Legend has it that the Persian King Xerxes was confident in his ability to crush the Greeks because he saw them as dishonest men. They lied to one another in their marketplace and in their debates over politics and law. From the perspective of the Persians, a people who allegedly viewed lying as the worst crime possible, this defect would undermine their efforts to resist the Persians. Men who cannot trust one another cannot defend one another when under attack.
We know Xerxes was wrong, if he indeed thought these things. Much of our history of the time comes from Herodotus, who was not afraid to gild the lily when rerecording the history of the Greeks and her enemies. It is a useful insight, however, as the market-based society is, when you think about it, a system where the rewards go to those who are best at deceiving their fellow citizens. More accurately, status comes from deceiving people into thinking you are being honest with them.
The marketplace for goods and services is where sellers misrepresent their goods in order to maximize profit. Sellers exaggerate key features and do not disclose possible defects to potential buyers. On the other hand, the buyer will misrepresent his interests and make claims about finding a better deal from another seller. Both sides haggle trying to take advantage of the other. The dynamic of the marketplace is a game of liar’s poker where cleverness and deceit are rewarded.
Democratic politics is just taking the marketplace idea and applying it to the governance of the society. The sellers are the people with ideas for how to solve problems in society and the buyers are the majority who vote on it. The game is to convince the mob there is a problem and that you have the solution. Being right about the problem or the solution is unimportant. What gets rewarded is convincing fifty percent plus one to go along with your scheme, which makes you the winner.
The recent trial balloon launched by the inner party regarding a wealth tax is a good example of how the lying game works. The idea being floated is that billionaires will be subjected to a new tax that applies to their unrealized capital gains. They will pay a tax based on the potential profit from the sale of certain assets. Presumably, this will apply only to equities, the market value of which can be determined by the current trading price at the time the tax is assessed.
Right away, you see that everything about this is a lie. For starters, how does one determine if you are a billionaire? It is easy when it comes to oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, but further down the list it gets less clear. Calculating net worth is not as straight forward at this level as most assume. Of course, avoiding the tax will spawn an industry to help the rich hide their assets from this tax. Since that exists in other areas, this tax is a boon to the financial schemers who currently serve the rich.
Then you have the impracticality of the idea. When would the tax be levied, and would it be levied on the same asset every year? If you buy a stock in 2021 and it goes up ten percent, you get taxed on the ten percent. If it goes up again in 2022, do you pay a tax on it again or just the increase in 2022? What happens when you pay the tax on unrealized gains that disappear the day after you paid the tax? What about assets held in family trusts? Do they get taxed as well?
The point here is that this is a nutty idea simply on the grounds that it is a wildly complicated solution to a problem that is simple to address. If you really want the rich to pay more tax, you tax them at a higher rate. Treating all income equally is the most straightforward and honest solution. Those gains and losses from investment activity are just another line in the income section of the tax return. Imputed income like stock options is just another entry on the W2.
Of course, this will never become law. It is just a sop to the mouth breathers on the far left who operate on massive corporate platforms while pretending to be anti-capitalists and socialists. It also allows the zombies in Conservative Inc. to come out from under their beds and do their libertarian dance. They get to put on the thin tie, throw on the Flock of Seagulls cassette and carry on like it is 1985. It is party night at the museum where everyone gets to pretend the outside world does not exist.
Everything about this drama is a lie, because it is just a drama. It is a story being told to arouse the passions of the crowd so they stop thinking about things that should matter to them, like the fact that gasoline prices have doubled, or their government lied about the Covid pandemic for two years. This is the nature of democratic politics. The winners are just the best liars. The losers never lose anything. They just have to come up with better lies so they can get another crack at the lying game.
A culture built around rewarding the most devious and dishonest is going to get more of the devious and dishonest. Assuming Herodotus was right about Xerxes, it was an important insight about the nature of democracy. The marketplace society is inevitably a society full of liars. On the other hand, the factious Greeks, and their penchant for lying, did beat the Persians. They did not just defend their lands, they dominated the Persians on land and sea, despite the numerical disadvantages.
It may be that a hidden strength of the marketplace is that because no one can trust anyone and there is no neutral arbiter to enforce honestly, everyone has to be on their game all the time. Therefore, it boils off those who are less clever and less able to live by their own wits. The cost to the collective strength that comes from the lack of trust is less than the benefit that comes from stronger individual members. Deracinated clever liars are better than united trusting morons.
That may be why democracy is such a violent form of government. The Greeks were always fighting with one another and then with the Persians. America is a hyper-violent empire that is always looking to wage war. Perhaps the hidden cost of that hidden strength of the market it is needs an enemy to bind the parts together. The reason liberal democracy looks a lot like fascism is the only way to bind the sticks together is with enemies, real and imagined.
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We used to call this market phenomenon “Jewing”.
Just sayin’
15
Waddaya mean “used to”?
10
Ha. What was revealing to me years ago when I played in the liars pen was that all the ivory tower discussions of “markets”, economics, capitalism, etc. were just intellectual rituals to keep the rubes and goy fixated on principles as opposed to shining the light on the operant culture. A lot like how young white boys are taught all about equal rights, chivalry, and Nice Guy morality while the savages and cads take their turns with the girls.
Eventually, after all the maths and charts in the world repeatedly failed to demonstrate how a market would correct for a determined psychopath, you either learn to become more jooey yourself or you take whats left of your chips and leave.
To this day when people want to debate the merits of “Capitalism” versus other derivatives absent any mention of the culture and character of those who would occupy such a system, it rings hollow like other great debates of libertarians. And I then wonder if they are trying to convince me that a human system can be self-purifying to become more pure than the sum of the hearts of the men within it – or if they are trying to convince themselves that their own lies and deception are whitewashed because at least its not socialism, which is bad.
1
Over the long term, maybe market-based (I.e. lying) societies select for IQ, which would explain some of the disparities among the races. The causality could run the other way: smarter people are able to create market-based societies. Then again, Arabs have their bazaars.
2
I’ve always been taken by the Yuri Slezkine concept of mercurial versus apollonian people. I think his formulation is a bit simplistic. Instead, it is scalar. English people have more mercurial types than Slavic people, but both population have both types. Smart fraction theory but for personality type.
2
I think Arabs (and Semitic-speaking peoples) are pretty smart. They have created great cities out of mud, held large empires, and generally imposed themselves and their religion on peoples round the world. Now they’re building Abu Dhabi and Riyadh while Baltimore and St. Louis go to shit. Did the bazaar prepare them for that? Maybe. I know the native Brits don’t flail around like Arabs do, but high-IQ people can be emotive.
Is that why all their engineering plant is done by the Swiss, Germans, Americans and Jap firms under contract?
7
Heh. I was going to add in the English architects, too. But I think Marko’s point still stands, the sand wogs did have a good time of the mathematics/astronomy way back when – and they’ve at least taken YTs tech and made places that turned out to – perhaps – be less anti-white and progressive than those places YT carved out for himself.
Trumpton? Are you related to Camberwick Green?
1
I wonder how much of the supposed preservation of knowledge is true, given the early accounts at the start of the printing era of rediscovery of Greek/Roman manuscripts (if they are taken at face value) are nearly always entwined with non Arabic sources from Germany/France and Italian locations, with some coming back via Persia/Baghdad from sources in Byzantium (like the Almagest).
Seems a bit “we waz kangz in some respects given the inability to progress this in the last 1000 years and the fact to-Arabic translation numbers are perhaps the lowest for any major language.
But then some areas seem to have been quite civilized before my lifetime, so who knows.
“Time goes by when you’re a driver on the train.”
Right?
In places like UAE and Qatar don’t the Western expats outnumber the natives by something like 10 or 11 to 1?
Pretty sure that the key exec and management slots at airlines like Ethiad, Emirates, and Qatar are all Western expats as well.
1
The Arabs didn’t create great cities. They conquered them.
1
The Arabs/Middle Easterners we know today have been in a period of decline since the late middle ages that they may be emerging from now. Now that certain Arab governments have found a way to get along with the Israelis, I think the whole region will take off. There will be tyranny and religious fanaticism of course, but it won’t get in the way of development. And we here in America are dealing with a tyranny (global capital) and religious fanaticism (progressivism) ourselves, and we aren’t even getting the fast wifi and bullet trains Dear Leader has promised.
1
The bullet trains are a political challenge, not a technical, or even economic one. Perhaps once the airline industry collapses bullet trains will be politically possible. For now, they want you flying the friendly skies.
The IQ stats for Arabs are pretty low. Nonetheless, history tells us that Arabs invented the 10-based numeral system and algebra.
Were the Arabs of the past different than the Arabs of today?
This dumb ass democratic (former) country has enemies aplenty, the vast majority of which are imaginary. Things like covid, White nationalists, White privilege, systemic racism yada yada. And unfortunately, we’re “led” by a bunch of deracinated and fairly clever deceivers over the proverbial cliff followed closely by the united mewling and trusting morons. The future doesn’t look particularly bright.
9
In a farmer’s market, haggling over price is typically good-natured banter that aids both parties in quickly finding common ground and facilitating a transaction. And this works best in a community in which people know each other and reputation can have a big impact on your livelihood. The latter is a check on going too far.
Lying is a word most often used when there is malicious intent in a deception. For example, we now know that the Stasi orchestrated the Jan 6th invasion of the Capitol Building and it’s agents proactively used deception to induce others into committing criminal acts. This is a case of malicious lying, and in a sane world, would permanently tar the reputation of the Stasi. Why are our Federal law enforcement agents actively working to manufacture crime? The answer is that they are political tools (read Jackboots) and not neutral guardians of the rule of law.
That is no trivial thing.
17
Where the analogy breaks down is at the farmer’s market the apple is there. It might not be as good as the seller is letting on, but the apple does exist. Under the current regime they’re saying “we’re talking all your money in an effort to bring you an apple later” and then they disappear with no apple ever to be seen.
8
Yes. And you can see the apple and the apple you see is the apple you get. The farmer doesn’t sell you a paper bag labelled “apples” that you can’t open until you’ve paid.
4
Have you seen the billboards and bus signs soliciting hate-crime snitches? Really can’t express how much I hate these maggots.
9
I hope that my sister doesn’t see the billboard.
1
Yesterday I drove past a billboard that had the standard “Huxtable” model father and son in their UMC kitchen smiling at each other because they had just taken the “Safe, Effective, and Free” mystery juice jab thereby “bringing freedom back”. So many lies in one space. The f*cking nerve of these people.
Even with the provocateurs trying to egg on the crowd it wasn’t an invasion or an insurrection or any other scary word the regime has tried to misrepresent events of the day with. Even seemingly friendly media sources will use the enemies language on this and that’s one quick way to tell if they are enemies too. I noticed Revolver did it recently with a story about the Fed provocateur that Massie publicly pointed out. I would have all dissidents insist on refusing to use the enemy’s mischaracterization of the protest of blatant election fraud and the attendant mild civil disobedience as a riot, insurrection, invasion etc.
2
Trying to get dissidents to not use the language of the enemy is like pulling teeth. Hell, just try getting them to stop smearing our women as “Karens” “Karen” is exclusively used against White women and ridicules the very notion of a normal White woman.
Or get them to stop financing the enemy by paying for subscriptions to things like netflix.
1
In this particular case I don’t agree. I think this is part of a long plan to seize private retirement accounts. Eventually they want to nationalize all 401(k)s and IRAs and will give you a monthly payout instead of allowing you to draw it down as you see fit or pass it on to your heirs. Steve Sailer talks about how the equity portion of DIE means they want the equity in your house, they also want your life savings. At a minimum they don’t want you to be able to leave it to your privileged white kids and grandkids.
6
Both are true. This sham is to grease the skids for strip mining the White middle class because that ol’debbil GOP saved the billionaires through the courts.
4
They have already seized your retirement funds. Everything about them is controlled by a small class of people who control the financial system.
13
Yup.
At some point we will go to our brokerage accounts with the intent of selling equities for cash and find that:
1) There are no sellers in the market, only buyers.
2) Every instance of the ‘SELL’ button has been removed from the platform.
1
Uh, 1) should read-
1) There are no buyers in the market, only sellers.
Someone needs more coffee!
1
The financial sector really would like to monopolize the real estate market so there is o alternative to equity investment for this very reason. That is probably too costly at the moment. I expect a controlled real estate crash some time before 2024 so the financial houses can expand real estate holdings. This is how Whites can be deprived of their equity there.
2
I’m currently looking at some interesting properties in low cost of living areas. The market seems to have cooled off *slightly*.
A couple are decent houses in decent areas of a 71% white metro that run about $300/mo on a 30-year fixed note. This is well under my means.
The other two are mixed-use with two residential units and retail/office space that run around $550-650/mo on a thirty year fixed. These are in a small 93% white city.
I *think* I could set up either mixed-use property to get someone else paying the mortgage, but the possible utility and maintenance costs give me pause.
1
I’m assuming that you mean the single family home market since institutional money already dominates other commercial real estate and is consolidating that control even more with fintech.
But, yes, the SFR (single family rental) is the one area – outside of farmland – that Wall Street hasn’t been able to get its tentacles into that deeply. Well, it has the loan on your house, but that’s not enough. It wants the actual house.
Granted, this isn’t my area, but I know enough to know that the problem for Wall Street is that the SFR market is unbelievably diffuse. Wall Street works on scale. One house isn’t even a round error on a rounding error. They need whole developments.
Unless Wall Street can figure out how to manage a ton of individual rentals over a large geographic area (unlikely), it needs people to accept renting en masse. That’s why institutional money (big and small) likes apartment complexes. They’re big enough to be worth the effort.
Institutional money likes (needs) scale. They get way better financing rates than you and me, but only for big deals. They can also hire apartment complex managers but, again, they need a big enough complex to make that work.
Scale.
Therefore, Wall Street/institutional money needs whole rental communities. Basically, apartment complexes but with single family homes instead of apartments.
But to get whole rental communities, you need people willing to forego buying their own home and living in a rental house for a long time either because they want to or because they can’t afford a house.
This would require a massive change in the American landscape and psyche. Owning your own home has always been a central part of the “American Dream.” Home ownership has also always been central to middle-class wealth. Indeed, without home ownership, there really isn’t much middle-class wealth.
If institutional money starts taking over the single family home market, it’s game over for middle-class America. They will return to being serfs.
But institutional money is hugely motivated to get into this market. Bonds don’t pay squat. The stock market is expensive. They already own other parts of the commercial real estate market. SFR offers the last place to earn a decent return, especially since financing is unbelievably cheap.
They’re going to try their best to get into this market. But it can only really work if people are willing to living in single-family rental communities. If they don’t want that, i.e. giving up their dream of their own home, it won’t work. Institutional money needs scale; it needs those big community projects.
We’ll see.
2
Citizen: Yes, SFR’s. Elimination/debasement of single family residences via zoning currently is underway. I think that will be done over time. See California.
The existence of single family residences is indeed the largest impediment to destruction of the White middle class. I’m looking at how the financial sector is able to wrest those that currently exist and are not vulnerable to multi-family, read “non-White,” zoning changes. That will be a tough nut to crack unless clever taxation such as surcharges on energy usage, to save the planet, mind you, are implemented.
1
At those prices, WGH, buy them. The only reason to be concerned, and it is a good one, is that there is an ongoing attempt to nationalize zoning to eliminate White enclaves. That is tough for the Ruling Class and financial sector to do but efforts are underway.
Elimination of single family residences is a top priority of TPTB.
2
Aside from outright theft (which is not beyond the realm of possibility) the next best thing is reverse mortgages to deprive middle classes of home ownership. I guess that didn’t pan out because I have not heard as much about them lately.
Didn’t they already do this once with the video game store (I want to say gamestop)? They disabled all trading (except selling, of course) in the main app the reditors were using because some hedgefunds who were short the gamestop were losing a ton of money.
yep,
We caught a glimpse of this with the GameStop/AMC thing a year or so ago. RobinHood decided to disallow novice stock traders from transacting those stocks to prevent them from doing exactly what professional stockbrokers do every day with computer algorithms.
It’s fine for me but not for thee.
7
GameStop was hilarious. Federal law enforcement more or less became more overt “Tribal Police” after Tribe members got pissed that they got bested. It also signaled to the world that American markets are approaching Third World levels of corruption.
3
It’s already being done with inherited IRAs (other than a spouse). Prior to 2020, non-spousal inheritors such as children could draw it down over their lifetime – now it’s ten years and even that’ll probably get cut down.
8
It will be expanded to spouses soon enough.
2
Gonna be pretty ironic when the ‘muh pension’ coppers that banged your skull for their government masters … find their pensions taken away for some reason. Say, like not getting ‘Booster 72’ on time.
Then what? They “march”?
3
Regimes like France and Australia are exempting the bronze from the jab mandates to ensure the bronze will be eager to beat down the non-compliant on behalf of their controllers.
2
To follow up on Wild Geese Howard’s point about exemptions, I thought about this very point earlier. They almost will have to carve out exemptions for federal employees when IRA’s and Roths are seized.
1
Sharp take. Truth is indeed an impediment to liberal democracy/fascism.
As to the alleged billionaire tax, that fraud is being pushed for a second reason. While most people, including those in Congress, are innumerate and economic illiterate, there is widespread agreement among those who are not that inflation is going to get much, much worse. This so-called infrastructure grift will throw gasoline onto the fire.
So this fraudulent tax will be used as a fig leaf to claim the latest round of looting is fully paid. Of course, when courts strike it down and Treasury solemnly announces it cannot be enforced but the funds have to be raised somehow, the mostly White middle class will be strip mined once again.
You recently wrote that deficit spending can continue considerably longer. There I disagree, and that is based on the actions of those who shape economic policy. For example, a story not being reported is the widening insider trading scandal among Federal Reserve members and the Treasury secretary, who is all down with this grift and probably has her eye on some building material equities.
While nearly impossible, it would be pure karma if the billionaire tax became reality. Probably ain’t happening but a boy can hope.
The economy is being set up for implosion, and the grifters are grifting while the gritting is good.
6
The melt up in TSLA due to the headlines that recently emerged from bankruptcy rental car agency Hertz will buy 100k Teslas seems like a signal that we are witnessing a blowoff top.
3
I am still thinking this is some form of elaborate April fool.
I mean WTAF.
3
How does that work when you return your rental TESLA?
Do you have to have a “full charge” when you return it, or just pay the overpriced “re-charge” fee?
Instead of a quick car wash, now it has to go to a recharging station for a few hours for the next renter?
This seems like more of an appeal-to-vanity play by Hertz. They used to rent impractical sports cars..but never very many of them at a single location, and always at a ridiculous premium.
3
Hertz probably has been tipped off related to electric cars/tax credits.
3
Word is the Woke big banks wouldn’t float the loans to buy ICE vehicles.
2
I just realized Tesla is now a $1 trillion company.
5% of the total US GDP.
Its amazing what concerted worldwide government regulation can do for your business model.
My first thought was “do we then get to claim unrealized losses?” I mean no one would pay any taxes again ever if that was the case*
*From what I understand there is a limit to how much of write-down one can take, I think.
Tangential, I realize, but your point about democracies being hyper-violent is really important, despite it flying in the face of what “everybody knows.” Back in the 80s we were taught that no two “democracies” have ever fought each other — you can disprove that in about 10 seconds of googling, but whatevs, just roll with me. Then in the 90s we were taught that no two nations with a McDonald’s have ever gone to war. Again, 5 seconds’ googling would disprove it, but there it is.
The point is that nations observably get more bellicose the more “democratic” they get. Kaiser Bill was so belligerent precisely because his nation was getting more democratic. A Bourbon, or even a Bonaparte, wouldn’t have been so dumb as to ally with the Russians, the Russians themselves were eager to go to war to defend “pan-Slavism” because Nicholas II could never forget the humiliation of being forced to grant a representative assembly, and so on. Take it back further: The England of 1831 would’ve told Jardine Matheson to suck it up, buttercup, them’s the breaks; but the England of 1839 invaded China on their behalf, thanks to the 1832 Reform Act. The only exception I can think of offhand to democracy increasing bellicosity is Australia, and, well, look where democracy has gotten them….
One wonders what would’ve happened if the crowned heads of Europe had kept their heads crowned in 1914. No doubt the US would’ve annexed quite a bit of Latin America, and probably fought Britain for Canada (as they nearly did in the late 1890s)….
10
“…— you can disprove that in about 10 seconds of googling…”
This reminds me of a common occurrence in my interactions:
Person A: Makes assertion out of their ass/”As Seen on TV”
Person B: Hey, let’s look it up, here I have my phone.
Person A: “No, no NO!”
2
Do dishonest governments make dishonest men? Or is it the other way around?
Trump is a good example.
Developing real estate in NYC is near impossible. Banks won’t lend money until you get the permits, the government won’t give you permits until you get the money, and a million other variations of moving pieces have to fall into place for anything to get done. So of course it’s “liars poker”; there is no honest way to accomplish much of anything.
Maybe it was always thus.
9
Some men were made to get things done in Rome.
Some men were made to get things done in Tarantum.
Caesars can be made anywhere, though eventually they need to deal with Rome.
4
It’s very pleasant when one meets someone with whom they can have a genuine exchange; with lying at a minimum. As far as I’m concerned, the more people have an even greater number of human connections (digital or real), the more the lying amps up. Ever prevalent media devices have magnified this and are, for many, inescapable.
I’ve been conducting an exercise recently, carefully parsing my exchanges with various people I encounter for this lying. The result I’ve found is that almost every exchange was just a sequence of lies and or passive-aggressive balless-ness that was rather sickening and tiresome. A recent exchange with a manager had him repeatedly tell me he was “disappointed” in me; you know, I didn’t do something I ought to have. It was all rather mealy mouthed, phoney, forced and dishonest.
That said, there is lying, and then there is Lying – The System does both; always and everywhere with sphincter squeezing intensity, simply to alter reality. It’s all so tiresome… But it’s even faker and gayer than that.
9
That’s where if I were able, I’d make a sharp distinction between “lying” and “haggling.” It doesn’t surprise me that Xerxes wouldn’t have known the difference. I have no idea how to draw that line, but like everyone who has ever traveled in the Third World, I got tired of the constant haggling in about three hours. Nothing is straightforward. Nothing is on the level. Everyone is trying to get over on everyone, with everything, always. The same joke made about Brazil applies to China, India, anyplace that kind of thing is endemic: They’re the country of the future, and always will be, because they can’t stop screwing each other over long enough to accomplish anything.
Whatever the Regime does or doesn’t do — and I’m starting to come around to the idea that most people are simply tuning The Media out at this point — there’s your future: Instead of a boot stomping on a human face, imagine haggling with a New Delhi rug merchant, for everything, forever.
14
There’s the time factor involved as well. It’s no wonder some of these nations can’t do the bootstrap thing, they’re too busy pissing away their mornings on trying to get or save one last rupiah, riel, or kyat. Lee Kwan Yew grasped the need for well-defined systems to lubricate the gears of commerce and society.
4
like everyone who has ever traveled in the Third World, I got tired of the constant haggling in about three hours. Nothing is straightforward. Nothing is on the level. Everyone is trying to get over on everyone, with everything, always.
Yes. That was what put me off poverty tourism back when backpacking was a thing. Everybody you meet and talk to has one agenda and one agenda only: rip you off as big as possible.
I can’t say I blame them but it freaked me the fuck out.
6
Heck, one summer growing up I had a job in a tourist trap location in a Great Lakes state.
Car rolls up with out of state plates?
Game on!
1
Yeah, but that’s different. In the Western World, you’re only ripped off by people who work in the tourist industry, not by each and every person you meet.
4
There used to be a fellow by the name of Stanley, who did some poverty tourism of Africa way back in the 1880s. He didn’t have an iPhone and an Instagram account, just a Maxim.
That’s the way to do it. The authentic colonial experience.
3
I well remember haggling with Hajji in Iraq, 2003, using porno mags as currency for cigarettes and other stuff.
Some of the first English I heard from some Iraqi dude with his Saddam mustache was almost invariably, “You have tit book?”
4
The Americanized “haggle” is the business trying to goad you into a fight. What I most hated about living in NYC was how often the way a business expected to be used—where to wait, how to order, whom to pay, etc.—was a secret, and if you came in not knowing it, employees and regulars would gang up and attack you.
The fiction in the “Soup Nazi” episode of Seinfeld is the irresistible draw of the soup. It was irrelevant. What he sold was the opportunity to join a screaming mob. They literally cheered when they chased away people who wanted to try the soup.
1
There is also lying, Lying, LYING with the ability to force you to repeat the Lies at the barrel of a gun and the systematic construction of a culture wide torrent that intentionally consists of nothing but falsehoods and projection to humiliate(not sure what to call this last one).
The system does not just lie it also forces you to accept it or the social A-10 scorched earth approach will be applied to your life, career and family.
That is a great position to be in for the pathologically malicious.
As Cartman was wont to say it becomes no more than:
“Respect my Authoriteee”.
5
You’ve lost me on the point about modern capitalism being about lying, fraud and deception. Certainly many defects of our system can be attributed to the dishonest, but the fundamental premise of a market based economy is that value is both subjective and unknown until a transaction takes place.
The simplest manifestation of this is to walk into a ubiquitous third world market to buy fruit. You get to look at the fruit, squeeze it and then sample it. Thereafter, you barter with the owner about cost. You understand what the price should be but you also know there is value to the fruit other than the money – that is the surplus you gain by parting with you money. Conversely, the merchant parting with those goods makes a decision whether the goods are worth the price you bid for them. The essence of the agreement is that you both meet at some place where you both gain from the transaction.
We can scale this concept up to the modern economy and talk about Bernays-ian deception through advertising and messaging. We can then add in social pressure and desire for conformity. And then we can mix in fraud. But those aspects, though common, are bugs that can be resolved through government.
But still, at its root, a transaction is an exchange where both parties agree to some value. Look to the stock market where every single transaction has both a buyer and a seller agreeing to a price and getting a trade done. Both disagree as to whether the price of that stock is going up or down. Just because one is right and one is wrong, doesn’t necessarily mean fraud is occurring or one party is dishonesty
When extrapolated, this core precept of the capitalistic system has enabled extraordinary human progress and been the foundry of success for western civilization when combined with its highly capable people
.
Of course, the excesses and gamesmanship of the ruling class do not resemble anything close to a capitalist system. And, a capitalistic systems needs to have rules enforced and protections in place coupled with a rigorous anti-trust mechanism.
But the alternatives are simply wasteful, anti-freedom and anti-western man.
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Good analysis, and I agree.
“The simplest manifestation of this is to walk into a ubiquitous third world market to buy fruit. You get to look at the fruit, squeeze it and then sample it.”
Mmmm… dried out fruit from a bazaar fondled and fingered by Mahmoud, Afshar & Ranjat… fresh after washing down their camels. It’s the future; haggle away!
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Haha, but the best fruit in the world, passion fruit, comes from those places…
This is one of the areas libertarianism goes off the rails. It just assumes that any transaction that happens is by definition, mutually beneficial because it happened. Like it’s a tautology. Then, extrapolating it is even worse, because then you get the cries about how limiting free trade is damaging to the consumer. It is a very short step from all trade is mutually beneficial to “barriers to trade” is harmful because you are preventing this voluntary exchange (which by definition is good). Of course, this is why drugs should be all legal.
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When you look at the history of the United States, it does seem that it always needed an enemy and/or challenge to keep the factions united. The frontier and the taming/conquering of the West – along with that little dust up from 1861-1865 – provided an outlet.
Once the South and the West were subdued (around the end of the 19th century), the American democracy started to look abroad for enemies. We started with a warm-up by attacking the Spanish and then moved to the big leagues with WWI and WWII. The Cold War provided an almost perfect enemy for fifty years.
It seems no coincidence that the infighting amongst the various tribes in America started picking up steam after the fall of the USSR. TPTB have tried to replace the enemy, first with Muslims, then Russia and now China, but none of them stick, so we always turn back to internal enemies.
Of course, let’s also not forget that a certain tribe really started to consolidate power at about the same time that the United States lost its great enemy. That tribe is great at gaining power but isn’t know for governing ability, at least not over other tribes.
We are a democratic empire lacking an enemy to united it and ruled by a cunning but ultimately incompetent (at least at the task of ruling) tribe. Things aren’t looking so great for the good ol’ USA, but, on the other hand, there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation this powerful so it could take some time before things fall apart.
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Citizen, I believe this is the most optimistic comment I’ve ever read from you!
Solid, pithy observations, as always. Thanks.
This is a good article that outlines how the Covid psyop has been used as a cover for the breakdown of the financial system/global economy:
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic-simulation/
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Breakdown? What are you on about, man?
I’m safe behind my perspex safety screens, with three masks on and washing my hands every thirty seconds… no collapse’ll get me!
On a serious note this was one of the things I gave immense consideration to upon the arrival of the shamdemic. After it being one, two, three then four weeks with no bodies piling up outside, it became clear that something sinister was afoot.
I’ve since replaced the word ‘sinister’ with ‘evil’. All we can do is prepare the best we can, spiritually and physically and try and have a decent network when things begin to decline at a greater rate. But this decline may have a lot of life in it, I hate to say.
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Its funny isn’t it.
After 2 years of no bodies and no blood spurting from eyeballs in the street you think the livestock would have noticed something?
Yet even today I notice an uptick in the mask retards out and about due to the TV/media’s were all freaking doomed mantra coming round again.
I honestly have trouble processing it as real people doing this.
Maybe we can replace Guy Fawkes with Mask Day every year.
Penny for the mask!
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“I honestly have trouble processing it as real people doing this.”
It’s difficult to know if these are the ‘go-along, get-along’ types, or full blown Branch Covidians. But it is sad to see. That said, where I am in the UK, the mask wearing has dropped massively – especially since the latest ‘crisis’ resolved itself… The dreaded fuel-shortage.
Strange, when at school, we always learnt that Guy Fawkes was very, very naughty…
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I’d say it’s impossible to know who’s who out at the store.
I hope that most still in face diapers are unjabbed and just going along to get along.
I fear that most still in face diapers are jabbed true believers.
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I remember, before getting kicked off my local “next door.com” site, asking for bodies. There is no pandemic without everyone knowing at least one, or several dead people.
Stores would close not because they wre told to do so , but because half the employees were dead. Thats a pandemic
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Before I just either didn’t discuss the shamdemic, or just call it evil, this would be my go to line: “Where are the bodies in the street, huh?”.
People got rather defensive, to put it mildly. As you say, if people are not obviously dropping dead, of all ages, all over the place, then there’s not really a big problem.
But the peep-al loves themselves the ‘stistix from da gubmint.
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Nextdoor turned out to be peak karen. With male karens being some of the worst. I got tossed for repeatedly posting “what is a ‘case’?” or simply “Cases?” any time they squealed about exploding/skyrocketing/soaring/surging cases.
I knew early on we were already in a mass delusion/hysteria when these normal on the surface people would react violently against the most benign attempts to bring reason into the discussion. Suddenly everyone was an expert on the emergency and completely devoid of rational thought. Full trigglypuff. All in a culture of defect-defect trading in lies, but suddenly the government and media and whole apparatus were beacons of truth. heh.
The very definition of a case, for example, and the rapid and most obvious moving of the various goalposts and definitions of words went unnoticed. The talking points were eagerly gobbled up and regurgitated. That blind hysterics and the ritualistic howling from the front porches every evening sealed it. That was creepy AF. “We” are most definitely not all in this together.
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It reminds me of Quatermass and the Pit, where they discover a Martian spaceship from 5million years BC that starts broadcasting a signal into the city.
80% of the population immediately turn into a hive mind controlled by the signal, hunting for those not of the hive in order to cleanse the hive. It turns out the majority were descendants of the genetically engineered humans created by the same insectoid Martians as slaves.
It gets more real every day.
If only we could shut off the broadcast signal.
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Totally agree. I just quit after it became one hysterical post after another about people not wearing masks or businesses that didn’t enforce diapering. Truly pathetic.
Wow – thanks for that. Happy reading indeed – what a cluster you know what.
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When you consider the laws promoting “puffery”, you realize that dishonesty is built into the system. Or, when you look at the absurdity of advertising. Well, all I’ve got to say to that is, “Welcome to reality!”
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“It also allows the zombies in Conservative Inc. to come out from under their beds and do their libertarian dance.” That’s great writing.
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Oops, here I thought it was Cyrus who dismissed the Greeks as liars!
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Mistrust of government is a bedrock American value, a lot lip service still given to it. The contradiction is strange.
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Did you really write this post?
“The cost to the collective strength that comes from the lack of trust is less than the benefit that comes from stronger individual members.”
This is a simplistic endorsement of Machiavelian diktat minus the Straussian/Antonian overly. “The few, the proud, the ubermenschen.” Your usually trenchant commentary is way beyond that.
If Herodotus is the source of Greco-classical revisionism, how do we know the Greeks who allegedly defeated the Persians were so mistrustful of one another?
Even if strict liability in tort for the sale of defective products (extended to services in many states) isn’t what it used to be, don’t tell the poor used care dealer who gets nailed because he sold a car “as is” with standard warranties and then gets walloped for a defective sensor he couldn’t’ve known existed.
If your point is that government in a decadent nation is dominated by grifters, flaneurs, hustlers and mountebanks, even the kids on Tik Tok can tell you that.
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Interesting take on the market and lying. I had a series of long conversations with a fellow Catholic Trad. He has been a very successful businessman and is always starting new ones. I myself ran my own business. While he never recommneded outright dishonesty, there was definitely a ‘right-to-the-edge” quality of what he suggested in terms of how one could present products…perhaps its why I was never that successful at business!
Why wouldnt that translate into politics.?
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There is one fellow, with hair sometimes yellow, who boasts of his “truthful hyperbole.”
This is why, although we’re supposed to tremble in fear of East Asian, and particularly Chinese culture as “the future” that will dominate us. I find the culture to be autistic and prone to making massive bets on things that don’t necessarily pan out. What worries me, as what was previously posted on here by Z-Man (I was thinking this very thought for years) is that the culture of D.C. has imported the mandarin nature of East Asia, while the center of the country is nothing like that. So while the country itself doesn’t have the cohesion and group think to make big bets on terrible ideas, the D.C. crowd does, and they’re currently betting the farm on stupidity that would never fly between the Appalachians and the Sierras, and yet another reason why democracy really doesn’t reflect the culture in a large, continental country as it would in a place like Denmark. The larger format the country, the more democracy breaks down.
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A bit of a tangent from your post, but the debacle at the California ports is a perfect reason for any other state to secede. Surely this is once instance where DC has a constitutional mandate to step in because California is wrecking interstate commerce and even acting as the sovereign by effectively enacting a shipping blockade for the whole country. If the federal government is going to let one of the states arbitrarily block 40% of the imports to half the country then the other states not only should but must leave the union in order to achieve arrangements that won’t deprive the people of prosperity.
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If the regime wanted those ports operating at full capacity they would be. We can safely take it as a starting assumption. Pretending it’s a choice left up to California gov. gives regime someone else to blame publicly. Why then would the regime deliberately hinder things? It’s an old protectionist trick to find reasons to block imports. How many of those ships are loaded with Chinese imports? My bet is that the port blockage is another expression of the growing conflict with China. We as nativist advocates for home based re-industrialization have projected how painful weaning ourselves from Chinese “trade” relationship would be. Not that I believe the regime intends to rebuild American industrial capacity but only to apply pressure to find slave labor elsewhere.
There are plenty of places other than Commie China where slave labor exists: Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Fiji, Madagascar, most of the countries in Africa.
Our industries have chosen Commie China because our industries over the las 15 years have been taken over by communists fresh out of the communist propaganda mills we call “universities” now running them. The same reason almost all media and social media are a bunch of Free speech censoring pigs.
The “slaves” mean nothing to these people it’s the commies that count.
Every institution and industry in America is currently controlled by Bolsheviks. That’s what happens when we let the evil bastards distract America from controlling the education of its children.
We don’t need an insurrection, we need a reckoning and make these fascist commie pigs pay. Dearly.
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Although they’re phasing it out (or rumored to be) the ChiComs also subsidize labor over there. So not only are you getting very good slave labor, you’re getting it for free. Add in good (but not great) infrastructure and access to other resources and China bowls over the competition
Even the “rule of law” is a lie. Our phones never stop ringing, either cell or landline, with Indian scammers and the government will do absolutely nothing about it. But they got plenty of time to hand out 10 million dollar fines to “racist” robocallers.
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/nearly-10m-penalty-for-man-who-made-antisemitic-racist-robocalls-683114
or to charge them with felony crimes in the case of Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl
I saw another story yesterday of 2 cops getting indicted because some African American who was running from them on a moped got hit by a car (not a police car, some random car driven by a citizen) while blowing a stop sign or red light in DC. This is a new low. It is just another example of how the law is weaponized. DC’s chase policy is written in such a way where it is so vague that it is entirely up to the discretion of the prosecutor. The rules are as clear as mud. So if you are a white cop and you chase a non-white, there is plenty of wiggle room to throw you under the bus.
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A myriad of contradictory laws and selective enforcement.
One of the great hallmark’s of the Bolshevik soviet time.
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I often look at the shamdemic as one of the great indicators of mass hypnosis and worshiping of state power; but the fact remains that modern American policing seems to have an almost similar story. What white guy would be a police officer now? What honest white guy would stay, and wouldn’t be looking for a way out?
Sure, people may speak of the pension/benefits and whatever, and maybe these types feel like there is nowhere left to go. But surely? That said, perhaps many police persons really cannot put together the dots – it just seems so counter to being a white person, this being a copper lark.
Propaganda, lies, brainwashing… it’s all there.
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I don’t want to get mired in the weeds here because I totally agree with you that tax policy is FAR down the list of our national rot. However, the solution isn’t as clear as you indicate. The far left solution if taxing unrealized gains is insane. However, simply taxing the rich more on income isn’t the solution either. There’s a number of ways the rich hide their income. I’m not a financial adviser, but the gist of a big one is this. The super rich will take out loans as their income, and they’ll use their stock as collateral backing. You don’t pay taxes on loans. Plus, as long as the gains are making more in interest than the loan, you come out on top. What’s the solution? I’m not sure, but it’s more complicated than anything proposed by red or blue. I just know that the working white stiffs like most of us will keep getting the short straw.
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I do not disagree. I was merely pointing out that there are simpler ways to tax the rich. What you describe, by the way, is why things like sports franchises are so valued. The franchise is bought on credit. The value of the asset increase and the principle decreases. The owners then refinance the franchise and take a portion as a loan to themselves.
I don’t think that the market society rewards lying. The iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma says that lying only works on the last transaction. So, car salesmen are notorious liars, but the local grocery where you buy food every week needs to be on the up and up.
But politics, as per Nazi Carl Schmitt, is all about the enemy. If there isn’t one, you’d better make one up.
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