Perhaps the soft-boiled-egg will now start to hit the electric fan

Michael Winning

I saw this on a comment over at Legiron (Underdogs bite Upwards.)

microdave said…

Glad to see you’ve linked to this article LI. The Mail comes in for a lot of flack, but this article should be compulsory reading in every household in the country.

@ junican – here are few quotes from The Green Agenda. If you had any doubts that this is one gigantic scam these should convince you.

“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
- Prof. Stephen Schneider,
Stanford Professor of Climatology,
lead author of many IPCC reports

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
- Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony… climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
- Christine Stewart,
former Canadian Minister of the Environment

“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
- Prof. Chris Folland,
Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research

Plenty more here: http://green-agenda.com/

 

Richard Blake – News re Blood of Alexandria

My dear friend Richard Blake, the critically-acclaimed and internationally best-selling novelist, tells me that Slovart has just bought to Slovak rights to his “Blood of Alexandria.”

I do not think I can be accused of any base motive if I congratulate the Slovaks on their excellent taste.

You are to be directed to the Underdog

David Davis

Good one here about GreeNazis and FOE.

John Prescott in Money Supermarket Advertisement

Note: You may wish to adapt this for your own use. SIG

Darren Drabble,
Company Secretary
Money Supermarket
darren.drabble@moneysupermarket.com

Dear Mr Drabble,

I wish to protest at your use of John Prescott in your latest advertising campaign.

Mr Prescott was a Minister in the most treasonable and oppressive government in British history. Between 1997 and 2007, the Blair Government completed the transfer of effective power from London to Brussels. It sent our armed forces into unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without legal authority and at the behest of the United States. It abolished freedom of speech and association and massively increased police and other state powers over the individual.

As an individual, Mr Prescott behaved in ways to his immediate staff that would get you the sack if you tried to copy him – sacked and sued and possibly prosecuted for criminal offences.

Using this man to advertise your business is a catastrophic public relations blunder. The moment I saw him in your television advertisement, I decided at once to stop using your service. There are tens and hundreds of other people in this country who will have been equally shocked and offended by your use of Mr Prescott.

Please immediately drop all advertisements that feature John Prescott. If you do not, it will be clear that the Money Supermarket supports treason, illegal wars, police state oppression, and sexual harassment in the workplace.

Yours sincerely,

Sean Gabb

For the Right, Freedom Isn’t Free — In Any Sense of the Word

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=5951

We seem to hear the words “freedom” and “liberty” from some pretty unlikely sources.

Think back to the “liberty cabbage” of WWI — recently updated as “freedom fries.” The word “Freiheit” figured pretty prominently in Nazi propaganda; Nazi Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels started out as editor of Volkische Freiheit.

I usually don’t write columns about stuff on blogs, because I assume that if people reading a newspaper column were interested in inside baseball from the blogosphere they’d just read the blogs themselves. But in this case, I think Matt Yglesias states things about as well as it’s humanly possible to state them. Reviewing Tim Pawlenty’s latest political ad, which looks like something out of Paul Verhoeven’s version of “Starship Troopers,” he writes (“Tim Pawlenty and the Rhetoric of Freedom” Jan. 25):

“I continue to be fascinated by the way in which the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ is always so closely associated with authoritarian populist nationalist movements. Absolutely nothing in the imagery of the video or the policy agenda of the Republican Party is suggestive of freedom. It’s full of flags and grim-faced folks and bourgeois respectability and military jets flying in tight formation. It’s an ad from a conservative politician that’s about exactly what an ad from a conservative politician ought to be about — about preserving a way of life against Muslims, freeloaders, sexual deviants, and other threats.”

In other words, all images that would have been just as much at home in Nazi propaganda posters, in which the word “freedom” was so ubiquitous. For the Nazis, “freedom” was about a collective way of life — the right of the German people to their “place in the sun.” And for the American Right, “freedom” — in their idiosyncratic sense of a collective way of life — seems to be threatened mainly by other people being allowed to do what they want: Like people with the same sexual equipment being allowed get married, or people with unfamiliar religions being allowed to build places of worship.

In the Lee Greenwood conceptual universe, it’s unclear just what “freedom” is actually supposed to mean beyond a worshipful submission to all manifestations of uniformed authority — except perhaps for a bunch of stuff like baseball games and church picnics that not even Hitler was ever interested in actually stopping anyone from doing.

After 9-11, George Bush suggested shopping and other forms of public relaxation as a way to prove that “the terrorists haven’t won.” Because shopping at the mall, apparently, is the central sacrament in the religion of American freedom. But it’s hard to imagine anyone in the Nazi state objecting to any of the things that Bush celebrated as exemplars of “freedom.”

Can you imagine Hitler complaining about Germans spending money at department stores, attending soccer matches, or using public transit? Do you think that he’d grumble that they were “entirely too free,” and that something needed to be done about it? No, Nazi propaganda posters were full of imagery of happy Germans going about the very same kinds of daily activities to which Bush exhorted Americans after 9-11.

What would have angered the Nazis is precisely the kinds of things that the folks on right-wing talk radio object to today. Hitler would have frothed at the mouth over someone questioning the background of the Reichstag fire or the powers granted in the subsequent Enabling Act. He would have ordered the immediate arrest of anyone who publicly questioned the official account of events in Danzig as a rationale for invading Poland. He would have shut down any publication that challenged the power of the German national security state, the necessity of an expansionist foreign policy to “defend Germany’s freedom,” or the alleged “threats” presented various foreign powers.

It’s the stuff the people in uniform don’t want you to do that makes you free.

Blood of Alexandria – a Topical and Economical Read

This involves a desperate and bloody rising of the Egyptian mob against the established order. It’s ever so topical, therefore. And the Amazon discount makes it a bargain – a mere £3.49 at the time of writing. Buy now, buy often!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blood-Alexandria-Aelric-Richard-Blake/dp/0340951176/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1296299437&sr=8-3

We drink because the climate is miserable, and because we’re told not to

David Davis

Ian B, a frequent commentator on this poor shambolic blog, has articulated what is possibly the main reason why socialism, and in its puritan calvinistic humourless form here in the Anglosphere, is so pernicious and life-threatening. he refers often to “Anglo-Socialism”, which I understand to be (correct me, Ian if I’m wrong) a mutated form of utopian idealism: this is one which calls upon the ordinary human instincts of helping someone over a bad patch, while adding the awful, European-Imperialist-Compulsive force of threats, burning in hell and even death for non-compliance, ultimately.

This stuff I just chanced on in a hurry in the Waily-Mail, but it highlights perfectly the sort of sniffy, high-minded tutt-tutting and censure of behaviours supposedly different from the Political Class (although I have my doubts there.) Furthermore, it is sexist: it implies that whereas “boys 11-15″ might binge-drink, it’s more “shocking” that girls should.

In my wilder moments, I’m inclined to float a new conspiracy-theory: that James Bazalgette brought proper sewage and clean drinking-water to “the masses” so that the Calvinist socialists could take away their alcohol. None of the “upper classes” would dare to drink water until at least this time.

Modern British boys and girls may well binge-drink (whatever that is: I suppose it just means they have had “several skinfuls”, as P G Wodehouse would say) because the Political Enemy-Class, through its media-brainwashing-arm, presents role-models who do just that and are deliberately well-reported as having done so – such as “foot ballists” and “celebrities”, in things called “clubs” – odd dark deafening places, with unfathomable names which are supposed to mean something “cool”.

The last “club” I entered was Annabel’s in Berkeley Square, in about 1988 (I think): it was before the days of credit-card-pin machines and one round of five drinks cost me £56.60….in cash: I made some excuses and left as soon as decency and politeness would let me. I can only imagine with horror the bills that today’s poor young people run up. A certain Tim Laughton MP was present in the party, who might be able to corroborate.

*PPP and PFI = Buy now, pay later

by Robert Henderson
http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/?p=622

“Figures obtained by this newspaper [Daily Telegraph] through Freedom of Information requests reveal the full, mind-boggling cost of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) upon which the last government relied to fund its public sector infrastructure projects. More than 900 schemes have been completed with a total capital value of £56 billion – yet the amount the taxpayer will have to repay currently stands at £229 billion. That is the kind of interest rate a sink-estate loan shark would be proud of. In one particularly egregious example of how not to negotiate a contract, the Princess Royal University Hospital in Bromley in Kent cost the contractor £118 million to build but the final cost to the NHS will be £1.2 billion.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/8279753/Gordon-Browns-poisoned-PFI-legacy.html 24 Jan 2011)

Startling as the figures above are, if it had not been for the recession they could have been considerably higher because there is no reason to believe the Labour Government would not have kept on accelerating their PFI spending at frightening pace if the economy had not all but capsized in 2008. The Daily Telegraph reported in 2006 that:

“The size of the Government’s controversial Private Finance Initiative scheme is expected to spiral from £53 billion to almost £80 billion in the next four years.

Treasury documents reveal that ministers have approved 200 new PFI deals worth £26 billion to start by 2010, and the amount involved in each has almost doubled. The average size of each contract awarded for the next four years is £130 million, compared with £75 million between 1987 and 2005.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1517684/Whitehall-oversees-huge-increase-in-private-financing-of-public-projects.html

How did Britain develop such an almighty and dishonest mess? The Private Public Partnership (PPP) began in earnest in the 1980s as the Thatcher Government sought to both satisfy its ideological dreams (public service = bad; private business = good) and reduce the headline figure of a burgeoning national debt. In 1992 the major Government introduced a new form of PPP the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) which was primarily a way of keeping money off the national debt books. The Blair and Brown Governments greatly increased its use.

The really frightening thing is the fact that the true cost of these schemes is unknown. The £229 billion cited by the Telegraph is speculative. That is not because the paper has false data or has guessed to cover gaps. It is simply because it is impossible to quantify eventual costs. Sometimes this is because the contracts are so long that renegotiation of terms is built into the contract at certain points. In others, the contracts are too tight for the private company to make a reasonable profit and provide a decent product or service. Private companies may even accept risks and obligations in their contracts which they know they cannot meet and go into the contract with the intent of holding the taxpayer to ransom by saying they will not honour the contract unless the terms are improved. (The experience of military procurement shows how often original quotes are wildly below the actual cost).

Whether the default on contract terms is intended or not, it leaves the public body with a real headache. If they do not give in to a company’s demands or simply offer more off their own bat to keep the show on the road, they may well have to pay a new contractor even more than is being asked by the existing contractor. Nor is it a given that there will be another company which can take on the contract, because many public contracts are so large few companies could handle them and some, for example, the maintenance of the railways, requires specialist skills which are not readily available.

Then there is the problem of what happens if a company goes bust. It is all very well saying that the contractor will bear the cost if things go wrong. They may not be able to or be unwilling to bear losses and in either case liquidate –liquidation will be relatively painless because a company will have been set up to administer the contract and losses will be limited to the assets of that company. That produces the colossal administrative problem of what to do if a contractor fails to fulfil a contract. The state will no longer own the facilities or employ the staff to take over a failed contract. If the contractor is providing an essential service such as health provision or running a local authorities schools, the contract cannot simply be allowed to lapse and time taken to award another one because continuity is essential. Such a situation opens the way to Governments being willing to pay well over the odds to keep the service running.

The contract to maintain London Underground which ended in tears in 2008 is a classic example of the problems of PPP and PFI. Ignoring the shambles which are our privatised railways, the Labour Government forced a PPP on the London Underground, one of the largest Metro systems in the world and a transport conduit absolutely necessary to London’s functioning, carrying as it does millions of people a day. They added insult to injury by retaining the running of the trains in public hands while putting the maintenance of the infrastructure – track, stations, signalling and so on – in the hands of private companies. The fact that it was the maintenance of the infrastructure which has caused the most serious of the problems in the privatised overground railways was recklessly ignored. Just to make sure that it was a disaster, the contracts were divided between two groups. In addition, the contracts to set up the PPP ran to some two million words, which made it a lawyers’ golden egg as squabbling between contractors and Transport for London continued incessantly which undermined the executive efficiency of both Transport for London and the contract holders. Here is the Daily Telegraph in 2007:

“The PPP was a classic Labour fudge. Labour’s reformers at the Treasury wanted to privatise the Tube, but old Labour had promised not to. The result was a Third Way on wheels, which repeated the Railtrack mistake of separating responsibility for trains and track. Under the PPP, the trains remained in public hands, with London Mayor Ken Livingstone in charge via the capital’s transport authority, Transport for London. The tracks, tunnels and signals were carved up, with three private infrastructure companies (infracos) undertaking to maintain and upgrade them on 30-year leases, starting in 2003.

Metronet – a consortium of WS Atkins, Balfour Beatty, Bombardier, EDF Energy and Thames Water – won the bid for two of the infracos, agreeing to do the work for £17bn.(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2812424/Signal-failures-that-sent-PPP-down-the-tube.html)

In May 2008, after a Metronet had a period in administration, the two Metronet infracos were transferred back into public hands to Transport for London.

This PPP had just about every flaw that one could imagine. The contractwas very long. Even if everything had gone to plan, the eventual cost to the public was unknown. Right from the start the taxpayer was paying a subsidy to the private consortia of £1 billion a year, despite assurances originally that no subsidies would be paid.

The contractors’ liability for cost overruns was capped, more or less, at £50 million for each quarter of the 30 year deal and there was a disclaimer for events such as flooding. If the private companies ran into trouble, the taxpayer had to take over responsibility for 95% of the loans taken out by the private companies. Just to put the cherry on the cake, the private companies were given a “guaranteed” rate of return on capital of almost 20%, a return twice that considered to be a good commercial profit.

Apart from overly favourable contracts, the cost of PPP and PFI projects are expensive because the private concerns financing the projects have to borrow money at a higher rate of interest than the Government can, perhaps 1-2 per cent more. That is because the risk is greater for the lender. The borrower has to make a profit on the borrowed money so he must charge more than he is paying for the money to finance the scheme

There is also the problem of divided responsibilities. We now have hospitals where there are separate PFI contractors for the food, for the ward cleaning, for the laundry, for the cleaning and maintenance of multi-media installations (TV/Internet etc) and the general maintenance of the building. No one has overall control. Head teachers with PFI maintenance contracts find they cannot change as much as lightbulb without getting the PFI contractor in. To add insult to injury such services often result in offensively high charges, for example:

“George Osborne, the Chancellor, recently told how he was informed that under the Treasury’s PFI service contract signed by Labour, the cost of supplying a Christmas tree to the Treasury stood at £900, despite being sold by the retailer B&Q for only £40.

A few months earlier, he had been told that the PFI contractor would charge £148.58 to provide a fish and chip lunch for six in his private office.

In the end, Mr Osborne, Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, and their team ate the same lunch in the Treasury canteen for £32.88.

Hospitals have complained that PFI service contracts mean that they have to pay up to £333 to have a light bulb changed.

A hospital in Hereford was charged £963 to have a new television aerial, and a school £1,000 for a computer desk which normally retails at £200.” (Daily Telegraph Rosa Prince, Political Correspondent 8:00AM GMT 27 Dec 2010)

One of the things which strikes outsiders as odd about PPP/PFI is the constant granting of contracts to the same bidders after the bidders have already run contracts in unsatisfactory fashion. Capita is an example which comes to mind with, for example, the Criminal Records Bureau fiasco of September 2002 when schools were prevented from opening for the new term because those working in the schools had not been vetted for criminal convictions in time, the Individual Learning Accounts scheme which resulted in a loss of at least tens of millions of pounds.

Part of the explanation lies in the size of the undertaking. Many of the contracts being offered are of a size and complexity to reduce the number of realistic bidders to at best a few and at worst one. The other possible reason for continued contract winning regardless of performance is corruption. That is not to suggest that corruption has occurred to date, merely that the possibility exists

In modern times, the British Civil Service has been remarkably free from corruption considering the vast amount of money it disposes of each year. There are two sound reasons for this. The first is the tradition of public service. This developed primarily from the lifelong working careers public servants, especially senior ones, have commonly had and the ethos of the Civil Service as an apolitical institution which serves not political ideology but politicians in power with disinterested advice. Government since the 1980s have attacked both of these pillars of public service. They are currently reducing the terms of employment of new civil servants, especially with regard to their pensions, and have increased recruitment of senior staff from outside the civil service. The most contentious of these are the large number of “special advisers” who are classified as civil servants, but are really party political appointees. The most notable has been Tony Blair’s erstwhile director of Communications, Alistair Campbell.

The second reason is lack of opportunity. If the Government is spending taxpayers’ money on its own employees to do a job, any serious fraud is difficult because the money is kept within the public body concerned and rigorous accounting procedures can be applied. Where serious corruption amongst public servants has been found in the past, it has been almost invariably in those areas where Government contracts are granted to private companies, most notably in Defence Procurement and building contracts. It is a reasonable assumption that the more public contracts offered to private companies, the greater the corruption will be sim[ply because the opportunity is increased. The example of local government where public contracts have long been used freely is scarcely encouraging.

Corruption is more than people receiving money in brown envelopes or the provision of material benefits in kind such as expensive holidays. It is also the provision of jobs years down the line, directorships for politicians and civil servants who have granted contracts. That is next to impossible to prevent. Even if a law was passed banning any civil servant or politician from accepting a post with any company which has been granted a contract which has passed through their hands, the politician or civil servant could simply be handed a directorship with another company – the linkage in personnel between major companies is positively incestuous – on the basis that “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”.

If corruption does occur, you can bet your life that the contracts will be less advantageous for the taxpayer than honestly negotiated ones.

Because many of the contracts are for periods of 30 years or more there is no meaningful political responsibility. The life of politicians in Government is short on average, either because of election defeats or sacking by the PM of the day. Five continuous years as a cabinet minister is good going. In the vast majority of cases the politicians who made the decision to go ahead with PFI will be out of office not merely long before the final bills are paid but in all probability by the next Parliament after a contract is signed. Once out of office, they can ignore any problem which arises and the sad truth of the matter is that nothing can be done to make them take responsibility for their decisions as things stand. At worst, all that will happen is the electorate throwing them out at the next election, which for an ex-minister is no great loss. It should be added that it rarely happens that an individual MP is thrown out by the electorate because of his personal failings because the power of party label is too great.

The introduction of private money into public projects by any form of PPP is a fraud on the public. As Hire Purchase used to be advertised in my youth, it is “Buy now, pay later”, but with the added difficulty of not knowing what the final cost will be.

The honest way for Governments to finance projects is to raise taxes or increase the national debt. Then the public can see clearly what is being done and judge the cost. With PFI and its ilk, the cost does not appear as government spending immediately. It is Enron accounting, the removal of expenditure from the balance sheet for the present but not the future. The expenditure only appears gradually as the debt is met by charging the government for the services provided or alternatively by charging the customer directly. For example, if toll roads are built and/or maintained by private capital, the contractors could charge the motorist directly to recoup their costs.

But the deceit goes beyond the hidden deferral of expenditure. Much of the detail of the contracts made with private companies is not being made available to the public one the spurious grounds of “commercial confidentiality”.

All public/private financing is a political con – it is either deferred taxation (because the taxpayer has to service the debt) or the taxpayer pays through direct charging, for example, road tolls. PFI does not equal competition or higher efficiency, merely the taxpayer being locked into a system where the PPP/PFI providers can hold the state to ransom.

* The Government defines PPP and PFI thus:

“Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contracts are a form of public-private partnership (PPP). Other forms of PPP include:

Strategic Service Delivery Partnerships (SSDPs)

Concessions (e.g. toll roads)

Strategic Infrastructure Partnerships, such as the NHS Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT) programme in the health sector, and Local Education Partnerships (LEPs) in the Building Schools for the Future programme

Some PPPs may involve setting up Joint Venture Companies.

PFI contracts allow local authorities to gain access to new or improved capital assets (most commonly, but not always buildings). The public sector may or may not own the assets, but in either case will pays for its provision and use, together with associated services (for example, maintenance, management, security, cleaning, etc). Capital investment in the assets is made by the private sector which recovers its costs over a long contract period (often 25 years or more).”http://www.communities.gov.uk/localgovernment/localgovernmentfinance/pupprivatepartnership/

Food rationing coming nearer

Michael Winning

First they came for the smokers, and I didn’t speak out, for I was not a smoker. Then, they came for the drinkers, and….and so on.

I thinks I see a food rationing green scam coming on. Hat tip the Underdog, a fat tax will get thourhg I think because nobody cares and the papers all want you to be thin.

The Churchill Memorandum (2011), by Sean Gabb, Chapter One

The Churchill Memorandum (2011), by Sean Gabb, Chapter One.

I’ve just updated the puff for this novel. Though many people have now bought copies, more are always welcome!

What’s he trying to say?

Michael Winning

As Bernard Levin once said : “it’s not what they say, its the way they can’t say it”. The fellow in charge of the Bank of England is trailing something bad which smells, but I can’t quite see what. Can any of you?

Me, I can’t see why we have to pay for the deliberate policy decisions (=mistakes) of our erstwhile leaders. Cameron had a golden opportunity about 2 years ago, he could have said as the Boss says sometimes, “we will not underwrite any more bonds or gilts taken out by the government after midnight, until we are elected” or something like that, but he didnt. Then at lest it would not have gone over a trillion, and something could have been done.

Where Calvin Meets Mao

by Keith Preston
http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/untimely-observations/where-calvin-meets-mao/

In this interview with Craig Bodeker, AltRight contributing editor Derek Turner provides what may be the most concise yet penetrating explanation of the origins and nature of political correctness I have yet to encounter. The full video is available on the website of the National Policy Institute.

Critics of PC have advanced several theses regarding its origins. Paul Gottfried has suggested that it is largely an outgrowth of left-wing American Christianity. Bill Lind considers it be a form of “cultural Marxism” derived from an inversion of orthodox Marxism advanced by the Frankfurt School. David Heleniak has an interesting thesis suggesting that PC is largely a derivative of the Christian doctrine of original sin that subsequently took on a secular form through the influence of the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Still others regard PC as good old fashioned Communism wearing a different set of clothes. My own efforts to investigate the historical development of PC (which I prefer to call “totalitarian humanism”) have led me to a position that is something of a synthesis of these narratives.

Derek points out that political correctness has become the most deeply entrenched in historically Protestant countries, primarily the nations of Scandinavia and the Anglosphere. Presumably, this can be explained as a manifestation of the sense of Calvinist guilt that has been woven into the cultural fabric and historical memories of Protestant societies. That colonial American Puritanism was a rather extreme manifestation of the Calvinist ethos, and that American left-wing Christianity came about largely as an eclipsing successor of orthodox Calvinism in the American northeast, may help to explain why PC first took root in America and exported itself throughout the Western world the way that it did. If indeed Rousseau’s philosophy provided a secular transformation of the notion of original sin, then it is not improbable that such thinking would take root in a cultural milieu where orthodox Calvinism had once been virulent, but was in the process of shedding that history while retaining some of its residual influences, which would have been the case with northeastern American Protestantism during the developmental periods of this country.

It should not be surprising then that the Frankfurt School found a home for itself in northeastern American universities following its exile from Nazi Germany (and after an ironic stay in Geneva, the city most closely associated with the legacy of Calvin!). Some of the iconic figures of the New Left, such as Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman, were personally students of the Frankfurt School’s most extreme left-wing advocate, Herbert Marcuse, and it is another irony that just as Marcuse eventually settled in California, it was at West Coast universities such as Berkeley that the leftist student rebellions of the 1960s began to emerge before spreading throughout the West and even elsewhere. As for the relationship between orthodox Communism and PC, in my efforts to trace the origins of the term, I have encountered phrases such as “correct politics” or “correct political line,” and references to persons being shunned or dismissed from organizations for “incorrect politics” in old radical literature from the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly among Weather Underground-influenced groups or the most extreme offshoots of the “black power” movement. The Maoist influence on these groups is well-known, as is the fascination of some of the more extreme New Left radicals of the era with the Chinese Cultural Revolution. PC in many ways resembles a Maoist self-criticism session, so there is likely a connection there.

I actually grew up in part as a Calvinist fundamentalist myself during the 1970s. My family were adherents of old-style orthodox Calvinism of the kind represented by theologians like J. Gresham Machen and Cornelius Van Til, and for a time we were involved with a church associated with the theocratic “Christian reconstructionist” movement of R.J. Rushdoony and Gary North. All of my education up through and including my sophomore year of high school was done at a fundamentalist academy that adhered to dispensational Christian Zionism (think of Bob Jones University and you will get an idea what the atmosphere there was like). During the late 1980s and early 1990s I was a left-wing Chomskyite and it was during this time that I first began to personally encounter PC. Observing the psychology of PC and its behavioral manifestations up close and in an unadulterated form gave me a sense of déjà vu: “Where I have seen this kind of thing before?” Having long since abandoned my previous Christianity by that time, I came to realize that PC essentially amounts to Christian fundamentalism without a Christ (perhaps this explains the Left’s habit of elevating perceived progressive saints such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the status of Christ-like semi-divine figures).

Whatever the true historical trajectory of PC may be, its obscurantist and totalitarian nature is obvious enough. It is ironic that eccentric religious subcultures such as the ones I came from are as dangerous theocratic fascists about to carry out an Taliban-like coup any minute now (a view that wildly exaggerates the influence and degree of extremism of such subcultures), while a form of obscurantist totalitarianism that has actually has the support of elites, intellectuals, academics, journalists, and others of genuine influence continues to entrench itself in Western cultural and political institutions.

Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment (2007), by Sean Gabb

Epicurus (341-270 BC) was, with Plato and Aristotle, one of the three great philosophers of the ancient world. He developed an integrated system of ethics and natural philosophy that, he claimed and many accepted, showed everyone the way to a life of the greatest happiness. The school that he founded remained open for 798 years after his death. While it lost place during the last 200 of these years, his philosophy held until then a wide and often decisive hold on the ancient mind. The revival of Epicureanism in the 17th century coincided with the growth of scientific rationalism and classical liberalism. There can be no doubt these facts are connected. It may, indeed, be argued that the first was a leading cause of the second two, and that we are now living in a world shaped, in every worthwhile sense, by the ideas of Epicurus.

via Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment (2007), by Sean Gabb.

China – A Paper Tiger

Justin Raimondo

China – A Paper Tiger

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/01/20/china-%E2%80%93-a-paper-tiger/

The utter hypocrisy, economic ignorance, and general all around cluelessness of America’s political class – never very far from the surface — was on full display during Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington this week.

There was Nancy Pelosi, a longtime Sinophobe, hectoring the Chinese leader over his country’s human rights record – when her own country openly practices torture, spies on its own citizens, and has murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in a series of wars of “liberation.”

There was Paul Krugman, economist-in-chief of Bizarro World, explaining to us that Chinese subsidies which keep their exports affordable for US consumers are supposedly hurting us – when actually the opposite is the case.

And there were the neocons over the Weekly Standard, pointing to the “boundless” military ambitions of the People’s Liberation Army and the alleged threat from Beijing – this from a magazine whose editor has proclaimed that the goal of US foreign policy ought to be “global hegemony“!

Are these people deaf to their own absurd utterances? My guess is they just don’t care: after all, to whom are they answerable? Only their financial patrons, the various special interests that fund their careers, so making fools of themselves in sight of the whole world – the world outside the sealed cocoon of official Washington – is no big deal. The shameless – by definition – are immune to embarrassment.

The “Yellow Peril” is a convenient scapegoat for politicians and their partisan followers eager to divert popular anger toward a foreign – and non-white and non-black – scapegoat. Oldsters will recall another yellowish peril, Japan, which supposedly threatened to upend American economic supremacy by flooding the market with cheap goods – and we all know how that turned out.

Japan was supposed to be the wave of the Asiatic future, a future that never came – and the myth of China, the Sleeping Giant Awakened, is but the second act of a fundamentally . That fear is partially rooted in economic misconceptions, and the rest is perhaps accounted for by racial animus and a complete lack of contextual knowledge about China’s past and its future prospects.

It’s true that the free market reforms unleashed by Deng Xiaoping greatly benefited the nation, but a recent report on China’s much-touted economic growth rate puts the issue in perspective:

“In nominal terms, the nation’s GDP is more than 100 times bigger than in 1978, when Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping began rolling out free-market policies. While China outstripped Germany in 2007 and the UK and France in 2005, the economy remains less than half as big as that of the U.S.”

The average annual income of the typical Chinese worker – a farmer – is under $5,000. Urban workers are better off: they make nearly twice as much. In spite of Beijing’s pretensions, the Chinese leadership is acutely aware of the country’s relative poverty, and massive underdevelopment. That was the whole point of Deng’s radical reform program, which sought to modernize an essentially pre-industrial agricultural society. And they aren’t even halfway there: most of China remains mired in poverty, while the coastal regions are booming. A huge displaced lumpen proletariat is forming, displaced by the upheavals of the past few decades, rootless and dangerous to the established order.

A great deal of China’s festering social problems are directly linked to the inflationary policies – the pursuit of a “cheap” currency – implemented by the regime. In order to fuel its export-driven industries, Beijing increases prices on the home front, where inflationary pressures keep prices high, in order to subsidize exports headed to the US, where they will be snapped up by bargain-hunting American consumers. In the meantime, we borrow from them in order to finance our ballooning deficit, while Ben Bernanke speeds up the printing presses at the Federal Reserve – and we pay them back in devalued dollars.

It’s a better deal than the old-style colonialism ever was – and still the Americans complain! I’m beginning to understand what our nationalists mean when they talk about “American exceptionalism” – a condition of being exceptionally whiny.

The myth of Chinese economic prowess is complemented by the myth of China as a rising military power, one that directly threatens the United States and its interests. The reality is that our military budget is more than ten times larger than China’s: they spend $75 billion, we spend nearly $900 billion per year. The main function of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has, historically, been to keep order within the country, rather than project its power beyond China’s borders, and its military posture is doggedly defensive – unlike the US, which has its troops stationed throughout the world.

The internal role of the PLA as a force for political stability underscores the fragility of the Chinese state, which has, after all, only existed as a unified entity for a relatively small slice of China’s long history. Regional, racial, linguistic, and other divisions are centrifugal forces that militate against the kind of lockstep unity considered ideal by the lords of Beijing. The country is so vast, its people so varied, and its history so rife with the seeds of future conflict that the cleverest, most brutally implemented Five Year Plan can only hope to exert the faintest pressure on the real life of the nation.

Rising economic inequality, the physical and social effects of rapid modernization, increasing labor turmoil, and regionalist revolts in the far Western provinces – all of these factors are evidence of the inherent weakness of the central state apparatus, which is as brittle as the Soviet model before its dramatic implosion. Far from being a threat to the US, or to anyone outside their own borders, the Chinese regime is itself threatened by its own internal contradictions.

The heirs of Mao do have one trump card to play, however, thanks to the War Party in the United States – including both Bill Kristol and Nancy Pelosi, strange bedfellows whose fearmongering over China unites them in unholy alliance. Every time the internal problems of the regime reach the crisis point, the lords of Beijing wheel out the foreign devils to divert the Chinese “street” and provide a safe target for their wrath. Every time the US fleet comes within a few miles of China’s shoreline, or a US spy plane is taken out by one of their much-admired pilots,

the Americans prolong the life of a failing gerontocracy. Since no one believes in Marxism-Leninism, let alone Mao’s Thoughts, anymore, the only ideology left is Chinese nationalism. The Chinese Communist Party calls it “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” but it is nationalism just the same.

Useful for the regime, this nationalist sentiment is also greatly feared by the leadership because its course is unpredictable – and unpredictability, or, indeed, any hint of instability, is the leadership’s greatest phobia. Any sort of ideological hysteria, whether it be nationalist or ultra-Maoist (the two often met and merged in Mao’s time), makes this generation of Chinese leaders extremely nervous, and with good reason. The years of the Cultural Revolution made an indelible imprint on the consciousness of people like Hu Jintao, whose father was accused of “capitalist transgressions” during that time of ultra-leftist upheaval, and physically tortured in public. The elder Hu never recovered, and died ten years later at the age of 50.

Periodic bouts of hysteria have plagued Chinese

history, usually in the form of religious fervor, or, in the case of the Cultural Revolution, pure nihilism. The leadership lives in mortal fear of it, which is one reason why they repress the Falun Gong cult that gets so much uncomprehending sympathy in the West.

Far from a looming giant whose shadow threatens our own delusions of grandeur, China’s ruling elite is beleaguered on all sides, barely able to ride the tiger of popular moods and constantly in fear of some massive upheaval that will undo all the patient work of the post-Mao era. China, in short, is a paper tiger, from which we have little to fear – except insofar as we insist on creating an enemy of our own making.

Albert Mayer, Comment on “The Churchill Memorandum”

I enjoyed the Churchill Memo… a page turner, even for someone like me who hardly ever read a novel unless authored by Charles Dickens… could be turned into a movie… it has that gotcha… escape… ho no, gotcha again… and again sequence that would keep audiences in suspense… for someone like me who have been following British politics for decades, the characters were familiar as well as other references uniquely British… the irreverence with which you treat these hallowed or rather hollowed names of Westminster was terrific… 

Review of Cultural Revolution Book

A fine and searching review of my “Cultural Revolution, Culture War”. You can buy copies now from here:

Buy

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4654

Sean Gabb And The Western Cultural Revolution
From the desk of Michael Presley on Sun, 2011-01-23 20:00

G.C. Wallace, the last of the mainstream Southern Populists, always claimed that there wasn’t a “dimes worth of difference” between Republicans and Democrats. Wallace’s quip is also a beginning theme from Dr. Sean Gabb’s book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back [on-line for download or purchase at http://www.libertarian.co.uk/]. Gabb offers an ideological explanation for the current British social-political environment, and then offers suggestions as to how the situation may be reversed. Although ostensibly writing about Great Britain, Gabb acknowledges that his insights hold throughout the West. At the time of writing Tony Blair’s government, described as an “evil” regime, was in power. However Gabb recognized in Blair nothing original, but simply, “a working out of principles established before 1997. There was no break in continuity between the Blair and the Thatcher and Major Governments. It is notorious that no bad act of government since 1997 has been without precedent.” One often asks why, if governments and parties change, the course of social-political events never appreciably does? It is because, as Wallace noted above, political parties, whether Labour or Conservative, Democrat or Republican, typically share similar foundational cultural assumptions and goals. Gabb writes, “We can imagine a Conservative Government. It is much harder to imagine a government of conservatives.” Here, then, begins Gabb’s historical analysis.

For Gabb, Western democratic politicians can never be counted upon to change much of anything since they do not possess absolute power, but rely on a “wider community” providing advice and consent. We know them as civil servants, school teachers, the unelected bureaucracy, business interests, and media outlets all forming a “ruling class” that usually, but not always, includes the politicians, or the elected government. Gabb admits that his notion of a ruling class is nothing new or original, but is simply the extended group possessing shared interests. And in their embrace of a “shared body of ideas” the group delimits how social-political questions can be framed. In the extreme, certain ideas can always be downplayed, ignored, or in instances of particularly dangerous ideas, suppressed by sanction. Gabb explains how, in and of itself, this arrangement is not particularly sinister inasmuch as regime stability is normally desired by the citizenry. However, once a ruling class ideology turns against the existing consensus, and once the ruling class begins transforming a regime into something not originally intended or wanted, problems arise.

The British tradition has been that of liberal democracy, but by the late 1970s the ruling class became fundamentally at odds with traditional liberal political thinking, and all conservative institutions. In order to effect changes the ruling elite began a program of “reshaping” citizen thinking. Also, it was necessary to hold thought more important than action. How? The so-called Neo-Marxist Rescue Hypothesis. That is to say, with dogmatic (historical) Marxism on the wane, revolutionaries demanded a new formulation. Here, Gabb cites three seminal thinkers: Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault:

According to their reformulation of Marxism, a ruling class keeps control not by owning the means of production, but by setting the cultural agenda of the country. It formulates a “dominant” or “hegemonic” ideology, to legitimize its position, and imposes this on the rest of society through the “ideological state apparatus”—that is, through the political and legal administration, through the schools and universities and churches, through the media, through the family, and through the underlying assumptions of popular culture.

None of this wholly relies on overt state coercion, but rather a “systematic manufacture of consent.” What was previously controversial, or what was once considered culturally subversive is now, through the overt action of ruling class manipulations, taken as normal. Using a Maoist metaphor, Gabb places this “long march through the institutions” as beginning, perhaps ironically, from about the time of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or in the mid 1960s. Dominant Western cultural revolutionary themes consist of the usual suspects: racism, multiculturalism, feminism, the normalization of homosexuality, equalitarianism and so forth. What is remarkable, though, is that while state sanctions may play a role in later stages of what elsewhere has been termed “Cultural Marxism” (Gabb does not employ this terminology), it is the general citizenry’s internalization of this new way of thinking that creates the ground for whatever subsequent sanctions may be necessary for those “just not getting it.” Older citizens who, in private, may express completely antithetical (that is, traditional) views will, when confronted openly, proclaim their support for new cultural norms. On the other hand, having been already schooled within the revolutionary milieu, the newer generation understands “instinctively,” and needs no convincing. For them, “new ideas” are self-evident, and not new at all. At the same time, Gabb holds that the ruling class, for their part, may well be completely cynical.

…since our new rulers spent their younger years denying these truths, they are quite willing, now they are in power, to act on the belief that they are not true. Because they believe that tolerance is repressive, they are repressive. Because they do not believe that objectivity is possible, they make no attempt at objectivity. Because they do not believe that justice is other than politics by other means, they are politicizing justice. Because they believe that liberal democracy is a facade behind which a ruling class hides its ruthless hold on power, they are making a sham of liberal democracy.

Nations, taking the word in its traditional sense, are incommensurate with Neo-Marxism. This is because nations are comprised of more or less homogenous, like-minded groups founded within a shared organic tradition. The break-up of the nation-state is, because of that, essential. In fine, Neo-Marxism wages a “war against the past.” Traditional culture becomes deprecated, and those hitherto associated with the tradition must be made to feel both ashamed of and responsible for the crimes of their fathers. Self-criticism in the form of agonizing over racism, colonialism, sexism, environmental degredation, and all the rest is required, but the guilt can never be assuaged. Guilt is a means of self-control.

Also, the process relies upon language manipulation. A “blurring of distinction” promulgates. The “right wing” is associated with Hitler, therefore men as disparate as David Irving, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and Enoch Powell are associated with Nazis. On the other hand, the left are described as progressive, reformers, modernizers, etc. Too, traditional terminology must be modified in order to express a desired goal, and in order to keep the majority confused. We see examples in the transition from colored, Negro, black, People of Color, to African-American. Or, in a transition from homosexual to gay, to lesbian and gay, and now a mere acronym, LGBT (with the reflexively associated word, “pride”). Gypsies are Roma, and in print, gender neutral language must be enforced. All this has the effect of shutting down debate, and making one conform to the new rules. Often one never knows the rules of speech since rules can always change. Finally, the word “racism,” really a meaningless word that can mean anything, exists as the ultimate accusatory tool used for proscribing thought.

Operating within a Neo-Marxist agenda the media, both news and popular, create a distorted reality that few question because it is simply “the environment.” We routinely view minorities acting in roles they rarely occupy in reality, and behaving in ways they rarely do in day to day life. Minority crime is downplayed, while crime against any protected class is highlighted. In many cases the media conflates majority thought and speech with actual violent behavior. We mention an example of this situation in the recent Arizona shooting where, from all accounts, the actions of a mentally unstable man is blamed on “right wing” speech. Gabb points to the sinister nature of such obvious fraud. Because it is so obviously false, those believing it can only accept the notion by way of passionate faith, and faith is most difficult to penetrate by reason.

The second half of the book is less an analysis of the ground of the Neo-Marxist program, but Gabb’s own prescription for counter-revolution. This requires a more in-depth review than can be offered here, especially with Gabb’s questionable embrace of certain aspects of the welfare-state and his seemingly pro-Islamic attitude. At the end, however, Sean Gabb wakes his reader. He reminds us that England is not facing a revolution. On the contrary, the revolution has taken place, and it is a big question as to whether counter-revolution can ever succeed. The author is not sanguine about working within established political parties because both parties have accepted existing Neo-Marxist ideology to one extent or another. And this brings us back to George Corley Wallace, and whatever one can expect for one’s political dime.

This just highlights the problems we libertarians face

David Davis

A short while ago I posted this below. The trouble we have is that there is no really effective way, to convert our articulated opposition to statism into effective action to remove it, and to thus prevent statism ever troubling mankind again. We did have one or two fleeting opportunities, such as late-Sept 1944 (Arnhem and the aftermath, when we could have got the Ruhr and Berlin in a week), May 1945 (when we could have over-run Moscow) and the Fall of the Wall in 1989 and the few months that ensued. But we did not seize them.

Margaret Thatcher is hated by many libertarians, for merely making the British State more “efficient”. There is some truth in this accusation. But she did want to “abolish socialism for ever” (as I believe that she said once.)

As liberals should (I suppose) say, we allow people to exist and gallivant about in our midst, who profess to want to destroy us and all we stand for.  We have no right to be not offended. I actually don’t think, in my advancing old age, that this is a right way to behave about important matters such as liberty. Perhaps it is because I see the Sands of Time running out for me, or perhaps not.

Mu comment below was about the forced insertion of characterisations and life-roles of a certain kind, not generally thought of by most humans as how they themselves would want to behave, into the pedagoguy of unprogrammed young people under the ages of, say, nine or ten (or less.) The only justification of such moves would be to undermine the thoughts and modes of social interaction that they would ordinarily get inside their own family groups – looking at what probabilists would call “the expectation of” some result or other!

We libertarians can argue till we are blue in the face, about typeface colours on posts, or whether so-and-so is right about the aspects of this-that-and-the-other-in such-and-such cases. but until we can know how to DO REGIME CHANGE, really, now, when it matters, we will be of no use at all.

 

“Gay lessons” in Maths, Geography and Science

David Davis

I lift the following comment from the Daily Telegraph’s comment-thread on this subject. The purpose of education is to educate people to understand the wonders of the universe, and to see to what extent Man might be small but that yet his Mind is a giant, to comprehend it.

The introduction of “gay” slants and nuances to questions is rather like what Baldur von Schirach did to German schools in the 1930s, with “National Socialist Mathematics”… such as :-

“Gunther can kill three Jews in 32 minutes, but Helmut can kill five in 40 minutes. At what time after the start of the experiment will they be exactly killing one Jew each at the same moment?” (This is a problem about the “Lowest Common Multiple” concept.)

Look, I’m not saying that nobody ought to be gay, or indeed is gay at all, although I privately believe that the whole “gayness” thing is a put-up-job. I have for long now, thought that the supposed widespread (and so we are told, increasing) spread of “gayness” is manufactured by the GramscoStalinsists as a way to undermine traditional human familial relationships to make the glue of them easier for an all-powerful-state to dissolve further. And I also believe that there is a population of humans, mostly men, who go along with the gayness thing for cultural reasons (it makes them more sexually-attractive to certain types of women) and particularly because they are very welcome in “night clubs” because they spend money.

But I could be wrong, of course, on all these counts, since I don’t know anything about modern culture or indeed post-modern culture, whatever that is, or today’s “empowered” women, or night clubs, or about money.

the_bogeyman

40 minutes ago

Recommended by
2 people

The whole thing is a side issue.

Our national curricula need to be torn up completely , there is no sense to it at all. I am a former teacher, a grammar school pupil in the late sixties, having taught in Inner London Comprehensives, I have been through it all.

The last thing we need is another initiative. The school I attended is now one of the lowest ranking and has been under OFSTED measures. When I attended everyone was taught Latin for the first two years, after which it was up to you. From my class two pupils went up to Oxbridge reading Medicine and one for Music. During my schools transition from Grammar, to Secondary Modern and Comprehensive, alarm clocks were handed out to all because of the tardiness in time keeping. Our head mistress headed the national conference and spoke out against the proposed changes, it was all downhill after that. My chemistry and biology teacher had doctorates, they have trouble filling positions now.

Large proportions of children in the Inner Borough’s of London do not read, write or speak English. Large number are classed as having other special needs.

Curricula needs to emphasise a high level of skill in reading, nothing can be achieved without that. Across the world it is obvious that the most successful methods of education are the traditional ones.

More than our curricula, our whole means of delivering education needs to be looked at. It is not immediately obvious that the state ought to play any part. Conversely, that always opens the system to the pursuit of a political agenda.

The state ought to be excised completely from the educative process. Parents ought to have the basic freedoms to choose what their children are taught. The only way to achieve this is to place funding, and purchasing power directly into the parent’s hand. This places emphasis on the schools to compete for pupils rather than the other way round. Strong schools will prosper and the weak will fail and there is a more efficient allocation of resources, bringing the overall budget down.

This would be across the tiers, nursery to university. Apart from the basics and languages, institutions could be free to do what they want.

It is not suitable that the apogee of attainment for any pupil at school should be a clutch of A levels, which are not really of much worth. Some people want to leave being able to build houses. And there are many other suitable outcomes for pupils not possible the ways things are. This country needs a base of skill sets that are not catered for. This is a huge gap in our system.

It is a parent that knows its child best and is best placed to identify its needs. You can’t fit them all in one size. Britain has capabilities but we are stripping her of her skills.

I suspect under such a system we would have far fewer media degrees. Certainly there would be more doctors, dentists and the like. and as importantly a range of engineers and technicians. Administration would be minimal and we would no longer be having debates like this.

Dubai and the end of the world

Michael Winning

Sorry heres a link which might work…

I was reading the Daily Mail as you do, and I chanced on this thing about that mega-islands-thing in Dubai, which seems to be sinking. It looked sort of funny at the time and a laugh if you had about 8-zillion to spare.Analogies about “The House Built On Sand” would be uncharitable here, because real people are going to lod=se real money, I hear that the boat-comapny wants out and the builders and developers and the Dubai Royal House (whatever that is) won’t let it, which is quite something too. These places all have royal houses even if they say they dont. And the king can have your girl if you don’t watch your arse, Or thats what somneone told me about his anyway.

BUT it all points to socialism, which makes you want to have a blowout when theres enough seed-corn in the shed, and means theres none when theres none left, when you mopst want it later, if you see what I mean. You spend the autumn drunk, seeing who can stand up longest after being decapitated while standing up with a beermug in hs hand and not spilling the beer till he falls over (X Factor and stuff), and then suddenly theres no food.

It’s very unfortunate. I don’t criticise people for wnting summy islands but perhaps they could have spent some time thinking about not voting for politicians in the US who forced banks to loan money to nonpayers. Or thinking about not voting for polticians in the UK and the EU who wanted to tax and spend more.

Getting Off the Hamster Wheel

Not one of Kevin’s best – though I suppose I would say that! SIG

http://c4ss.org/?p=5884

As someone who defends Paul Krugman more often than not, I know I stand out from the libertarian mainstream. But given the realities of the form of state capitalism we live under — an essentially corporatist system whose resemblances to the “free market” are mostly coincidental — I find the Keynesians have it right when it comes to analyzing the causes of the Great Recession.

Those on the Right who think the problem is that the rich lack money to “invest in jobs” are living in a dream world. No, the rich invested money in Ponzi schemes like the real estate bubble precisely because they had more capital on their hands than they could find productive ways to invest. The economy was already plagued with excess industrial capacity that could barely be utilized, even with the level of demand revved up by debt on bubble-inflated equity. The rich already have more money than they’re willing to invest, because no sane person would hire people to produce more stuff in an environment where there are fewer employed people out there buying stuff — and the purchasing power of those who are employed is no longer inflated by home equity loans from ditech.

Simply put, it’s not the level of investment that’s the problem — it’s the level of demand.

So the Keynesians have it right about the proximate cause of the problem — an analysis that applies far better than that of most of the libertarian Right to the corporatist economy we actually live under, if not to a genuinely freed market. Their main shortcoming is an inability to penetrate beyond proximate causes and go to the root of the problem.

A good example is Krugman’s NYT column Wednesday on “The Output Gap.” He points to an estimated gap between actual and potential GDP, resulting from a shortfall in aggregate demand, of $903 billion for the coming year. So far, so good.

What he fails to note is that not everything that adds a dollar to GDP is good. A lot of GDP amounts, in the language of Frederic Bastiat, to the cost of replacing broken windows. A lot of the GDP, at its height, resulted from subsidized waste and planned obsolescence. So, with all due respect to Krugman, most of the missing output he points to is shoddy crap designed to fall apart in order to keep the industrial capacity fully utilized, and the demand for it was fueled entirely by people going into debt to keep buying that shoddy crap.

There’s no way of getting around the fact that, as our economy is currently structured under state capitalism, a large share of people are employed making stuff that’s worthless. And there’s simply no way to avoid a drastic decrease in nominal GDP and employment figures short of subsidizing pathological behavior to keep people consuming.

Krugman is entirely correct in arguing that, as the economy is currently structured, there is no way to achieve full employment other than government spending to make up the demand shortfall. But there’s no plausible scenario in which the economy, once kick-started by Keynesian pump-priming (if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor), gets going on a self-sustaining basis without continued government spending. There’s no plausible scenario where the economy ever attains the levels of demand, or nominal output, that existed three years ago.

Keynesian “aggregate demand management” will work this year, if the government runs a $1 trillion deficit. But the economy will slip back into depression if the budget is balanced next year. So the old Keynesian model, in which the government ran a deficit in bad times and paid it back by running a surplus in good times, is as dead as the passenger pigeon. There are no good times, as state capitalism is currently structured, without a perpetual deficit.

So count me among the “deflationists” that Krugman routinely mocks. The material reality we face is that it takes less investment in physical capital, and fewer hours of labor, to produce what most people regard as a comfortable standard of living.

The agenda of both Bush and Obama was to prop up rent-inflated asset values, as a source of aggregate demand, and to inflate the dollars of investment and hours of labor required to produce a given unit of use-value. But the only way out, in the long run, is just the opposite: Eliminate the portion of the price of goods and services that results from artificial scarcity rents, so that the average person can live comfortably with a shorter work week.

In the short run, Keynesianism is the only way to prevent the collapse of state capitalism. But in the long run, state capitalism is unsustainable. The only way out is to go beyond state capitalism.

In the end, we’ve got to find some way off the hamster wheel.