AndrewJackson – ILANA MERCER

Conservatism’s Perennial Piñata

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 05:22:28 +0000

The Indian tribesman’s claim to his ancient stomping grounds can’t be reduced to a title search at the deeds office. That’s the stuff of the positive law. And this was the point I took away from a conversation, circa 2000, with Mr. Property Rights himself, Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Dr. Hoppe argued unassailably—does he argue any other way?—that if Amerindians had repeatedly traversed, for their livelihood, the same hunting, fishing and foraging grounds, they would have, in effect, homesteaded these, making them their own.

Another apodictic profundity deduced from that conversation: The strict Lockean stipulation, whereby to make property one’s own, one must transform it to Western standards, is not convincing.

In an article marking Columbus Day—the day Conservatism Inc. beats up on what remains of America’s First People—Ryan McMaken debunked Ayn Rand’s specious claim that aboriginal Americans “did not have the concept of property or property rights.” This was Rand’s ruse for justifying Europeans’ disregard for the homesteading rights of the First Nations. “[T]he Indian tribes had no right to the land they lived on because” they were primitive and nomadic.

Hoppean Homesteading

Cultural supremacy is no argument for the dispossession of a Lesser Other. To libertarians, Lockean—or, rather Hoppean—homesteading is sacrosanct. He who believes he has a right to another man’s property ought to produce proof that he is its rightful owner. “As the old legal adage goes, ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law,’ as it is the best evidence of legitimate title. The burden of proof rests squarely with the person attempting to relieve another of present property titles.” (Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, p. 276.)

However, even if we allow that “the tribes and individual Indians had no concept of property,” which McMaken nicely refutes—it doesn’t follow that dispossessing them of their land would have been justified. From the fact that a man or a community of men lacks the intellectual wherewithal or cultural and philosophical framework to conceive of these rights—it doesn’t follow that he has no such rights, or that he has forfeited them. Not if one adheres to the ancient doctrine of natural rights. If American Indians had no attachment to the land, they would not have died defending their territories.

Neither does the fact the First Nations formed communal living arrangements invalidate land ownership claims, as McMaken elucidates. Think of the Kibbutz. Kibbutzim in Israel instantiate the principles of voluntary socialism. As such, they are perfectly fine living arrangements, where leadership is empowered as custodian of the resource and from which members can freely secede. You can’t rob the commune of its assets just because members elect to live communally.

Conservatism’s Perennial Piñata

Columbus Day has become an occasion for neoconservatives, conservatives and their followers to vent their spleen against American Indians. And woe betide the deviationist who pens anything remotely fair or sympathetic about, say the genocide of the Indians, the trail of tears or the relegation of Indians to reservations. Berated he will be for daring to lament the wrongs visited on the original inhabitants of this continent on the grounds, mostly, that they were savages.

Come Columbus Day, the same hackneyed observations are disgorged—as though these repetitions cut through the left’s rhetoric of moral superiority; as if these shopworn shibboleths challenge a cultural script that upholds the myth of the purity of primitive life, juxtaposed to the savagery of Western Culture. They don’t.

I mean, who doesn’t know that natives were hardly nature’s custodians? This fallacy was popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s panegyric on the Noble Savage. Pre-Columbian America was no pristine natural kingdom. Native tribes likely engaged in bi-annual forest burning to flush out the species the Indians most wanted to hunt. There was the stampeding, during a hunt, of herds of animals over a cliff. Used repeatedly, some buffalo jumps hold the remains of hundreds of thousands of animals, with patterns of local extinction being well-documented. Where agriculture was practiced in the central and southern parts of America, evidence from sediment points to soil erosion, which was, too, likely ongoing before the arrival of Europeans.

It’s old hat that the Americas are scattered with archeological evidence of routine massacres, cannibalism, dismemberment, slavery, abuse of women and human sacrifice among native tribes. In no way can these facts mitigate or excuse the cruel treatment natives have endured. For is such exculpation not the crux of the neoconservative creed, against which President Trump ran? “The world is up to no good. As a superior ‘nation,’ let American power remake it in its image.” By hook or by crook, if necessary.

Neoconservative deity Dinesh D’Souza likes to claim Native-Americans were decimated not by genocide or ethnocide, “but by diseases brought from Europe by the white man.” Not quite. In his magisterial History of the American People, historian Paul Johnson, a leading protagonist for America, details the rather energetic “destruction of the Indians” by Andrew Jackson.

Particularly poignant are Red Eagle’s words to Jackson, on April 14, 1814, after the president-to-be had rampaged through villages, burning them and destroying crops in a ruthless campaign against the Indians east of the Mississippi:

“I am in your power. My people are gone. I can do no more but weep over the misfortunes of my nation.” Jackson had just “imposed a Carthaginian peace on 35 frightened Indian chiefs,” forcing them to part with the lion’s share of their ancestral lands.

Equally moving is the account of another philoamerican, philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville. The Frenchman describes a crowd of displaced Choctaw warriors—having been subjected to ethnic cleansing (in today’s parlance):

“There was an air of ruin and destruction, something which gave the impression of a final farewell, with no going back; one couldn’t witness it without a heavy heart. … it is an odd coincidence that we should have arrived in Memphis to witness the expulsion, or perhaps the dissolution, of one of the last vestiges of one of the oldest American nations.”

As they heap contempt upon native American societies—conservatives, with admirable exceptions, are at the beck and call of African-Americans. Most conservatives agree about the legitimacy of African-Americans’ eternal grievances (“the fault of Democrats,” they intone). The same establishment offers incontinent exhilaration about the greatness of African-American heroes (MLK über alles). And the only piss-poor argument mustered in these quarters for raising, rather than removing, statues for the South’s heroes is, “We need to preserve our history, horribly flawed with respect to African-Americans, mea culpa.” Or, “Who’s next? Jefferson?”

Conservatives are constitutionally (as in physically) incapable of arguing the merits of the great Robert E. Lee, something Lord Acton managed on solid philosophical grounds.

Here’s a theory as to why Conservatism Inc. uses American Indians as its perennial piñata, while generally acceding to the aggressive demands for permanent victim status levied by African-Americans.

Plainly put, among African-Americans, the extractive view of politics prevails. People seek and aggressively obtain an advantage from positions of power. Unlike African-Americans, Native-Americans have little political clout and even less of an extractive approach to politics.

In short, the First Peoples are politically powerless and proud, making them an easy target.

©2017 ILANA MERCER
Mises Wire, The Daily Caller, The Unz Review, WND.com, The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom, The Liberty Conservative, Constitution.com.
October 12

* Image credit

The post Conservatism’s Perennial Piñata appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

‘Great Depression 2.0’: An Interview with Vox Day

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The “infamous Internet Superintelligence,” Vox Day, author of The Return Of The Great Depression, needs no introduction. My WND colleague and fellow libertarian dishes it out on the impending depression, D.C. dummies (down to their position under The Bell Curve), the U.S.’ Marx-compliant financial system, and a dark future. As always, Vox makes this glum stuff fun.

Ilana: Republican president George Bush was as good if not better than Clinton and Carter at laying the legislative foundation for the minority mortgage meltdown. Comment with reference to the thesis of your book (and mention some other Republicans who’d like ditto-heads to forget their political pedigree).
Vox: Like Carter and Clinton, George W. Bush pushed government programs designed to boost homeownership among low-income families that couldn’t afford to meet the debt obligations they were assuming. These programs were focused on minorities, particularly Hispanics, which is why the four states where the majority of defaults have been located to date are California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida. However, it should be kept in mind that these inept and bipartisan housing programs were not the cause of the core problem; they were merely a consequence of the overall problem of debt chasing a dwindling pool of borrowers.

Ilana: “Too much aggregate savings reduces growth.” “A global savings glut” got us into the depression. So say the money mavens. Unpack this intellectual fraud for us. Why is it important that our readers grasp that Keynes’s General Theory, received wisdom by both parties, is a political theory, not an economic one?
Vox: First, on the theoretical level, it’s incorrect. Second, on the empirical level, it’s simply false. There was no savings glut. It’s not possible for there to have been too much aggregate savings because even if one doesn’t bother to correct for inflation, the savings rate was declining in the USA and elsewhere around the globe. This should be obvious given the way in which the global debt statistics clearly show that the various Asian economies that supposedly had too much savings didn’t actually have any net savings at all. If I have $5k in the bank but have racked up $10k of debt on my credit card, what have I saved? It’s an absurd argument, false on every level. The reason it’s important to understand that the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money is a political theory, not an economic one, is because most of the macroeconomic statistics reported are based on Paul Samuelson’s practical application of it. So, the statistics used are intrinsically politicized and therefore unreliable.

Ilana: You point out that the Communist Manifesto calls for the kind of system of credit we already have, and both parties champion. Democratic lackeys are either mortified or mocking when we say “socialism” vis-à-vis BHO (you and I would apply the socialism designation to Bush Babies too). Comment (with reference to the Financial Overhaul Bill). What other economic edifices and legislation, pending or passed, would meet Marxist maxims?
Vox: There is nothing capitalistic or free market about the present U.S. economic system. To claim that a central bank monopoly established by the federal government is somehow indicative of laissez-faire economics is ridiculous on its face, especially given that “centralization of credit in the banks of the state” is the fifth pillar of the Communist manifesto. Other openly Marxist institutions are the FCC and FAA, which centralizes the means of communication and transportation as per pillar 6, the death tax (pillar 3), the progressive income tax (pillar 1), and of course the government-funded school system which is referenced in the tenth pillar.•

Ilana: The other day I watched Newt Gingrich twist like a cirque du soleil contortionist in trying to excuse his support for the Bush bailout, or TARP. He blamed the experts. As you tell it, Nobel Prize winner F. A. Hayek knew and liked Keynes the person, but disliked Keynes the political operative. The economic mast Hayek claimed Keynes “was [not] a master of the body of economic theory,” and that “his main aim was always to influence current policy, and economic theory was for him simply a tool for this purpose.” What accounts for the refusal of establishment “intellectuals,” politicians, and media sorts ─ against all standards of reason ─ to recognize the same? Is it a case of “No one knows anything”? “Intellectual inertia”?
Vox: It’s partly that. The dirty little secret of politics is that most politicians are of barely above average intelligence and possess very narrow educations. They’re mostly people with IQs of around 120 and a law degree. So, they know literally nothing about economics and lack the capacity to see that what the experts are telling them doesn’t add up. Given those circumstances, it should come as no surprise that they so readily embrace the economic theory that tells them exactly what they want to hear. “Go, thou, and spend, and thus shalt the economy be saved. And lo, thou shalt be the savior of thy people!” That’s a lot more palatable than being told that the nation is in dire straits and their careers are in jeopardy due to the actions of their predecessors and there’s not much they can do about it. So, they listen to the self-interested parties and blindly go about making the situation worse.TARP was like something out of Kafka. Imagine it was the NFL instead of the Wall Street banks. Everyone would have laughed if the NFL suddenly called a press conference and declared that unless each NFL team was immediately given $20 billion dollars, cats and dogs would start living together and martial law would have to be declared. But because it was the banks, naturally the politicians panicked and started handing over the money, no questions asked.

Ilana: “The Democratic Party’s first candidate” ran, in 1829, on a “fiscally conservative, anti-central bank platform,” and all but eliminated the federal debt. What was Andrew Jackson thinking? It’s hard to believe that the fear of the inflationary fed resulted in “the foundation of … the Democratic Party.” Comment.
Vox: Yes, it is amusing that so few Americans can envision an economy without the Federal Reserve given that it is the fourth central bank with which the nation has inflicted itself. The same thing has happened every time. The central bank inflates like crazy, eventually the economy collapses, and the politicians are finally forced to step in and get rid of it. Eventually people forget and fall for the temptation of cheap credit and the process starts again. Who knows, perhaps the Tea Party will evolve into the modern version of the Jacksonian Democrats.•

Ilana: To mention the Fed today as anything but a hedge against inflation is to qualify as “Worst Person in the World.” Early Americans were not nearly as baffled about what the Fed did. Comment with reference to the on-and-off attempts to eradicate this Federal Frankenstein. What good would an audit of the money mafia do?
Vox: Keith Olbermann should have stuck to sports. He has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to economics. The Fed isn’t a hedge against inflation, it is the primary engine of inflation just as its three predecessors were. A genuine audit of the Fed will immediately end its political viability and probably its existence, which is why the Fed is fighting so desperately against the Ron Paul bill. But the end result is inevitable. The Fed can’t hide behind fictional statistics forever, as with the Soviet Union, people eventually begin to notice that they are not, in fact, wealthy and well fed.

Ilana: My second favorite line in your book: “… the only sense in which mainstream economic theory is worthy of serious study is the sense that a flight recorder demands intense examination after an airplane crash.” (One quibble with this analogy would be that the flight recorder contains retrievable immutable truths.) What hope is there for an awakening if “mainstream economic theory” is precisely what is being seriously studied and heeded by those among us who are not reading Dick Morris? Vox: The only hope is for economic sensibility to be restored post-crash. There are some positive signs, such as the widespread mocking of Paul Krugman’s belated warning of a “third depression” after the failure of the second stimulus. Krugman said a $600 billion stimulus package was needed, Obama got a $787 billion package through the Congress, and it failed anyhow. But the fact that these Neo-Keynesian clowns are still taken seriously and their models dominate the political discourse is an indication that a serious theoretical retooling will not happen until after the Great Depression 2.0 is well underway.

Ilana: At first the pols conceded that what they had given us was a jobless recovery, which is a lot like a housewarming for the homeless. They’ve quit that Big Lie and are now touting all the jobs BHO has created. What’s going on? Tell us why official indices such as unemployment and GDP are not to be trusted.
Vox: Unemployment is dependent upon reducing the size of the labor force. So, if you’re out of work and aren’t jumping through the BLS hoops, you don’t count as unemployed. It’s a joke. GDP counts spending but doesn’t subtract debt, so it’s like saying that you’re rich because you maxed out your platinum Mastercard. Until the debt is paid back, you can’t properly count it as economic growth. And almost all of the GDP growth over the last 20 years has been nothing but debt growth. And now that the debt is shrinking as people and governments default, GDP will begin to contract oo.

Ilana: I know who the “Zulus” are; I’m from that part of the world. You lost me with “Whisky Zulu.” Explain.
Vox: It’s just my personal reference to Weimar and Zimbabwe, two famous cases of hyperinflation. The Whisky Zulu scenario I consider is the hyperinflationary one that many inflationists favor. It’s a credible scenario anticipated by many very smart people, but I believe events are demonstrating that the debt-deflation scenario is the one that is playing out instead.

Ilana: I agree with you that “the Great Depression 2.0 will be worse than its predecessor.” Debt. Consumption. Credit. Have at it (p. 211).
Vox: It’s pretty simple. I give 10 reasons in the book, but two should suffice for here. First, the amount of outstanding US debt to GDP is proportionately greater. It hit a peak of 287% in 1933, and 375% in 2009. Second, stimulus plans that extended and exacerbated the Great Depression were limited to the USA. This time around, Europe, Japan, and China have been actively engaged in their own stimulus packages as well, so the economic blowback is going to be much larger on a global level than it was in the Thirties. Except for Germany, which had its own particular issues related to losing WWI and the strictures imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, the problems faced by Europe did not rise to the level of a “Great Depression” because Europe’s leaders didn’t make it worse by listening to the Keynesians as Hoover and Roosevelt did.

Ilana: It’s befitting that we end with perhaps the most important right in a free society. My favorite line in your book: “… one should always be deeply skeptical of any economic theory which … serves as a justification to allow one man to dispose of the property of another.” Private property has become a dirty word in an increasingly collectivist America. Not even Rand Paul, in his valiant defense of “private businesses” vis-à-vis the Civil Rights Act, could bring himself to speak to the sanctity of private property. People are comfortable alluding to “freedom of association” but not to what a man owns. Your thoughts with a view to what lies ahead.
Vox: Government can’t fix what government has broken. All of the desperate attempts to “fix” the global economy according to Neo-Keynesian and Monetarist principles are going to fail, state, local, and even national governments are going to default on their debts, and it’s going to be a very difficult road ahead for the next two decades. There will probably be a major war or two as well, as usually happens in times of large-scale economic contraction. But it is a second Great Depression, it’s not the Ragnarok. This isn’t a Democratic problem or a Republican problem and although the politicians will do their best to take partisan advantage of the situation, it is a structural crisis that cannot end until the structure collapses and is replaced with a more economically realistic one. Needless to say ownership ─ self-ownership, property ownership ─ will not fare well.

The post ‘Great Depression 2.0’: An Interview with Vox Day appeared first on ILANA MERCER.