Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Government Corruption Extends Far Beyond What Politicians Admit.

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Allegations of corruption have recently been levied against Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau (since resigned) for not recusing themselves from discussions about awarding a contract to a charity which has financial ties to their families.

Notice that the wrongful act—corruption—is completely focused on the names of the state’s decision-makers, not on the actual decisions. Thus, the purpose of the state’s rules is to create a perception of legitimacy for state activities so long as the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats remains within the boundaries which they define. Moreover, these boundaries do not consider the collecting and spending of taxpayers’ money, per se, to be an act of corruption.

The definition of corruption from Merriam-Webster (emphasis added): dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as government officials or police officers).

Now let’s consider some things which we’re told are totally not corrupt and perfectly fine.

The state monopolizes the provision of police and judicial services. These bureaucracies are enriched, yet they fail to solve a majority of violent crimes. But the state refuses to return any of the tax dollars—tax dollars taken by coercive means—to citizens, as compensation for its failure to provide all of the services it promised in exchange for those tax dollars.

In Canada, the state implemented universal healthcare with a dishonest claim that this was necessary because many poor people lacked access to healthcare. Healthcare bureaucracies have been enriched, as healthcare has become the largest item in provincial budgets. However, once again, the state refuses to return any of the stolen tax dollars to citizens as compensation for its failure to provide all of the healthcare services it promised.

And then there is the usual political lobbying process in which interest groups provide “campaign contributions” to politicians in exchange for political favors.

This, of course, could easily be called bribery, although politicians have defined it as perfectly legal.

Part and parcel of all this is the state’s regulatory apparatus (of similar magnitude in Canada as in the US on a per capita basis), which supposedly exists to protect the safety and welfare of consumers from unscrupulous corporations. Yet somehow the regulatory machine manages to affect a massive transfer of wealth from workers and consumers to politically influential corporations. Thus, the 1 percent gains at the expense of the 99 percent, thanks to the politicians who are on the receiving ends of these legal bribes.

Those are just a few of the thousands of examples of state corruption, which Frédéric Bastiat refers to as legal plunder.

We must not allow the state, and its sanctimonious cheerleaders in the mainstream media, to bastardize the definition of the word “corruption.” If Justin Trudeau, Bill Morneau, and all the other politicians and bureaucrats start “obeying the rules,” this does not eliminate corruption. These rule breakers are not the problem. They are merely symptoms of the disease. The disease is legalized corruption, with the state’s forced taxation, complete lack of accountability, and its predisposition to grant itself legitimacy through democratic elections every four years. As Albert Jay Nock wrote:

The interests of the State and the interests of society…are directly opposed.

The State is not…a social institution administered in an anti‑social way. It is an anti‑social institution.

State power has an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically, disinterestedly or honestly. (emphasis added)

The truth is that those who are tasked with serving the public interest are well positioned to serve whatever interests they choose because the rules they create to control their own behavior are far too lax. And why wouldn’t they be lax? When state officials have the power to make their own rules, you can be sure they will give themselves wide latitude.

Pragmatism, Good Intentions, and Proletariat Lives Are All That Matter. To Avoid Death. For Now.

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In week one of our We the Living Study Group, we were introduced to year five of the Soviet Revolution: “the State’s New Economic Policy (NEP) had allowed a temporary compromise.” It is 1922, and in Part 1, Chapter 2 we were also introduced to Kira’s Gen Z cousin, Irina,

A door crashed open and something came flying into the anteroom; something tall, tense, with a storm of hair and eyes like automobile headlights; and Galina recognized Irina, her niece, a young girl of eighteen with the eyes of twenty-eight and the laughter of eight.

Representing Soviet temporary compromises was Irina’s brother Victor, who tells his family,

The days of confiscations are past. The Soviet government has a most progressive policy outlined. The most promising career for a woman is offered by employment in a Soviet office. One has to be practical nowadays – as you ought to know.

Here, Ayn Rand has used an economy of words to illustrate the implied threat in every sentence: there will be future confiscations, ambiguous centralized economic power equals progress, and female careers outside a Soviet office are not promising. Practicality means pragmatism, rational principles be damned.

Irina’s principles were still being developed, yet she knew she wanted to live. More precisely, to learn what it was like to be really alive. Upon seeing her cousin Kira for the first time in four years, she excitedly asks, “Did you eat fresh fruit in the Crimea? I’ve been dreaming, yearning and dying for grapes. Don’t you like grapes? Victor, they’re wearing the funniest things in the south. Did you notice Kira’s wooden sandals?”

While Kira’s dream was to build, and work with steel because it doesn’t tell lies, Irina’s was to work with music and paint because great art reflects her highest values. Victor’s highest aspiration was to conform, to do anything necessary under the fog of Soviet dictates, and volunteer for the dirty work needed to enforce the equality of their social justice.

To attain power, the Soviets preached ‘equality,’ for the ‘goodness of humanity.’ It was a world-wide proletariat lives matter movement after all. In Chapter 2, Kira asks Victor what his “stupendous whole” called society really means,

I don’t understand it. To whom is it that I owe a duty? To your neighbor next door? Or to the militia-man on the corner? Or to the clerk in the cooperative? Or to the man I saw in line, third from the door, with the old basket and the woman’s hat?

Yet, mindless duty is nearly universally accepted in 2020 America. In Chapter 1 of Part II, Ayn Rand explains that “the people” does not have a mind. In 1776, Adam Smith explained further in his classic treatise on economics, An Inquiry in to the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk of our own necessities, but of their advantages.

However, in order to rationalize government power, the 1920’s Soviets and 2020 American Democrats chose the 19th century economics and philosophy of Karl Marx,

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure. The less you are, the more you have.

This quote from Marx was intended to demonize capital, and capitalists, yet it became the ideal behind Soviet control of every day life in 1920s Russia. In this case, “treasure” belongs to Communist Party insiders and Washington political elites. With the removal of Revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky in 1925, pragmatic five-year New Economic Plans (NEP) became the norm.

Likewise, in Part II, Chapter 8 of We the Living, Victor Dunaev betrays everything he had ever claimed about self-sacrifice being a virtue and self-interest being a vice. He paid his dues by informing the Soviet secret police about his sister Irina’s ‘counter-revolutionary’ behavior. In order to get ahead in Party politics, Victor snitched that Irina was hiding her boyfriend Sasha in their apartment.

Victor’s father-in-law knew betrayal, and the Soviet big secret very well. During the wedding party in the previous chapter, Kira had heard Lavrov’s wife grunting about Leo Kovalensky’s new-found display of wealth, “And they say private traders don’t make no money . . . Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Lavrov growled, and spat loudly.”

Irina, still desperate to learn what it was like to be really alive, was arrested, taken to prison, and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian gulag. Upon being hauled away, she faced Victor,

Her eyes stopped him. They were looking at him fixedly; they looked suddenly like the eyes of Maria Petrovna in the old portrait. She turned and followed the soldiers. Without a word. She went first.

Her life now ended before it had really begun, Irina’s eyes had acquired the consciousness of the living dead, something Ayn Rand had described when Kira noticed a Soviet guard at the Petrograd train station, “His eyes were austere and forbidding like caverns where a single flame burned under cold, gray vaults. The soldier looked at her coldly, indifferently, astonished.”

The soldier’s vision was closed to a future for himself, and he was surprised to see it in another human being. Irina’s father Vasili was finally broken too; not by Maria’s kind of submission to God or Victor’s to Society, but by the 18th century moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant that combined both and dominated Soviet culture,

Many years ago, I felt sure of what I thought. I knew when I was right and I knew when to condemn. I can’t do it now. I don’t know that I can condemn anyone for anything. You’re my son Victor. I love you. I can’t help it, as you can’t help being what you are.

Vasili has submitted to the idea that we can not know what is objectively true, so principles are subjective. We do not possess free will, so good intentions are all that matter. Here, We the Living becomes the ultimate mystery novel. While visiting Irina in prison, before her transport to Siberia, Irina asks Kira,

There’s your life. You begin it, feeling that its something so precious and rare, so beautiful that its like a sacred treasure. Now its over, and it doesn’t make any difference to anyone. But there’s something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it, Kira? What?

What?

Who Controls The Past, Controls The Future. Which Is Why The Left Wants To Rewrite History.

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If we teach our kids in school that America is a bad country, founded by bad people with evil intent, then we can expect those children to grow up anti-American, destroyers of our established ways of life. It’s important to understand just what today’s teachers and professors, the storm troops of the Long March Through The Institutions, are doing.

In this matter of history, freedom is at stake, but also our humanity is at stake. America having been made for humans, the nation is at stake too.

In the novel 1984 (1949), the job of the protagonist Winston Smith is to rewrite history. He is one of thousands, likely millions, who rewrite every account of past things: every newspaper and magazine article; every book of every kind; anything written down they adjust to the changing desires of the regime. The new versions are reprinted in an endless stream.

These alterations concern big things like with whom the nation was at war, and little things like whether some middling official was a hero or a villain. Winston, secretly alienated from the regime, does not fully understand why he undertakes his work until the end of the novel. Here, in a series of conversations that are among the great contrivances of literature, a member of the inner party named O’Brien explains to Winston, as he tortures him, the purpose of these revisions: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Teaching philosophy by torture is characteristic of the regime.

This dark novel is only restating the theme that can be found in writing about despotism that goes back to the classics. It is in Book V of Aristotle’s Politics. It is in the grim and profound novel Darkness at Noon (1940). It is in the apparently happy world described in Brave New World (1932), where the classic books are kept locked in a safe for the private enjoyment exclusively of the world controller Mustapha Mond.

The key to understanding the slogan of the regime in 1984 is that tyranny, to be complete, to be perfectly itself, must overturn nature or reality. Only then can the passion for power run free. The part of reality about which we can know the most is the past. The present is fleeting and constantly changing, and the future is not yet here. This gives rise to the great doctrine of Aristotle, repeated in Thomas Aquinas and in many great places: “This alone is denied even to God: to make what has been not to have been.” If there is any reality, the past is not malleable.

Today our children are being raised in the gloomy light of a false view of our history. This view is legislated and enforced through centralized standards and textbooks that proceed from Washington, D.C. and the capitals of the biggest states. It is reinforced in schools of education across the land where teachers are trained. It is ingrained in graduate schools, where the teachers of teachers are trained. In its most radical statements it does not even pretend to be true. It is a perspective committed entirely to fashionable and “correct” attitudes.

Here is a simple example: students all learn that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder and that he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Therefore he was a hypocrite. In some ways he was, but you cannot quite claim him to be a hypocrite unless you study what he says. And what he says consistently about slavery is that it is wrong and must be got rid of. “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just…. The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.” (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII: Manners, 1781)

Children today do not learn this, nor do they learn that Jefferson the slaveholder understood the Declaration to condemn the practice of slavery, and that Jefferson the slaveholder was the prime agent in assuring that the first land upon which our union expanded, the Northwest Territory, would be forever without slaves. If they learned this it would open the way for them to love and know their country better, but also it would open the way for them to understand things better, because things are like that: never perfect. The soul that knows this growing up knows that life will be full of challenges and that it must try to do well, even if it cannot do perfectly. Nevertheless, it is worth the striving.

In such failures of education we are laying the groundwork for an overturning of two things: first, our connection with the great principles of America that have militated against the evils that are common in both our history and our present and in the history and present of every land occupied by every people; and secondly, our attachment to the forms of government, above all the Constitution, by which the American people remain in control of the awesome power of government.

The relationship between the final cause of the union, the Declaration of Independence, and the formal cause, the Constitution, was stated sublimely by Abraham Lincoln as so many things were. Quoting the Bible, Lincoln said that “a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” The Apple in this image is the Declaration, the frame of silver is the Constitution. We should cling to both of them. We must learn once again how to study and teach history and find the truth, both tragic and sublime, in its stories.

is the President of Hillsdale College.

Fear The New Ideology: Lockdownism.

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Why we chose this article: Jeffrey Tucker is a writer who has been consistent in his analysis of the motivations of governmental authorities and their army of experts in subjecting the citizenry to lockdown – the strangulation of economic and individual life. He expresses the opinion that this behavior of governments has become a new ideology, akin to communism and fascism.

Every political ideology has three elements: a vision of hell with an enemy that needs to be crushed, a vision of a more perfect world, and a plan for transitioning from one to the other. The means of transition usually involve the takeover and deployment of society’s most powerful tool: the state. For this reason, ideologies trend totalitarian. They depend fundamentally on overriding people’s preferences and choices and replacing them with scripted and planned belief systems and behaviors.

An obvious case is communism. Capitalism is the enemy, while worker control and the end of private property is the heaven, and the means to achieve the goal is violent expropriation. Socialism is a softer version of the same: in the Fabian tradition, you get there through piecemeal economic planning.

The ideology of racism posits something different. The hell is ethnic integration and race mixing, the heaven is racial homogeneity, and the means of change is the marginalization or killing off of some races. Fascism imagines global trade, individualism, and immigration to be the enemy while a mighty nationalism is heaven: the means of change is a great leader. You can observe the same about certain brands of theocratic religious traditionalism.

Each of these ideologies comes with a primary intellectual focus, a kind of story designed to occupy the mind. Think about exploitation. Think about inequality. Think about race theory. Think about national identity. Think about salvation. Each comes with its own language to signal one’s attachment to the ideology.

Most of the above ideologies are well worn. We have plenty of experience to draw on from history to observe the patterns, recognize the adherents, and refute the theories.

This year has given us a new ideology with totalitarian tendencies. It has a vision of hell, of heaven, and a means of transition. It has a unique language apparatus. It has a mental focus. It has signalling systems to reveal and recruit adherents.

That ideology is called lockdown. We might as well add the ism to the word: lockdownism.

Its vision of hell is a society in which pathogens run freely. Its heaven is a society managed entirely by medical technocrats whose main job is the suppression of all disease. The mental focus is the viruses and other bugs. The anthropology is to regard all human beings as little more than sacks of deadly pathogens. The people susceptible to the ideology are the people with various degrees of mysophobia, once regarded as a mental problem now elevated to the status of social awareness.

This year has been the first test of lockdownism. It included the most intrusive, comprehensive, and near-global controls of human beings and their movements in recorded history. Even in countries where the rule of law and liberties are sources of national pride, people were put under house arrest. Their churches and businesses were closed. The police have been unleashed to enforce it all and arrest open dissent. The devastation compares with wartime except that it was a government-imposed war on people’s right to move and exchange freely. We still cannot travel.

And remarkably, after all of this, what remains missing is the empirical evidence, from anywhere in the world, that this shocking and unprecedented regime had any effect on controlling much less stopping the virus. Even more remarkably, the few places that remained fully open (South Dakota, Sweden, Tanzania, Belarus), points out Will Jones, “lost no more than 0.06% of their population to the virus,” in contrast to high deaths lockdown New York and Britain.

Early on, most people went along, thinking that it was somehow necessary and short term. Two weeks stretched to 30 days which stretched to 7 months, and now we are told there will never be a time when we don’t practice this new public-policy faith. It’s a new totalitarianism. And with all such regimes, there is one set of rules for the rulers and another for the ruled.

The language apparatus is now incredibly familiar: curve flattening, spread slowing, social distancing, targeted layered containment, non-pharmaceutical intervention. The enemy is the virus and anyone who isn’t living their life solely to avoid contamination. Because you can’t see the virus, that usually means generating a paranoia of The Other: someone unlike you has the virus. Anyone could be a super spreader and you can recognize them by their noncompliance.

If Robert Glass or Neil Ferguson deserve to be called the founders of this movement, one of its most famous practitioners is Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes for Health. His vision of the future is positively shocking: it includes restrictions on who you can have in your home, the end of all large events, the end of travel, perhaps an attack on pets, and the effective dismantlement of all cities. Anthony Fauci explains:

“Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues. In such a transformation we will need to prioritize changes in those human behaviors that constitute risks for the emergence of infectious diseases. Chief among them are reducing crowding at home, work, and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation, intense urbanization, and intensive animal farming.

Equally important are ending global poverty, improving sanitation and hygiene, and reducing unsafe exposure to animals, so that humans and potential human pathogens have limited opportunities for contact. It is a useful “thought experiment” to note that until recent decades and centuries, many deadly pandemic diseases either did not exist or were not significant problems. Cholera, for example, was not known in the West until the late 1700s and became pandemic only because of human crowding and international travel, which allowed new access of the bacteria in regional Asian ecosystems to the unsanitary water and sewer systems that characterized cities throughout the Western world.

This realization leads us to suspect that some, and probably very many, of the living improvements achieved over recent centuries come at a high cost that we pay in deadly disease emergencies. Since we cannot return to ancient times, can we at least use lessons from those times to bend modernity in a safer direction? These are questions to be answered by all societies and their leaders, philosophers, builders, and thinkers and those involved in appreciating and influencing the environmental determinants of human health.”

Fauci’s entire essay reads like an attempted lockdown manifesto, complete with the fully expected longings for the state of nature and an imagined purification of life. Reading this utopian plan for a society without pathogens helps explain one of the strangest features of lockdownism: its puritanism. Notice that the lockdown particularly attacked anything that resembles fun: Broadway, movies, sports, travel, bowling, bars, restaurants, hotels, gyms, and clubs. Still now there are curfews in place to stop people from staying out too late — with absolutely no medical rationale. Pets are on the list too.

If an activity is fun, it is a target.

There is a moral element here. The thinking is that the more fun people are having, the more choices that are their own, the more disease (sin) spreads. It’s a medicalized version of Savoranola’s religious ideology that led to the Bonfire of the Vanities.

What’s remarkable is that Fauci was ever in a position to influence policy through his closeness to power, and he did in fact have a strong influence over the White House in turning an open policy into a lockdown one. Only once the White House caught on to his real agenda was he removed from the inner circle.

Lockdownism has all the expected elements. It has a maniacal focus on one life concern – the presence of pathogens – to the exclusion of every other concern. The least of the concerns is human liberty. The second least concern is the freedom of association. The third least concern is property rights. All of this must bow to the technocratic discipline of the disease mitigators. Constitutions and limits on government do not matter. And notice too how little medical therapeutics even figure in here. It’s not about making people get better. It’s about controlling the whole of life.

Note too that there is not the slightest concern here for trade-offs or unintended consequences. In the Covid-19 lockdowns, hospitals were emptied out due to restrictions on elective surgeries and diagnostics. That suffering from this disastrous decision will be with us for many years. The same is true of vaccinations for other diseases: they plummeted during the lockdowns. In other words, the lockdowns don’t even achieve good health outcomes; they do the opposite. Early evidence points to soring drug overdoses, depression, and suicide.

This is sheer fanaticism, a kind of insanity wrought by a wild vision of a one-dimensional world in which the whole of life is organized around disease avoidance. And there is an additional presumption here that our bodies (via the immune system) have not evolved alongside viruses for a million years. No recognition of that reality. Instead the sole goal is to make “social distancing” the national credo. Let us speak more plainly: what this really means is forced human separation. It means the dismantlement of markets, cities, in-person sports events, and the end of your right to move around freely.

All this is envisioned in Fauci’s manifesto. The entire argument rests on a simple error: the belief that more human contact spreads more disease and death. In contrast, Oxford’s eminent epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta argues that globalism and more human contact has boosted immunities and made life vastly safer for everyone.

The lockdowners have had surprising success in convincing people of their wild views. You only need to believe that virus avoidance is the only goal for everyone in society, and then spin out the implications from there. Before you know it, you have joined a new totalitarian cult.

The lockdowns are looking less like a gigantic error and more like the unfolding of a fanatical political ideology and policy experiment that attacks core postulates of civilization at their very root. It’s time we take it seriously and combat it with the same fervor with which a free people resisted all the other evil ideologies that sought to strip humanity of dignity and replace freedom with the terrifying dreams of intellectuals and their government sock puppets.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. This article appeared at aier.org.

There Is No Coronavirus Pandemic.

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Why we chose this article: It takes courage to speak out against conventional wisdom, especially when it is enforced by the unlimited coercive power of the State. In the case of the fake coronavirus pandemic scare, that coercive power is being exercised worldwide in some kind of concerted effort. But if we try to think our way to the real truth, is there really any pandemic? Gary D. Barnett has the courage to ask – and answer – the question.

When truth, honesty, and facts are considered, there can be only one valid reality, but that is not how ‘reality’ is understood or accepted by the common man. Given the dire situation we face today with this fictitious pandemic, the concept of reality as viewed by the masses is simply perception. That perception therefore can change with every passing moment, so it is not reality at all except in the sense of what is falsely believed as truth in any given time frame. In other words, each individual sees reality as what he thinks or believes in the flash of the present, and this belief is mostly based on what suits his own interest. So each person therefore, perceives his own reality, which means he has little knowledge of reality at all.

There has been an enormous amount of truthful information available concerning this fake virus scare, and many extremely qualified investigative journalists have continually exposed the lies coming from the mainstream media. The exposure of the lies of the controlling self-claimed ‘elites’ and the entirety of the political class have been made available, but are either ignored or hidden by those seeking to advance very nefarious agendas. Little if any of this honest information gets to the average American public, as reliance on mainstream news is still evident among the proletariat class. This is a travesty, as this same mainstream is the enabling arm of the propaganda state. There is so much information available, but so much of it is conflicting that it leaves the public-schooled masses in such a stupor that they look for the easy way out that aligns them with the largest crowd of non-thinkers.

Because of this, it is useful to concentrate on some factual basics that can be understood by a large portion of people in this country. I am speaking about total death rates and mortality; two terms that leave little room for argument or speculation. Putting aside for just a moment the bogus deaths claimed to be strictly due to a virus that has never been identified, the world’s actual death numbers tell a different story.

For purposes here, all considered will be for this current year of 2020. As of this moment, according to the World Life Expectancy tables, total deaths have reached over 44 million out of a total population of 7.734 billion people. If this number is extrapolated out for this year, total deaths worldwide will be approximately 58.7 million. Average deaths per year worldwide currently average close to 60 million deaths per year, so this year is certainly not abnormal, and in fact seems to be slightly less than normal. How can this be, given that we are told we are in the middle of one of the most deadly pandemic periods in history, so deadly that the world has been shut down?

Total deaths ‘claimed’ due to the so-called Covid-19 have reached according to these tables, about 1.009 million so far, which includes all Covid-19 deaths worldwide counted since last year. This does not take into consideration that the CDC has stated that only 6% of all Covid deaths in the U.S. (and therefore most likely the world) are from Covid alone. Using the current number of cases claimed of approximately 34 million worldwide, and current deaths claimed of 1.009 million, this equates to a death rate of 0.0297. If only deaths due to Covid without multiple co-morbidities are considered, that death rate falls to 0.0018. Either way, there is no pandemic!

To expand on this assertion, consider deaths due to other factors that apparently do not qualify as any pandemic? Once again, using the highest and certainly inaccurate number of a million claimed deaths due to Covid-19 alone, cardiovascular deaths this same year are 12.854 million, or almost 13 times more than Covid. Cancer is 5.7 times higher, respiratory 3 times higher, perinatal 2.3 times higher, diorrhoeal 1.6 times higher, digestive 1.5 times higher, and TB 1.1 times higher. To accentuate the ludicrous nature of this hoax by using the actual CDC U.S. death rate of Covid patients at 6% of what is recorded, the only morbidities less deadly than Covid are Dengue, a mosquito borne disease, and natural forces. So why is this being called a Pandemic?

Even automobile accidents will account for about the same number of deaths as are claimed as Covid deaths this year, (automobile deaths happen every year) but I have not seen the world governments outlawing the use of all motor vehicles on the planet. If any logic among the world’s population still exists, please consider the stupidity of this virus false flag event meant for the singular purpose of a global reset allowing for the control of the entire planet by the few.

The assaults on the freedom of global populations, and the propaganda campaign perpetrated by the controlling forces and their enforcers in government have been very successful considering the state’s agenda. The enormous amount of tyranny that has befallen the world’s residents in just the past few months is staggering, but this has been only the beginning of the terror, as in order for the state to achieve total power and control, much more death and destruction is planned.

The next major step in this attempt to conquer all of us, and in the process, relegate the bulk of society to that of a slave underclass to be used as fodder for the claimed elites, is a vaccine strategy that will seek to deliver its poison to 7 billion people. This attempt at massive population control will first be tried by gaining voluntary acceptance by the people at large all across the world. This will require much more fear mongering, and the state stands ready to frighten the people enough to gain mass compliance. If that does not work as planned, mandatory injection will be forthcoming, as the delivery of toxic poisons and viruses, possible sterility additives, monitoring and tracking technological agents, gene-altering nanoparticles, and any number of other dangerous mind-altering elements, will be sought and enforcement ramped up to extreme levels. That is one reason that the current administration here in this country has called out the military to distribute vaccines.

I believe the critical point of this horrendous coup meant to subdue society is upon us, and that this upcoming election will be the turning point that will signal a finality of any chance for revolt against this tyranny if apathy and indifference continue to consume the people.  Stand up now and fight against the monsters that are planning our demise, or our fate will be sealed in totalitarian madness.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

~ Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , “The Gulag Archipelago,” written 1958 to1968—Published 1973 by Editions du Seuil

Source: Here.

Are We Living In A Pre-Totalitarian Society?

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Why we chose this article: Each Monday, Mark Shupe publishes his analysis of 2020 America compared to 1920’s Russia, in his series Reliving We the Living. You can find a link to his free downloadable e-book on the Center For Individualism home page. Mark is not the only one to call upon us to make this sobering comparison. In today’s article, another author cites Hanna Arendt among others, in identifying the signs of a coming totalitarianism. We may each judge for ourselves.

Left-wing hysterics with major media platforms have for years been shrieking that President Trump is about to install a fascist dictatorship any minute. Meanwhile, unheard immigrants from the Soviet bloc warn that totalitarian tyranny is actually emerging from the left — and Americans are too naive to see it coming.

Sounds crazy, right? I thought so when I first heard it from an elderly woman who spent six years as a political prisoner under Czechoslovakia’s Marxist regime. But the more I talked to people like her, the more I came to see them as canaries in a coal mine. Their message is the same: What’s happening in America today reminds me of life under Communism.

It’s hard for Americans to see it, in part because our idea of totalitarianism comes from Orwell’s “1984” and Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago.” But Stalinism 2.0 is not what the old dissidents predict. They point out that the left in power is achieving totalitarian goals — not simply obedience, but the internalization of left-wing ideology by much softer means.

Who needs the gulag when you can compel obedience by threatening someone’s job or destroy her reputation on social media? Why bother with the secret police when the masses already hand over ­detailed personal information to Google and other woke capitalist behemoths via smartphones and laptops?

The coming soft totalitarianism may well unify the government, major corporations, the media and leading institutions of civil society, which will collaborate to suppress dissent and coerce conformity. The United States could one day have its own version of China’s high-tech social credit system. Those who resisted Soviet Communism urge us to prepare now for resistance, while we still can.

The shocking truth is, we Americans are living in a pre-totalitarian situation. In 1951, Hannah Arendt published her landmark study “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” in which she studied the conditions that led both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany to embrace totalitarianism. It makes for sobering reading in our present circumstances. Among the signs:

Loneliness and social atomization: Totalitarian movements, said Arendt, are “mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.” And “what prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.”

Loss of faith in hierarchies and institutions: Loneliness is politically significant because it leaves the masses hungry for a sense of community. In a healthy society, an individual could find fellowship and common purpose through the institutions of civil society: political parties, churches, civic clubs, sports leagues and the like. In contemporary America, these have largely withered.

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Transgressiveness for its own sake: In both pre-Bolshevik Russia and pre-Nazi Germany, elites reveled in acts of rebellion that made fun of traditions and standards, moral and otherwise. They immersed themselves in baseness and called it “liberation.” They also took pleasure in overturning institutions and established practices for the sake of outsiders.

Wrote Arendt: “The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.” Her words apply with eerie prescience to the Black Lives Matter upheaval in the streets and in elite institutions.

Susceptibility to propaganda and ideology: In pre-totalitarian nations, wrote Arendt, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.” It’s like Arendt anticipated The New York Times’ fraudulent 1619 Project.

America is sleepwalking into soft totalitarianism. If we ignore the prophetic voices of those who survived Communism, we deserve what we get. The best defense ordinary people can mount, said Solzhenitsyn, is to refuse to stay silent in the face of ideological lies. If we hope to defend our freedom, we have to start by rejecting a comforting lie we tell ourselves: that it can’t happen here.

Rod Dreher is author of the just-published “Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.” This article appeared at nypost.com.

German Scientists: COVID-19 Presents No Significant Risk To Healthy People, Old Or Young.

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Why we chose this article: Another COVID-19 article? Really? Well, yes, because we strongly believe that the public has been duped into giving up freedom when there is no valid reason to do so. In this case, two scientists have made an assertion, supported by facts and figures, that no-one else is willing to make: COVID-19 represents no threat at all to healthy people, over and above everyday occurrences like the common cold. 

What if the world vastly overestimated the seriousness of the coronavirus and effectuated countermeasures that wrought far more damage than the disease itself? That is the central question that Karina Reiss and Sucharit Bhakdi, a biochemist and microbiologist, respectively, set out to answer in Corona: False Alarm? Facts and Figures. 

Needless to say, they do so affirmatively.

From a lay perspective, I admit to having long been skeptical of most countries’ responses to the virus, believing that the consequences of locking down societies for months or even years on end would far outweigh the benefits, if not at present, certainly in the long run. But I accepted the common wisdom that the virus, while no more dangerous than the flu to those under 50, presents a significant risk to those over 60 years old.

The authors argue, however, that SARS-CoV-2 is akin to a run-of-the-mill respiratory virus, as most of its victims are already so ill that it is “almost always the last straw that breaks the camel’s back” (30). This is a controversial thesis, even amongst experts who are critical of extreme policies implemented in response to the virus. Nevertheless, the authors make a persuasive case.

Published by Chelsea Green, a company that “promote[s] the politics and practice of sustainable living,” Corona was first released in Germany over the summer, and the English version will become available in early October. The most compelling and original parts are the first several chapters, in which the authors explain how flaws in diagnostics and criteria for attributing deaths to the virus led to a distorted picture of the disease’s dangerousness.

In violation of “all international medical guidelines” “every deceased person who had tested positive for the virus entered the official records as a coronavirus victim” (16). When deaths are counted properly, Reiss and Bhakdi argue, it becomes evident that only those with serious underlying conditions are at risk of dying, and those “without severe preexisting illness need fear the virus no more than young people” (emphasis added). Stated otherwise, the virus simply does not present a significant risk, beyond those we take in everyday life, to healthy, older people, much less young healthy people (16-25, 30-35).

Various problems with the accuracy of PCR testing and methods of data collection also are addressed, and lead to the conclusion that “no reliable data existed regarding the true number of infections at any stage of the epidemic in [Germany]” (22). Other countries face similar problems. The authors quote Professor Walter Ricciardi, an advisor to the Italian Ministry of Health, for example, who stated that the virus had not actually been the true cause of 88% of Italian deaths attributed to it (25). Altogether, the authors make a powerful case that SARS-CoV-2 is in the realm of seasonal influenza, with an infection fatality rate of 0.27 % (17-29). That certainly calls into question the drastic measures implemented around the world to combat the virus.

The authors acknowledge that certain areas experienced higher death rates, specifically parts of the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and of course, New York City. Special circumstances, they posit, account for the elevated death counts. Those include avoidance of hospitals for fear of catching the virus by those suffering from heart attacks and strokes (United Kingdom), an elderly population, poor air quality, and other vaccinations that, in combination with coronavirus infections, could cause adverse reactions (Italy), and undocumented immigrants fearing detection and so refusing to go to the hospital (New York City) (34-39). These contributing factors indicate that severe outcomes could be drastically reduced by addressing some of these other problems, and do not warrant assigning SARS-CoV-2 a special status as a “killer virus.”

Reiss and Bhakdi then thoroughly explore the adverse effects of misguided attempts to control the coronavirus. While they discuss negative health consequences of mask-wearing (55), their focus is on lockdowns and forced social distancing. Such policies have caused economic catastrophes, skyrocketing drug use and suicides, increasing deaths from stroke and heart attack due to hospital avoidance, and myriad quality of life issues from isolation among the elderly to deprivation of education to encroachments upon human dignity that conflict with the tenets of liberal democracies (73-91).

I agree with Reiss and Bhakdi that those pressing for lockdowns and other restrictions, often members of the educated elite, vastly underestimate the hardship such measures inflict upon those less fortunate (83-85).

Not only do they cause substantial harm, but suppressive measures are ineffective (49-54, 60-61, 91-98). The authors pay particular attention to Sweden, which never adopted widespread mask usage and did not lock down. Instead, only gatherings of over 50 people were prohibited and citizens were relied upon to behave responsibly.

Reiss and Bhakdi correctly observe that the “press relentlessly emphasized that Sweden would pay a high price for its liberal path,” while noting that in reality, “Sweden without lockdown is not significantly different when compared to countries with lockdown” (93-94). Indeed, Sweden now has fewer deaths per million than the United States, fewer infections per capita than its Nordic neighbors, and its 7-day coronavirus-related death average is zero.

The authors discuss T-Cell cross immunity, a crucial topic and one that warrants far more discussion in the media. Recent studies have established that previous exposure to other coronaviruses, for instance the common cold or SARS-CoV-1, protects against infection from SARS-CoV-2. Thus, large portions of the population – the precise percentage varies across geographical locations – have some level of immunity to SARS-CoV-2, which explains why the virus tends to die out after infecting no more than around twenty percent of people in a municipality, regardless of restrictions (104-07).

While the authors do not mention this, other scientists, for instance theoretical epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta and structural biologist Michael Levitt, believe that means the virus has burned through the susceptible population in any location that has had a first wave, and there will not be a second. This has profound implications for places like New York City, which has remained partially shut down for many months past its peak, causing serious economic problems and educational deficits, as residents remain petrified that a second wave is imminent. Perhaps if the populace was acquainted with this theory, some of the terror would dissipate and a return to normal would be possible.

Reiss and Bhakdi also blame the now-discredited Imperial Model designed by Professor Neil Ferguson for the unwarranted alarm. Ferguson projected that two million people in the United States and half a million people in the United Kingdom would die, absent extreme restrictions (47). As the authors point out, Ferguson is famous for nothing if not his wildly exaggerated past predictions (47).

The authors suggest that the media, politicians, pharmaceutical companies, and large corporations, driven by financial motives in some cases and sheer incompetence in others, fueled the public panic that began with photos from Wuhan and Northern Italy and was exacerbated by Ferguson’s model (117-130). While Corona is written for a German audience, from an American’s perspective, it is hard to escape the fact that politics played a significant role in the events that have transpired. As early as January or February, opinions about the virus’s seriousness divided rapidly along political lines. Once President Trump publicly doubted the severity, and suggested that following Italy and China into lockdown would create an economic horror show, the Democrats’ position was a fait accompli. 

Likewise, the media’s dereliction of duty is beyond evident. As Reiss and Bhakdi observe, broadcasters and the press became “servile mouthpieces of the government” and never “critically questioned” the “disturbing images and frightening numbers” (50, 117-18). Incidentally, a letter recently published by 200 Belgian scientists similarly criticized the media: “[t]he relentless bombardment of numbers, unleashed on the population day after day, hour after hour, without indicating those numbers, without comparing them to flu deaths in other years, without comparing them with deaths from other causes, has induced a true psychosis of fear in the population. This is not information, but manipulation.”

As an avid consumer of the New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR, I can attest to the media having operated no differently in the United States. Apart from a few pieces in early March that questioned the wisdom of the course we had set upon, there was no serious discussion and no debate, at least in the left-leaning media, and anyone who dissented from the prevailing view was and continues to be dismissed as stupid or selfish. Early on, and without any nuanced analysis, Sweden was deemed a failure. The public has been beset by such terror, driven by anecdotes often presented without context, that it has become virtually impossible to dispel these many misconceptions using facts, figures, and logic.

For that reason, Reiss and Bhakdi embark upon an uphill battle by attempting to pierce the veil of fear that has enshrouded the world. If it can be done, however, this accessible book will play a key role. I urge the reader to approach Corona with an open mind, and when in doubt, to check the citations. Because, at the risk of sounding dramatic, our civilization depends on it. If we, as a species, can be so easily manipulated into ceding our liberty, dignity, and very lives to irrational fear, I shudder to see what the future holds.

Jenin Younes is a public defender in New York City. This article appeared at realclearmarkets.com.

A Sickening Reminder Of How Quickly Politicians – Who Never Miss A Paycheck Or A Meal – Can Wreck Things For Others.

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Why we chose this article: We believe that it is important for all of us to think carefully about the economic damage that our elected politicians, at federal, state, and local level, impose on people, and its direct negative effect on people’s quality of life, and, sometimes, ability to survive. It is, as John Tamny states, sickening.

Café Phillip is a sandwich shop on the NE side of K Street in Washington, D.C. Call this the historically unfashionable K Street versus K Street NW where the major lobbying shops have historically located. Until March of 2020, Café Phillip was booming. Staffed with energetic and highly professional immigrant employees, it did huge business in a part of D.C. that was increasingly filling up with office workers and residents.

Then came the political panic related to the coronavirus. Even though there were no indications from the virus’s origin, or Asia more broadly, that it was terribly lethal, U.S. politicians panicked. In their panic they quite literally chose to fight the virus with strict lockdowns that resulted in soaring unemployment, bankruptcy, and economic desperation. It would be hard to imagine a more wrongheaded approach to a health threat. Think about it.

Economic growth has historically produced the resources for scientists and doctors that have made victories over viruses possible. Yet in their panic, politicians on the local, state, and national levels forced the very contraction that would logically shrink economic resources, only to follow up with the extraction of trillions from the private economy in order to throw money at the horrendous problems they created. You really, really can’t make this up.

If Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser can sleep at night, it’s a miracle. Café Phillip is instructive in this regard. What was formerly packed, what was formerly defined by frenzied sandwich making in keeping with its enormous popularity, is generally empty during the day. Café Phillip is still open, at least for now. Other businesses in the area are beginning to close. Panicked politicians who will never miss a meal or a paycheck decided we the people couldn’t be trusted to go to work. We might spread the virus. Lockdowns were instituted, supposedly for our own good.

Sorry, but economic growth is what’s for our own good. It doesn’t just produce resources for those eager to find cures for viruses that make us ill or kill us, economic growth also frees us to quarantine or shelter-in-place if we feel some kind of virus threatens us. Please think about this. While many had the choice to work from home amid this panic, their options would have been great deal more limited in 2000. In 1980, forget about it.

Back to Café Phillip, to walk in nowadays is to see formerly energized employees with forlorn looks on their faces, mostly immobile as they wait for customers. It’s a far cry from what it used to be. And these are the employees that the Café still employs. The staff is a fraction of its former self, and it’s not unreasonable to speculate that if D.C.’s strict rules with regard to restaurants and offices continue, the Café will shut down.

It’s all a sickening reminder of how quickly politicians can wreck things. How they can thoughtlessly break things. They’re way too powerful on all levels.

Worse is that they’re breaking things in response to a virus that is once again not very lethal. What was obvious in the early part of 2020 when deaths didn’t soar in China is still obvious now.

To put a number to all this, the New York Times has reported all summer that over 40% of U.S. coronavirus deaths took place in nursing homes. The people dying with the virus tend to be very old, and with some kind of pre-existing malady or maladies. Who knows what the actual numbers are, but it’s no reach to conclude that of the 200,000 reported deaths related to the coronavirus, some (or maybe a lot) were on the verge of death either way.

To the above, some will respond that the musings are those of a heartless person. No, they’re not. In truth, they’re the words of a realist.

As this is being written, the global death count from the virus is a million people, but it should once again be at least suggested that the number is inflated. To die with something isn’t necessarily to die of it.

Still, for the purposes of this piece, let’s assume it’s a million. Better yet, let’s assume two million since the virus was traveling around the world for months before anyone was really testing.

The deaths are of course sad, but the same New York Times reporting that over 40% of U.S. virus deaths have happened in nursing homes has also projected that over 285 million of the world’s inhabitants are rushing toward starvation. Yes, you read that right. The Times won’t say it directly, but the panicked political reaction to the virus that revealed itself in contraction-inducing lockdowns and other limits on activity has parts of the world’s economy collapsing, and as a consequence hundreds of millions rushing back into poverty, starvation and death. Poverty is easily the biggest killer man has ever known. Nothing else comes close.

This would ideally get more attention from the Times. Consider the newspaper’s above-the-fold headline from Monday: “A Nation’s Anguish As Deaths Near 200,000.” Really? One senses the headline writers don’t even believe this. When old people die it’s sad, and sometimes very sad. But it’s rarely – if ever – a tragedy. Figure that death from old age is a very modern concept born of healthcare advances made possible by the very economic growth that politicians mindlessly snuffed out in their panic.

Thinking about anguish, the true anguish is born of hundreds of millions rushing back to poverty, starvation and death thanks to politicians fighting a virus with forced contraction. After that, a successful business is a bit of a miracle too. Most don’t make it, but when they do they lift up owners, employees, and customers alike. Tragic is seeing what improves people, gives dignity to workers, and wealth to owners being snuffed out by politicians who will once again never miss a meal.

The New York Times might think about this as it publishes alarmist headlines that obscure actual truths reported within the paper. It’s sad when we lose our grandparents and old people more broadly, but it’s tragic to read of people starving, and heart-wrenching to contemplate formerly productive workers sitting, waiting for customers; increasingly aware that what puts a roof over their heads will no longer. Proportion New York Times, proportion.

John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, where this article first appeared, and Vice President at FreedomWorks. 

The Price of Priest, Potentate, or Party ‘Protection’ Is One’s Mind, Happiness, and Future.

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Part II of Ayn Rand’s epic 1936 novel We the Living began with an abstract about the history and consciousness of St. Petersburg, Russia. In our Facebook study group, a member introduced us to the 1986 TV miniseries, Peter the Great. In an early scene of the movie, Czar Peter asks the assistant priest to the head of the Russian Orthodox church,

Our Lord told the Jews that the world must come to an end, and man come to judgement before the death of his last disciple. Correct? Correct, sire. Yet the last disciple has been dead for 17 centuries. Why hasn’t the world ended? Hmm, God, like a Czar, might change his mind. Very good, Father. Very resourceful!

From God to the Czar to the Party, and inevitably the individual, Chapters 4 – 6 illustrate the death spiral of socialism’s vortex. It begins with Kira coming to face to face with the ‘speculator’ she first met at the train station in Part I, Chapter 12, the one who had caused her subconscious mind to experience terror.

Now, this speculator was in her apartment with Leo, and recruiting Leo to front a private food store in Petrograd. It would be supplied with contraband from Soviet insider Pavel Syerov. Much like President Obama’s 2012 hot mike moment with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, “after my election, I have more flexibility,” Kira responded,

A lamp stood on a table; in its glow, she could see Morozov’s face leaning toward Leo’s, his slow words muffled to a sly, guilty whisper. “What are you talking about?” Kira threw at Morozov with the violence of a slap in the face. “A little business deal, Kira Alexandrovna.”

After Morozov left, Kira asks Leo, “This isn’t a joke you’re playing on me, is it? Or have you lost your mind entirely?” Leo replies, “I’m glad to find some use for it.”  This neutering of the mind continues at Pavel Syerov’s house party, the one celebrating Morozov’s deal with Leo that will make them wealthy,

Pavel Syerov can afford anything now. Anything on this God-damn earth! He can buy you all, guts and souls! I’m going to be a very great man! No one appreciates me, I’ll show ’em who’s got the whip! I’ve got a secret, a great secret! But I can’t tell you.

Protecting us poor dumb slobs, 2020 Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden can tell us: “I’m the guy, said we follow bin Laden to the gates of hell. I’m the guy who helped bail out the automobile industry. I’m the guy that ran the Recovery Act. I’m the guy that set up drug courts. I’m the guy that helped put together the Iran deal. I’m the guy that got the Brady Bill passed. I’m the guy that asked the CDC to keep detailed reports.” And the guy who invented water?

What he can’t tell you, as reported last week, is that Hunter Biden got wealthy exploiting his power of political pull with Russia and China. “C’mon, man?!”

The keeping of secrets becomes the essence of daily life when avoiding reality dominates everyone’s mind. Chapter 5 begins with Kira leaving a meeting of her excursion guides and telling a colleague,

“Yes, a splendid speech. Of course, our cultural duty to the proletariat is our primary goal.” It was easy to say. It was easy after she looked straight at Leo and laughed: “Leo, why those foolish questions? Don’t you trust me?

In 2020 America, the sadistic treatment and ensuing death of George Floyd by Minneapolis police preceded a summer of riots, looting, Molotov cocktails, and murder. Yet Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison withheld video evidence of Floyd’s arrest. Why? Ellison is a trained Communist who will instinctively lie to protect the Party.

Conversely, Kira was forced to lie to protect herself and Leo from the Party. At her cousin Victor’s wedding party in Chapter 5, his new father-in-law, Ilyitch Lavrov, explained this and exposed the effects of Pavel’s and Victor’s great secret,

I still see the people starved and ragged and crushed under a boot. Only the boot is red. I didn’t go to Siberia to fight for a crazed, power-drunk, bloodthirsty gang that strangles the people as they’ve never been strangled, that knows less of freedom than any Czar.

In the wake of the ensuing commotion, Victor’s father Vasili approached Lavrov, “Let us drink to our children’s happiness.”

Yet last week’s death of Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg, and the ensuing threats of blowing up the system if President Trump nominated a replacement, was reminiscent of the paranoia that opens Chapter 6,

Comrades! The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is surrounded by a hostile ring who watch and plot for its downfall. But no external enemy, no heinous plot of world imperialists is as dangerous to us than the internal enemy of dissension within our own ranks!

Of course, shipping Party loyalists to Siberian, or Minnesotan gulags doesn’t help much until after the Party holds absolute power.

In that spirit, 2020 Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is swelling the Party ranks. His offer to pay the outstanding fines of 32,000 Florida felons, and regain their voting privileges, is designed to help secure that state’s large electoral college. The elegant duplicity of the Communist loyalty and purgatory package-deal was explained at a Soviet Party meeting,

We must follow, with absolute discipline, the program dictated by our Party . . . We don’t need the obstinate, unbending Communist of iron . . . Idealism, comrades, is a good thing in its proper amount.

Faith and loyalty to scripture and doctrine is demanded, for now, maybe, at least until God, Czar, or Party changes its mind. Exiled Democratic Minnesota Senator Al Franken knows how this works, and so does the exiled Baltfleet naval officer, Stepan Timoshenko (the one who had arrested Leo and Kira in Part I, Chapter 10 while they were escaping to Germany).

Drunk, Timoshenko tells his last Soviet friend Andrei, “I’ve never felt better in my life. Free and finished. No worries of any kind any more. How many years you got left at the Institute? Think you’ll need it? The learning?” Timoshenko, mind finally severed from future, asks Andrei,

Have you ever seen a woman falling on the street, vomiting blood on the cobblestones, dying of hunger? I have. Did you see the limousines speeding at night. Did you see who’s in them?

Pavel Syerov and Stepan Timoshenko were drunk and boasting over the same great secret – the Party was nothing but a protection racket promising “freedom to all suffering humanity!”

“Did ever occur to you, Comrade Taganov, what a peculiar thing it is so many of our Party comrades are dying of overwork? Suicides. Only the papers will never say it.”

Economic regulations are a brake on economic growth.

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Why we chose this article: We favor economic growth as a force that can improve everyone’s life. 100% economics is a better focus than 100% politics. The research behind the academic paper quoted in this article demonstrates empirically that politicians – as regulators – detract from economic growth. They are not for the people, they are against the people.

In “The Impact of Economic Regulation on Growth: Survey and Synthesis,” James Broughel and Robert Hahn review cross-country studies that use indices of regulation produced by the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The authors find an apparent consensus in that body of research: economic regulations appear to reduce growth and productivity.

Economic Regulations Correspond With Lower Growth

Economic regulations include regulation that imposes barriers on firms seeking to enter an industry, regulation of product markets, and labor market restrictions on hiring and dismissals. A review of 25 studies that use World Bank and OECD data to assess the impact of economic regulation on growth or productivity finds an apparent con­sensus that economic regulations slow growth. This is consistent with several aspects of economic theory:

  • Incumbent firms will lobby for regulations that benefit them. These firms can organize politically to sup­port barriers to entry and other regulations that benefit them at the expense of new firms. This can lead to industrial concentration that reduces competition and the dynamics that spur economic growth.
  • Regulations hurt innovation. Entrepreneurs wrest markets from established firms by innovating produc­tion processes and final products—and firms innovate to escape competition from potential rivals. In both cases, value is created for consumers. However, regulation can dampen competition and, with it, the inno­vation and creativity that drive long-term growth.
  • Regulations may be portrayed as being in the public interest, but they often limit competition. Regulations are often defended on public-interest grounds by groups that stand to benefit from them financially. For example, physicians may defend licensing restrictions on nurse practitioners or pharmacists, framing arguments on public health grounds while actually seeking to limit competition in their industry.

Other Regulations May Also Affect Economic Growth

These include social and process regulations. Social regulations include health and safety regulations and environ­mental regulations.

  • In practice, social regulations and economic regulations tend to overlap. For example, many states have passed certificate-of-need laws that establish an approval process before a new healthcare facility can be constructed.
  • Much of environmental regulation involves setting up roadblocks to development in the form of permit­ting, environmental impact statements, or bans on certain kinds of development or modes of production.
  • Process regulations involve costly activities associated with filling out forms, such as tax forms.

More research is needed to better understand the consequences of social and other forms of regulation on growth. This is especially important given that social regulation has grown to be the dominant form of regulation in the United States.

Key Takeaway

Empirical evidence supports the theoretical hypothesis that economic regulations can reduce growth. Policymak­ers should be very cautious about increasing economic regulation. The burden of proof should be on policymakers to show that such regulation is likely to do more good than harm.

This article appeared at mercatus.org. There is a link to the quoted paper in pdf form here.

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