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“The foundations of economic freedom are weakening around the world, according to the 2013 Index of Economic Freedom published by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. Particularly concerning are the rise of populist ‘democratic’ movements that use the coercive power of government to redistribute income and control economic activity,” wrote Ambassador Terry Miller, in The Wall Street Journal of 9 January 2013. Earlier this year, an article in the Economist, ‘Venezuela: The revolution at bay’ (14 February 2015), confirmed the truthfulness of that warning issued by the Heritage Foundation two years ago.

“Sixteen years after Hugo Chavez took power in Venezuela, and two years after he died,” said the report in the Economist, “ his ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ faces the gravest threats yet to its survival. The regime is running out of money to import necessities and pay its debts. There are shortages of basic goods, from milk and flour to shampoo and disposable nappies. Queues, often of several hundred people, form each day outside supermarkets. Ten patients of the University Hospital in Caracas died over the Christmas period because of a shortage of heart valves.”

Despite being the beneficiary of the greatest oil boom in history, receiving around $800 billion in oil revenue between 2000 and 2012, “or two-and-a-half times as much in real terms as in the previous 13 years,” the report continued, “He [Chavez] spent the money on ‘21st century socialism’…As well as rewarding supporters with State jobs (the public payroll has more than doubled in 16 years), Chavez expropriated or nationalised 1,200 companies, from steelworks to a maker of cleaning products. Most now lose money or require government loans just to meet their payroll, according to Victor Alvarez, Chavez’s industry minister in 2005-06. The State subjugates the still large private sector through price controls, which discourage investment and production. The result is that Venezuela imports much of the food and consumer goods it used to produce, though not enough to meet demand.”
– See more at: http://www.cobdencentre.org/2015/10/resisting-socialism-in-early-20th-century-britain/#sthash.URAsbwLC.dpuf

Austerity Good or Bad?

October 12, 2015

Austerity Good or Bad?

QUESTION: Martin,

The ‘Austerity’ argument seems a bit confusing.

Surely, “Austerity” means reducing the size of Government and is an understanding that we can’t keep funding zillions of civil/public servants and on the other is a reduction of the Social Security Bill – healthcare, social benefits, the cost of the un and underemployed etc – both of which seem to be excellent objectives unless you are in one of the groups affected. Isn’t it impossible to return to or have a vibrant economy unless and until these objectives are achieved?

ANSWER: The problem with austerity carried out in the fashion is they are turning off the spigot, which is ending Marxist/Socialism, but they are continuing to service the debt and to accomplish that they hunt the rich and raise taxes, then agree to exchange all info and in the process you cause capital to hoard and not invest. So you are not really ending socialism, you are moving more toward totalitarianism.

So we will get these riots for they are not just people who receive, these are the people who cannot find a job because nobody is creating them with deflation. We have to look at both sides and this is why our proposal is to eliminate taxation at the federal level to unwind this mess from both directions.

So there is more to this than just reducing social programs. Doing that raising taxes to still service debts you end you with taxation without representation for the current workforce must then pay for spending that they never received anything in return.

Venezuela isn’t looking too hot

October 7, 2015

Venezuela isn’t looking too hot

If anarcho-capitalists should move to Somalia, then socialists – especially, “social democrats” — should move to Venezuela. The country is a complete disaster. But don’t take my word for it, read what a Caracas homemaker said after she tried to buy three cans of sardines and was ordered to put one back due to food rationing: “This is a disaster.”

Food shortages, rising prices, inflation, corrupted incentives, and rampant crime are all symptoms of a primordial problem: socialism. Just because the Socialist Party was democratically elected does not mean that the economic calculation problem has been solved. It’s as if the gods needed one more example to shove down the throats of Western leftists. Economic chaos, food rationing and a complete break down of the social order aren’t lessons of a misguided dictatorship of the proletariat, but a fundamental reality of socialism, whether democratic or not.

Democracy is just an insidious form of communism and the Venezuelan December 6th legislative elections won’t likely loosen the power the Socialists hold over the judiciary and government watchdog agencies. But since street protests led to more state violence, the Venezuelan people have retreated to a electoral solution.

Like Canada, where government workers prefer to vote for the party that offers more tax-funded goods, it’s assumed that in Venezuela, the government-controlled TV and radio stations will convince enough people to vote for the Socialists.

Pollster Luis Vicente Leon said that over 16 years in power, first Chavez and now [President Nicolas] Maduro have mastered the electoral arts. “They fiercely control the institutions and the money which allow them to become stronger through electoral engineering even when their support is flagging,” Leon wrote in the Caracas daily El Universal.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What It Means to Be a Socialist

September 21, 2015

What It Means to Be a Socialist

Chris Hedges gave this speech Sunday at a Santa Ana, Calif., event sponsored by the Green Party of Orange County.

We live in a revolutionary moment. The disastrous economic and political experiment that attempted to organize human behavior around the dictates of the global marketplace has failed. The promised prosperity that was to have raised the living standards of workers through trickle-down economics has been exposed as a lie. A tiny global oligarchy has amassed obscene wealth, while the engine of unfettered corporate capitalism plunders resources, exploits cheap, unorganized labor and creates pliable, corrupt governments that abandon the common good to serve corporate profit. The relentless drive by the fossil fuel industry for profits is destroying the ecosystem, threatening the viability of the human species. And no mechanisms to institute genuine reform or halt the corporate assault are left within the structures of power, which have surrendered to corporate control. The citizen has become irrelevant. He or she can participate in heavily choreographed elections, but the demands of corporations and banks are paramount.

History has amply demonstrated that the seizure of power by a tiny cabal, whether a political party or a clique of oligarchs, leads to despotism. Governments that cater exclusively to a narrow interest group and redirect the machinery of state to furthering the interests of that group are no longer capable of responding rationally in times of crisis. Blindly serving their masters, they acquiesce to the looting of state treasuries to bail out corrupt financial houses and banks while ignoring chronic unemployment and underemployment, along with stagnant or declining wages, crippling debt peonage, a collapsing infrastructure, and the millions left destitute and often homeless by deceptive mortgages and foreclosures.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Human Cost of Socialism in Power

September 12, 2015

The Human Cost of Socialism in Power

The attempt to establish a comprehensive socialist system in many parts of the world over the last one hundred years has been one of the cruelest and most brutal episodes in human history.

Some historians have estimated that as many as 200 million people may have died as part of the dream of creating a collectivist “Paradise on Earth.” Making a better “new world” was taken to mean the extermination, the liquidation, the mass murder of all those that the socialist revolutionary leaders declared to be “class enemies,” including the families, the children of “enemies of the people.”

The Bloody Road to Making a New Socialist Man

We will soon be marking the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (November 1917) under the Marxist revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin. In Soviet Russia, alone, it has been calculated by Russian and Western historians who had limited access to the secret archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB (the Soviet secret police) in the 1990s, that around 68 million innocent, unarmed men, women and children were killed over the nearly 75 years of communist rule in the Soviet Union.

The communist revolutionaries in Russia proudly declared their goal to be destruction and death to everything that existed before the revolution, so as to have a clean slate upon which to mold the new socialist man.

The evil of the Soviet system is that it was not cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Rather it was cruelty for a purpose – to make a new Soviet man and a new Soviet society. This required the destruction of everything that had gone before; and it also entailed the forced creation of a new civilization, as conjured up in the minds of those who had appointed themselves the creators of this brave new world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The City’s stranglehold makes Britain look like an oh-so-civilised mafia state

September 9, 2015

The City’s stranglehold makes Britain look like an oh-so-civilised mafia state

Dodgy donations, misselling, trading scandals, tax evasion: wherever you sniff, something stinks

Illustration by Sebastian Thibault on Britain as mafia state

‘The financial sector exploits an astonishing political privilege: the City of London is the only jurisdiction in the UK not fully subject to the authority of parliament.’ Illustration: Sébastian Thibault

Be reasonable in response to the unreasonable: this is what voters in the Labour election are told. Accommodate, moderate, triangulate, for the alternative is to isolate yourself from reality.

You might be inclined to agree. If so, please take a look at the reality to which you must submit. To an extent unknown since before the first world war, economic relations in this country are becoming set in stone. It is not just that the very rich no longer fall while the very poor no longer rise. It’s that the system itself is protected from risk. Through bailouts, quantitative easing and delays in interest-rate rises, speculative investment has been so well cushioned that – as the Guardian economics editor, Larry Elliott, puts it – financial markets are “one of the last bastions of socialism left on Earth”.

Public services, infrastructure, the very fabric of the nation: these too are being converted into risk-free investments. Social cleansing is transforming central London into an exclusive economic zone for property speculation. From a dozen directions, government policy converges on this objective.

The benefits cap and the bedroom tax drive the poor out of their homes. Theforced sale of high-value council houses creates a new asset pool. An uncapped and scarcely regulated private rental market turns these assets into gold. The freeze on council-tax banding since 1991, the lifting of the inheritance tax threshold, and £14bn a year in tax breaks for private landlords all help to guarantee stupendous returns.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Real Enemy Is Within

September 7, 2015

The Real Enemy Is Within

Steve Mann / Shutterstock

If you are not dedicated to the destruction of empire and the dismantling of American militarism, then you cannot count yourself as a member of the left. It is not a side issue. It is the issue. It is why I refuse to give a pass in this presidential election campaign to Bernie Sanders, who refuses to confront the war industry or the crimes of empire, including U.S. support for the slow genocide carried out by Israel against the Palestinians. There will be no genuine democratic, social, economic or political reform until we destroy our permanent war machine.

Militarists and war profiteers are our greatest enemy. They use fear, bolstered by racism, as a tool in their efforts to abolish civil liberties, crush dissent and ultimately extinguish democracy. To produce weapons and finance military expansion, they ruin the domestic economy by diverting resources, scientific and technical expertise and a disproportionate share of government funds. They use the military to carry out futile, decades-long wars to enrich corporations such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. War is a business. And when the generals retire, guess where they go to work? Profits swell. War never stops. Whole sections of the earth live in terror. And our nation is disemboweled and left to live under what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” Libertarians seem to get this. It is time the left woke up.

“Bourgeois society faces a dilemma,” socialist Rosa Luxemburg writes, “either a transition to Socialism, or a return to barbarism … we face the choice: either the victory of imperialism and the decline of all culture, as in ancient Rome—annihilation, devastation, degeneration, a yawning graveyard; or the victory of Socialism—the victory of the international working class consciously assaulting imperialism and its method: war. This is the dilemma of world history, either-or; the die will be cast by the class-conscious proletariat.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why is it So Hard for the West to See Everything is Connected?

August 14, 2015

Why is it So Hard for the West to See Everything is Connected?

QUESTION: Marty, you have written many times how everything is connected and how in Asian culture that is the foundation of all understanding. Why is it so hard in the West to comprehend this fundamental concept?

All the best

ANSWER: I think it is all part of the idea that we can alter society forcing it to do as we desire. Politics is based upon this. Socialism is all about robbing one class to benefit the other. There is no comprehension that everything is connected and this permeates analysis as well. This is not my personal discovery for many have seen these connections in Eastern Philosophies. I think in economics, politicians are not interested in such realizations for it means they are not the masters of the universe.

You take Obama’s policy against Russia. He has effectively been disrupting everything around Europe and the consequences are pouring in refugees to Europe and his sanctions have hurt European farmers and the economy. It is not deliberate, but it is reckless for there is no recognition of how everything is connected.

Every action has a consequence. We have the Fed lowered rates to help the banks. But that crisis is over and the consequence has been to create the next crisis – the defaults of pensions and insurance companies that required high interest rates. So many regulations required pension funds to own government bonds. The regulations have set the stage for the next crisis.

We cannot escape this connectivity. Whatever action we take has a consequence. It is impossible to manipulate markets and the economy for there will always be unintended collateral damage. We are living in the era that will bring about a collapse of socialism precisely as took place in communism. Government is incapable of ever managing society for they cannot escape the inter-connectivity.

Venezuela Increasingly Looks Like A War Zone

August 2, 2015

Venezuela Increasingly Looks Like A War Zone

Over the years, we have repeatedly poked fun at the transformation of Venezuela into a “socialist utopia” – an economy in a state of terminal collapse, where the destruction of the currency (one black market Bolivaris now worth 107 times less than the official currency’s exchange rate) and the resulting hyperinflation is only matched be barren wasteland that local stores have transformed into now that conventional supply chains are irreparably broken.

Just this past Wednesday we showed a clip of what is currently taking place inside Venezuela supermarkets, noting that “the hyperinflationary collapse in Venezuela is reaching its terminal phase. With inflation soaring at least 65%, murder rates the 2nd highest in the world, and chronic food (and toilet paper shortages), the following disturbing clip shows what is rapidly becoming major social unrest in the Maduro’s socialist paradise… and perhaps more importantly, Venezuela shows us what the end game for every fiat money system looks like (and perhaps Janet and her colleagues should remember that).”

Unfortunately, while mocking socialist paradises everywhere is a recurring theme especially once they have completely run out of other people’s money to burn through, what always follows next is far less amusing – completely social collapse, with riots, civil war and deaths not far behind.

That is precisely what the video shown below has captured. In the clip, a demonstration against Venezuela’s poor transportation services quickly turned violent. End result: one person dead from a gunshot wound, more than 80 arrested and four shops looted on the Manuel Piar Avenue in San Felix.

What is most distrubing is how comparable to an open war zone what was once a vibrant, rich and beautiful Latin American country has become.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cronies, Polluters and Funny Money

July 31, 2015

Cronies, Polluters and Funny Money

What’s Really Killing Capitalism

VANCOUVER, Canada – Hillary is taking the bull by the horns… and putting the knife between her teeth. She is a “take-charge” candidate and aims to let us know.

Yes, earlier his week, she promised to improve capitalism. Now, it’s the climate of planet Earth that has her attention. She’s going to make it better by decreasing carbon emissions – by force, of course.

Clinton Saints preserve us! Now she wants to “save the planet” too. Ironically not even the reds and professional scaremongers are happy with her “climate change” contortions (as seen in the Guardian, a hotbed of climate alarmism and a preferred medium of assorted limousine socialists).

Photo credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

Next week, presumably, she will vanquish death itself.

But let us turn to the markets. On Tuesday night as the sun set, things were looking up. From Bloomberg:

U.S. stocks rose, ending their longest losing streak since January, amid better-than-forecast earnings and as Chinese equities pulled back from a selloff.

Whether the rebound continues… or collapses altogether… we wait to find out. Unlike Ms. Clinton, we are a slave to God and to the markets; we are not their master.

As we reported on Tuesday, Hillary also wants to punish investors who don’t hold on to their positions for long enough. She never mentioned that meddlers like herself largely caused the problem of “short-termism” in the stock market.

In a free economy, people choose how long to hold on to their stocks, according to what suits them. Some are investing for generations. Some are retiring soon. Some are traders, looking to profit from short-term moves in the market.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Today’s Anti-Capitalists Ignore the Fundamental Problems of Socialism

July 29, 2015

Today’s Anti-Capitalists Ignore the Fundamental Problems of Socialism

Anti-market and pro-socialist rhetoric is surging in headlines (see also here, here, and here) and popping up more and more on social media feeds. Much of the time, these opponents of markets can’t tell the difference between state-sponsored organizations like the International Monetary Fund and actual markets. But, that doesn’t matter because the articles and memes are often populist and vaguely worded — intentionally framed in such a way to easily deflect uninformed attacks and honest descriptions of what they are actually saying. In the end, they can all be boiled down to one message: socialism works and is better than capitalism.

While most of it comes from the Left, the Right is not innocent, since the Right appears to be primarily concerned with promoting its own version of populism, which apparently does not involve a defense of markets. “Build bigger walls at the border,” for example, is not a sufficient response to “All profits are evil!”

Instead of stooping to this level or simply resorting to “Read Mises!” (a more fitting response), we must show, yet again, that socialism — even under well-meaning political leaders — is impossible and leads to disastrous consequences.

The Necessity of Profits, Prices, and Entrepreneurs

Socialism is the collective ownership (i.e., a state monopoly) of the means of production. It calls for the abolition of private ownership of factors of production. Wages and profits are two parts of the same pie, and socialism says the profit slice should be zero.

The inherent theoretical problems of socialism all emanate from its definition, and not the particulars of its application. However, the supporters of socialism define “collective,” as no exchange of the factors of production. And without exchange, there can be no prices, and without prices there is no way to measure the costs of production.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Venezuela’s Hyperinflation Crack-Up Boom on its Way to Outer Space

July 25, 2015

Venezuela’s Hyperinflation Crack-Up Boom on its Way to Outer Space

Why Stock Markets Are Not an Indicator of the Economy

In a free unhampered market economy based on a sound monetary system – this is to say a market-chosen monetary system with a free banking industry and no central planning institution that is manipulating interest rates and determining the size of the money supply – the gains and losses of shares prices in the stock market will simply be a reflection of entrepreneurial profits achieved in the past, plus embedded expectations of profits likely to be achieved in the future.
Maduro Nicolas Maduro, the hapless president of socialist Venezuela, here seen hung with all sorts of bling supposed to testify to his achievements.

Photo credit: Prensa Presidencial

Under the assumption that such a free market money system would be largely non-inflationary, this mixture of “historical record” and expectations would primarily be expressed by the relative prices of shares. The bulk of the returns achieved by investors would come from dividend payments, as a general inflation of “the market” would be nigh impossible.

And yet, although the stock market as a whole would barely appreciate in price in nominal terms, the gains achieved in real terms as well as real economic growth, would be far stronger than they are under our current, centrally planned system of constant inflation. Moreover, economic progress would be far more equitable as well, as the reverse redistribution of wealth caused by inflationary policy wouldn’t exist.

This is why a rising stock market tells us absolutely nothing about the state of the underlying economy in the present inflationary system. In fact, we once again have a real life example providing ample empirical confirmation of this assertion. Venezuela’s economy is in free-fall. Its desperate socialist government, in an attempt to satisfy the masses of voters who have voted for it in order to receive handouts, is resorting to ever more repressive economic policy and money printing on a truly gargantuan scale to at least keep up theappearance that bread and circuses will continue.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Individual and His Future

July 15, 2015

The Individual and His Future

“It’s instructive to read what authors wrote about core values a hundred or two hundred years ago, because then you can appreciate what has happened to the culture of a nation. You can grasp the enormous influence of planned propaganda, which changes minds, builds new consensus, and exiles certain disruptive thinkers to the margins of society. You can see what has been painted over, with great intent, in order to promote tyranny that proclaims a greater good for all.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

Here I present several statements about the individual, written in 19th century America. The authors, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and James Fenimore Cooper were prominent figures. Emerson, in his time, was the most famous.

“All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity.” James Fenimore Cooper

“The less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of [by] formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The former generations acted under the belief that a shining social prosperity was the beatitude of man, and sacrificed uniformly the citizen to the State. The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Henry David Thoreau

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Greece illustrates 150 years of socialist failure in Europe

June 25, 2015

Greece illustrates 150 years of socialist failure in Europe

Greece cannot pay its debts…ever. Nor can several other members of the European Union. That’s why Europe’s elite are loath to place Greece in default. If Greece is allowed to abrogate its debts, why should any of the other debtor members of the EU pay up? The financial consequences of massive default by most of the EU members is hard to predict, but it won’t be pretty. Europe has built a financial house of cards, and the slightest loss of confidence will bring it crashing down.

The tragedy of Europe has socialism at its core. Europe has flirted with socialism since the late nineteenth century. Nineteenth century Bismarckian socialism produced two world wars. Leninist socialism slaughtered and enslaved hundreds of millions until it collapsed, mercifully without a third world war. Yet, not to be deterred, in the ashes of World War II Europe’s socialists embarked on a new socialist dream. If socialism fails in one country, perhaps it will succeed if all of Europe joined a supranational socialist organization. Oh, they don’t call what has evolved from this dream “socialism”, but it is socialism nonetheless.

Socialism will not work, whether in one country, a multi-state region such as Europe, or the entire world. Ludwig von Mises explained that socialism is not an alternative economic system. It is a program for consumption. It tells us nothing about economic production. Since each man’s production must be distributed to all of mankind, there is no economic incentive to produce anything, although there may be the incentive of coercion and threats of violence.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This Time is Different

May 28, 2015

This Time is Different

For years, I have warned that we will face our worst nightmare – the collapse of socialism. In the death throes of this abomination that even the Ten Commandments listed as a serious sin, equal to “thou shalt not kill”, government will become the ugly beast that will devour society to retain power. Of course, they will never see themselves that way, but they will justify in their minds that stripping us of our freedom, rights, privileges, and immunities, is necessary to maintain socialism for the good of the people.

We are running out of other peoples’ money, as Margaret Thatcher warned. Karl Marx, who sought to change society by sheer force, set all this in motion. What has taken place is really scary, for indeed they have altered society far more than anyone dares to ponder.

Why is this Sovereign Debt Crisis collapse different from 1931? When the governments of the world defaulted on their debts in 1931, there were no pension funds. Government has exempted itself from all prudent reason for you take the state operated pension funds, like Social Security in the USA, where 100% of the money is in government bonds. They may have no intention of defaulting, but very few government have ever paid off their debts in the end.

Then there are states who regulate pension funds requiring more than 80% to be in government bonds. A Sovereign Debt Default this time around will wipe out socialism, yet the bulk of the people are clueless not merely about the risk, but the ramifications. Younger generations do not save to support their parents for that was government’s job post-Great Depression. Socialism has altered thousands of years of family structure following the ranting of Karl Marx. This has been one giant lab experiment that ended badly in China and Russia and is coming to a local government near you.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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