Friday, August 28, 2015

Reply to Chris Trotter: The West is Not Capitalist - Keynesian Big Statism.



New Zealand Progressive commentator Chris Trotter, who wants our Inland Revenue to squeeze the rich until their pips squeak, is advancing collectivism by crowing the disasters of capitalism which he thinks is leading to another bust bigger than the Global Financial Crisis out of 2008.


ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND it goes, and where it stops nobody knows! You might think that ordinary human-beings would have tired of Capitalism’s cyclical catastrophes by now. But our capacity to absorb these entirely man-made calamities appears to be no less impressive than our ability to cope with the genuine disasters nature sends our way. Indeed, Capitalism’s longevity is, almost certainly, attributable to its success in convincing us that it, too, is a force of Nature – something far beyond our feeble strength to influence for good or ill.

It was not always so. Eighty years ago, with the world in the clutches of another capitalist catastrophe, human-beings somewhere found the collective strength to denounce this “force of nature” falsehood. They decided that what humankind could ruin just by “letting things go” (laissez-faire) it could rebuild by replacing the “invisible hand” of the all-powerful capitalist market with their own.


And then Chris warbles on about Roosevelt’s New Deal, oblivious to the fact that grand piece of interventionism extended the harmful effects of the Great Depression by upwards of a decade. Chris should also read up on how it was US government interventionalism leading up to the Great Depression which was in large part culpable.

Anyway, I couldn’t let Chris away with this nonsense regarding the modern-day Big Brother State West, so posted the below quick reply:


The West is not capitalist, Chris, no more than China has an actual sharemarket. The West is crony capitalist, which is totally crippled markets ruled by government interventionism that has broken market coordination and the quick liquidation of malinvestments of a true laissez faire system. Through centrally banked command economies which print fiat money while playing loose with interest rates, to fund the Huge State model where state spend is close to 50% of the entire economic activity in Western economies, out-of-control and God help me, well-intentioned politicians, only build asset bubbles, then grow them bigger and bigger by trying to cap the chaos caused through socialising what should remain private sector losses.

But I say private sector, which denotes property rights, and where it's important, we don't have those anymore.

It's Keynesian socialism and though it doesn't destroy lives, thus liberty and the quality of living as directly as the straight out communist gulag economies did - those paragons of collectivism - it still achieves that in the long run. Indeed economystic JM Keynes has managed what the Soviet Union couldn't: total destruction of classical liberalism, and with that the West itself.


[And not forgetting Keyne's awful legacy in enslaving the arts to the state, and thus taming it as a vital market of ideas in resistance to the modern day abuses of state power.]

2 comments:

  1. In terms of starting a business, getting ahead, getting workers who understand who the damn money belongs to (clue: it's my damn business, and my damn money)

    China beats Keynesian countries like the US, and communist ones like NZ, AUS etc hands down.

    Hell: viewed objectively, there is more regulation, more taxes, more surveillance, and more intervention in somewhere like NZ than there was in East Germany at the height of "communism". You could always have a smoke in East Berlin!

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    1. I admit to being surprised in learning China has a lower corprate tax rate than we do.

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