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Tag Archives: socialism
#ResistFinance
#ResistFinance
It may just be fitting that today is May Day, the old remembrance of the once “great” destructive force of international communism. Of course, it still resonates largely because its proponents view it from the standpoint of actual purity. Stalin, you see, never really practiced it; as such it has supposedly never really been tried. Repeating that lie long enough has left generations susceptible to the same cowing interpretations.
Normally, these fascinations with Marx and Marxism are left to the ivory towers of academia, who have apparently taken heart to the KGB’s “liberation ideology” and brought it to America’s college youth. I don’t mean for this to be such a political discussion, but it is somewhat unavoidable. After all, one of the most trending topics on Twitter earlier this week, just in time for May Day itself, was #ResistCapitalism.
The open spaces for this backlash are provided neatly by the recovery that doesn’t exist outside of various DSGE and GARCH models central banks employ to tell us how well they have done. Today’s youth are being inundated with Marxism that once appeared ridiculous in obviousness, but now contains, seemingly, some righteous prescription. This is not just “inequality” but it isn’t apart from it either, as stock bubbles and the very real lack of wage opportunity sharpen this great sense of divide.
From the perspective of anyone who appreciates actual freedom and free markets, there is an easy answer to the problem – that all these neo-socialists that don’t appreciated the irony of being “afforded” the opportunity to resist and renounce capitalism by all its very successful fruits. They are confused over the nature of capitalism itself, as maybe should not be so unappreciated or unexpected since it has been buried for some decades now.
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Modern-Day Social Engineers and Inequality
Modern-Day Social Engineers and Inequality
Is Inequality a Bad Thing?
We couldn’t believe what we were seeing when coming across the following headline at Reuters recently: “Fed’s Yellen says research needed to understand inequality issue”. Seriously? Maybe we can help the good chairwoman out a bit. First of all, human beings are already born unequal. With that we not only mean that they are born in different social strata, but that they are usually born with unequal talents, brains, physique, and so forth.
Fed chair Janet Yellen – she doesn’t look concerned here, but of course we don’t want her to constantly wear a frown. Anyway, inequality is on her mind she says.
Photo credit: AP
In that sense, inequality is not an “issue”, but simply a fact of life. Ms. Yellen refers of course specifically to inequality in incomes and wealth. This has been an “issue” for etatistes of all stripes for a very long time. However, one must ask: why should it be an issue, if not for envy? Socialism thrives on envy. Its message to its supporters is basically: your fellow men don’t deserve to be wealthier than you are. Therefore, their wealth should be taken from them by force, and distributed “justly”. In actual practice, we usually find that the political representatives of socialism are enjoying capitalist luxuries which will forever remain out of reach for most members of their target audience.
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Amid “US Coup”, Venezuela Takes Another $5 Billion Loan From China
Amid “US Coup”, Venezuela Takes Another $5 Billion Loan From China
The people of Venezuela can rejoice… not so fast. Amid paranoid-sounding (though not unlikely) rantings about US-created coups (and blaming ‘economic’ war for his nation’s Socialist utopia hyperinflation), it appears President Maduro just got another life-line (or more rope to hang himself). After begging China’s leader Xi early in January for moar money (and getting it), China – which is already Venezuela’s biggest creditor with over $50 billion loaned since 2007 – as Reutersreports, is said to plan on signing another $5bn loan to Venezuela for “wide-ranging” projects like “mature oil fields.” So, it appears China is enabling Maduro to hollow out his economy even more.
China is poised to lend Venezuela around $10 billion in coming months, half as part of a bilateral financing deal and the other half for development of oil fields, a senior official at state oil company PDVSAsaid on Thursday.The first $5 billion loan, part of the Joint Chinese-Venezuelan Fund, is due to be signed this month and will be destined for wide-ranging projects in the OPEC country, said the official.
The other separate $5 billion loan is set to be clinched in June and will likely stipulate contracting Chinese companies to boost production in PDVSA’s mature oil fields, the source added.
“China wants to decisively back investments in areas like mature oil fields so that PDVSA can rapidly increase its production,” said the source, who asked not to be identified.
* * *
Maybe it’s time to stock up on condoms and toilet paper?
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The EU’s Stalinesque “4 Year Plan”
The EU’s Stalinesque “4 Year Plan”
They Didn’t Want to Call it the “5 Year Plan”
We have already commented on previous occasions on the EU’s “investment plan” (see: “EU Planning to Spend Money it Doesn’t Have” for details), which is bound to result in the production of countless white elephants across Europe (such as Poland’s “ghost airports”). These investments are apt to “boost GDP” in a number of countries, but will very likely leave nothing but proverbial bridges to nowhere behind. It is going to be yet another giant waste of scarce resources.
Apparently the EU has now given its placet to a “Four Year Plan” with the aim of investinf €315 billion, with various EU governments vying for the best place at the trough. It seems they didn’t want to make it a “Five Year Plan” – that would have been too reminiscent of the Soviet GOSPLAN agency, so a four year plan was adopted. However, what they may not have been aware of is that Stalin actually gave orders that the Soviet Union’s five year plans had to be fulfilled in four years:
An old Soviet GOSPLAN poster: “Let’s fulfill the five year plan in four years!”
As Reuters reports on this latest giant boondoggle thought up by the administrative apparatus of the European socialist superstate project:
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Venezuela To Start Fingerprinting Supermarket Shoppers
Venezuela To Start Fingerprinting Supermarket Shoppers
Back in August, when we wrote about the latest instance of trouble in Maduro’s socialist paradise, we cautioned that as a result of the economic collapse in the Latin American nation (and this was even before the plunge in crude made the “paradise” into the 9th circle of hell), Venezuelans soon may need to have their fingerprints scanned before they can buy bread and other staples. This unprecedented step was proposed after Maduro had the brilliant idea of proposing mandatory grocery fingerprinting system to combat food shortages. He said then that “the program will stop people from buying too much of a single item”, but did not say when it would take effect.
Privacy concerns aside (clearly Venezuelans have bigger, well, smaller fish to fry) there was hope that this plunge into insanity would be delayed indefinitely, as the last thing Venezuela’s strained economy would be able to handle is smuggling of the most basic of necessities: something such a dramatic rationing step would surely lead to.
Unfortunately for the struggling Venezuelan population, the time has arrived and as AP reported over the weekend, Venezuela “will begin installing 20,000 fingerprint scanners at supermarkets nationwide in a bid to stamp out hoarding and panic buying” as of this moment.
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Is It Socialism or Just Failure?
Is It Socialism or Just Failure?
It’s all still about Greece, and that makes sense, if nothing else Syriza is a breath if not a tornado of fresh air. But those too pass. The question at the end remains: did anything really change? It’s quite possible, don’t get me wrong, but Tsipras and Vanoufakis are busy looking out for the people who voted for them, not the rest of the Europe, or the world for that matter. And neither should they.
They’ve already gotten good response from Obama, from France and Britain, and if only for that reason they will get more. But you have to understand what they are trying to do: getting a better life for their own people, and that’s hard enough all by itself. The best they can do for now, hopefully, is that. But Greece is merely a symptom of something bigger and deeper that is going wrong.
There’s an ideological battle happening between money and wellbeing, between people and banks. Western leaders have so far chosen to protect money and banks, instead of people and their wellbeing, and that’s why we find ourselves where we do. Choosing money before people can only end in the demise of the system that makes such a choice. That, however, is apparently terribly hard to comprehend.
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American Exceptionalism and the Entitlement State
American Exceptionalism and the Entitlement State
If social policy were medicine, and countries were the patients, the United States today would be a post-surgical charge under observation after an ambitious and previously untested transplant operation. Surgeons have grafted a foreign organ — the European welfare state — into the American body. The transplanted organ has thrived — in fact, it has grown immensely. The condition of the patient, however, is another question altogether. The patient’s vital signs have not responded entirely positively to this social surgery; in fact, by some important metrics, the patient’s post-operative behavior appears to be impaired. And, like many other transplant patients, this one seems to have effected a disturbing change in mood, even personality, as a consequence of the operation.
The modern welfare state has a distinctly European pedigree. Naturally enough, the architecture of the welfare state was designed and developed with European realities in mind, the most important of which were European beliefs about poverty. Thanks to their history of Old World feudalism, with its centuries of rigid class barriers and attendant lack of opportunity for mobility based on merit, Europeans held a powerful, continentally pervasive belief that ordinary people who found themselves in poverty or need were effectively stuck in it — and, no less important, that they were stuck through no fault of their own, but rather by an accident of birth. (Whether this belief was entirely accurate is another story, though beside the point: This was what people perceived and believed, and at the end of the day those perceptions shaped the formation and development of Europe’s welfare states.) The state provision of old-age pensions, unemployment benefits, and health services — along with official family support and other household-income guarantees — served a multiplicity of purposes for European political economies, not the least of which was to assuage voters’ discontent with the perceived shortcomings of their countries’ social structures through a highly visible and explicitly political mechanism for broadly based and compensatory income redistribution.
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