I ran across this tweet and I was struck by the one entry in the thread where Noah Smith says supply and demand do not apply to labor markets. It does not have a place in the discussion, but it is an example of something the managerial class types believe, in spite of everything we know about the world. Noah Smith, from what I gather, is one of the new breed of libertarians, who embrace central planning and the custodial state. I’m not a reader so I may be misjudging him, but I really don’t care all that much either.
What struck me is how common it is to hear economists and pseudo-economists make the claim that the laws of supply and demand do not apply to labor markets. In fact, they regularly argue that the axioms of their field don’t apply to all sorts of things that cause trouble for the orthodoxy. In that twitter post, it appears that some Progressives are now saying it is bad idea to build more housing in their favorite cities, because that will magically make housing more expensive. It’s nonsense, but how long before some economist offers a supporting study?
It is easy to pick on economists for stuff like this, because they deserve it. The managerial class is shot through with guys toting economics degrees, offering up statistical justifications for their favorite policy. Today the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen argues for more currency manipulation, which one would think is something libertarian economists would oppose. They routinely argue against manipulating the supply of goods and services, but for some magical reason it is good for the state to control the supply of money.
I’ve often compared economics to astrology because it is almost as empirically sound as astrology and it holds a similar place in the ruling class today as astrology did in the olden thymes. The rulers today bring in the court economists to read their figures and predict the possible futures. In the olden thymes the court astrologer was brought into to read the stars and tell the king what the omens meant. In both cases the ruler was simply looking for confirmation so that’s what he got from his trusted magician.
It’s not just the economists. Security experts are always on our televisions telling us about the need for government surveillance of the public. After all, it is a dangerous world out there and if we’re going to invite the world into your towns, we have to have cameras on every corner. If that bit of thinking is not crazy enough, none of them ever talk about what happens when someone we don’t like gets that massive data trove collected by the surveillance state. They just pretend that can’t happen, even though it always happens.
An axiom of data collection is that the easier it is to collect, the harder it is to protect. An axiom of life is that anything worth stealing, gets stolen. For a long time, liberals argued against the state collecting data on citizens for exactly this reason. If they can get it, they will misuse it and then someone will steal it. But, all the alleged experts on these issues tell us that the NSA is an exception so no one will ever steal this stuff or misuse it. One has to wonder how many times we have secret data stolen before they stop insisting it can’t be stolen.
If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will know I have walked through the impossibility of open borders, self-government and individual liberty working together. If we do away with citizenship via open borders, there is no reason for anyone to have loyalty to the government. Things like patriotism and national loyalty stop making sense in a world of open borders. That means the state cannot rely on people “doing their duty” as they no longer have a duty to the state. How else will they get people to obey the rules?
The open borders types never bother to explain how their new borderless society will work or what would happen if it turns out to be something other than paradise. When anyone bothers to ask them, they respond like it is obvious, but to date no one has tried to explain how a world without borders could possible work. The best they can muster is something about “who we are” which is ridiculous in a world without borders, as there is no “we” for us to be. It’s madness dressed up as morality.
Guys like Steve Sailer think all of this is deliberate. The people at the top not only understand the factual realities, they understand the implications of their preferred polices. They know the currency manipulation we see cannot last. They know open borders is doomed to failure. They know the surveillance state cannot work. They are just cashing in while they can. Wealthy interests pay them to keep the lie going as long as possible. It’s not a ridiculous possibility. To get to the top of the power structure, you have to be pretty clever, but also spectacularly devious and dishonest too.
Alternatively, they could see everything everyone else sees, but they have no answer for how to square all of these circles. Building more housing in major cities is what is needed, but the entrenched interests see no advantage and they have prominent spots in the managerial class. Running a surveillance state is a terrible idea, but no one knows how to put the genie back in the bottle so they just make peace with it as best they can. The libertarian economist knows the truth about policies like open borders, but he likes his job at the university too.
Sometimes, societies evolve down a dead end. Study the French Revolution and you begin to see that it was not so much a revolution as a collapse. The old order had reached a point where reform was impossible. The cost of maintaining it exceeded the benefits so it broke apart in big chunks like a building falling over in an earthquake. Perhaps that’s the issue faced by America. The current arrangements are unsustainable, but the cost of reform seems prohibitive, so all efforts are put into keeping the plates spinning, not matter how absurd.
There’s another possibility and that is our betters have been gripped by some sort of collective madness. This used to be the reason people gave for why the Germans went nuts and backed Hitler. Germany was the most advanced and sophisticated culture on earth and then within one generation it veered into barbarism. That’s not an answer that explains much, but to date no one has ever explained why the Germans turned to Nazism. Similarly, there’s no good explanation for why our rulers indulge in the madness we see on a regular basis now.
Clearly there are a lot of “libertarians” who don’t know or understand the meaning of that word.
“They just pretend that can’t happen”
Because they don’t give a red rat’s ass if it happens. It’s a minor embarrassment for a news cycle, that’s all.
You’d have to get back to antiquity to find this level of madness. It’s almost as though feudalism evolved as an antidote or rejection to precisely this sort of crazy. The anti-urban, anti-diversity, localist, small-c catholic religious tendencies, lack of literacy, and cultural heroism almost seem designed to prevent this kind of mess from happening.
Today’s prize for the pithiest comment goes to the Zman himself. In fact, it is so good that I am going to use it as the sub-heading on my blog: “… in a world without borders…. there is no “we.”
Think on that for a moment. With open borders “we” will not build any schools. With open borders “we” will not build any schools. With open borders “we” will not build any roads, and so on. “Open borders” is pure nihilism: conceptually barren, without meaning or purpose.
What kind of people would embrace such a concept? The kind of people, so vacuous, that, at a recent political fundraising event on Martha’s Vineyard, the very rich hostess, in an attempt to make the event more interesting, brought in Cher to enlighten and entertain everyone with her typically astute political observations. Sorry to make light of such a serious subject but what we are dealing with here is not so much an evil people or even a callous people but, simply, a silly people. Evil people like Soros can be dealt with but how do you deal with thousands of rich society matrons like St. Teresa of Heinz?
Michael x, you just made way too much sense. “Silly people” really hits the nail on the head.
And why do we have to let soros in our country? He isn’t a citizen is he?
I need to believe that Trump voters will pour into the streets on Election Day.
There’s another possibility and that is our betters have been gripped by some sort of collective madness
I believe this is the case. We all have idiots in our families. People that can’t seem to function very well on their own. We would love to take care of them, since they are our family, but we simply don’t have the means. The elite class has the means, and so they tuck their idiots away in NGOs, nonprofits, and the government bureaucracy where they have a nice living, but can’t really do any harm, they think. The truth is however that the idiocy and insanity builds up, and after a time the morons create their own fitness test. It will test them, and if they fail it will dispose of them. A new competent elite class will rise from the ashes and all will be well, for a while.
The open borders types never bother to explain how their new borderless society will work or what would happen if it turns out to be something other than paradise.
We know what happens, but everybody is afraid to say it. War happens. We’re already well on our way to the next big one. The only real ingredient missing is for the other side to bulk up enough to resist the U.S. military. Or the U.S. military is stripped down so they can compete. Either works.
How about both happening together. Makes for an interesting scenario doesn’t it?
The next borderless world will develop just like the one that was sorted out by the Peace of Westphalia.
…collective madness… used to be the reason people gave for why the Germans went nuts and backed Hitler. Germany was the most advanced and sophisticated culture on earth and then within one generation it veered into barbarism… but to date no one has ever explained why the Germans turned to Nazism
Well, surely the answer is that to contemporary Germans it didn’t seem to be either madness or barbarism. A major strain of Nazi thought was to abandon the traditional divisions of society into economic classes and religious denominations that were mutually inimical and to replace these centers of identity with a sense of collective pride based on a common ethnic origin and linguistic unity. And added to this was a pronounced dislike of the Jews, which was also widely popular.
Apparently, this new sense of common feeling was very appealing, especially when it was combined with economic, military and diplomatic successes that swept away the humiliations that followed from the catastrophic end to the Great War.
Of course, it all ended in tears and turned out not to be such a good idea after all. But, as the expression goes, it works until it doesn’t, and with Nazism in this case being the ‘it’, it seemed to work gang busters, until December 1941. And it was all downhill from there.
To return to the main point, it’s only in retrospect that the choices made in the winter and spring of 1933 could be taken to be a ‘veering into madness/barbarism’. Must have seemed to most Germans to have been the right choice for a number of years.
That means the state cannot rely on people “doing their duty” as they no longer have a duty to the state.
Well, not to quibble, but the populace undoubtedly will continue to have a legal “duty to the state”. What they will cease to have is much reason to give a shit about the state anymore.
Unless of course, the elites can inculcate in the locals a sense of ‘cosmopolitan patriotism’ (I read a piece on this idea recently but can’t find it readily).
I’m reminded about how people can have a strong sense of loyalty and devotion to the local sports team, despite the fact that the members of the team are paid professionals who for the most part come from elsewhere. Yet, the Drudgevilletonians still go berserk about the Drudgevilleton Wombats winning the Splunge Ball Cup. They want people to have a sort of vague allegiance to their states along the same lines. They want you want to say “rah, team!” without there being much more substance to it (e.g., a set of specific policy decisions and governmental tendencies rooted in historical precedent, with your ancestors having had something to do with where we are now) than your connection with the local team’s management (sure, you can bitch about whether you agree or not with the choices they’ve made, but fundamentally it’s none of your business).
Used to be that the Olympic teams at least were made up of residents of the country under whose flag they competed. But nowadays you get complete foreigners brought in from elsewhere who happened to train in your country, or immigrants who came from elsewhere. Yet, they’re just as much worthy of a ‘hurray!’ as the native competitors and we’re supposed to see them as just as much a ‘reflection’ of the flag country as people who grew up there. I expect that’s how the ‘cosmopolitan’ is going to be told how he should feel about his ‘country’.
It’s sort of like all those ships flying the flag of Panama or Liberia. The Liberians no doubt take great pride in their merchant marine. Just the way everybody in the future will have the same pride in everything branded with the US flag (or whichever), regardless of the actual lack of any substantive connection between the long-term residents of the area and the management of the state.
Conspiracy defined: An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
Cabal defined: A conspiratorial group of plotters or intriguers. A secret scheme or plot.
If I was part of a cabal of elite globalists (or I guess the new term now is “multi-nationalists”) I would work to conspire together towards economically collapsing sovereign governments to bring about a New World Order. At the same time, I would also utilize the liberal left (or I guess the more recent term is “progressives”) – and their useful idiots – to bring about lawlessness.
To do this, I would implement the Hegelian Dialectic (Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis) as follows:
1.) The Sheep Cry “Wolf” (Thesis / Crisis) = Immigrant chaos, Lawlessness and Terrorism are scaring us!!
2.) And the Wolf says: “I’m from the Government and even though I caused the problems, I am here to help” (Antithesis / Solution) = Check out my new surveillance society! It will protect you so you won’t even need your guns anymore!
3.) Then the Beast covers Sting and sings a stalker’s tune: “Every move you make. Every breath you take. I am watching you. Baby, please don’t go. Come back to me. I LOVE you! Obey me now or suffer and die.” – (Synthesis / Change) = Social control.
It probably started sooner, but the Creatures from Jekyll Island have long since been allowed to successfully shred the Constitution over the last century, resulting in the complete (i.e. beyond the point of no return) overreach since 911.
Trying to fix it now would be like feeding the Constitution and Bill of Rights through an office shredder and trying to put it back together with Elmers glue & scotch tape. It ain’t gonna happen.
Law has been diminished and this is why we have tyranny in our courts today. Without constitutional law, chaos ensues as freedom progresses towards slavery. In other words, the Cloward and Piven driven “Fundamental Transformation of America” is, indeed, becoming a Brave New World.
But Trump is now the Law and Order candidate, so that’s good! But until he wins and fixes everything, be careful out there.
The ruling class dream of open borders and the end of citizenship in fact require the omnipotent surveillance state. If it were any other era that state is impossible. and that is why the importation of alien and hostile populations never happened. Conservatives favor law and order so they must favor the surveillance state without ever stopping to think they are cutting their own throats. Huck Finn never had it so easy suckering Tom to paint his fence. We get a hostile population and a hostile government all for the same price.
There’s no good reason why our leaders .. Etc.
Maybe they are just dumb people who think they are smart.
It is mind boggling to try to understand how someone cannot understand that the supply and demand curves for labor apply equally as for any other resource. Maybe people get confused by the word “labor.” But if you have an over supply of MD’s, Journalists, JD’s, MBA’s, Engineers of any specialty, Scientists, etc., their inherent value in the marketplace drops. Simple. We are not talking about disruptive technologies or other stochastic shocks to the economic system. Labor is the same input as rice or corn or copper or steel or cotton, etc. If you have too many, then they are cheaper by the dozen. If you don’t have enough, then their value goes UP.
@ LetsPlay – To your point “If you have too many, they are cheap. If you don’t have enough, their value goes up.” But this assumes the classic economic theory of the four production factors; land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship is still true. This model assumes human labor is even necessary in the first place – when in fact is not. And the need for land, while necessary physically, is also declining.
For example digital production and distribution where the value (or need) of human labor remains at zero regardless of demand for the product (e.g. digital music, movies, blogs, etc.) You can distribute one song once or ten millions times while the labor factor required to do so is zero.
The classical economic theory is being changed because what we make and how we make it is changing. Demand is irrelevant when the supply is infinite and the requirement for labor and land is zero. When this happens, as we are seeing now, production costs are also nearly zero, while profits are also nearly in finite.
Just ask Mark Zuckerberg if you don’t believe me.
Karl, what is the old axiom “They aren’t making any more land?” At least not in the sense of building islands and landfill from sand dredging as in the ME for their island paradiso’s for the rich and famous who want to vacation in the desert! It is still a limited resource, i.e. good land on the coast with beachfront property always in high demand. That is until someone convinces everyone that the seas will rise, the shores will flood and everyone dumps their holdings out of fear. I don’t think that has really happened. I see Obozo has one of his retirement homes in Hawaii, on the beachfront. But he is a climate change believer you know.
As for things like FacePlant, idiots using that stuff are born every day and what is called “value” is truly in the eye of the beholder. To me, that does not determine the whole game with economics of inputs. If technology is disrupting things, so be it. But labor is still an input for many other sectors and demand for it goes up and down and it’s value changes accordingly as supply changes also. It doesn’t matter what one segment of the economy is doing.
Same reason Fortune 500 companies die. You can see the existential threat to a business coming, often for a long time. But there are so many people invested in the current processes, or have nice predictable cash flows coming in from existing business that require little or no capex to function that the effort and risk of changing things is just not worth it in their short term calculus. The immediate benefits are too great. Even now, working on a turnaround of a division of a global financial services company I am astonished at how many of the legacy employees still can’t get their minds around the fact that if this is not successful it all goes “poof”. Nations are the same, it just takes longer for the grizzly bear to catch them. As a recovered historian (who thankfully had a facility for numbers to make a living) economics always seem more useful as another tool in the historians toolbox (hence took lot of economics courses) rather than as a completely standalone social science.
With all the recent talk about Economists, I have been wondering why they get judged by performance on publishing instead of results. Someone like my favorite punching bag, Krugman, should be judged like a Major League Ball Player. How many hits did you get this year? How many singles? Doubles? Triples? Home Runs? Grand Slams? Of course, ‘close’ counts also but a day late and a dollar short is no way to go about prognosticating about their chosen field. The MLB players does not make excuses for striking out with bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th with two outs. It is what it is. A choke by the batter and/or a great job by the pitcher.
A facility with numbers does come in handy but therein lies the problem … statistics. And with computer modeling, well, we’ve seen what so-called scientists are doing with tweaked models to make their stories about climate change factual. Lies, damn lies and statistics. They just want bigger budgets. And as for the real economic status, just who decided that “we can’t handle the truth!” That’s right. Some politician. And probably a lawyer to boot.
“Supply and demand does not apply to labor markets” This is actually correct.
Labor supply and demand does not function the same way as other economic commodities. One need look no further than automotive industry to see the difference between the VW Transparent Factory in Dresden and Henry Ford’s assembly line 100-years ago. Where Ford had thousands of people on the assembly line, a modern factory can produce more vehicles with better quality, lower costs and fewer people. Multiply this across hundreds of thousands of factories making everything from light bulbs to jet aircraft and you start to get the picture.
The problem is the ruling elites have no real understanding of todays modern industry. They still think in terms of “we need one man to run one machine” just as we did 60-years ago. In just the last 10-years, technology in manufacturing has surpassed exponentially even those changes that occurred during the 1970’s to the 1990’s.
The problem with the ruling elites is they are disconnected and isolated from reality. I suspect their labor and economic advisors provide some sense of things, but when you’re dealing with immigration, political unrest, banking problems, race riots, natural disasters and hundreds of other issues, understanding how many people it really takes to make a car these days is way down on the priority list.
The problem with the elites isn’t madness, it’s simple ignorance.
Karl, there is so much wrong with your comment that I don’t even know where to begin a cogent critiqué, so I’ll just say this:
Supply and demand is so immutable a concept that it begins in nature itself (pre-dating human existence by, oh, at least 100s of millions of years). For God’s sake, it even applies to friggin’ plant life. The “law” of S&D is simply a human expression of natural law. Verstehen Sie?
Can’t you just state bloody obvious? Just like Krugman you try to shoehorn some crackpot theory onto objective reality. The more you try to explain it the more convoluted your reasoning becomes and the deeper into the briar patch you go. Geeze, comparing Henry Ford’s assembly line of a century ago with current methods of production as some sort of evidence?
C’mon, man.
@ FuelFilter – The “law” you state is based on an outdated model that applies to commodities, not human labor.
Clearly you don’t understand how modern industry works. Are you another one that thinks it takes one person to run one machine. A Luddite, perhaps? The need for human labor is going away whether you like it or not. Ford’s production line is a simple example, but it’s also a fact. Foxconn replaced 60,000 factory workers with robots this summer.This is the future of mass production, and you should get use to it.
Humans are becoming less and less necessary in the production of almost everything. You can “thumbs down” my comments all you want. It doesn’t change that fact.
Consider digital information. In the past one needed an army of writers, massive printing presses and a huge delivery systems to get newspapers out. Today, one person can create and article (like this blog) and distribute it for nearly zero cost around the globe. Even if the demand for this article goes up, there is zero cost involved on the human labor side to supply it
@ John the River – Yes, we’re there now. The problem is we’re also tied to an outdated model of paying people x number of dollars for x number of hours worked. This model simply can’t continue. Companies will only offshore for so long. Once it’s cheaper to buy a robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who is inefficient, making $15 an hour bagging French fries, then paying McDonalds’s workers $15/hour becomes irrelevant – and so does the worker.
I’m interested in anomalies, at the time I read your comment it was at a neg 4 (?). But the comment was valid, fitted in and elucidated a necessary point. Yet it irritated several readers. Obviously someones thought you were p*ssing in their rice bowl.
Thinking about it, I believe that it was the amorphous human job classification versus the (new) industrial work process that raised their ire. “I am a skilled worker, I am needed” against the ‘skill’ is now IN the machine and the computer process that is running and controlling it. Fewer bodies, even skilled bodies are required. Not because they want to impoverish hard working people, but because it just works.
When do the factories begin to overproduce goods that might be well made and cheaper; but so far fewer can afford because their human labor is out of fashion? Are we nearing the SciFi vision of Frederik Pohl’s ‘The Midas Plague’? Where the poor labor are set quota to ‘consume’ the flood of robot produced goods while the rich can afford to consume less and live simply.
The people at the top don’t worry about things like borders and surveillance anymore because they have a gut conviction that they are in control so it isn’t an issue they dwell on. Its a settled idea for them like water being wet or the sky being blue. The idea that could change or be in the realm of possibility doesn’t occur to them. That’s why they get hysterical about Trump, because he sounds like someone outside of their control; every time he says something, the questions you raised in this post about begins to itch at the back of their brains. (Whether he’d be all that different or could be co-opted is an entirely different question but that isn’t occurring to them now; only the fear that they could end up on the outside is.)
The collective madness we suffer from is the idea that we are any different from humans of the distant past. Progress and technology and most of the modern philosophies that shape the current elite give them the impression that this generation is a unique development and can forget about the past and move on to bigger and better things. We can move forward and live in a Star Trek type world! The reality, that nothing much has changed outside of technology, that we just changed some names around and have economists instead of astrologers, and that we could lose everything in the blink of an eye, are details that they ignore.
I don’t think the elites are in some sort of deliberate conspiracy to wreck the world for their benefit or to roll things back to some sort of neo-feudal mishmash on a global scale. They just think they are better and that the people screaming about problems like the border or a police state are crazy or are doing it for some ulterior motive. They can’t believe that everyone isn’t on board with their plans to go to the future and that must mean they are bad or backward. The idea that the people screaming out about the obvious problems might see an iceberg coming at the elite’s Titanic doesn’t occur to them.
(I’m almost tempted to say its just an extension of boomer narcissism, that the generation of hippies who told their parents to fuck off and wrecked the country thinking to themselves, well everything worked out so lets keep doing what we’re doing! “What’s that? Old man Reagan fixed things? We were heading to malaise and living in a country wide mix of Death Wish and Taxi Driver? You must be crazy! Don’t you see how things turned out? WE did that, not those stiffs in suits! Just relax and everything will be A-OK!” Do we stick with hippies or try something else? And who do we have that can come in and clean things up? That’s the beginning of the debate today.)
They believe more in the idea of progress that anything else. They have been taught a variation of the Whig theory of history and any setback that we will come to will be only temporary and all that is needed to overcome it is mutual respect and cooperation. Sure, there are errors built into the economic theories that are guiding us now, but they are bugs that will be worked out shortly. The problem of scarcity will be overcome by having fewer people or by having the proper distribution of them. All we need is better management. And doing this means strengthening the managerial aspect of every economic component right down to every mud puddle on every farm.
Watching the libertarians learning to love big brother has been interesting and instructive.
I’ve become suspicious that the managers’ managers plan is to force Islam on Their globe. Christianity is on the wane (not accidentally), and besides, it allows too much forgiveness and wiggle room. Gaia worship and pc are fine for small groups of fascists, but the majority of humans see right through the bullshit.
So – rape, plunder, and destroy entire economies to break the will of the people, then bring in the shock troops to invite Global Citizens to convert or die, and you are left with all the riches, a pliant population, and as many wives as a Saudi prince. What’s not to like?
I truly look forward to the shock the current Muslim community will get if they succeed in converting any of the American, Germanic, Gaelic, Latino or Slavic people.
Then, and only then, will they truly understand what jihad means.
I get your point.
Oooooo….let’s watch as the contemporary “economic models” of U.S. “higher” education, and “health” care payment, fall apart in big chunks, like walls of glacier ice, calving into the frigid waters with huge destructive “ripples”
It’s not just the ruling classes who are mad. The lunacy I hear from my labour class and tradesman class employees is also quite shocking.
I sometimes wonder if in fact there has ever been a time when we hairless monkeys with a taste for gin, trouble and bad women have ever behaved sanely. I suspect that Ford may have been mostly right with his ‘history is bunk’ comment.
I saw a nature video many years ago with three monkeys browsing about the jungle, then stopping together to bask serenely in the sunshine. This lasted for about 3 minutes, until one of them began poking and ‘bugging’ the others for no apparent reason until a raucous brawl ensued.
My German father often told me that Germans and Germany went to hell when they got too rich and didn’t have to struggle to survive. I mocked him for that and much else until I got older and he got correspondingly smarter. I have generalized his comment to the whole human race. Nature built us to struggle but when we succeed and are rich we need to continue to struggle and create problems to struggle with, or struggle with imaginary problems, both of which create real problems. We in the west are very, very rich, and very, very bored.
You are absolutely right! We have leftists & snowflakes & globalists, because we can afford to indulge them.
If the nation (or the world) were truly at an existential crisis point ( S.M.O.D., stunning epidemic, total money collapse,etc), useless eaters & agitators would be abandoned, thrown off cliffs, or drowned. Dog psychiatrists, community organizers, & the like, better have some barter-worthy skills.
Else, it’s off the cliff they go.
I know not what the future holds, but at least I’m useful.
Agreed! I’d thought this for a long time, but PJ O’Rourke’s memoir confirmed it for me — we got the Sixties because college kids were BORED. That’s it. They riled up the Negroes, het up the women, worshipped Mao, and in general made a worker’s paradise of the country because they had nothing else to do. The normal kids just wanted to drink beer and join frats and go to football games and in general be decent upstanding citizens, so of course they couldn’t do *that*. Which left politics.
Witch doctorism does seem to go along with prodigious environmental abundance.
A proper famine would clear it all right up.
Wait, wait; a taste for gin, trouble and bad women isn’t sane? NOW you tell me!
Exactly! As an old saying goes – I spend 90% of my money on booze and women. The rest I just waste.
The real rulers are the people with the big, big money. Think Soros, Buffett and the Goldman Sachs heavyweights. They set the agenda and it’s always in their best interest. They buy politicians wholesale. Some of the pols think they’re doing good, most are cashing in and passing themselves off as altruists. They’re job is to sell their benefactors’ agendas to the masses, which, with the help of Hollywood, the teachers unions and an idiotic media, they have done an excellent job of. Everyone has their hand out to catch a few dollars flowing from the top. Full coverage surveillance is what is supposed to keep the proles in line. It may backfire, it may not. Here’s my take on where we may be headed:
http://jlepore.fineartstudioonline.com/blog/100913/utopia-inc
Our elites are shallow, poorly educated and arrogant. It’s easy to appeal to their vanity as the smartest people ever. They live in a bubble where they are never exposed to new ideas or forced to deal with the results of their policies.
Our elites are not poorly educated, their problem is that they are well educated in that curriculum of biased facts and narrow ideological viewpoint that is an Ivy league education. They have been what to think, not how to think. Their educational attainment is the equivalent of a well groomed Border Collie. They think they are equipped and destined to hold the reins of power, but it is they who are leashed.
I hope Soros likes dogs.
I can explain “building more houses makes housing more expensive,” at least. The only reason every hipster who wants one can’t afford a loft in Portland is because “housing is too expensive.” Building more housing would allow more hipsters to move to Portland, but not into the lofts they crave… but it would also a lot of the non-hip to move there, and we can’t have that! Therefore, building more houses makes housing more expensive. I know, I know, but think about it: Liberals “fucking love science. ” Therefore, whatever else they “fucking love” IS science. That’s just how their brains work — there is one and only one explanation for everything, and they know it (because they fucking love science), and so their canned explanation is the answer, no matter how the question changes.
Last thing first – Germany was still reeling from WW1 and good sounding, uplifting, inspirational, we-can-do-this speeches by the up-and-comer was an easy sell. The promise of restoration and prosperity is always a big fat carrot to a struggling society. The real agenda was not presented to the masses. Sound familiar? Works every time. I read a book years ago – They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer. It’s a like reading a script.
And not all Germans backed Hitler. Many died for their stand.
First thing last – I sort of disagree that those with the hidden agenda know what the outcome will be. Modern evil isn’t like the cartoon villain who rubs his hands together and laughs “BRA HA HA I am beautifully evil!” Nope. The underlying operating system, even when the plans never end well, ever, historically speaking, is rabid self-righteousness. They think they are RIGHT! And you will like it!
And, yes, I see this as a sort of mental dysfunction but also as a tool that makes these folks so malleable and useful to a darker evil.
We’re fond of saying, “hindsight is 20/20 but at the time….” and that’s often the case. We have the benefit of knowing how things would unfold after some fateful decision. Still, there are many times when the people at the time *should* have know what would come next. The *should* have acted differently. I think that’s why the open borders stuff is such a hot topic with normal people. The answer is obvious, yet no one in politics, except Trump, are stating the obvious.
Because…the obvious does not usually align with good-for-goodness-sake sensibilities which is a by product of self-righteousness. War is hell. That’s tough but real. Make love not war. That’s goodie but fruitless. Real vs goodie – the age old battle for first place. Those who know how to wield the goodie bat controls the way society deals with what is real. Even when it never bears fruit.
There is never a hidden agenda:
https://youtu.be/gCF8fmBP3aI
In Europe WW1 was caused by an ambitious and autocratic German government, WW11 in large part by Weimar and universal suffrage, but I repeat myself. This lesson obviously has never been learned. Anywhere.