When most American think about Denmark, what comes to mind is blonde-haired children in traditional dress. Maybe it will be the image of Viking invaders, rushing off their long boats. The more worldly sorts will know it is one of the happiest countries on earth, according to regular surveys. It is also one of the safest, with a high standard of living and high quality of life. Those who have visited the country come away with a highly positive view of Danish society.
It turns out that Denmark is a blighted hellscape, a land full of tax slaves aching to be free of the welfare state. According to someone calling himself David Harsanyi at National Review, Denmark is exactly what you’ll get if Bernie Sanders gets his way. “In Bernie’s beloved Denmark, 24.5 percent of tax revenue as a percent of GDP came from personal income taxes and social-security contributions, compared with only 16 percent in the United States.” What monsters!
Further, “Denmark’s corporate tax rate is 22 percent, compared with a combined state and federal American corporate tax stands at 25.9 percent.” As we all know, the bedrock measure of societal happiness is the corporate tax rate. The only thing close on the human rights scale is how a people treat carried interest. Everyone knows that you judge a society by how well it treats its most vulnerable and massive global corporations are the most vulnerable in every society.
All joking aside, that short post by David Harsanyi is everything that has gone wrong with conservatism over the last many decades. He is, to quote Ben Shapiro of all people, acting on his middle-man mentality. The middle-man is not concerned with either side of the transaction. His interest lies only in the efficiency of the transaction, as that is where he extracts his profit. The middle-man is the tollbooth operator, who gets paid on commission, based on the number of cars that pass his booth.
From the perspective of the middle-man, the state is always a competitor, as it makes the transaction less efficient. Sometimes it is through regulation, intended to curb certain undesirable activity. In other cases, the state seeks to displace the middle-man, in order to collect taxes. This is why the middle-man not only opposes state involvement in economic activity, but does so on the grounds of efficiency. The raison d’être of the middle-man is to increase efficiency in order to increase his profit.
Citizens are not driven by efficiency. They have an interest, often a moral interest or a societal interest, in at least one side of the transaction. The citizen opposes drug dealing, for example, because it increases drug taking and makes popular the exploitation of citizens. It is not about halting drug dealing or drug taking, but about stigmatizing both activities. No one wants to live in a land where self-abuse and lethal exploitation is tolerated, much less celebrated.
This is why Denmark has the sorts of regulation on commerce that American conservatives find so abhorrent. The Danes wish to remain Danish, which means discouraging that which they don’t like and encouraging what they like. The Danes don’t think it very Danish to have a small number of people with massive wealth, while a large number live in squalor. The typical Dane looks at an American city, for example, and thinks Americans are monsters for tolerating it.
Therein lies the problem with American conservatism. Over the last many decades, conservatism moved from a discussion about “who we are what do we want to be” to debates about how to maximize efficiency in order to profit the middle-man. What passes for conservatism is just the self-interest of the middle-man, who has no social connections or moral duty to the whole of society. As far as David Harsanyi is concerned, the only thing that matters about Denmark is its tax rates.
A middle-man conservative like Harsanyi does not think about whether it is good for America that corporations now control so much of society. He’s indifferent to the abuses of the tech giants. Why should he care? The middle-man conservative is uninterested in the parties of any transaction. Just as the middle-man only cares about getting the deal done in order to extract his profit, the middle-man conservative just wants the deal open so the middle-men can do their thing and make it happen.
The irony of modern conservatism is that it has actually arrived at the exact opposite of what has always defined conservatism. For the conservative, society is defined by its people, their history and their customs. It is that identity as a people, around which all things must be organized, including economics. Modern conservatism is the complete rejection of that. The middle-man conservative rejects the very notion of identity in terms of society. There are only temporary parties to a transaction.
That’s what makes conservative opposition to Sanders so ridiculous. The Right used to oppose Sanders-style Utopian socialism on the grounds that it was bad for us, as in all of us in the society. Today, the so-called conservatives oppose it because it is bad for them and their paymasters. The rest of us are on our own. They oppose populism for the same reason. For middle-man conservatism, the interest of the people inevitably becomes an adversary, because it is bad for business.
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They don’t have the Jews there to overrun Whitey with 3rd world assholes.
I went to a local soccer game recently with a buddy and he ran into a guy he had met years ago. He was about 40, Scouse accent, certainly single and proudly proclaimed that he was a Communist and was not ashamed to say it. What he said next pretty much sums it up, “I just want the workers to be happy, that’s all…” This kind of thing had probably deflected criticism over the years and is not the kind of thing that could be disputed by any blue-collar person. So I said, “Take a look around mate, we are surrounded by thousands of workers and they seem pretty happy to me.” My buddy burst into laughter while this other dork just stared blankly. Was I right – of course. Will his phoney-baloney views change – not a chance.
Well, then they’re being happy WRONG!
Too many of those inclined to repair the world don’t care if their intended beneficiaries want to be “benefitted”.
Bend over, here comes the tikhhhhhun olam. (My attempt at spelling it out all Scouse-like.)
Dear Z, even if I agree with the leve 100 stupidity of anti-Denmark article from NR, I think there is a blind spot in your analysis. Consider what you wrote : ” that short post by David Harsanyi is everything that has gone wrong with conservatism over the last many decades”.
The problem is you still think True Conservatism is a solution. Instead, Conservatism bring defeat (like is cousin, Reactionary) like leftism bring stupidity. Why ? Because, ontologically speaking, a conservative and a reactionarie BY ESSENCE is only REACTING to things witch happen to him. (Things commited, of course, by leftistes -or fascist, in rare days). In sport, in war or in politics, the never-attack-first strategy is a 100% lose strategy. That’s quite logical.
Another weakness of conservatism (buckley’s or true’s, don’t matter) is this strange idea you have to not have your own ideology. Conservatism pretend to be based on reality. hewww… Find me someone wich would pretend his ideas are not based on reality.
(Whatever, I daily appreciate your clever blog, and ask you to forgive my awful english)
Better known as Upper Middle Class attitudes, period. You can find the same sort of bougie individualism around the world in various circles. It comes from the loss of any hope at homogeneous society and the rise of other means to maintain civility and order.
Agree, I call it “pulling up the drawbridge.”
Every. Single. Time.
(((Harsanyi)))
Conservatism in the U.S. suffered particularly from the fact that it was an oppositional movement rather than a propositional one. Although Buckley gets sledged on this site quite a bit his problem was how to unite disparate groups who had little to unite them except for their loathing of the left. I mean consider the ideological spectrum that you have to bridge between the Birchers and Libertarians, How do you unite Christians, Jews and Atheists who are opposed to the Left? I don’t think people on these forums fully understand just how bad the intellectual state of the Right was at the end of WW2, particularly in America, with its own profound anti-conservative tradition.
Economics is what you’re left with when you can’t agree on anything else and that’s how the Right became an economics focused party. The ideology of profit maximisation over all else became its defacto policy. I mean a conservatism that focuses on race is going to exclude a significant portion of the population, as will be one that focuses on Christianity so you don’t talk about this stuff, in fact you play it down. However this is a losers game since your Right simply becomes another version of materialism, albeit a better managed one.
That is why we lose always.
“Economics is what you’re left with … your Right simply becomes another version of materialism, albeit a better managed one.
That is why we lose always.”
True, all true, well done.
Another victory for the Narrative writers.
They are astoundingly good at this sort of thing. We never knew what hit us, and the religion- our well of social knowledge- left us completely unprepared.
Sterile liberal nations can actually get away with low taxes because they like to fund themselves with bonds, which are preferred by risk averse old people. Socialist European nations have extremely high taxes relative to their population pyramids.
Denmark isn’t a role model for anyone.
Don’t look now, but the Fed is buying bonds to fund our government. Our country would have the biggest government yard sale ever without floating bonds.
Hoo boy, Wirth. I’m looking for a scenic fjord to yump off of.
Low bond rates to match a rate of growth that only reflects natural population growth of the native population?
Reining in leveraged arbitage, allowing equitable sharing of benefits made possible by that native population across the whole of that population?
Boring. Bonds are borrr-ing.
We need some churn in here!
(Btw, that was a true and thoughtful comment, Reactionary. Interesting. Disagree only with the last sentence, but good economics.)
Bonds aren’t boring tonight! Never seen it so crazy after hours.
” The Right used to oppose Sanders-style Utopian socialism on the grounds that it was bad for us, as in all of us in the society.”
Right. I never understood paleocons because they had what seemed odd ideas about what was “bad for us”. The TVA, which along with SS and the Interstate is the most success and popular govt. program, was supposed to be somehow “bad” for all those hillbillies who got electricity. In fact, SS and the interstate were bad too. Richard Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences sneered at those who “prefer shoes to philosophy” in defense of keeping the South poor and shoeless lest it lose some kinda special virtue lacking in the shod. Forget national health care — Russell Kirk opposed having insurance at all — acts of God were acts of God, after all, to be suffered in stoic dignity, I suppose — which is why he had to eventually sell out in order to make enough money to suppose his 7 daughters after his death. As Mayor Curley of Boston said, “A strange and stupid race.”
That’s one of the biggest differences of a 1930s Socialist vs. a 2020 Socialist. A 1930’s Socialist would dam every river and kill anything that moves in the river to provide cheap power to poor people. A 2020 Socialist thinks electricity is dirty, preferring that the country revert to some dimly lit hell at a thousand dollars per kilowatt hour to save a guppy. A return of the left to an industrial socialism would be the best thing that could ever happen.
The Interstates are wonderful, a big benefit to the giant corporations who don’t pay taxes.
Plus, they killed the tiny, absurd, absolutely wonderful little town I graduated from. Not much left but the rumble of 18-wheelers passing by.
SS? Why stay on the farm to care for Ma and Pa? You’re free to move to the city, pay for your papers to join the clerisy, and work for those institutions- producing all those valuable, intangible middleman innovations.
Wierd how the revolutionary inventions were created in small town Farm America. People in 1928 were such rubes, eh?
PS I oppose much of what passes as “insurance” myself. I worked in a large claim center.
That, and Air Jordans. Shoeless Negros were in a lot better shape, socially- and my kids don’t theirs jack squat.
They owe us, and their masters owe us more reparations than Solomon could EVER repay.
On the other hand, any great entrepreneurs coming out of Denmark? Any cutting edge drug development or rock n roll? Anyone working hard there to find the limit of Moore’s law? Physics used to be pretty good, but anything exciting happening in Copenhagen? Should MIT or Cal Tech be worried?
I had a couple who lived next door some years back — the husband is an ex-pat Dane (who had to come the USA to get a good grad school education) and his wife is American, a Boston native. They go back to Denmark every summer, and once the wife told me, “After three months, I am losing my mind. Everybody’s nice, everybody’s friendly, everybody is so satisfied, it’s all so clean and it’s all so perfect. I can’t wait to get the hell out.”
David Harsanyi’s reasons to not like Denmark are idiotic. My ex-neighbor’s? Those are really good reasons, and I totally get it..
If a place is nice and clean, the people are friendly and satisfied, and things are perfect, and she doesn’t like it there, the problem isn’t the place and the people, the problem is her.
Sometimes your life is so perfect and boring, you just want to jump off a fjord and end it all. Marin County has the same problem.
Denmark is a great place. You can just abandon your baby in the stroller and have lunch. The baby is still there when you get back. It’s not even stolen by gypsies. People leave that country in droves due to the no right turn on a red signal rule, which is an abomination. As far as Pharmaceuticals go, they have Novo Nordisk which keeps half our Walmart shopper nation from going into insulin shock.
Around half of the US states have populations greater than Denmark’s. I grew up 30 minutes southwest of Boston. It was once nice and clean, the people were friendly, it was full of multi-generational families and the sensibilities were mostly those of Western European peoples. Not a lot happened in those communities: people passed on their traditions and raised their families. And generation by generation the social capital in those communities built up bit by bit hardly noticed. I’m sure by today’s standards it was boring, especially to a more than likely childless harpy. The financialization of every corner of our civilization, the draining off of capital and people to a handful of corporate wonderlands has sucked the lifeblood out of communities like that. The nuAmericans are now flooding communities like that everywhere. I’ll bet Ferguson, MO was once a nice place. Add to that flood the blunt weapon known as Section 8. The inheritors of those communities have traded in history, culture, family and community for stuff they don’t really need and consequence free sex.
If the only way to preserve something of who you are is to pull back from competing for ZOG’s attention then godspeed.
I dunno. Define “great entrepreneur”. Or better yet, who would the man on the street name when you ask HIM to name some great entrepreneurs. Is the US better off (from a sociocultural perspective) because of Amazon, or Apple, or Uber, or Twitter? Is the existence of Tesla a clear net positive for the US? I’ll admit that GPS is a blessing (mostly), but I don’t see many/most of the newer tech things touted as wonderful advances as having significant value to the things that matter most to me. (And I work in a fairly cutting-edge developmental segment of the medical world. It is really rewarding to be part of teams working on some very interesting devices and drugs that can greatly benefit specific individuals with specific diseases, but overall we have lost our way in terms of what we as a society value.)
Danes do have a tendency to be smug about their hygge, but I’m not sure they’re wrong to be that way.
Let me guess, they have no children?
It is always quite astonishing to see how the Zman can take a short blog post by someone at National Review and turn it into a fusillade about the failures of conservatism, or use it to explode the evil nature of the writer. Obviously, NR really, really flips his switch.
Here is a condensation of what Harsanyi actually wrote:
Bernie says he can give you a welfare state like Denmark without raising your taxes. Bernie is lying. The tax rates in Denmark are substantially higher than in the US. They can’t work here.
From this Zman informs us that “David Harsanyi is everything that has gone wrong with conservatism over the last many decades,” and that he is “acting on his middle-man mentality.” According to Zman, the middle-man mentality opposes taxes because it views the state as the competitor who is stealing his profits and making him less efficient.
According to Zman, “Citizens are not driven by efficiency.” In Zman’s view, the Danes are willing to tolerate higher taxes and regulation because this somehow helps them “remain Danish.”
And then it’s back to the middle-man mentality of Harsanyi, which leads to all sorts of evil about how corporations control society, the tech giants are abusers, and the middle-man doesn’t care about the identity and customs of the society where the middle-man lives, and the conservative opposition to Sanders is “so ridiculous.”
OOOOkay.
I guess we’re all in now for higher taxes and more government regulation because somehow that will conserve our identity, just like the Danes.
Call me stupid (and I’m sure you will,) but I’m just kind of wondering how high the taxes and regulation will have to go before we get to that state where the “interest of the people” overcomes the “bad for business” faction.
The point is that taxes and regulations aren’t the point. The point is that we should not make our decisions based on the same debates – higher-lower taxes and less-more regulation – that have driven US politics since the 1980’s, because this punditry is driven by donor cash.
I’m just kind of wondering how much longer you can tolerate never getting ahead no matter which side of that debate holds power.
Low taxes and less regulation are not the key to happiness and they are not the most important issues we are facing. Yet they frame the debate.
DH wants us to focus on the balance-sheet rather than the happiness of the Danish people. No matter how high or low your taxes are, woke capitalist diversity sucks and makes people unhappy.
Do you honestly believe that David Harsanyi or anyone else at NR or the Federalist would take a pay cut to fight for less regulations or taxation?
Deflection #1: “…taxes and regulations aren’t the point.” Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure that was the point of the DH blog post. In fact I went back and read the DH post again, and, yeah, I’m pretty sure taxes were specifically the point he was making. You’re the one who wants to talk about something else. You’re the one who is trying to flip the script. This is standard fare for this comment section.
It’s also standard fare around this blog to take a narrow and limited public comment by someone else, even if it is true, such as DH’s comment that Bernie is lying to you about Danish taxes, and conflate this into a contemptible ideological world view.
I read the DH post and thought, yeah, he’s right, Bernie is an idiot. It was so trivial I wondered why DH would take the time to write it. Everyone knows Bernie is an idiot. Maybe he just thought it was worth the time to catalog one more example of why Bernie is an idiot.
On the other hand, around this blog, there is an irresistible urge to condemn anyone at NR over anything they say. It’s actually kind of funny to see the contortions people go through around here to twist an observation of fact at NR into yet another example of NR’s evil failures, even when the observation of some political fact by NR is true.
Non sequitur #1: “…we should not make our decisions based on the same debates……because this punditry is driven by donor cash.” It doesn’t follow from the idea that donor cash drives political punditry that the same historical debates are useless.
Deflection #2: “DH wants us to focus on the balance-sheet rather than the happiness of the Danish people.” Yep, that’s right. DH says Bernie is lying about Danish taxes and what we’re supposed to be worried about is the happiness of the Danish people. OK, I wonder if the Danes would be happier with a 90% tax rate?
Non sequitur #2: “No matter how high or low your taxes are, woke capitalist diversity sucks…” It doesn’t follow from the idea that “woke capital diversity sucks” that taxes don’t matter. Personally, I’d take low taxes and “woke capital diversity” over high taxes and “woke capital diversity,” although I would prefer low taxes and no “woke capital diversity.”
Non sequitur #3: “…take a pay cut to fight for less regulations or taxation?” It doesn’t follow that if you want to fight for less regulation and taxation that you have to take a pay cut. Why should anyone have to take a pay cut if they want to fight for less regulation and taxation?
Autistic libertarian boilerplate. You’re not ready or willing to participate in good faith around here. Happy trolling – I’m out.
I was calculating how long it would take before the “libertarian” canard would appear. You’re right on schedule. As far as “willing to participate in good faith” goes, you should look in a mirror.
It seems to me that one of the main points was that the taxes Danes pay go to the programs and purposes that are good for the Danes. In the US, much of the tax burden goes to pay for diversity, which is bad for us whites. Without that differentiation, talk about taxes is pretty pointless.
Hmmm, very interesting…. We went to war with England over the Stamp Act and a rather minor tax on tea. Now, some 10 generations after the founding, you think it’s rather pointless to talk about taxes unless we differentiate between “bad” taxes that carry the burden of diversity and taxes that are for some “good” purpose that you like, as if “good” taxes are acceptable as long as you don’t have to live in a diverse society. Wow, what a difference 10 generations makes!
The point of the criticism wasn’t about good vs bad taxes. It was about framing and reducing our current milieu to how it would respond to a change in tax policy.
This is the equivalent of discussing the proper shoe size for a leprous foot.
“We went to war over the Stamp Act.”
Judas. H. Priest.
And a young George W. told his father he chopped the cherry tree. He could not tell a lie. That was actually a lesson in my grade school.
What kind of ‘people’ and what kind of ‘business’?
Denmark doesnt have an expansive economy!
Well America is expanding itself into distopia.
When all we talk about on the Republican side is GDP, the stock market, black unemployment and how many women now work outside the home?
Well expect the loons on the other side to put up a senile old man who can’t remember where he is at.
And still win!
There is no tech singularity and no economic manipulation that can raise up a civilization dying from diversity. High taxes/low taxes, more regulation/less regulation, high tech/low tech, universal healthcare/self-admin healthcare, better educated people/ 10% literacy rates, more public investment/zero public investment…none of this means squat as long as diversity remains our greatest strength and as long as foreign interests get to set the ground rules. Middle men, 6 public workers digging a 3 foot ditch, office personnel engaged in meaningless busy work and on and on and on and…These are not the problem they are symptoms of a problem. We can spend the next century fighting a 1000 small problems or we can deal with the few big ones and then let the little ones fix themselves.
Bust-out America is socially bankrupt. A nation of strangers looking to swindle each other has no future.
Contra Ayn Rand, social Darwinism doesn’t breed trust and goodwill and doesn’t result in the most moral rising to the top. That wasn’t John Galt twerking in South Carolina, but it was one of America’s elect billionaires.
Alisa failed to check her premises. At least one of them was wrong.
Ayn Rand was a product of her socialist (USSR) upbringing. In the USSR a bulldozer operator was paid at the level of a medical doctor. Mediocrity is elevated when the market is so interfered with. When one remembers this, her books are a good read—but only a good read, not an instruction manual.
Judging by our current elites, mediocrity is elevated when the market isn’t interfered with.
Our current elites are by and large political hacks who have created nothing. Our tech giants, as much as I deplore their political persuasions, have at least taken risk and created wealth. They are anything but hacks. I don’t know enough about symbol manipulators (banking, stock marketers, fund managers) to comment there on.
Good piece. I was thinking along similar lines this morning when I read a story about Lou Dobbs attacking Lindsey Graham for not doing anything about the corrupt FISA fiasco. Where the hell you been the last fifty years, Lou? The Republicans have been completely captured by the merchant class for decades and never do anything about anything that doesn’t involve big business because antagonizing your political opponents isn’t good for the business atmosphere. They’ve thrown everything – their constituents, the nation, conservatism, freedom, Western Civilization, even their own political party – under the proverbial bus in service to Wall Street. They declined to take action in the past for this reason and now they’re losing the actual ability to take action.
I suppose they think that they’ll long have just enough power in the Senate to squelch anti-business bills and that’s all they care about but they should understand that the filibuster is going to be history and the establishment won’t need gatekeepers to keep whitey on the plantation once mass migration has turned us into a de facto one-party state. In fact they do understand, they lie about the true situation in order to keep the con game going just a little bit longer. They’re “busting out” their constituents and the nation, to use Mob terms. That’s why they’re called grifters.
‘Efficiency’ in govt. services is a shibboleth that wouldn’t matter so much in a homogeneous culture such as Denmark’s. Here, OTOH, it is one of few still-allowed means of opposing unlimited govt. grifting. So it has some limited utility as a critique. But it cannot nor ought not be the end-all-be-all. Why_?
In govt. services that are critical to life and property, it is *effectiveness* at a reasonable cost that matters. For example, an efficient fire dept. would have only enough fire engines and firemen such that they’re constantly employed at fires. But no idle engines or firemen means they can only come to your fire after they’ve put out the last one. So your 911 call just puts you in the queue.
Same approach as enshrined in the UK and Canadian National Health Services: Likewise the Leftist lode star of Obamacare. We’d better pray that Corona Chan doesn’t gobble up all of our efficiently-allocated hospital beds like it did in the PRC.* Socialism’s goal of efficiency eats up system margin in the name of fairness and equality.** This, in turn, makes every bureaucratically un-forecasted event a potential crisis.
*That’s* why Commie Bernie is such a threat to you and yours.
___________________
* Apparently only ~20% of the COVID 19 cases require hospitalization, primarily for respiratory support. If you get that support your chances are pretty good. But the kicker is that such support can be required for 10 – 15 days. Pretty soon you’re out of beds and patients are left to die in the hallways, like you see in the nightmare pictures from China. Plus your healthcare workers start dropping too.
**Only two basic ways of allocating scarce resources: Price and queuing. Not all economists are wrong about everything. Commies like queuing because the Inner Party gets to jump the queue.
Zman wrote: “The Danes wish to remain Danish, which means discouraging that which they don’t like and encouraging what they like.” Are you saying allowing 310,000 mohammedans to settle in Denmark confirms the Danes’ wish to remain Danish?
I pretty said the exact opposite.
“The typical Dane looks at an American city, for example, and thinks Americans are monsters for tolerating it.” – This is exactly why I don’t like going to Europe anymore. I’m not going to spend nine hours on a plane to sit at a bar and be lectured to on this very topic by Euro-trash. The problem with Western Europeans is that, outside of pockets, black people are a concept to them. Very much like a liberal white millennial from a place like Nebraska. They don’t have the curse of Ham wandering around like we do. We can’t build any quality society as long as that millstone hangs from our necks. The Irish are the worst these days by the way. Somehow, 20 years ago, they all decided to become preening, moralizing Sinead O’Connors.
Denmark is a great place, but the things it does it can only do because of scale and uniformity. As Mark Steyn once said, and I’m paraphrasing, socialized medicine is difficult in small countries, you can’t even begin to implement it in a country of over 300 million people. This country has too many moving parts with too many diverse population groups. The fact that Seattle is in the same country as Miami will be considered stunning one day.
I support Bernie as an accelerationist. Someone full of unworkable concepts that will fall on his face while causing havoc for the current inferior power elite. The best men to hold together a failing system are people like Bloomberg. They’re smart enough to not want to kill the sickly host. Bernie knows no such concept.
“The Irish are the worst these days by the way. Somehow, 20 years ago, they all decided to become preening, moralizing Sinead O’Connors.”
Yes, with knobs on. I remarked the other day that the only country in Europe more pozzed than Britain was Sweden. But I forgot about Ireland. It’s like they’ve been gripped by some mass psychosis. They’re tripping over each other in the headlong rush to displace themselves.
The EU has saved the Irish Republic’s financial cookies in the last 20 years or so. Ireland is, culturally and economically, a desperate place in which to live, underneath it all, and they know who butters their bread.
BTW, the same thing is being attempted by the Proggies with the utes of this country, creating a cultural and economic wasteland for them, so they will eagerly turn to Big Bro for the goodies.
Ireland’s on my list for my next Euro trip. I spoke with an older Irish nationalist at Scandza who would largely agree. Check out Keith Woods on this as well. Our Fellowest Whites are leading the charge (Shatter’s a one-man Frankfurt School of (((Gaelic))) poz) and our buddies from Silicon Valley (Google, Amazon, Faceberg) are buying all the Ireland they’re selling.
Lenin was also an accelerationist, then he called it “creating a revolutionary moment”,
I’m not going to spend nine hours on a plane to sit at a bar and be lectured to on this very topic by Euro-trash.
I’m sorry to say that I absolutely recognize this attitude, but I’m surprised you still get it, now that we’ve been enriched the same way America is.
At any rate, I’d recommend American tourists do what someone upthread suggested tourists in Los Angeles do: rent a car and get out of the metropolises ASAP. It’s not just a matter of escaping the diversity, it’s that people outside big cities are not assholes.
This is especially important in France, where the Parisians have been holding the uncontested throne of assholery since at least Henry IV.
From Bavaria to Sicily, Europe is one, big tourist attraction, medieval castles, towns and churches everywhere and few, if any, poc outside the metropolises. See it while it’s still here, and avoid the big tourist magnets: it’s a choice between jostling 2,000 Chinese to see the cathedral of Chartres or have a slightly less magnificent church all to yourself.
I haven’t visited myself but judging from videos, England is an absolutely charming country once you leave London.
Visiting Europe in winter was a blessing. No crowds whatsoever, prices were cheap (more affordable than staying in CA for the same months), even over Christmas. The weather was mild, too – a couple of weeks of foot-deep snow but mostly temps above freezing, never below 20 degrees F or so. No surprise everyone there thinks Earth is melting, it was unseasonably warm.
I must admit I’m a bit surprised by that. Our winters are famously hellish, and the mild ones are the worst. Cold rain or sleet is way worse than -5C and snow, and a proper snow cover makes a world of difference light-wise – not that we get that very often here in Denmark.
I hope you stay to see Scandinavia in the summertime, experience the long days and the bright nights. If you want an off-beat recommendation, rent a bike and try Læsø. Very quaint, great beaches, lots of wildlife, almost no tourists. No cathedrals, though, and no art exhibitions.
The next time I go I’m definitely pulling up a map of voting patterns. I want to give the anti-immigration nationalists my business. That will include choosing regions that reflect a part of a country that still wants to be alive. The capitals always have the worst people, just as here the D.C. area has the worst people (cold, boring, anti-social androids) despite the rudeness in NY or Boston.
You think Denmark’s bad? In the Netherlands, starting this year, lower incomes are taxed at 37.35% and the higher incomes for 49.50%. And for American ex-pats, they have the pleasure of paying taxes twice since the US (unlike EU member states and many other countries) doesn’t have an exemption for their citizens who work outside the country.
You can play around with their tax calculator here –
https://thetax.nl/?year=2020&startFrom=Year&salary=36000&allowance=0&socialSecurity=1&retired=0&ruling=0&rulingChoice=normal
It is often difficult to compare tax rates—but I’m not arguing with your figures. Here in the US, we have many taxing jurisdictions, and they all add up. Over there you are often not dealing with so many and I often hear only tax quoted at the national level. On the other hand, you do have the VAT tax, which adds a bit.
I used to live in NYC. For that privilege you paid the same in Federal Income tax, then a fairly high State Income tax, and finally a City Income tax. Where I am now, there is no city income tax, but both City and County have sales taxes and the State get both income and sales taxes. In most everywhere I know, one gets the privilege of paying “school” taxes, and “property” taxes (a form of wealth tax in essence), not to mention licensing your motor vehicle. And of course, we have the standard FICA taxes for retirement and medical care at the federal level.
Sound ridiculously complex, you bet—and probably deliberately so. But if you tell me that the Netherland’s wants 50% of my paycheck—and tosses in free health care and a national pension—I’m all ears, because as far as I’m concerned I’m at that level now, especially if one figures out what my health insurance costs (private) currently are.
Does health care cost ~$20k/year (not counting the massive deductibles.)
The tax rates in Scandinavia are high but they’re worth it, for now. Swedes whose society is crashing are starting to question this, but that’s due to immigration policy, not muh Socialism.
Scandinavia has always been a glitch in the “conservative case for capitalism.” As Z has noted in the past, they’ve come up with facile excuses for why Norway didn’t have sh*tty cars, food lines and 102% national alcoholism like the USSR – US defense spending, cooking the books, etc… None of these were all that convincing. Companies like Nokia kept innovating, Scandis kept being happy and food and other basic goods remained perplexingly plentiful, cheap and high-quality.
Personnel is policy. The USSR couldn’t accomplish what the Danes have with Imperial Russia’s mystery-meat populace of Ashkepaths, Slavs, Teutons, Mongols, Tartars and Muslimistanis, even with totalitarian authority. You can plow a field with a team of sled dogs if you have enough dogs & enough patience, but it’s not going to be easy, pretty or cheap. Scandis make socialism easy, pretty and cheap as living in Southern California without the squalor and Tower of Babel anti-culture.
The color-blind conservatism of Harsanyi is the craven conservatism of the status quo. It is not grounded in a noble-if-misguided heritage American tradition of muh Founders & the Magic Paper. It’s an apologia for neoliberalism, the true common faith of the ruling elite. The neoliberals make policy and the “conservatives” tell us why the new hotness is a perfect new expression of the old faith.
Conservatism is dead and we should bury the term. Too much baggage, too many qualifiers and disclaimers required. We don’t want to conserve anything about the present system. Trying to conserve a tradition that’s been entirely memory-holed by NuMerica makes you a NuMerican radical.
We’re radicals, the Bernie Bros are radicals. We share common enemies. Instead of wasting four more years on Red-Blue politics as usual, we should work together to burn the whole kabuki show down.
As for shills like Dave, Let Them Eat Bugs. I’m sure he can come up with a conservative case for it.
Yup, most of the places and events of culture are now artifacts, like they are encased in amber. Go to the art museum (real art, not what passes for modern art), and you get the feeling you are in some sort of exotic outpost of a vanished civilization. A recent trip to the zoo came off the same way for me, that I am immersing myself into some sort of long-gone culture, like going to Macchu Pichu or something. It is what it is, and the kiddos don’t know what they missed.
It’s hard to bridge the gulf of perception between YZ’s and Boomer/Xers on this. Those who grew up in the 90’s-2000’s vs. the 60’s-80’s have only know Clown World America. Skepticism about “American values” like capitalism and Christianity comes much more naturally.
We had to let go of what they’ve never even hoped for. Growing up with diminishing prospects is something we never faced. Acceleration comes easier when you’re not giving up anything you love or believe in to begin with.
Losing things like going to the zoo or a museum with the kids or a trendy neighborhood with cool shops are part of the price of diversity. Diversity shows up at these places and just ruins them. Fights, stealing, loudness and all the lousy behavior diversity brings with them just makes doing these things untenable. Even things like little league become a problem. All the stuff that makes a community just gets ruined. There are a thousand things big and small that all eat away at your quality of life. In Philly you can tell what kind of neighborhood you are in just by the amount of litter on the ground! You go into the hood and there is just trash on the ground everywhere.
In L.A. it’s the graffiti. You can always tell which railway cars have recently passed through L.A.; they are the ones where every inch of them up to six feet high is covered with the stuff. Then it gets exported all over the place, so the L.A. graffiti garbage can visit the rest of us, when we are near a rail yard or some tracks.
Grafitti is the one aspect where London matched up with LA in terms of sh*tholery.
Too harsh to say that taggers should get a helicopter ride?
Like hacking, spam and vandalism in general, it’s an indiscriminately anti-social crime that serves no purpose but to say “F society.” Society should F them back. Broken windows.
And yes, this only applies to our non-degenerate new societies post-winning. I’d paint “it’s OK to be White” on anything Imperial at this point.
Well, don’t forget you live in clownworld. As soon as someone saw “It’s OK to be white” painted on something, rest assured they will marshal every possible resource to find you, catch you and punish you!
Diversity can write their tags all over the city and nobody will lift a finger to stop it. But let some white kid (or man) write It’s OK to be white on something and suddenly graffiti is a national scandal and felony!
This is what is meant when we say we no longer rule of law. The law selectively ignored or ruthlessly enforced depending on the target. This selective enforcement of the law has already begun in earnest, especially in the cities.
No amount of black-letter law can compel citizens to act in good faith toward each other. If your intentions are twisted, you’ll find a way.
There are at least a half-dozen groups competing for control in America (or at least wrangling for second place below you-know-who). None of them is willing to work honestly and in good faith with any of the others toward a common public good. It’s all down to self-interest now. The only vote that can fix that is voting with our feet.
Always wanted to take a road trip up the Northwest coast, hitting Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver but just never got around to it. See what happens when you put things off.
“Everyone knows that you judge a society by how well it treats its most vulnerable…”
Almost. It’s you judge a society by how well it treats those who most loudly CLAIM to be most vulnerable. Duh.
With that bit of joshing aside, is David Harsanyi’s concern for The (Eternal) Middleman nature or nurture then?
I think the reason so many people bought the cuckservative middle man’s pitch is because nobody wants to feel like a sucker. In Denmark, your tax dollars are going to needy Danes. They don’t feel like a sucker for supporting their fellow Danes. But in America, things like welfare and food stamps and the like are seen as transfers from whites to non-whites. They are deeply offended by projects filled with non-whites with 3 generations of welfare recipients under one roof. To what extent this is actually true, I don’t really know, but there is no denying that many Americans feel this way.
So many of our societal problems are framed around race. Real problems don’t get solved because people understand at some level they are being sold a narrative. The cops are out of control, but nothing gets done about it because the press always highlights obvious good shootings framed entirely around racist cops and normal people look at that and see what we see. So then when stuff like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThmRQM1-XnU&t=8s&bpctr=1583424102 happens, nothing is done about it.
As if it’s not bad enough that our tax dollars were going to support non-whites (mostly meaning blacks in the past), now we are importing new parasitic non-white mystery meat from around the globe to add to the burden.
When I was growing up (mid 70s-early 80s) in Southern Oklahoma, all of us white kids worked at all sorts of farm jobs (repairing downed fence, feeding and haying cattle, working the cattle sales, cleaning out horse stalls, hauling hay, even planting and taking care of pecan orchards, etc., etc.), and that’s when we weren’t otherwise working at mowing grass and that sort of thing. Fewer and fewer of the white kids are doing those jobs now; Mexicans and their offspring are doing them, while the white kids goof off on their cell phones and play video games. And devoting all their “spare time” to playing sports, of coure. I can’t for the life of me figure out what their parents are thinking. I suppose they’re not. Not a very satisfying explanation, but it’s the best I got.
I packed fish. When we were doing Hospice for my dad, the way things worked out, I was looking for night-shift work. I ran into my high-school friend (and fellow fish-packer) and was told they only hire illegals–mostly Central Americans. I made ~$16/hr back in the day. Now they make nothing.
ROBG: Bless you for taking care of your father! My wife and I did the same four years ago when my father was dying of cancer. I moved the entire family “back home” and brought the tools of my trade back with me. I put all of my (meager) savings into it, and even cashed in what little gold and silver I had accumulated over the years. I don’t regret any of it, though, not at all. Two of my boys still work for me, and they stepped right up to the plate and kept our little operation going for the most part when I was otherwise preoccupied taking care of dad.
$16 an hour “back in the day” sounds like pretty good wages for an adolescent. When I was working all of the jobs aforementioned, I should imagine I was making “beans” by that standard. The good thing was that it only took a few of those beans to impress the ladies, and impressing the ladies was all that mattered to me and my friends back in them days, if you know what I mean. 🙂
Yeah, alien labour is only half the battle, to be honest.
The average white kid (or their parents) has really declined in quality. Say what you will about Mexicans their kids aren’t sitting inside playing video games all day, watching white girls have abortions on Tik Tok. White boys are some of the most feminine and poorly socialized. Most are spiritually dead too. They look like zombies.
We need a strong cultural shift AND a removal of all alien labour.
T. Morris: consider this: if a white kid wants a farm job, he’s probably going to be the only gringo, and the only english speaker. Would you want to do hard, possibly dangerous, manual labor with coworkers you cannot speak to and who dont want you around? What if one of them accuses the outsider white boy of raaacissm? Is that going to derail his chances of a non-manual-labor career, maybe get his college acceptance rescinded? Also, is that kind of work experience going to help or hinder him getting a middle class or higher kind of job? Realistically, probably hinder. A couple extra curriculars with his friends (who are white, not criminals, and speak english) that prevents getting a job is probably a much better bet than a couple hundred bucks from hard work, both short and longterm.
The need to scrape every last nickle off the table so you can stick it to some sucker and to moralize about it is a sure sign that you have been invaded and that the worst of your kind once kept in their pens were kept there for a reason.
“The irony of modern conservatism is that it has actually arrived at the exact opposite of what has always defined conservatism.”
I’m sure I’ve noted this here before, but… What the above sentence describes is the end state of Buckley “Fusionism,” the unholy alliance of the traditional conservatives, the right libertarians and the social conservatives, and eventually the neoconservatives.
The right libertarians got the economy that the Z Man describes here, the neoconservatives got the endless Middle East wars, and the traditional and social conservatives got… tens of millions of brown and black hoards streaming over the border and drag queen story our at their local library…
It’s time to put the torch to Fusionism.
You sound just like the kind of guy who opposes vending machines that dispense prostitutes in every hospital, well let me tell you right now you are not invited to our next conference Zman.
OT but…
The middle-man thing is incredibly common in both government and the private sector. In working for a number of very large financial services firms, it still baffles me that there are so many people making enormous salaries that don’t actually do anything productive. People making six figure incomes with incredibly benefits that never actually interface with customers. They spend all day in meetings and “working” on endless projects that don’t actually accomplish anything. If you are moderately clever you can retire with a seven figure 401k without ever producing anything of value.
On the other hand, I needed a copy of the deed to my house yesterday so I went to our small courthouse in our rural county. I had to pass through a portal that locked behind me before the interior door would open, a station guarded by two armed guards. There has literally never been a crime in our courthouse but now we have Detroit-level security. I walked into the Recorders office and four women were sitting around, apparently doing nothing. One printed up my deed, took my one dollar fee and sat back down. Total elapsed time about 2 minutes. The next county department I went to had two more women sitting around not doing anything other than waiting for some schlep to come in so they could take my piece of paper and hand it off to one of the men in the back. Oh and they collected my fee of $150, my toll for expecting the people already paid by my taxes to process a stupid permit.
How much productive labor is sucked dry of any value by the vampires who sit in cubicles all around America, exacting a small toll on every bit of economic activity?
Sucks to say it, but it might be better than putting them on welfare. Not as efficient, but at least it’s something. Not sure what to do but about it other than letting the superfluous fail. Then one has to ask himself if he’s superfluous too. It’s a whole can of worms, but it’ll eventually need solving one way or another.
Plus they may just be doing something you don’t understand. For example it’s easy to blow off a lot of project management as “thas jus paper pushin’ bullshit!” but the reality is once a project reaches a certain size you HAVE to push some serious paper to keep everything straight. Projects without records and processes turn into failures fast.
A movie director for example doesn’t act, shoot the camera, do lighting, do grip work or stunts, of write the script or do anything “useful” on the surface. so its bullshit right? Wrong because somebody has to pull the whole thing together. Without a director you don’t have anyone responsible for a finished product, and if no ones responsible it doesn’t happen. This is the problem Marx had, having never managed anything, he assumed the orchestra would be just fine without a parasitic director. He was wrong as usual.
Of all the examples you could have used to make your point, you choose that of a movie director? Yikes! A building contractor normally doesn’t do much actual work, but he’s pretty good at scheduling, coordinating work, overseeing quality and efficiency and that sort of thing. The difference between him and a movie director is that the former is managing the construction of a project that takes raw materials and makes something useful from them. The latter is managing a bunch of play actors in the production of entertainment. Not that entertainment is utterly devoid of (sensual and a aesthetic) value, but for my money at least I see a lot more real value in the building contractor than I ever could a movie director or art dealer, for that matter.
Hoyos;
Agree. But project management (PM) doesn’t turn into pure paper shuffling in industries where there is some degree of competition, or at least, penalty for failure. In govt. controlled industries, OTOH, like big pharma (as somebody mentioned), not so much. But dog-eat-dog in drug production also seems like a really bad idea too.
A prudent choice of what to control and what to leave to a competitive market is something no Commie could ever be trusted to make, even though we often do a sub -optimal job of it now.
Why is it, to your mind, that the only other option is putting them on welfare?
Welfare never works. It creates dependency and resentfulness. It is the lazy man’s solution to a devilish problem, surplus human capital. We are made to work, physically/psychologically, not sit around waiting for a welfare check. Don’t believe me? Explain better, the current opioid crisis overwhelming a once employed and prosperous White middle class?
In the US it does. Believe it or not, most Welfare recipients in the US work. Their wages are suppressed by the unending stream of illegals. When you drop-anchor you get a Green Card. When you harbor a minor that’s been trafficked across the border you get a Green Card and are protected from deportation, whether you’re a relative or not.
That is correct. My thoughts were toward those who are under-employed from once prosperous jobs and the new proposals for putting everyone on UBI of some form.
You know, I wonder if there isn’t something to this idea in relation to women entering the workforce en masse. The amount of labor-saving devices invented in the past 100 years for the home reduced the amount of work to be done int the home so far as to give women far more free time. We have a sewing machine but use it sparingly, the dyes in clothes now don’t run very much (for the most part), kitchen appliances and youtube have made gourmet cooking available even to working class folks…
Could it be more than just corporate america wanting to keep wages flat, but also that women were being made to sit aroud?
For “clever” I’d substitute “cagey” or “cunning”, but otherwise this is spot on. I spent a decade contracting at a large pharmaceutical company, surviving one merger and two economic downturns before they finally got me, and the one constant was how many – thousands if not tens of thousands, in a company that employs hundreds of thousands around the world – useless “workers” there were. We know the gov’t drones are basically affirmative action, but it rarely gets mentioned that an awful lot of (I’d say most) corporate lower and mid-level people are completely superfluous to The Cause, as witnessed by the fact that business went right along, and sometimes picked up some steam, after every cull of five, ten, or twenty thousand individuals. I suspect this is the fear that haunts the Robot Revolution people, and therefore Paintersforms has it right: What do you do with millions of people of average to above-average intelligence when they have no way to earn a decent living and nothing but time on their hands?
The other thing I see going on in the corporate carousel is the dumbing down of the non-executive job descriptions. They get a two-fer out of this. One is that the pool of job applicants, especially the ones they need to hire to fill out quotas, are not very skilled, so having them fill out forms according to the instructions beats the heck out of making them figure anything out. Two is that as they dumb things down, they can run out the ones who think too much and ask too many questions, and not lose their ability to function. The efficiency of the middlemanning at the big corporate end of things (Amazon as the case study) keeps the thinking types from quitting the big corporations and being able to make a go of it on their own as competitors to them.
Libertarians: “I want be free to screw you over.” Their magic word is ‘efficiency’. People are starting to wise up, thank God.
Then you have left libertarians who want to be free to be degenerates, but that’s another story.
We generally associate the term “useful idiots” with defenders of left-wing ideology, but it could be equally applied to defenders of large corporations.
Even before the Woke Capital era, big business ruthlessly obliterated traditional social structures.
But now that the corporate world has signed on to Globohomo, I don’t see how anyone with rightist views of any kind can defend it.
All big corporations are little fascist states but I still prefer having a collection of these bureaucratic globohomo statelets over the 20th century style national or international socialist experiments where the choice is usually no choice at all but the graveyard.
Big corporations drive society to experiments. Russian laughing that capitalism is preparation society for communism. To make experiment, first capitalism must destroy the society, so impoverished atomized rootless mass can not fight back When people have little money, little friends and little free time, people unite and fight off fanatics. Capitalism makes you scared about your job, your living your shelter and turns society into caged rats survival fight.
Juri nails it – both systems make you dependent & servile, neither is a solution in themselves. If you get the biology and culture right, you can make almost any system work. If you don’t, no system will.
Consider the USSR was the way it was Partly because of who ran it.
The truth is Europeans have managed to run fairly successful states as monarchies, democracies, quasi-socialist states, and theocracies. Because the success of the state is far more dependent on WHO is running it than HOW it’s run.
The corporate powers buying government are far closer in ideology to the people who ran the USSR and they don’t have any intention of being restrained by constitutions or democracy.
I am sorry who ran USSR? Mexicans? Russians are Europeans last time I checked.
REF: Meme War Vet and Hoagie comment.
To quote from yesterday’s post: “You cannot run anything with feckless airheads and narcissistic nitwits. That’s democracy though. It elevates the vain and stupid into positions of authority. It elevates narcissism and boasting over prudence and caution. It makes the people reckless and stupid”.
Here in the USofA , we’re eat up with this – particularlly by an entire racial strata comprising +/- 12% of the population – far greater that the enrier population of Denmark.
Personal experience with the Danes primarilly on a busienss level with Maersk – the shpping conglomorate. Other than that they’re coo coo for carbon elimination, they run a tight ship (no pun intended).
Unable to say if / how Denmark has a link to the middle man brand of conservatism in the US
An analogy that doesn’t show too much strain would be donating blood. What do I think of donating blood? Provided it’s to people I love and know and it’s not too much, I can part with it. But my cousin who needs O positive blood is not the same as some Xenomorph with acid for blood. And I don’t want my phlebotomist to wield a knife in a dark alley when he comes looking for the donation. Yes, I know, certain parties won’t like the idea of comparing the shedding of blood with taxation because “some people did something,” in Europe a long time ago as Congresswoman (and Biden VP pick?) Rep Omar once said, but it will have to suffice for now.
Even in terms of taxation we aren’t better off having lower taxes than Danes. In theory the taxes should go to some benefit for the people paying them. But much of our taxes go to pointless wars and into funding more ghettos. You’re average American would probably be hard pressed to point to any real benefit they get from their taxes. At least Danes are actually getting something.
There is no “we” in America if you are White. It’s illegal.
My European friends are always happy to visit and they’re always happy to leave.
A lot of Americans don’t get that. They never do any self-reflection. It’s just assumed the USA is the greatest country in the world. In a lot of ways it is and yet we grow more miserable everyday.
Think we could learn something from our cousins across the pond 🙂
They aren’t addicted to money like we are. Nothing will really change until Americans face that. Staying optimistic but 240 years on, it doesn’t look good.
Addicted to money? Please explain.
Last time I checked money buys me a roof over my head, food in my stomach, and a vehicle that transports my ass to work every day.
So EXACTLY where does the addiction come in?
How bad you want it, how much you want, and what you will do for it.
Americans are famous for commodifying everything. Everything is for sale. The whole country is for sale. Men sell their sperm, women sell their wombs— and that’s generally considered legitimate. Generations of kids have come home to empty houses because their parents were out making money. Young people are being robbed of their country for cheap labor. People care about what the Dow Jones is doing. We’re addicted to the stuff.
And on a personal level, when I talk like this I get raised eyebrows, or somebody asks me if I’m a socialist.
As to where exactly the addiction comes in… idk maybe when you’re willing to sell your home (not house), community, country, etc. Big chunks of your identity. People say Germany for Germans, Russia for Russians. America for Americans never really caught on. We’re for sale.
People throwing around BS statements like ” kids come home to empty houses because their parents were out making money”….. are just being lazy.
Show me on the doll how the AVERAGE WHITE American family – affords to live in a location where their kids aren’t exposed to depravity and diversity on a regular basis – WITHOUT BOTH PARENTS WORKING.
Deconstruct where all the damn money is going – and you start to understand why both parents are working. And it’s not because they’re all driving around in Mercedes, living in a 5000 sq. ft home – and taking regular vacations to the islands.
Unless you’re willing to really address the issues as to why it takes two parents working just to maintain a middle class lifestyle and not have to live in the ghetto – you’re just spewing bullshit.
https://mobile.twitter.com/oren_cass/status/1230505649794166785
Two minds with but a single thought. 😉
I thought this point was bang on and deserves a special call out. Economists are so tied up in theory they forget reality.
“A key assumption of our inflation-adjusted analyses is that old products are still available. Don’t like / can’t afford the $26K 2018 Grand Caravan, go buy the $18K 1996 one instead. Except you can’t. Same problem is even more pernicious in areas like housing and health care.”
Also…
“When we say “inflation-adjusted wages look good,” we are actually saying “if you could take your wage back to 1970 and spend it, you’d be better off than you were at the time with a 1970 wage.” “
@ Z ManI love how the first reply to that thread is “I hope you start looking at households where the primary wage earner isn’t male.” Yeah. That’s why we’re screwed. That right there.
Being a “car guy” since I was a teenager – what Oren Cass is detailing there makes perfect sense, and is in fact in line with why I’ve constantly argued against all the goddam “safety” regulations that have been shoved down our throats.
The fact of the matter is that all those airbags, and ABS, and collision avoidance systems – etc – all COST MONEY. And there’s no way you can not have them because they’re required to be built in to all vehicles. Some of the safety stuff is optional – now….. but the history of these things is that once the politicians and the mad mothers can start saying things like “40% of all new cars are built with X safety device anyway – why don’t we just require it by law?” – your costs to buy a new vehicle just went up BY LAW.
Back in the mid-to late 80s and into the early 90s , you could still buy VERY light vehicles like the Honda CRX HF and the Geo Metro. These things would get something like 50 miles to the gallon. There was a subculture of people who just kept driving these cars forever – because it was simply impossible to get any modern car that was similarly efficient. With technological advances in engine design, aluminum and plastic composite bodies and other advancements that have come along since the 90’s – I believe it would likely be possible to build a small efficient car like those previously mentioned – that would go 60 mpg on gas – and maybe 70-75 with a small diesel.
The law simply forbids these types of vehicles from being built – so it basically forbids people from buying tools ( a vehicle is a tool) – that would save them money.
The culture has also changed – in that vehicles like these are pretty much socially unacceptable now. They’re perceived as too unsafe. This – despite the fact that millions of people used to drive little cars like this just a couple of decades ago.
Even notwithstanding the globohomo stuff – there’s plenty that the popular liberal-drive mass culture has done to make life harder for the average person, and the liberal politicians have done thru their rulings to just constantly suck money out of the pockets of the working class.
A majority of my friends were latchkey kids.
And yeah where I live there’s lots of Mercedes and big houses. People whose grandparents were conservative Mennonite farmers, whose parent sold the farm because the kids couldn’t be bothered to keep it going. People living off the capital their families built up by working hard and saving. People with screwed up kids who don’t amount to much. Over and over. It’s the love of money doing it. I see it firsthand every day.
And then there are the people who buy the new $350k house instead of the $170k fixer upper who have to sell in a couple of years because they can’t afford it. And the people moving in looking for the authenticity we’ve got here and their stupid developments called American Tradition or whatever garbage. And their strip malls, and their conveniences, and their generic corporate crap. I would almost feel sorry for them if they weren’t so stubbornly and proudly wrong-headed. They completely miss the point. And the diversity that comes with all of it, and the good church people virtue signaling to save the world, and their precious refugees.
None of these people like how things are getting but nobody wants to do the hard things to fix it because they’re addicts. They can’t give up their stuff, status, and higher incomes any easier than a crackhead can break his pipe. Even if they’ll ACTUALLY HAVE MORE MONEY, happiness, health, and children who love them and won’t dump them in a home the way they dumped their kids in daycare. I have a feeling that’s why more and more people aren’t leaving much to the kids— they know the kids will screw them. Generational wealth destroyed, families destroyed, communities destroyed, a nation destroyed—and it all comes down to love of money imo.
I’m not jealous of people living in hell. I certainly don’t want what they’ve got.
More moms working = more dollars = more consumerism = inflation = equals more debt to maintain the facade of wealth = the pusherman gets away with your money = ruination. It’s fine to complain about bankers and corporations and big government. They deserve it. But at some point you have to admit they couldn’t get away with it if people didn’t keep falling for it.
A lot of what are talking about with the cost of living increases is thanks to women entering the work force. Base cost of living followed the female abandonment of home life. Putting women to work increases GDP as it raises consumption, so middle man incentive is for women to work.
It isn’t easy to do and requires a lit of early sound decision making, but it’s possible to break the cycle. We did. And I think more people are doing so than 10-20 years ago.
Stina, great point. Economically, day care eats up a huge percentage of the “additional” income, double transpo costs/commute time, etc… The social costs are much harder to quantify but much greater for sure.
Nuclear > extended family + no fault divorce + working women have done the most damage to the White race of any issues that vex us. Had we maintained extended families, stable marriages and stay-at-home moms, we would have resisted most of the subsequent rot.
Its not day to day folks like you that are the issue, its the grifting pieces of trash that arbitraged your wages down by half since the 1970’s
Some schmuck who works for the government gets a nice wage benefit package and instead of questing why you aren’t getting what he is or inflation adjusted , people a few decades ago got, you fill yourself with resentment .
The crab pot mentality pervades the US but really you are being screwed and have been for a couple of generations.
Basically 10% of the population breaks even and 1% gets all the growth . The US isn’t going to work that way and the only way you are going to get better wages is with State.
Otherwise the supreme cold logic of the business equation says “you are a liability and must go.” and sure this short sighted to say the least, they don’t care, If you can’t buy anything do to wage Uncle Same will mint them money just like they have been doing for decades
Americans still want slaves, either prison labor or people paid so poorly they can’t have a life and fixing this for many, one income for family will require using the State
This must change or you get war, collapse or someone who makes Bernie look like a moderate.
First thing though, fix the Demography. This lowers the labor pool and increases social capital making it less necessary to go full Bernie Bro and you never want to go full Bernie Bro .
“You can have a rising GDP, but if it’s in the context of collapsing families and people no longer getting married and declining fertility rates and so on and so forth, you haven’t necessarily enhanced well-being.”
https://twitter.com/oren_cass/status/1230505649794166785
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Its essential to restore social capital to have families.
1st Demography, 2nd Culture 3rd Money
Its a three legged stool of sorts, #1 there allows for the 2nd to work (too many faces means no society) and the 2nd allows the social pressure to make the 3rd happen.
To get the first, stop immigration, repatriate and assimilate what remains.
Once that is done, you essentially have to change to culture to a socially conservative and one where it is assumed that people have a family and its shameful to divorce or be unmarried and/or voluntarily childless after 25 for a woman (Leftover Christmas Cake as they call it in Japan)
It may require top down efforts which sucks but given our culture was pozzed top down, think of it as a repair task
To make child bearing work you also need to make sure younger workers are paid enough to do this in the urban and semi urban places most people live.
There is no one weird trick even Demography while it comes close won’t do it all.
Long and short anyone working should be able to have a kid or two without too much trouble which means import controls, speculation controls and a lot of effort so that wages and when needed State benefits work out
Do that and maybe you can push the TFR up. If you can’t, fix the demography and let time handle it Population will shrink to meet wages and that smaller, more Conservative population will inherit.
You’ll have to live without the GDP growth, maybe with shrinkage but oh well.
“ Basically 10% of the population breaks even and 1% gets all the growth .”
AB, bingo! This is important. The top 10% of the population controls 80% of the wealth! The rest, fight over 20%. This was not the situation as late as the 60’s—where, IIRC, the lower 4 quintiles had a 33% share. The difference went to the top .1-1%. You can play around a bit with these numbers, say defining the top as 10-20% of the population, but the stat’s are very stark no matter how generous you may be in playing down the numbers.
Why is this important, because it causes social unrest. Bernie Bro’s are not crazy, they are desperate. This is not a call for simple wealth redistribution—that shit never works. But it is a call for re-evaluation of our priorities wrt creating wealth. Unbridled capitalism will soon be selling human flesh in the meat market…actually, I think it already is.
Nicely done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_brothels_in_Nevada
The company I work for made the most net profit and gross income it’s *ever* made last year. I got a 1% raise and a ‘meets expectations’. Also, they laid off a bunch of folks to replace them with H-1Bs from the Indian Consultancies. It’s far worse than Dilbert… I’m interviewing elsewhere today…
The roof over your head doesn’t have to be a 4,000 sq. ft. McMansion, the food doesn’t have to be from a restaurant every night, and the vehicle doesn’t have to be a Tesla. Much of our misery comes from the extra work we do to afford things we don’t really need.
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” – Fight Club
I strongly agree with you on the moral question and that we don’t need anywhere near as much as we think we do.
However wealth is status which is a basic human need in modernity and if the overall wealth in society grows, people won’t settle for less wealth and status just to have a kid the elite can use as cheap labor.
The equation is pretty simple. Share or no babies from anyone but the fanatics.
Not as many folks are eating out every night and living in 4000 sq. ft. homes as you think.
https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/highlights.html
Even for new construction, the median size is ~2400 sq ft, which is approximately 3 or 4 bedrooms.
Even many of the ‘super-zips’ are mostly 4 bedroom homes.
Yes, houses are larger than in the past. But not nearly as bad as you make it sound.
The far bigger problem is that the cost per square foot has gone way up, *especially* in neighborhoods not blessed by diversity. Also, large amounts of middle-class immigration have made middle-class used homes far more expensive than they could be, given that the Boomers ought to be starting to ‘downsize’…
Most of America IS the greatest country in the world. I would never trade where I live to go to some European country. On the other hand, I would never live in NYC or L.A. We don’t really live in a single country, we live in a bunch of distinct nations united by a common currency.
You should get out more.
I went to grad school in Los Angeles. I would meet European tourists who were visiting for the first time and very disappointed with America. I would tell them that they were in LA, not America. Get in a car and drive north or east for a few hours, you’ll get there.
Great minds think alike. I told everyone in Europe I was from Los Angeles – not California, not America. The most diverse city in the world – look upon her and despair.
When I visited Sequoia National Park, there were a lot more Euros than Americans there – good for them, bad for us. That’s a place Americans should see.
Similar story. As a midwestern boy, I’ve told plenty of foreign visitors that Boston is not the rest of the US, and that they should visit flyover country. One MD (from Venezuela, ironically) nodded solemnly and said “Yes, I know. The rest of the US is ignorant and uneducated compared to Boston.”
I don’t know what I looked like on hearing that, but I do recall she flinched suddenly. Never did speak to me again the month she was visiting. Doubtless no loss to either of us.
I have to laugh, as a native Bostonian. Our accents are atrocious. Transplants and college kids don’t count. I lost mine after 25 years of life in the military. The average Bostonian doesn’t exactly sound cultured, regardless of education. I love being lectured to by folks who have never stepped foot out of Cambridge or Newton.
Until quite recently, all of North America was a European country.
i would leave mexico out of that…
Specifically what can we learn?
Not disagreeing, genuinely curious.
Meme, I’d first say the Euro lifestyle for one – less “work ethic,” more enjoying time with friends and family.
In my Bush-Con days I mocked Euros for taking six-week unionized vacays while Muricans work hard. But the joke’s on us. Americans will work at 4:00 am on Sunday – but why should they? Because Paco and Juan are willing to work those hours, living alone in America and sending all their money back to the fam in Mexico? Because Ben Franklin, railsplitting Lincoln, John Henry etc…? Because Bezos wants more BJ’s? Muh GDP?
America has really internalized the idea of rich = success = winning = good person. We could use a little anti-Puritan, anti-Elect sentiment – a reminder that conspicuous wealth is more often an indicator of social ruthlessness and self-dealing than honor and merit.
Serving Mammon is a sufficient qualification for sh*t-libbery, but not necessary. Euros seem as fraught with social-signalling sh*t-libbery as we are, so money isn’t the root of all evils here. As Mark Steyn noted years back, a lot of Euros are spending their free time much as we do now, amusing ourselves to death, childless, with shallow friendships and little sense of purpose. But the spots I saw, particularly in Scandinavia, still had happy groups of normal couples with children.
TFR notwithstanding, there’s a core that’s relatively un-pozzed there. I’ve seen it in American fly-over country as well. They can’t get some Scandis and American rednecks to hate themselves enough to be GoodWhites. Thus, the ADL is needed.
But if they can rope you with money, they don’t need guilt and fear. You’ll fragment your extended family to chase lower tax rates or $1 more an hour. If you’re Kevin Williamson, you’ll damn your birthright and countrymen for shekels and attaboys. Europe’s been a harder nut to crack on that score, but that’s where the Y’s and Zoomers are letting us down. Shlomo found their price, and now young Euros are found everywhere but home, looking for shekels and status in Shlomo’s sweatshops.
A lot of the enjoyment of life vs working to excess is due to the social situation. In general, my experience with relatives over there is that there is a topping off of what you can earn and enjoy—and for that matter, what you have to earn to enjoy life’s basics.
Tell a relative you have a detached home of 3000+ sq ft on an acre of land and they’ll ask, “Why, are you a farmer?” Point taken. But the reality here too is that, if I want, I can move into a 900-1200 sq foot attached home/apartment on an eighth of an acre in the city along the metro line and live just as comfortably as they do. Whereas, they can never aspire to my current situation.
That’s what’s behind the increasing numbers behind every VISA and Immigration Bill. Before that was the financialization of the economy and the transfer of wealth from Labor to Capital. There is no good end to this for the American worker.
The difference just on parental leave between us and Europe is astounding. If you understand human development, its no surprise the Germans with their mandatory 2 year paid maternity leave were producing E32 BMWs when we were producing gen 3 camaros. Maternal constant attention and care in the “4th trimester” is worth 5-10 iq points: how many us companies even offer 12 weeks of leave? We cant even let our wahmen out of the slave galleys long enough to have developmentally healthy children, never mind vacations and such. Learning about child development makes it seem like someone is TRYING to impliment disgenics in the US, all for the greater good of the bottom line (aka mammon).
Exile – thanks for investing the time into a well thought-out and illuminating response. Iron sharpens iron here.
One thought that occurred to me while reading it was that, stateside, “work hard and you’ll achieve your dreams” was pretty much true for every generation up to and including the Boomers. (I think it’s still more or less true for the credentialed class, but that’s another story.)
Something has changed to where that’s no longer the case. We’ve discussed those “somethings” at length previously, but two key takeaways:
-Boomers and older can’t conceive of an America where hard work & achieving your dreams isn’t a law of nature.
-Millenials and Younger have never known a world where this is true.
Boomers don’t understand that you can literally make all the “right” life choices they made and still end up on your ass.
High school graduate will not get anywhere past McDonalds. New university grads are making about 70% of the required income to rent a 1 bedroom apartment in Toronto. This is if it’s in a good STEM field. Some business students do okay too.
You can scrape by as a STEM grad/ top third business grad, if not, you’re living with mom and dad making minimum wage.
Boomers just cannot accept that we are living in a new paradigm (largely of their own making), and good guy boss Joe isn’t gonna give a kid a shot because he likes him and has a good attitude (Joe is now Pajeet).
Just like they’re surprised how Romney lost (despite saying all the right boomer things, DR3, lower taxes, Israel). They can’t accept their Brave New World zombie creation.
Meme, the breakdown of the “boostraps” American dream is probably the most bitter pill. We are far past the point where you could expect to do well simply by working hard. Truth is, it was over long before we realized it was gone. That started with the 1970’s OPEC shenanigans & the collapse of the Rust Belt.
Guys my age are men of three worlds – the one we grew up in, Clown World, and the one to come. In some ways I envy the younger guys who see Clown World as the norm. My residual loyalties to America cloud my judgment. In the shoes of a Zoomer, I would have more moral clarity. And rage.
To be old enough to remember the vestiges of a functional society, but too young to have enjoyed any personal agency while it existed is an odd place to be, indeed.
I was fortunate enough to know multiple pairs of great-grandparents; they were of the generation between the World Wars and the “bootstraps” thing had worked out pretty well for them, as it had for their parents and their children. My younger cousins will never know them or that way of life.
What to do about it? Still figuring that out, but one thing I know for sure is that the old way is done and won’t be coming back.
To be quite honest I didn’t find Europeans to be pozzed at all. Liberal, sure, in the sense that they mind their own business if you’re minding yours, and are polite and interested in your story as a foreigner.
They were quieter than North Americans, and they didn’t seem to have the “negro chip” of uncertainty on their shoulders – they way we North Americans constantly seem to be worrying if we’re being “cool” or being “too white”.
It seemed to me that a small group of crazies were taking the entire continent for a loop. The only complaint I had was that the Europeans were too relaxed – not happy with the refugees but it’s easier to look the other way than to fight against it – for now. They stopped being the overseers of their own plantation, so to speak.
Of course, this might vary by country, and with younger generations. But my general impression of Europeans was excellent – quiet, humble, intelligent, friendly, and lacking many of the bad qualities we have in North America. Definitely a place I wish I was a native of rather than Canada.
What about opposing Sanders because he’s declared himself pro-open borders?
Who hasn’t? Is it better to have a guy who says he hates open borders but doesn’t do anything to close them?
I oppose this system. Trump will help this system last a few more years. He will not or cannot break it. I want it broken. Therefore I oppose Trump.
Sanders is hopeless – we already know he’ll roll over when the chips are down. But his followers haven’t learned that yet. Once they do, a lot of them are going to end up with Us.
Is it the middle-man who represents efficiency?
It would appear that Amazon, Big Tech, and Walmart have decimated both the middle-man and the small business man.
They would argue that they are creating efficiencies and their faux libertarian think tanks would defend them. Both would be wrong because the 12,000 mile supply chain, JIT, and subjecting their customers to communicating with Koresh in a Calcutta call center all create inefficiencies.
It’s not efficiency in the sense of delivering a better product. Its efficiency in giving a crappy enough product that you’ll pay the most for. The sweet spot between production cost and amount of product sold.
Amazon is the middle man.
Methinks Corona Chan is showing how bad an idea that was.
LibertyMike, all Amazon and big tech do is process payments and skim their cut. What does Amazon do? They skim a pct from people importing chinese crap. What does Uber do? They take a cut of the cab fare you pay to Sanjay. What does Ebay sell? Nothing, they just take a percent from sellers. Tech is nothing BUT middle-xirs (and advertising).
I’d argue that middle-men *are* a bad but necessary part of many transactions. Every retail store, for example, is a middle man. The key is preventing the middle men from gaining too much power over transactions. Uber, for example, does the work to find Sanjay for you and tell him where you are. A cab dispatch is similar. The problem with Amazon is not so much that it’s a middle man but that it’s the *only* middle man for so many things now.
The bane of the modern technological age (and it’s habitual addiction to EC media like cell phones and the internet) is the explosion of grifting via these new means. Nowadays, everyone has an opinion that they pitch over the electromagnetic spectrum to a worldwide audience and hope to get rich quick grifting farflung suckers. Harsanyi pitches a libertarian grift to a like-minded cohort, but millions are now into grifting on every topic imaginable. Here a grift, there a grift, everywhere a grift grift. And all are middlemen.
What’s really ironic is that Harsanyi’s position on gun control is actually genuinely conservative, based on tradition, rights, and what’s best for our polity, but like a lot of modern mainstream conservatives, his worship of utterly unfettered markets skews his thinking on any economic subject whatsoever. Yes, actual socialism is stupid, but of course, Denmark is not actually socialist, regardless of what Bernie and Harsanyi think – it’s a capitalist welfare state with slightly higher taxes and slightly higher welfare benefits than the US, that’s about it.
But of course, the real secret of Denmark is that it is populated by Danes. Replace them with Africans or Arabs and see what you get, regardless of marginal tax rates…
I don’t know about the higher tax rates thing. The US governments, including state and local spends over 8 trillion dollars! The GDP is only 20 or 21 trillion. A decent proportion of the GDP is complete fantasy anyway (but I don’t know what % or what % of Denmark’s GDP contains fantasy) with things like homeowner’s rent and free checking accounts being counted as part of the GDP. They are also not running an empire.
Tars, a big key is how we allocate the tax burdens between our working class (income taxes), elites (capital gains and corporate taxes) and foreigners (tariffs & duties). Buchanan made a great point in “Republic” and “Great Betrayal” when he reminded us that the Founders wanted most of the tax burden to fall on foreign traders, with the excess being absorbed by the elites. They were opposed to the idea of an income tax.
As for US metrics, they are hopelessly corrupted. We count fees paid to banks for overdrafts as “profit,” we call bad debt “investment,” Trump brags about historically low unemployment while ignoring labor force participation, on and on. Arguing the numbers and details just gets you lost amid the forest of lies. Stick to common sense and simple principles like supply and demand. More immigrants = lower wages – they can’t bend that curve.
Yeah Exile, our numbers for all kinds of things are just complete fantasy. The BLS actually calls eating hotdogs instead of steak as a “substitution” As usual, the BLS sold substitution in a different way, like if ice cream became too expensive, people would buy frozen yogurt and other example where things are roughly equivalent. Then there’s hedonic adjustment where things only get better even if quality drops off a cliff (which it has).
The only way BLS data even makes any sense at all is comparing the current year to the last year or any time since the most recent rule changes, which oddly enough, ALWAYS serves to hide the truth.
The biggest difference in Denmark outside of the demography is the fact that those rates actually get paid. Americans won’t pay a marginal Federal rate above 20% (Hauser’s Law) and larger American companies basically pay nothing in taxes.
The amount of revenue we take in is roughly enough to pay for Military, Social Security and Medicare and everything else, our entire mediocre welfare state and stuff even Conservatives thing the Feds should do (TM) is borrowed.
Even if there was a Demographic shift to pre 65 it would be hard to actually make ends meet on a genuine welfare state. And no we can’t cut enough military or save enough on Medicare .
This means if technology more or less mandates a welfare state to compensate for job losses either future generations will grow more tolerant of the shared risk society or the US will simply sink in wealth and given our birth rates population as well.
Even Hispanics aren’t having kids and Whites certainly won’t, caveat the religiously motivated, Future USA if there is such a thing will be lightly Hispanic and filled with Amish, highly religiously observant people , polygamist Mormons and the like. Back to 1840 basically.
Better than Clown World I guess but not the future any of us expected.
Whether we can change or not is questionable, but the problem is that we have become a highly technical society which rewards products of the mind and not manual labor. Manual labor is increasingly being automated and where automation is not possible, shipped off to foreign lands. So, folks that are lucky enough to be on the right side of the bell curve prosper and those toward the middle and left side flounder and find it harder and harder to achieve what once was called the American dream.
We tell out younger generation to go to college and graduate and find a good job. But that only promises false hope to those who really are not college material as they either drop out or worse are given degrees in phony disciplines which do little to increase future job prospects and leaves them in debt with at best, low paying positions.
But of course, the real secret of Denmark is that it is populated by Danes.
A most precise observation: the high-trust culture derives from the fact that Denmark is populated, not just by white people, but by a single tribe. The Germans, the French, the Spanish, the British and the Italians are all amalgamations of different tribes, but Denmark is a single-culture, mono-lingual nation, with the only (official) minority being a few handfuls of Germans in the south of Jutland.
(Technically, the Jutes are not Danes, but I’d advise you not to air this notion when in Jutland.)
Note too that from the British POV at least the US was founded by traitors with one of the great grievances that they could not import a lot of foreigners to goose economic growth.
Granted the foreigners were Germans and French mostly but any diversity erodes society.
On top of that a lot White Americans are from lower trust parts of Southern and Eastern Europe. Are the White? Absolutely. Are they high trust N/W Europeans? Nope
Another gut punch is that the original funders where religious were Protestant . Adding Catholics much less Jews or non Christians (caveat a small number of Deists who made a up a chunk of the Founders and were mostly harmless) added another unneeded level of diversity.
The US was poisoned from the get-go and making something new that works with the mess we have even if it becomes pre 65 demographically (or White enough) will be a hell of a trick
“The US was poisoned from the get-go and making something new that works with the mess we have even if it becomes pre 65 demographically (or White enough) will be a hell of a trick”
Cue the most well known song from “Man of la Mancha”.
When in Jutland ask, “Is it good for the Jutes?”
It’s more a matter of “will the Jutes be bad for you?”
Right, the libertarian conservatives act like tax rates caused Venezuela and not Venezuelans. Somehow they look at the globe and can figure out the difference between East and West Germany was due to Socialism, but they are incapable of figuring out why entire continents like Africa and South America are in perpetual poverty.
Moneychangers…just noticing…
Shh we’re not supposed to notice
Conservatism was co-opted and then subsumed by corporate interests and their nerdy libertarian water-carriers.
Hear, hear!
>>> The typical Dane looks at an American city, for example, and thinks Americans are monsters for tolerating it.<<<
In our defense, Danes have Danish cities, whereas we have African cities.
Everything you wrote is probably correct but Denmark has a population of 5.6 million not 330 million. Fewer than the population of NYC. That may or may not have a bearing on their economic situation but the last time anybody moved to Denmark to seek his fortune was never. When wealth is limited so is opportunity. It matters not if that wealth is limited by high taxes, high regulation or stupid citizens. That’s not even taking into consideration their entire country is lily white. If they had 75 million POC to manage Denmark may very well end up looking like Baltimore.
If I was living in a place that I was happy with, that was not a place where others moved to to seek their fortune, I would consider that ideal.
I looked into moving to denmark once. You have to prove you havea job waiting for you and have a good deal of experience in a high demand trade. If they allowed swarms of non-whites to colonize them like the USA does, your arguments would be moot. But keep being biased towards the Murica! that is replacing us and causing 100s of thousands of deaths of despair every year, most of which are our people. 80,000 by opiates from the enterprising “entreprenurs” to our south and elsewhere. Oh and suicide is the leading cause of death for young whites now. Yeah we are so much better than Denmark tho…. cause we are letting ourselves get colonized by shithole countries… You really think those swarms wouldn’t go to denmark if danes were dumb enough to let them in?
I suspect that the difference is caused by a group who only constitute 1/10th of 1% in Denmark rather than (we’re told) 3% in the US.
“. . . the last time anybody moved to Denmark to seek his fortune was never. When wealth is limited so is opportunity.”
You think that’s bad? That’s the point. Why the hell would the Danes want people moving in to “seek their fortune” (A/K/A parasitically exploit Danish society)? Opportunity for what? Make money? How about the opportunity to have an actual nation?
How is wealth or opportunity “limited” in Denmark vs. the USA in any real fashion?
It takes hundreds of man-hours of regulatory compliance to open a restaurant in “capitalist” NYC.
The tax rates in Denmark compensate for the social cost-shifting that capitalists pocket in America – e.g. WalMart & Amazon paying below-assistance-level wages, subsidizing immigration, etc…
If your American job wouldn’t exist in a higher-tax environment, that job is likely dependent on some of that stolen cash, what Taleb would call a “fragility transfer.” Your “opportunity” has been swindled out of someone else’s social costs.
The scooters covering the sidewalks and beaches of SoCal testify to the type of “opportunity” you don’t see in Denmark – the opportunity to rake marginal profits off cheap Chinese junk products, the opportunity to hire as few workers with as little skills as possible to manage your junk scooters and the opportunity to monetize the misery of native Californians as your customers leave your Chinese junk all over the public space.
Uber is outlawed in Denmark.
In 9/10 cases in neoliberal America, one capitalist’s “opportunity” is another citizen’s nuisance. Jobs with more net-positive social value don’t come with these kinds of costs attached. Those opportunities are still around in Scandinavia.
A pet peeve of mine is the time one must spend communicating with outsourced call centers, such as with AT&T’s Koresh in Calcutta.
Last month, in order to resolve billing mistakes AT&T made on my business mobile account, I lost nearly an hour just to resolve a relatively routine issue. I was bounced from Manila to Mumbai and and then finally to the states.
I unloaded on the last customer service rep, a regular, white guy American who agreed with everything about which I complained, particularly my rant on the opportunity costs AT&T is imposing upon its customers in the name of fulfilling its commitment to diversity.
But think of the “opportunities” this opens up for those call-center drones.
There are obviously cases where a more open, lower-tax environment is preferable. To the extent we maintain smaller cohesive communities, taxes don’t need to account for the whole social safety net. Those functions can be performed better by families, churches and social organizations. In a society more of our own making, we can master capitalism rather than let it master us.
But for the present, we have to break the “vote GOP b/c commies” mindset. Anything that damages this system and leaves us standing is a net positive. Once that’s done we can start rebuilding a world where Pajeet call centers are a bad memory.
That call center should be in the distant environs of Braggadocio, Arkansas.
I hear they have phones there.
The only problem would be the bizarre accent.
Ok, so move it to Congo, Arkansas.
Or maybe to Dead Broke, Nowhere, or Broken Cart Wheel, Missouri.
Not sure about call centers, but does podunk AR have the level of personnel needed to facilitate particular customer service needed? Prajeet in India may have language difficulty, but in the main I’ve found him knowledgeable most of the time.
If globalism were no closer than the phone or the internet that would be an exponential improvement.
Step 1; quarantine the world.
Sorry, COVID you know.
Step 2; cut the cord.
One thing Pajeet has done for us is explode the myth that Asians are geniuses.
I suspect that the real reason Danes are so happy, is that Indian call center workers don’t speak Danish.
Can anyone but a Dane speak Danish? I can pull off some Bokmal now but I’m still at the hot-potato-in-mouth-drunk stage of pronouncing Danish.
You’re going about learning spoken Danish wrong, my friend. The trick is that you learn Swedish. Then you have a massive stroke that takes out about 85% of your ability to speak. Carry on speaking Swedish in your impaired fashion and voila! you’re speaking Danish.
I learned that from a Swede. Admittedly she was (still is, I suppose) from Skåne, so not much of a Swede. Speaking of which, she is the one person I know who went to Denmark to seek her fortune. But in her case it was just a jaunt across the Øresund Bridge.
The trick is that you learn Swedish. Then you have a massive stroke.
This is both true and also the only documented case of a funny joke in Swedish history.
Isn’t that bridge occasionally closed at the whim of the exploding Mohammads that are now such a feature of Swedish cities?
Can anyone but a Dane speak Danish?
I’ve been told that if you don’t learn it before the age of about five, when your palate stops being malleable, you will never be physically able to do the guttural stuff properly.
I’m not sure that’s true, though. I once met a guy who, to my astonishment, told me he was from California, and that he’d only been in Denmark for eight months. He spoke flawless Danish and I had his story checked by independent sources simply because I couldn’t believe he wasn’t bs’ing me.
He’s a rare exception, though. Danish is fairly easy to write with a simple grammar, but the problem is that the spelling only offers vague clues to the pronunciation.
Having a hot potato in your mouth certainly helps but if you don’t have one around, try skipping half the consonants, swallow half the vowels, don’t open your mouth and talk very fast.
Some people just have amazing language talent. In high school I knew an Italian girl who basically grew up in Brazil. She went to Taiwan for 6 months, and came back speaking flawless Mandarin, despite never having been exposed to the language before. She could even put on a classy “Beiping-hua” accent (think “Standard Received Chinese”) when she wanted to.
Scanian Girl on the other hand, speaks Danish with an accent, English with an accent, French with an accent, and Swedish with a (horrible Scanian) accent.
Anecdote: So Scanian Girl got a flat tire one day in Copenhagen. Changed it herself of which she was very proud. Afterward she told me, “The US is much more friendly than Denmark. There no one stopped to help. In the US probably three people would have offered to help during the time it took me to change it!” Um, älskling, here people see an exotic blonde stunblast of 5’9″ and 119 lbs with big blue eyes and a 34-inch inseam. There people see “a girl”.
Oh, other story. (This is getting long, but what the hell….) I once met this Korean guy here in the States. He was fluent in English, but was hard to understand. Swallowed a bunch of vowels, and pronounced a number of consonants in a weirdly mushy way. I truly thought he had a complex speech impediment. Then it was revealed that he was born in Denmark and Danish was his first language. It all fell into place. I just hadn’t expected the accent from someone who looked like he did. (Obviously muh racism, mea maxima culpa.)
(horrible Scanian) accent.
Atrocious – Danish in origin, of course.
If you look at a political map of Sweden, you’ll see the Sweden Democrats light up like a Christmas tree in the old Danish lands.
I yearn for the day the Caliphate triumphs in Sweden. Then we can declare war on them, reduce Stockholm to ruins and liberate Scania – Sweden is not in NATO, and I’m sure the God Emperor will understand.
Once the Carlsberg-trucks start rolling across the bridge, we’ll be greeted as liberators.
Mike, can confirm. Ladies, be forewarned – Scandi-thots have about a 1.5-2.0 advantage on the 10-scale. Prepare your egos for relative obscurity that those of you who rate 7+ in the States haven’t experienced since puberty.
Is Scanian girl into SS Tay-Tay for Halloween? Asking for a friend.
I’m an Irish-Russian changeling raised by Scotch-Irish. Scotch-Irish R’s are so hard they make Germans sound French. The literal opposite. Fortunately Danish girls find it tragically cute and they all speak fluent English.
Back before airline deregulation, it was cost effective to charter entire airliners for “group” trips. So I joined the German American Club (of some sort), and went to Frankfurt on a chartered plane. Everyone started speaking in German and since the crew was all German, English was not used.
Blond lady across from me spoke the most perfect German, but when I was struggling, she switched to English (American English). Problem was she was from the Deep South and her American—with Southern accent was even less intelligible, so we went back to German. 🙂
x1000 trillion
funny enough, it’s the middle to upper class Pajeets who get those jobs. so we’re helping along class differences in India anyway. you rock, contradictory leftism/globalism!
The “limited” opportunity is to live like Warren Buffet or Mike Bloomberg. But the opportunity to put a good roof over one’s head in a nice neighborhood, where one can raise a family in environment that nurtures and properly supports such a thing, is really what normal people are after at the end of the day. Denmark looks like it might offer a whole lot more of that sort of thing, than the U.S. does any more.
If it’s true that Uber is banned in Denmark, I seriously want to discover some Danish roots and return to the homeland.
Uber is such a massive scam (and horrendously destructive to a job that wasn’t great to begin with), it’s hard to believe they’re still around. They took a so-so job ONE man could make a living at and turned it into a rotten job that FIVE men can’t make a living at.
Pretty sure the only way Uber will make a profit is by selling user information on a massive scale (which they’ve already coped to); won’t work, because every other app is doing the same thing.
Where are the poor Africans and Afghans going to work then?? They can’t all deliver Skip the Dishes to white people too lazy to walk/drive to pick up their food.
What Uber did to the taxi industry is sad. Basically new invasion immigrants totally fucked over older, more respectable Middle Eastern immigrants who spent their lives driving taxi. Neither kind is acceptable but I do feel sympathy with the older guys who spent thousands on a license only to be undercut by Uber.
I’m the first guy to say taxis are awful but Uber was no solution. Yes, cheaper rates, but it’s still a magnet for oddball Mos Eisley foreigners and the society at large is subsidizing those cheap fares.
yep. at first it seemed good, i also bought in the kool aid that the drivers were eventually gonna get paid better while rates would stay lower than for awful unionized cabbies, because of the overrepeated “we need larger market share to elevate wages/cut rates” phony mantra that all the globalist corporations use… and which incidentally is similar to the flawed communist argument of pooling up all the labor and production for their efficient pricing (guessed at by the bureaucrats, of course).
except that when rates stayed low, the Uber business model eventually revealed itself to just want market share for stock buyback, profit and wages for workers be damned. it’s a failure on multiple levels – workers were not rescued from bad taxicab unions but rather both unions and workers were gutted, while big tech allows raiding info and exploitation through the app, while wall street allows the unprofitable operation to stay afloat with newfangled financial products… and of course, upstream we find more guilty parties, public and private…
anyway, many laugh now, but eventually, the wheel will stop turning and the wages will not be enough either for the Uber incel driver to pay his own oil changes, nor for the normie catlady to pay for her own UberEats… and both will look up at the puppeteers then maybe.
Ah, excuse me, but I “deliver Skip the Dishes” to “people of color” living in government housing who may be too poor to live in decent housing but can damned well pay 6 bucks (plus a minimum $2 tip) for me to go to a stop-n-rob for three packs of “Smokes”, a bag of cheetos and a couple cans of Red Bull. They also pay me to go to Chic-fil-a for a 6-piece nuggets meal and a soda. I also do delivery runs for a major local supermarket chain and have yet to see a person of color (Mexican aside since they’re 65%+ of the population). BTW, I only do it because we need the money and it is only marginally profitable because I drive my wife’s Prius. I pay for a week’s gas before noon on Monday and when I do my taxes next year I intend to take the same mileage allowance as somebody driving an F150.
better take that tax allowance (thanks Trump), it’s the only “bootstraps” you can “pull yourself up” from. oh how i remember the Ron Paul days and all the silliness that could fill 3 internets spouted by supporters. made it so easy for the white working class to stay home and hand Obama wins.
on the other hand, the taxicab unions had become way too insular and pricied-up. then again, as highly regulated as they are, and bombarded by diverse customers, no wonder their older taxicabbies are rude and on edge. meanwhile in Uber, it is easier for the driver to set you on edge…
I was thinking about how UBER has destroyed the taxi business the other day when it was revealed that Airbnb has huge reems of data on every customer and extremely complex data algorithms. Gone are the days where you can just get in a cab and pay cash to go from point a to point b. Now, the app tracks you and your bank follows the transaction. Your phone pings your location and all that is mapped. All the time SIRI is listening to you in case you’re feeling diverse and need to find that taco shop or Taiwanese noodle bowl. All this is done for your own convenience man…what could go wrong? Why would you be concerned about a control grid being put on you that follows your every move and financial transaction?
…except that the scooter crap was imported from the fruity green Europeans. they can have them because their whites take enough care for them to park them properly in nice centuries-old areas. also, at least some of them must be locally made.
in America instead you rather leave your Chinese scooter on the street because the browns do the same and no one cares. plus it’s risky to go to parking places in certain areas, with certain peoples.
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Uber is banned in some Latin American countries too, yet they still have many illegal cabbies that are nicer than the (also numerous) cooperatives of taxicabs – until you get robbed/raped/shot, sometimes even by the legal cabbies. the fragility transfer exacted quite vividly, except the state is supposed to have fixed the problem with high taxes and regulation but actually didn’t… because it’s not Scandinavia.
and, let’s be real, before Uber it was hard to not think cabs in the US were overpriced – sometimes unions and the state also bring nuisance to the citizen. bureaucrats and labor bosses are not angels, in fact they tend to just wanna increase budgets for reasons that aren’t always “more roads” or “better wages for members”. and you also have certain unions with certain ethnics, ethnics of the kind not usually found in Scandinavia and its few million competitors for smaller-sized jobs in a more ordered and historically wealthy society.
doesn’t mean you’re wrong in your main point, just qualifying it somewhat.
Conservative Inc. types used to make a lot of hay talking about the Laffer curve. It has some value to be sure to think of “optimizing” the tax rates with that in view. The problem in America is that it’s gotten to the point where the solution to the tax rate equations would be a complex number or perhaps even a whole matrix of them.
All joking aside. One of the primary stages in Clown World is where various ringmasters of the Left and “Right” point at something that America does differently from Europe and either clap (usually the Righties) or boo (usually the Lefties). It’s all a distraction to keep people from noticing that a lot of American society is beyond fixing unless step 1 is “declare martial law and bulldoze everything.”
“When wealth is limited so is opportunity.”
Prove it.
Most ‘wealth’ is derived from rents of one form or another. The more wealth, the more rents. The more rents, the less opportunity.
If they had 75 million POC to manage Denmark may very well end up looking like Baltimore.
Yes, but they don’t. And we don’t have to either. We just need to stop focusing on economics and start focusing on race and secession.
“the last time anybody moved to Denmark to seek his fortune was never.”
Ah. So Denmark is not overrun with outsiders looking to exploit their resources and obliterate their customs, culture, traditions, and history? Oh yeah. That sounds terrible
The number of people who think that GDP is the purpose of human activity is astonishing.
Denmark doesn’t allow immigration.
If you’re not Danish you can’t live in Denmark.
40 million Mexicans just got offended. Luckily the upcoming census of consumers will define who we are so we can all better understand how to best serve the brave new market.
Ahora, oprima numero dos and buy the dip already.
PA is putting up flyers that “children count” in the census with a drawing of what appears to be an asian man and black woman and their mixed race children.
Did you see the animated commercial they are airing for the census? Muslims, homosexual couples with children (both kinds!), miscegenation, negroes, dot Indians, Asians, cripples, and waaaaaaay in the background, regular white Pennsylvanians. I’m surprised they couldn’t figure out how to work trannies in…
(Shhh! Don’t anybody tell Pickle Rick about those “regular white Pennsylvanians”.)
Yes, take a look at the future the census bureau has envisioned right here!
Negro future:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE8COwgnheM
Todos los latinos contamos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im5QXKojCYA
Everyone counts: (only white man in the commercial is marrying a fat negress)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLFjPTogMIs
Feather Indian POWERR (looks like mestizos tbh)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aa3-xRpZEg
Native Hawaiin and Paicific Islander:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHOjwoytKBM&list=PLewV-zKXDZkiYMTcq-k0poj2o84Ev1yIx&index=3
None for the largest group (Yes, whites are still 60% despite what the media shows), of course.
Based Donny is going to wave mah wyte rice!!!11!
Wow, check out the “Faith leaders” video
1. black episcopalian
2. black muslim
3. Latino Catholic
4. Hanadi Doleh (??) “Interfaith”
5. Jew male
6. White soyboy “Interfaith” again
7. Black woman (Federation of Protestant Black Welfare Agencies) – yikes
8. Jew male #2 – they sure do get alot of representation!
9. Olorisha Dr. Sheriden Booker (??) appears to be from the group “Ile Asho Funfun”
10. Hispanic Evangelical, wow! oh wait all he talks about is how the census will benefit the hispanic community.
11. Buddhist wahmin with bald head
12. Dr. Chloe Breyer – crazy cat lady “Interfaith” but appears to be Jewish
I think we can really see who is included in the future plans of this country… white genocide is a conspiracy though.
Say hi to your future faith leaders!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngoeN317l64
This cracked me up. I had no idea that “Karen” was a real language. I thought it the language spoken by women who ask to speak to the manager…
https://imgur.com/MUrM9pj
From here.
https://www.pa.gov/census/census-marketing-materials-order-form/
More here to make you angry:
https://www.pa.gov/census/outreach-materials/
This is the poster i was talking about:
https://www.pa.gov/census/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DCED-CH-2-EN.pdf
Also, in Europe, rich people live in the cities and the poc live in the suburbs.
The worst “no-go” areas of Europe are merely on par with the average bad neighborhood in any decent-sized American city. The worst city I saw, London, looked to be on par with Cleveland. A gang from Watts would eat the worst wogs in Britain for lunch, 10 out of 10 times. Can’t speak for Paris yet.
I felt safer in Oslo at 11:00 pm waiting for a bus at the “downtown” Stortovet station carrying bags of Christmas presents than I do driving down Normandie at 3:00 pm on a Tuesday.
Tell me how much it costs to trade LA crime for sub-Cleveland crime and I’ll scratch the check, right here, right now.
For giggles, take a look at the back-and-forth in this Wiki page about NYC vs. London crime – all sides in the debate are cooking the books and damning the other guys for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_London