John Maynard Keynes

Writes Robert Katz:

John Maynard Keynes, 1883 – 1946, was an infamous British mountebank and soothsayer who overpoweringly advanced the idea that an effective way for the State to defray the extravagant expenses met on route to its worldwide barbarous pillaging would be for it to engage in mass counterfeiting. He based his prognostication of the scheme’s efficacy on the premises that the multitude was either ignorant enough to believe that the debasement of their money was beneficial or wicked enough to energetically participate as the State’s privileged partner in the sham of taking in sound money and passing out fake. He was alarmingly accurate on both behavioral suppositions. Some of the biggest and most dishonorable swindlers of this morally offensive confidence game are Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell.

Stop blaming climate change for Spain’s disastrous floods

We can’t let the authorities off the hook for this horrific tragedy.

Article by Rob Lyons.

Excerpt:

As with all disasters, lessons must be learned and changes made so that human suffering can be reduced in the future. Furthermore, even if there is an element of truth to the claim that human-created climate change made the floods worse – and that’s a big ‘if’, according to the IPCC – we still have to learn to cope with the problems that the weather throws at us. With ingenuity and investment, we are more than capable of doing so.

The Birth of “Irrational Exuberance”

It’s still with us. Article by George F. Smith.

Excerpt:

John Law, the early eighteenth-century Scottish gambler and financier, thought the best way to revive an ailing economy was to remove the “great scarcity of money,” as he wrote in a 1705 monetary tract. A decade after its publication he took his ideas to the Continent and sold them to Philippe d’Orleans, the regent in charge of France’s finances, who needed a scheme more sophisticated than his failed program of coin clipping and confiscation to save the nation from bankruptcy.

In 1716 Philippe set Law up as head of the Banque Générale, the country’s central bank, giving it and him monopoly control of the note issue. Having won the nation’s trust with declarations of allegiance to sound money principles – he had promised his banknotes would be “payable on sight” in unadulterated gold coin – Law proceeded to apply another element of his theory. Because a scarcity of money, he believed, was the root of France’s economic problems, and since banknotes backed purely by precious metals would be in short supply, he began issuing notes “backed” by the nation’s vast landholdings. Exactly how one would redeem banknotes for acreage he neglected to explain.

Is John Law regarded as a charlatan today? Not whatsoever. The most influential economists of modern times regard Law with sympathy and respect. One eminent economic historian places Law in the “front ranks of monetary theorists of all time.” Others view him jealously for being the first economist to run an entire country, even if it meant running it into the ground.

Saint-Simon concluded,

[T]he chimera of the Mississippi, with its shares, its special jargon, its science (a continual juggle for drawing money from one person to give it to another), was to almost guarantee that these shares should at last end in smoke (since we had neither mines, nor quarries of the philosopher’s stone), and that the few would be enriched at the expense of the many, as in fact happened.

The allure of easy money drives irrational behavior, then and now.  End the Fed.

Net Zero means zero growth

Interview (podcast) on spiked-online.com with Jon Moynihan. Interviewer is Brendan O’Neill.

Introduction of the written excerpts:

Britain, the nation that birthed the Industrial Revolution, is now a world leader in deindustrialisation. The power stations, oil refineries and steelworks that helped make the UK wealthy are now closing down and moving abroad. High energy prices are crippling industry and hurting households. Yet politicians are doubling down on precisely the policies that have brought us here. Reducing carbon emissions, they say, must be the nation’s priority. Apparently, we need to embrace a Net Zero future, no matter what it costs our economy.

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.

No one cares if the boots exist…

1984 is MUCH more relevant than the more simplified versions we see in movies.

Article by Catte Black

What struck me last time I read 1984 was how much I had missed in it. It’s much much more than the images of brutal repression we tend to remember.

I was struck by how familiar the Party’s mind control methodology now seems – with the emphasis on invented, irrational narrative and willing suspension of critical faculties.

[Quote from the novel:]

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation—anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature.“

Journalism vs the people

Article by Jenny Holland.

From the moment Brits voted for Brexit and Americans put Donald Trump into the White House eight years ago, there has been a lot of talk about just how divided and polarised Western publics are.

Yet while the public is divided, it appears to be a different story for mainstream journalists. In multiple different countries across the West, they tend to hew to the same themes and offer identical analyses. They tend to be globalist in orientation and ‘progressive’ in outlook. This means that even if they are from different national cultures with different political systems and histories, they are often singing from the same hymn sheet – a hymn sheet that is at odds with millions of their compatriots.

[. . .]

Irish journalist and commentator David Quinn sees the selective reporting of Casey’s statement as an example of a broader problem among Irish media. ‘You can’t go off script, even if your fiancée has been brutally murdered’, he tells me. ‘I think some of it is old-fashioned snobbery’, he continues: ‘Journalistic consensus is rigidly enforced on pain of being socially ostracised, with many in the Irish media thinking, “This makes me look good, it makes me look respectable”, like drinking a particular kind of wine.’ And the result? ‘It’s basically propaganda we’re getting.’

Quinn explains the Western media’s shared worldview in terms of writer David Goodhart’s distinction between those who come from ‘Somewhere’ – rooted in a specific place or community, usually socially conservative and less educated – and those who could come from ‘Anywhere’ – urban, ‘progressive’ and university-educated. ‘Journalists are Anywhere people’, Quinn says. ‘They despise people who are attached to their place, culture, traditions and customs.’

Ian O’Doherty, writer for the Irish Independent, concurs. ‘It’s class contempt’, he tells me. ‘It’s very rare that you’ll see any overt editorial interference’, but the pressure to conform is huge. Irish journalists, he says, ‘are all middle class… They all know each other, they all go to the same dinner parties, they all have the same opinions.’

And these ‘same opinions’ cross borders. Those who work for Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, O’Doherty says, ‘would have much more in common with someone from the New York Times or the BBC than with someone from Crumlin’.

Similarly, Paddy O’Gorman, a retired RTÉ reporter and now a successful independent podcaster, points out that when it comes to what gets covered in Irish media, the ideological slant only goes one way.