-State

Article by Gary North from 23rd September 2011.

Excerpts:

In 1953, his [Robert Nisbet’s] book, The Quest for Community, was published by Oxford University Press. It received some attention, mostly favorable, but it was hardly a bestseller. He asked these questions: “Why was it that the modern world had turned to totalitarianism in the middle of the 20th century? What had taken place in the societies that gave birth to totalitarianism?” He concluded that it had to do with the breakdown of social order. Those institutions to which men had given allegiance throughout history, such as the family, the church, the guild, the fraternal order, and similar voluntary institutions, had faded in importance in the twentieth century. This left only the isolated individual and the modern nation-state. Men gained a sense of belonging through their participation in mass-movement politics. Totalitarian leaders began to attract individuals who were isolated, even though they were living in large cities. These leaders were able to offer a sense of brotherhood to millions of people who felt alone in the midst of cities. The modern totalitarian state functioned as a substitute for the family, church, and voluntary associations that for millennia had given people a sense of purpose and participation. So, totalitarianism was born out of radical individualism, institutionally speaking, even though as a philosophy, totalitarianism is completely opposed to individualism.

Man is cut off from any source of positive or negative sanctions in response to a transcendent system of morals. So, with the triumph of Darwinism and secularism, faith in transcendental morality has disappeared among the intellectuals. This in turn has undermined their faith in progress. There is no way to define progress unless there is a universal scale of values, meaning good, bad, and worst: the guides for mankind. The god of any society is the source of its laws and the enforcer of these laws. In the Darwinian universe, this means collective mankind. The trouble is, mankind cannot be trusted, precisely because mankind is afflicted with moral perversity.

Then he raises a crucial issue. This is the issue of what he calls religious renewal. “Whatever their future, the signs are present — visible in the currents of fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, even millennialism found in certain sectors of Judaism and Christianity. Even the spread of the occult and the cult of the West could well be one of the signs of a religious renascence, for, as it is well known, the birth of Christianity or rather its genesis as a world religion in Rome during and after the preaching of Paul was surrounded by a myriad of bizarre face and devotions.” There are also other signs. “By every serious reckoning the spell of politics and the political, strong since at least the seventeenth century, is fading. It is not simply a matter of growing disillusionment with government bureaucracy; fundamentally, it is declining faith in politics as a way of mind and life” (p. 356). With politics fading as a religion, there could be a revival of supernatural religion. That, too, was basic to the replacement of Roman empire by Christendom, although Nisbet never said this explicitly.

The importance of the language of theology and millenarianism for the Marxist revolutions

In 1988, Dr. Gary North gave a speech on Karl Marx and Marxism. The portion relevant here starts at this point and extends to the end about 12 minutes later.

Here’s what he says: In 1660, when Charles II acceded the English throne, it was clear the Puritan revolution had failed. From then on, the language, but not the system, of political tracts was secularised. For example, prior to 1660 there was regularly talk of the three ages of man being the age of the Father, the age of the Son and the age of the Holy Spirit. After that date, especially in the 19th century, there was often talk of the age of religion, the age of metaphysics and the age of reason.

This fed into the Marxian belief in an atheist millennium that was about to be ushered in, in fact that it was assumed to be “inevitable”.

However, the professional revolutionaries hit a brick wall in 1965, North says. And that was the undeniability of the failure of a socialist revolution in Indonesia. In a strong counter-revolution, 100.000 ethnic Chinese were killed by “racial anti-communists”. These, I assume, were Muslims (North doesn’t say).

North goes on to say that from then on, communists realised they couldn’t take over a country with deep religious roots. They would have to restructure their ideology and pitch and re-write their pamphlets.

They realised that they have to have a religious and theological foundation if they wanted to capture the minds of the people.

Out of these thoughts was born the “liberation theology”, which was, or is, particularly active in Latin America.

North finishes by saying that recruitment for revolutionary movements is based on a vision of world transformation and whose side you need to get on to drive progress toward a “new world order”.

My interpretation of North’s words here: From 1965, “Stalinist” communists implicitly agreed with the early “cultural Marxist” Antonio Gramsci, whom they had up until then treated as a heretic. The Italian Gramsci had in the 1920s written essentially that in Europe a Bolshevik revolution would not succeed because of the “cultural hegemony” of the Catholic church. It was these writings that inspired the Frankfurt School a generation later to their – largely successful – cultural revolution which has totally marginalised the church, where it has not been co-opted.

The Traditional Enemies of the Caesars of This World

Orthodox Jews and orthodox Christians

Excerpt from Gary North’s book “The Judeo-Christian Tradition” (1990), which can be downloaded for free here.

From the conclusion (pp. 160-162):

For the Sake of the Peace

I have done my best to honor Orthodox Judaism. When Orthodox Jews tell me that they honor the Talmud, I accept this statement as true. I do not attempt to argue that they really don’t accept it as true, that they really and truly take it only metaphorically, that “no rational person could believe such things in today’s world.” In short, I do not treat them as theological liberals treat me and those like me. If a man says that he believes something, and if he is a member of a group that has repeatedly been persecuted for adhering to certain ideas, then I assume that he is telling me the truth. He really does believe what he says he believes.

What the Orthodox Jews says that he believes is the Talmud. He also says that he believes in the Torah, what I call the Old Testament. I think that the Talmud is unfaithful to the Old Testament. The Orthodox Jew – or any Jew, for that matter – thinks that the New Testament is unfaithful to the Old Testament. What we have here is not a failure to communicate. This is not a debate over semantics. This is a debate over biblical hermeneutics, as formidable a disagreement as men can have in life, for its consequences extend to eternity.

Orthodox Jews and orthodox Christians disagree about many things, especially the theological integrity of their respective systems. The Talmud has some graphic things to say about Jesus and His followers. The New Testament has some graphic things to say about the Jews of that day: whited sepulchers, blind guides, gnat strainers, hypocrites, thieves, and dogs. Paul wrote: “Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision” (Philippians 3:2). The dog in those days was not a domesticated beast or “man’s best friend.” Dogs roamed in packs and devoured the weak.

What good does it do to cover this up? None. What good does it do to de-emphasize it? A great deal. Why? For the sake of the peace.

Both sides should be aware of the unbridgeable barrier between them. Both sides should also be aware of the equally unbridgeable barrier between them and the Caesars of this world. It has been the Caesars of this world, not the Christians, who have been the great enemy of the Jews. It is the Caesars who have been the great threat to the Christians, not the Jews.

Orthodox Jews and orthodox Christians are the traditional enemies of the Caesars of this world, because the Caesars are tied to time rather than eternity. Their efforts have meaning only in terms of time. But Jews and Christians are tied to eternity, and live or die in terms of this commitment. They are therefore the ultimate traitors to the time-bound systems of this world. This is why persecution always comes, especially after some crisis has called into question the survival of a particular world system. In this sense, both Jews and Christians are “a separate people among us” in the eyes of the humanists. What Rosenstock-Huessy wrote of this world’s leaders is equally true in every era: “The ruler who gives his name to an hour of history must be absorbed completely in that hour. He must dive into its waves and be lost in it more than any other man. For it is the ruler’s business to mark the epoch, to appear on the stamps or coins of his country. Rulership, because it personifies an epoch, always finds itself in a polarity to the workings of Eternity.” [Footnote: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (Norwich, Connecticut: Argo, [1938] 1969), p. 222.] What he wrote of the Jews applies equally well to orthodox Christians in history:

The pagan leader is the servant of time. The Jew can never “believe” in time. Since every Jewish leader or prophet thinks of Eternity or of innumerable generations, the star of Judah always shines most brilliantly in times when there are no pagan heroes. When a nation is despoiled of its governing class, when a national failure has brought a darkness without comfort or illumination, the nation is struck by the fact that the Jews are not leaderless in the absence of a king or emperor. Anti-Semitism always becomes especially violent in times of a lost war. The Jews must be guilty: this is the word that is quickly passed round. For are they not as ready to shoulder hard times without a complaint as they were to profit in the good? The star of Judah shines bright, and pogroms break out, whenever the Gentiles have just buried their Nebuchadnezzar or their Tiberius with disintegration. [Footnote: Ibid., pp. 222-23.]

As this becomes increasingly clear to both orthodox Christians and Orthodox Jews, I think the response of both groups will be to de-emphasize the words of mutual condemnation found in the Talmud and the New Testament. This is not to say that either group will deny the truth of its respective holy book, but it is to say that there is a time to emphasize differences and a time to emphasize similarities. To put it graphically, if you are in a foxhole with someone of a rival covenant, and the enemy’s shock troops are coming over the ridge, your immediate concern is not the precision of your partner’s theology; it is whether he can shoot straight and whether he can spare a few rounds of ammo.

I can see the enemy coming. Hand me that 30-round clip, Yitzhak, and we’ll discuss the fine points of our theology later.

Regarding that last remark, I think this is exactly what Jordan Peterson is doing while discussing and interpreting the whole book of Exodus with about 10 or so other scholars, some of which are Jews (e.g. Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro).

What makes the Bible unique

Says Gary North:

What makes the Bible unique among all books is its permanent ethical
applicability within a world of historical change. This is because it is the Word of
God. It applies perpetually because it is valid eternally. No other document in man’s
history has possessed or can possess this characteristic.

(From the book: “The Judeo-Christian Tradition”, p. 89, FN 6)