The entire communism schtick is about consolidating and centralizing power, wealth, resources, land, access and freedom into the hands of the few. It's a power grab and has nothing to do with equality or efficiency or 'workers of the world unite'. It's the same old us and them story by another name.
Throughout the first three chapters, Kropotkin constructs an argument for the common ownership of all intellectual and useful property due to the collective work that went into creating it. Kropotkin does not argue that the product of a worker's labor should belong to the worker. Instead, Kropotkin asserts that every individual product is essentially the work of everyone since every individual relies on the intellectual and physical labor of those who came before them as well as those who built the world around them. Because of this, Kropotkin proclaims that every human deserves an essential right to well-being because every human contributes to the collective social product:
But not every human does contribute. That's why things like monetary systems are necessary.
By offering ownership/entitlement (of resources/products) without tracking who has contributed in some way, there is far too much disincentive to actually contribute.
Monetary systems are good (assuming they're backed by something valuable), because they at least offer freedom to negotiate value for value. Bartering is good too, though how practical on a large scale is hard to fathom.
Probably good advice, but there’s a part of me that thinks we’ve been too chill for too long. And now we’re noticing that some bad ideas have taken hold while we’ve been chillin’
Fight bad ideas with better ones. Take advantage of what we’ve learned since the time of Kropotkin.
I couldn’t even finish the book, to be honest. But that opening had some gold in it. Everything does, even if it’s 99% dirt.
Sim’s piece is pretty good. The more free humanity is to do what it wants the better it often does. And even the downsides outweigh the “good” that comes from trying to control it.
As long as it's all voluntary, it's cool. But in general as soon as you say "You don't own that chair that you made, we all own that chair", it starts going off the rails.
There is some validity to the issue of that closeted hard drives or phones or the 10 year refrigerator. We are able to squander resources in our throw-away society. It has only been perhaps ~ 30-40 years we were able to afford the waste of planned obsolescence. Economically somewhat like the broken window model for improved GDP - hire people to break windows opening the need for a lot of work. But pointless work somewhat akin to the 1890 drudgery of hauling water for our needs. If you are doing that you aren't inventing the iPhone.
So we create an issue that means we can fix the issue, if there is an incentive. The free market will step in eventually. The right-to-repair is one such answer along with those reliability ratings that Consumers Report does for wiser shoppers. But at least we have those choices.
Right now it seems we are dominated by perhaps the most incompetent government ever. Not sure if it's part of the pendulum swing of politics or the rule of ever larger organizations that become inefficient over time. Economic creative destruction fixes itself because businesses fail while government remains stuck. They have no incentive to perform allowing incompetence to continue.
But until recently I had some reasonable trust in some parts of government. To think that professional scientists and physicians would be corrupt was not in my wheelhouse. My eyes have been opened. That a single sociopathic person could so dominate an agency has been a revelation. That such a small group of people could cause such damage is a reflection on how lazy but insecure we all have become to allow such damage. Worse yet has been the inability of our leaders to lead.
That mid/late part is the most important. In the free market, if you don't serve your customers you go out of business and the resources you had are freed for somebody who will (eventually) do it better.
I’m sold on the Free Market as the best solution. It’s too bad it does not actually exist. The government has meddled in the market for far too long. It’s a farce.
Yes, very good post. It is amazing that even though we have plenty of evidence that centralized government, corporate and institutional power fail and fail very big we still haven't figured a way to prevent it. History is full of the examples. Although our culture loves to denigrate these the examples of localized government and power through the people we keep repeating the same mistakes. The very definition of insanity.
"He who ignores the lessons of history will be like "Wind in the Buffalo Grass." (attributed to various American Plains Native American leaders)
And "I prefer dangerous freedom to peaceful slavery." (T. Jefferson)
These central planners ALWAYS claim ‘X is limited, therefore we must limit your X.’
This is their great mistake. It’s strange that these “geniuses” are still stuck in a mercantile economics and do not understand that free markets can *create* or *discover* more X if the incentives are there. I don’t understand why we keep having to make the same mistakes over and over again.
We have been shown over and over again, at least since the French Revolution, that central planning and authority inevitably results in disaster. People who promote these ideas despite all the evidence are not making a "mistake". They are operating from an incredible amount of hubris, the first deadly sin. They are absolutely certain that THIS TIME it will bring about utopia, because now their genius is in charge.
Everyone who supported this is morally responsible for the results. They claimed the knowledge and moral authority to implement their plans. The leaders and their ardent supporters own the consequences.
It is demonstrably false. That the car is driven 3% of the time? Do they mean during its existence or what? Ridiculous and the kind of ridiculousness coming from never having experienced lack or want. Spoiled rich brats with lots of education and no sense.
It was tried in the 1970s with "collective cars", bikes and so on. It didn't work because no-one can plan beforehand exactly when or for what or for how long I'd need the car, and when I do need it it must be available and filled with petrol. And since no-one wants to be then one filling it with petrol, it will always be out of it. I bet you a Biden-dollar that people will do the same with electric cars too - drive up to a parked one and attached your charger, siphoning from their battery. That should be even easier than slurping petrol from a real car.
Private profits for the already rich and corporate communism for the rest of us is the future, now that the power-triangle of nation state - private capital - demos/oikos has again become a pyramid with private capital at the apex playing at being philosopher kings, using the state (demoted to province in a global hegemony) as enforcer against the people, forming the base of the pyramid.
That's not a good structure, since it leaves the people with only one option: violent revolution. Again. And again and again until rich and powerful accepts that no-one has a problem with peope being rich or making a decent deal: it's the rampant greed and ruthless egotism that's the problem.
"Radix malorum est cupiditas" isn't a joke, it's the wisdom of the ancients telling us that greed and want both leads to evil. All things in moderation, even moderation itself.
Exactly. "I'll just rent out my car when I'm not using it" sounds great until you need it to run to the store unexpectedly and have no way to make it happen.
And Catholic Church teaches distributism, subsidarity... Government, economics at most local level possible... (hint: Francis, his church ain't Catholic). Imagine this... Then imagine commies not controlling death care at hospital, commie indoctrination at schools
I agree with your comment, like button wasn't working?
Interesting you bring up Catholic Church. I've learned a bit about Catholic Social Teaching (CST) lately, because of an ongoing "discussion" with an in-law who is a former nun. She is into it hook, line, and sinker. Scary stuff. I also note the current use of fear and guilt as tools of social control. To me, these are the hallmarks of religion, honed over 2 millennia of practice.
Hmmm.... but could it have anything to do with the US Petrodollar and military interventions that made sure we could make dollars and the rest of the world makes things that dollars buy? Russia actually has to trade something of value--oil--to get something back and then they had to sell it in petrodollars. And wasn't Yeltsin the drunk who couldn't get re-elected so US oligarchs bought up the whole media and shoehorned him in with Putin as his running mate?
I'm not a fan of any centralized gov't whether communism or socialism or so-called representative democracy but surely you're not confusing our gov't with freedom? We have rampant wasteful consumerism, for sure, that we can't escape. Aisles and aisles of poisons in every flavor you've been programmed to crave. But we can't afford real food.
Maybe I'm not reading this closely enough, or just have on my anarchist glasses ;-)
Hmmm.... but could it have anything to do with the US Petrodollar and military interventions that made sure we could make dollars and the rest of the world makes things that dollars buy?
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Over the last couple decades, sure. From 1776-1940? Not so much.
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I'm not a fan of any centralized gov't whether communism or socialism or so-called representative democracy but surely you're not confusing our gov't with freedom?
-------
Simply pointing out that as we move away from freedom, things suck more.
I'm confused, SimCom. When you talk about shooting a deer in the King's forest, that's the Enclosure Act of England, not so much Russia. In the US, 'we' shot all the people in the forest, then shot their buffalo. They had freedom, until 'we' took it away.
We haven't had a sovereign currency in the US since the colonial scrip prior to the Revolutionary War. We borrow all our money from private bankers and then work for them so we can pay it back. That's a Coke or Pepsi kind of freedom.
I'm with you in opposing the dispossession agenda of The Great Reset but so is Putin. I quote a lot of his St. Petersburg address in Russia: A Wrench in the Reset Gears? Here are some examples:
"Today, our job is to create conditions for building up production and increasing supply in the domestic market, as well as restoring demand and bank financing in the economy commensurately with the growth in supply.
"While at the end of 2019, imports of goods to the United States amounted to about 250 billion dollars a month, by now, it has grown to 350 billion. It is noteworthy that the growth was 40 percent – exactly in proportion to the unsecured money supply printed in recent years. They printed and distributed money, and used it to wipe out goods from third countries’ markets.
"This is what I would like to add. For a long time, the United States was a big food supplier in the world market. It was proud, and with good reason, of its achievements, its agriculture and farming traditions. By the way, this is an example for many of us, too. But today, America’s role has changed drastically. It has turned from a net exporter of food into a net importer. Loosely speaking, it is printing money and pulling commodity flows its way, buying food products all over the world.
"Let me emphasise that generating positive momentum in terms of household income growth and poverty reduction are the main performance indicators for government agencies and the state in general. We need to achieve tangible results in this sphere already this year, despite all the objective challenges we face. I have already assigned this task to the Government.
"It is also important to help small business employees, self-employed individuals and start-up entrepreneurs acquire additional skills and competencies. Please include corresponding measures tailored specifically to small towns and rural and remote areas as a separate line in the national project for promoting small and medium-sized businesses."
There's a lot more there that I think would surprise you if you're comparing to the old Russia. I haven't seen policies this progressive in my neck of the woods where the California energy grid compares to the third world. Check it out: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/russia-a-wrench-in-the-reset-gears
Yes, that comment was simply another example of how past governing bodies have looked at resources. In the end it hardly matters if it's The King's Forest or The State's Forest, except that a king might be benevolent but The State hardly ever is.
Not exactly sure how long you've been reading, but I rail against our monetary policy every chance that I get. Once the money is fake, the rest of the economy will follow.
Ah, I did remember we were on the same side somewhere in the middle of my rant. My daughter made a coconut cake out of those poisons smack dab in the middle of our consumer excess supermarket, and it's given me brain fog.
It’s incredible to me how often I hear people assert that things like healthcare, energy, the post office, etc. are so important that government needs to provide them. But in countries where the government took over the production and distribution of the most important material good for our survival (food), the result was…not much food! The lesson from countries like the USSR and Venezuela is that there are some goods and services that are so important, their production and distribution should be handled by markets, not government.
I would argue that the pandemic was a perfect glimpse of state-run medicine -- government making the rules and hospitals following along so they don't get punished.
To me is shows how easily monied interests can capture for profit systems and impose central planning on them. Vax manufacturers pretty much dictated the entire pandemic response to maximize their profits. If the incentive is “making money for shareholders” then patient outcomes don’t matter. A corporate captured capitalist system is no better than any other central planning system. A Free Market hospital system would look like fair and transparent pricing and published transparent patient outcomes. People could decide based on cost AND outcome measures. That’s not what we have.
Monied interests can only capture systems with assistance from the government. Your healthcare example is correct, but the problems are introduced by government, not a free market.
The healthcare industry has been central planned for a while, and was really kicked into gear with Obamacare. This is the obvious and predictable consequence of relying on government money (in this case via reimbursements) -- he who pays the piper calls the tune.
"A corporate captured capitalist system is no better than any other central planning system. A Free Market hospital system would look like fair and transparent pricing and published transparent patient outcomes. People could decide based on cost AND outcome measures. That’s not what we have."
100% agree. I like to say that a free market hospital would look like a restaurant -- here's the services we offer, here's the cost. Pay the doctor directly when you're done. Everything else is simply adding middlemen to the equation - driving up the cost without improving results.
And, nwo types wanted insurance... Easier to slip in controls. Medicare, Medicaid are a mess, and easily controllable.
These webs helped the civic nonsense. Payment schedules for remdesiver,vents... And many other carrots and sticks
Hospitals owned by conglomerates... One anonymous psycho could order No visits for dying. Local control, 8 guys would have visited this guy and made him an offer he couldn't refuse (of course it wouldn't happen w local)
I think you quoted Macbeth. Nice! Not sure though.
Here's the irony of the current shit:
The USSR generated large productivity increases in the 50's and 60's by moving people from rural areas and putting them into factories.
In the end, that totally failed to generate incentives for improving productivity or for innovation except in military areas where they put the preponderance of their resources.
Ultimately, when people were not forced to buy the goods Soviet industry produced, they basically went out of business.
Now the Russian economy is held up not by the benefits of centrally planned industrialization but by high natural resource prices.
We are HELPING Russia with our follies in Ukraine!
The Bureau of Land Management will pause oil and gas leasing on 2.2 million acres of Colorado public land after environmental groups alleged its current management plan failed to consider climate impacts, according to a settlement.
The agreement was filed Thursday in Colorado federal court and requires the government to conduct a new environmental analysis of the climate impacts of oil and gas leasing on public lands in southwestern Colorado. The government also agreed to consider how the leases may impact the endangered Gunnison sage-grouse and its habitat.
The Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity and others said in an August 2020 lawsuit that BLM had violated the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to take a hard look at the environmental impacts of its leasing decisions, when it approved the current 20-year plan.
Death by regulation! The plan is to make the cost, and complexity, of regulatory compliance so astronomical, so onerous, that it kills the petrochemical industry. Dead.
It hasn't occurred to our lords and masters that 50% of everything manufactured today, (off shore of course), is made of some kind of plastic. (Made of petroleum.) And that 80% of everything they eat uses fertilizer made of, and equipment powered by, you guessed it - petroleum. And they will be really upset when they discover that 100% of the stuff that keeps their private jets in the air comes from - horror of horrors, a fricken oil well.
"I need to buy a farm" ...... hoping that as the WEF's credo gains more and more ground, private ownership of agricultural land will not be banned!! After all, such independence from their control will be frowned upon sooner or later. Today's RFK's blog refers to the "partnership" between the WEF and the Canadian government developing a new Digital Identity Program.
Yesterday I read that in June 2019 (!!!), the WEF and the UN signed an agreement or Strategic Partnership Framework, to “accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and to meet the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution ".
Both Canada and the Netherlands (amongst others) are trying to destroy farming and farmers at the same time that there are escalating food shortages. In the US, Gates has become the largest owner of agricultural land. Since controlling the food supply is a direct way of controlling the population, (not to mention their bank a/cs via digital currency) what are the odds this repression of individuals being food independent is not on the agenda here sooner or later? The methods being contemplated do not seem so very different from the Soviet era.
In a free market I would be able to fly to a nation where the latest Apple-phone is being produced, fill a trunk with them, fly back to Sweden and hawk them from a market stand in the street (a nominal tax for keeping the street in shape I could stomach).
But today I must jump through umpty-zillion hoops to do so, all of said hoops created not by communists but by states acting on the behest of the companies involved, to make sure their profits aren't threatened by competition.
Capitalist Corporate Communism Policy- just as bad for people as the classic version of CCCP.
The entire communism schtick is about consolidating and centralizing power, wealth, resources, land, access and freedom into the hands of the few. It's a power grab and has nothing to do with equality or efficiency or 'workers of the world unite'. It's the same old us and them story by another name.
This piece reminds me of Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread. The first few chapters at least.
Humanity needs to go wide on solutions, not tall. We are all better the freer we are.
Chapters 1–3: The Right to Well-Being
Throughout the first three chapters, Kropotkin constructs an argument for the common ownership of all intellectual and useful property due to the collective work that went into creating it. Kropotkin does not argue that the product of a worker's labor should belong to the worker. Instead, Kropotkin asserts that every individual product is essentially the work of everyone since every individual relies on the intellectual and physical labor of those who came before them as well as those who built the world around them. Because of this, Kropotkin proclaims that every human deserves an essential right to well-being because every human contributes to the collective social product:
😬
But not every human does contribute. That's why things like monetary systems are necessary.
By offering ownership/entitlement (of resources/products) without tracking who has contributed in some way, there is far too much disincentive to actually contribute.
Monetary systems are good (assuming they're backed by something valuable), because they at least offer freedom to negotiate value for value. Bartering is good too, though how practical on a large scale is hard to fathom.
🤬🤬 Your emoji did not go far enough to express my level of disgust...
Oh relax. 😂
Probably good advice, but there’s a part of me that thinks we’ve been too chill for too long. And now we’re noticing that some bad ideas have taken hold while we’ve been chillin’
Fight bad ideas with better ones. Take advantage of what we’ve learned since the time of Kropotkin.
I couldn’t even finish the book, to be honest. But that opening had some gold in it. Everything does, even if it’s 99% dirt.
Sim’s piece is pretty good. The more free humanity is to do what it wants the better it often does. And even the downsides outweigh the “good” that comes from trying to control it.
Anyway. Just a few thoughts from me. That’s all.
Eh. I was more taken by the collective whole of humanity striving together to progress.
Not sold on the socialist aspect of it at all.
Take the best, leave the rest?
As long as it's all voluntary, it's cool. But in general as soon as you say "You don't own that chair that you made, we all own that chair", it starts going off the rails.
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's coffee." - Margaret Thatcher
I agree. Just get with the guy that likes making chairs. I bet he’ll make more. Maybe even set up a shop...
#LifeHack
Hell, you might even be able to trade it for some bread or something YOU enjoy making......
WHAT SORCERY IS THIS
There is some validity to the issue of that closeted hard drives or phones or the 10 year refrigerator. We are able to squander resources in our throw-away society. It has only been perhaps ~ 30-40 years we were able to afford the waste of planned obsolescence. Economically somewhat like the broken window model for improved GDP - hire people to break windows opening the need for a lot of work. But pointless work somewhat akin to the 1890 drudgery of hauling water for our needs. If you are doing that you aren't inventing the iPhone.
So we create an issue that means we can fix the issue, if there is an incentive. The free market will step in eventually. The right-to-repair is one such answer along with those reliability ratings that Consumers Report does for wiser shoppers. But at least we have those choices.
Right now it seems we are dominated by perhaps the most incompetent government ever. Not sure if it's part of the pendulum swing of politics or the rule of ever larger organizations that become inefficient over time. Economic creative destruction fixes itself because businesses fail while government remains stuck. They have no incentive to perform allowing incompetence to continue.
But until recently I had some reasonable trust in some parts of government. To think that professional scientists and physicians would be corrupt was not in my wheelhouse. My eyes have been opened. That a single sociopathic person could so dominate an agency has been a revelation. That such a small group of people could cause such damage is a reflection on how lazy but insecure we all have become to allow such damage. Worse yet has been the inability of our leaders to lead.
That mid/late part is the most important. In the free market, if you don't serve your customers you go out of business and the resources you had are freed for somebody who will (eventually) do it better.
The iron law of bureaucracy is this:
If the program works, it needs more money!
If the program doesn't work, it needs more money!
I’m sold on the Free Market as the best solution. It’s too bad it does not actually exist. The government has meddled in the market for far too long. It’s a farce.
Yep. This is what we need to reverse, but there's no incentive for that in DC.
Yes, very good post. It is amazing that even though we have plenty of evidence that centralized government, corporate and institutional power fail and fail very big we still haven't figured a way to prevent it. History is full of the examples. Although our culture loves to denigrate these the examples of localized government and power through the people we keep repeating the same mistakes. The very definition of insanity.
"He who ignores the lessons of history will be like "Wind in the Buffalo Grass." (attributed to various American Plains Native American leaders)
And "I prefer dangerous freedom to peaceful slavery." (T. Jefferson)
These central planners ALWAYS claim ‘X is limited, therefore we must limit your X.’
This is their great mistake. It’s strange that these “geniuses” are still stuck in a mercantile economics and do not understand that free markets can *create* or *discover* more X if the incentives are there. I don’t understand why we keep having to make the same mistakes over and over again.
This go-around I don't think they are 'mistakes.' :(
We have been shown over and over again, at least since the French Revolution, that central planning and authority inevitably results in disaster. People who promote these ideas despite all the evidence are not making a "mistake". They are operating from an incredible amount of hubris, the first deadly sin. They are absolutely certain that THIS TIME it will bring about utopia, because now their genius is in charge.
Everyone who supported this is morally responsible for the results. They claimed the knowledge and moral authority to implement their plans. The leaders and their ardent supporters own the consequences.
Fair enough. Poor choice of words.
Oh I guess I should read all the comments before responding from my e-mail. Great post!
You have crAcked one of the codes.
It is demonstrably false. That the car is driven 3% of the time? Do they mean during its existence or what? Ridiculous and the kind of ridiculousness coming from never having experienced lack or want. Spoiled rich brats with lots of education and no sense.
It was tried in the 1970s with "collective cars", bikes and so on. It didn't work because no-one can plan beforehand exactly when or for what or for how long I'd need the car, and when I do need it it must be available and filled with petrol. And since no-one wants to be then one filling it with petrol, it will always be out of it. I bet you a Biden-dollar that people will do the same with electric cars too - drive up to a parked one and attached your charger, siphoning from their battery. That should be even easier than slurping petrol from a real car.
Private profits for the already rich and corporate communism for the rest of us is the future, now that the power-triangle of nation state - private capital - demos/oikos has again become a pyramid with private capital at the apex playing at being philosopher kings, using the state (demoted to province in a global hegemony) as enforcer against the people, forming the base of the pyramid.
That's not a good structure, since it leaves the people with only one option: violent revolution. Again. And again and again until rich and powerful accepts that no-one has a problem with peope being rich or making a decent deal: it's the rampant greed and ruthless egotism that's the problem.
"Radix malorum est cupiditas" isn't a joke, it's the wisdom of the ancients telling us that greed and want both leads to evil. All things in moderation, even moderation itself.
Exactly. "I'll just rent out my car when I'm not using it" sounds great until you need it to run to the store unexpectedly and have no way to make it happen.
One world gvt... Think they are gonna fix that pothole?
A small to medium farmer owning his land KICKS ASS.
So, do they want to central plan garage sales? Bartering?😎😆😃😉
There will be no centralized garage sales, there will be nothing to sell.
And Catholic Church teaches distributism, subsidarity... Government, economics at most local level possible... (hint: Francis, his church ain't Catholic). Imagine this... Then imagine commies not controlling death care at hospital, commie indoctrination at schools
I agree with your comment, like button wasn't working?
Interesting you bring up Catholic Church. I've learned a bit about Catholic Social Teaching (CST) lately, because of an ongoing "discussion" with an in-law who is a former nun. She is into it hook, line, and sinker. Scary stuff. I also note the current use of fear and guilt as tools of social control. To me, these are the hallmarks of religion, honed over 2 millennia of practice.
Novusordowatch.com
Or youtube Father Cekada.
I found it fascinating... The current situation.
Well, at least know where Catholic Church is. It's not in Vatican. Since 1958.
You are correct. But even the idea of a centralized economic unit (say 1980)... Makes no sense
The late, great Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson...
https://youtu.be/VHIcmoY3_lE
Yes!
Hmmm.... but could it have anything to do with the US Petrodollar and military interventions that made sure we could make dollars and the rest of the world makes things that dollars buy? Russia actually has to trade something of value--oil--to get something back and then they had to sell it in petrodollars. And wasn't Yeltsin the drunk who couldn't get re-elected so US oligarchs bought up the whole media and shoehorned him in with Putin as his running mate?
I'm not a fan of any centralized gov't whether communism or socialism or so-called representative democracy but surely you're not confusing our gov't with freedom? We have rampant wasteful consumerism, for sure, that we can't escape. Aisles and aisles of poisons in every flavor you've been programmed to crave. But we can't afford real food.
Maybe I'm not reading this closely enough, or just have on my anarchist glasses ;-)
Hmmm.... but could it have anything to do with the US Petrodollar and military interventions that made sure we could make dollars and the rest of the world makes things that dollars buy?
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Over the last couple decades, sure. From 1776-1940? Not so much.
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I'm not a fan of any centralized gov't whether communism or socialism or so-called representative democracy but surely you're not confusing our gov't with freedom?
-------
Simply pointing out that as we move away from freedom, things suck more.
I'm confused, SimCom. When you talk about shooting a deer in the King's forest, that's the Enclosure Act of England, not so much Russia. In the US, 'we' shot all the people in the forest, then shot their buffalo. They had freedom, until 'we' took it away.
We haven't had a sovereign currency in the US since the colonial scrip prior to the Revolutionary War. We borrow all our money from private bankers and then work for them so we can pay it back. That's a Coke or Pepsi kind of freedom.
I'm with you in opposing the dispossession agenda of The Great Reset but so is Putin. I quote a lot of his St. Petersburg address in Russia: A Wrench in the Reset Gears? Here are some examples:
"Today, our job is to create conditions for building up production and increasing supply in the domestic market, as well as restoring demand and bank financing in the economy commensurately with the growth in supply.
"While at the end of 2019, imports of goods to the United States amounted to about 250 billion dollars a month, by now, it has grown to 350 billion. It is noteworthy that the growth was 40 percent – exactly in proportion to the unsecured money supply printed in recent years. They printed and distributed money, and used it to wipe out goods from third countries’ markets.
"This is what I would like to add. For a long time, the United States was a big food supplier in the world market. It was proud, and with good reason, of its achievements, its agriculture and farming traditions. By the way, this is an example for many of us, too. But today, America’s role has changed drastically. It has turned from a net exporter of food into a net importer. Loosely speaking, it is printing money and pulling commodity flows its way, buying food products all over the world.
"Let me emphasise that generating positive momentum in terms of household income growth and poverty reduction are the main performance indicators for government agencies and the state in general. We need to achieve tangible results in this sphere already this year, despite all the objective challenges we face. I have already assigned this task to the Government.
"It is also important to help small business employees, self-employed individuals and start-up entrepreneurs acquire additional skills and competencies. Please include corresponding measures tailored specifically to small towns and rural and remote areas as a separate line in the national project for promoting small and medium-sized businesses."
There's a lot more there that I think would surprise you if you're comparing to the old Russia. I haven't seen policies this progressive in my neck of the woods where the California energy grid compares to the third world. Check it out: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/russia-a-wrench-in-the-reset-gears
Yes, that comment was simply another example of how past governing bodies have looked at resources. In the end it hardly matters if it's The King's Forest or The State's Forest, except that a king might be benevolent but The State hardly ever is.
Not exactly sure how long you've been reading, but I rail against our monetary policy every chance that I get. Once the money is fake, the rest of the economy will follow.
Ah, I did remember we were on the same side somewhere in the middle of my rant. My daughter made a coconut cake out of those poisons smack dab in the middle of our consumer excess supermarket, and it's given me brain fog.
Always feel free to rip into me if we disagree! That's what makes this place so great :)
Love that attitude! Same here.
Like. Button not working
It’s incredible to me how often I hear people assert that things like healthcare, energy, the post office, etc. are so important that government needs to provide them. But in countries where the government took over the production and distribution of the most important material good for our survival (food), the result was…not much food! The lesson from countries like the USSR and Venezuela is that there are some goods and services that are so important, their production and distribution should be handled by markets, not government.
Gato and I both like to say the same thing:
It's not that healthcare is so important it must be left to government, healthcare is so important that it must be left to the market.
If tomorrow government mandated 'food insurance', we'd be starving by Halloween.
Our for profit healthcare system sure as hell didn’t manage the pandemic well. The incentive structure was all fucked up.
I would argue that the pandemic was a perfect glimpse of state-run medicine -- government making the rules and hospitals following along so they don't get punished.
To me is shows how easily monied interests can capture for profit systems and impose central planning on them. Vax manufacturers pretty much dictated the entire pandemic response to maximize their profits. If the incentive is “making money for shareholders” then patient outcomes don’t matter. A corporate captured capitalist system is no better than any other central planning system. A Free Market hospital system would look like fair and transparent pricing and published transparent patient outcomes. People could decide based on cost AND outcome measures. That’s not what we have.
Monied interests can only capture systems with assistance from the government. Your healthcare example is correct, but the problems are introduced by government, not a free market.
The healthcare industry has been central planned for a while, and was really kicked into gear with Obamacare. This is the obvious and predictable consequence of relying on government money (in this case via reimbursements) -- he who pays the piper calls the tune.
"A corporate captured capitalist system is no better than any other central planning system. A Free Market hospital system would look like fair and transparent pricing and published transparent patient outcomes. People could decide based on cost AND outcome measures. That’s not what we have."
100% agree. I like to say that a free market hospital would look like a restaurant -- here's the services we offer, here's the cost. Pay the doctor directly when you're done. Everything else is simply adding middlemen to the equation - driving up the cost without improving results.
And, nwo types wanted insurance... Easier to slip in controls. Medicare, Medicaid are a mess, and easily controllable.
These webs helped the civic nonsense. Payment schedules for remdesiver,vents... And many other carrots and sticks
Hospitals owned by conglomerates... One anonymous psycho could order No visits for dying. Local control, 8 guys would have visited this guy and made him an offer he couldn't refuse (of course it wouldn't happen w local)
Our government seems to think basic healthcare products and frontline pharmaceuticals are "insured" in China.
I think you quoted Macbeth. Nice! Not sure though.
Here's the irony of the current shit:
The USSR generated large productivity increases in the 50's and 60's by moving people from rural areas and putting them into factories.
In the end, that totally failed to generate incentives for improving productivity or for innovation except in military areas where they put the preponderance of their resources.
Ultimately, when people were not forced to buy the goods Soviet industry produced, they basically went out of business.
Now the Russian economy is held up not by the benefits of centrally planned industrialization but by high natural resource prices.
We are HELPING Russia with our follies in Ukraine!
Meanwhile, in America:
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2022/08/15/blm-suspends-most-oil-gas-leases-in-colorado-n489686
The Bureau of Land Management will pause oil and gas leasing on 2.2 million acres of Colorado public land after environmental groups alleged its current management plan failed to consider climate impacts, according to a settlement.
The agreement was filed Thursday in Colorado federal court and requires the government to conduct a new environmental analysis of the climate impacts of oil and gas leasing on public lands in southwestern Colorado. The government also agreed to consider how the leases may impact the endangered Gunnison sage-grouse and its habitat.
The Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity and others said in an August 2020 lawsuit that BLM had violated the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to take a hard look at the environmental impacts of its leasing decisions, when it approved the current 20-year plan.
Death by regulation! The plan is to make the cost, and complexity, of regulatory compliance so astronomical, so onerous, that it kills the petrochemical industry. Dead.
It hasn't occurred to our lords and masters that 50% of everything manufactured today, (off shore of course), is made of some kind of plastic. (Made of petroleum.) And that 80% of everything they eat uses fertilizer made of, and equipment powered by, you guessed it - petroleum. And they will be really upset when they discover that 100% of the stuff that keeps their private jets in the air comes from - horror of horrors, a fricken oil well.
They also purposely slow down everything they cannot stop or break. No penalty or pain for the guilty that do that.
endangered Gunnison sage-grouse*
They'll use any excuse to encroach on our freedom - and to keep the average Joe beat down.
Here's what's really messed up. My kids these days say "that's groused". Basically the equivalent of "that's rad" when we were growing up.
the future of shopping, it makes me realise my month or two of supplies is wholly inadequate and i need to buy a farm :(
"I need to buy a farm" ...... hoping that as the WEF's credo gains more and more ground, private ownership of agricultural land will not be banned!! After all, such independence from their control will be frowned upon sooner or later. Today's RFK's blog refers to the "partnership" between the WEF and the Canadian government developing a new Digital Identity Program.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/wef-canada-launch-federal-digital-id-program/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=5b323e68-b5fc-411b-85f6-abd6cafb485b
Yesterday I read that in June 2019 (!!!), the WEF and the UN signed an agreement or Strategic Partnership Framework, to “accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and to meet the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution ".
Both Canada and the Netherlands (amongst others) are trying to destroy farming and farmers at the same time that there are escalating food shortages. In the US, Gates has become the largest owner of agricultural land. Since controlling the food supply is a direct way of controlling the population, (not to mention their bank a/cs via digital currency) what are the odds this repression of individuals being food independent is not on the agenda here sooner or later? The methods being contemplated do not seem so very different from the Soviet era.
i may have to buy an island too
And now China is gobbling up our farm land...unabated.
I wonder why that's happening?
Or being allowed to...... About as stupid as the current border "policy".
I wonder if the Uniparty benefits from all that land being offered up to China? That wouldn't be a rhetorical question, would it?
Maybe there's a connection? All those "asylum" seekers....er...illegal aliens will be working on the farms owned by China in the USSA!
And bunkers to avoid large rolling machinery
i have my own large rolling machinery and king sized papers
A friend indeed!
MY MAN
EGM calls this dynamic the pareto optimization of markets.
It would be nice to live in a free(r) market again.
In a free market I would be able to fly to a nation where the latest Apple-phone is being produced, fill a trunk with them, fly back to Sweden and hawk them from a market stand in the street (a nominal tax for keeping the street in shape I could stomach).
But today I must jump through umpty-zillion hoops to do so, all of said hoops created not by communists but by states acting on the behest of the companies involved, to make sure their profits aren't threatened by competition.
Capitalist Corporate Communism Policy- just as bad for people as the classic version of CCCP.