Saturday, January 09, 2010

Liberal arrogance and the hydraulic empire.

Honestly, I'm getting sick of liberals and their smug assumption of premises that they have no real arguments to back up. I understand that a lot of it comes from a basic cognitive error (assuming that this current state of affairs is the result of a spontaneous order of some sort, without any evidence that it is). Conservatives make this same error, but talking about how conservatives suck is like shooting fish in a barrel, it's not even a real ideology, there's no guiding principles to conservatism that they actually take seriously. As I said, fish, barrel. I don't need to talk about the silliness of so-called conservatism.

But liberalism* is an actual problem because it looks convincing on the surface to a lot of people. A lot of their current ideas basically add up to "if the USA was more like western europe, everything would be peachy!" Tell that to the mine workers in Africa.
It is, in some ways, an attempt to prop up big business by using government to smooth over the contradictions of past government action to prop up big business. It won't work of course. Big business as we know it is doomed, it's been living off borrowed time and stolen money for over 100 years... Crushing small business to feed the dying body of big business will only make things worse in the long run. You're killing the future to save the present. But of course this is why the puppet masters of the liberal ideology constantly invent crises - "no time to think, just do it, or we're all doomed!"

The truth is, it's entirely possible to have high technology, prosperity and even mass production of a sort, without having any organizations larger than 150 or so people (my guess as to the large-end of organizations under anarchy). We don't need to rely on the current model of intensive, inefficient subsidized resource consumption, unless we want to produce enormous surpluses that go right into the hands of our "leaders". It's just another scammy revisitation of the hydraulic empire model, just like mercantilism before it. There would be no reason to "tax the rich" if the rich hadn't scammed us out of our capital in the first place. What they lose from taxation is a tiny fraction of what they have gained from being allowed a license to steal(fractional reserve banking), relatively cheap security services("public" police and military) and infrastructure by the government (not to mention all the other ways that government creates a "winner take all" model of economics). Take that away, and the rich as we currently know them no longer exist.

* in the modern American sense of "Keynesian/Fabian pseudo-socialists"

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