By Per Bylund
Exclusive to STR
These are troublesome times: the police state is literally only months away (if not here already), Big Brother already has full control of what everybody’s up to, and governments wage numerous wars while taxing their poor populations to ridiculous degrees. Yet in the midst of all this darkness, after a century of endarkening [6], there are signs of hope for a much, much better world. I was surprised to see that a recent such sign was in the G20 meeting in Canada, where political oppressors of the 20 richest nations got together to coordinate their oppressing activities and ensure that their serfs can go on producing prosperity to expropriate.
Believe it or not, but not only did this sign of hope come from the G20 meeting – it was a sign of hope economically speaking from the rich nations of Europe. In the middle of the Keynesian re-revolution, the corrupt welfare states of Europe were the ones to push for a less invasive political “solution.” Obama and his cabinet of morons pushed for increased spending according to the Keynesian gospel.
Keynes, if you didn’t know, preached that savings are bad and that anyone who has the nerve to save a little of the money he’s earned is a danger to us all. Savings, he stated, are basically an unearned benefit. To solve the “problem,” he proposed a policy where government keeps printing money to debase the currency and make sure to this way get rid of the problem of savings. Granted, savings may be a sign of trouble, especially in an oppressive political system such as the modern welfare-warfare state, where the existence of larger-than-normal savings – and sometimes any savings at all – often is a sign of successful political pull rather than a result of someone successfully serving his brothers and sisters through voluntary trade in the market. Savings under enormous government can often be a sign of political privilege rather than true service in the market. Yet this is not what Keynes had in mind – he wanted to get rid of any and all savings only to give government unrestricted power to maneuver the economy. That, of course, is very troubling.
Government spending means only one thing: that theft has already occurred and will continue to pay for future spending. Government cannot produce value; it can only expropriate the value produced by individuals through hard work and service to their equals in a market. So government spending means it has already expropriated the hard-earned money of its subjects, either through stealing it directly or undermining all value expressed in a currency through debasing it – printing more money out of thin air. Of course, Keynes did not have a coherent economic idea, which is obvious if one actually reads what he wrote in his magnum opus The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money; he had a political agenda and his goal was omnipotent government. So who is surprised when Obama, following Bush II, spreads and cherishes the Keynesian dogma? It is right up his alley as the emperor of the only modern aspiring empire.
The surprise is that the European welfare states, which already tax their subjects to a much greater degree than their American counterpart – and which have already spent hundreds of years as warfare states – oppose such an agenda. Europe has been a lost case for decades, and judging from the idiotic state of things in countries such as France and Sweden, we should expect ever increasingly idiotic policy suggestions from east of the Atlantic. Yet at the G20 meeting this was not the case: the “leaders” of the European nations stood firmly behind a sound economic policy of savings and budget cuts – that is, in other words, some degree of decreased government power. This could not, of course, be accepted by the hope-and-change emperor – probably because it would mean finally ending some of the wars fought by the DC wannabe kings in foreign lands.
But how can we tell the European “leaders” were actually proposing a better solution? Well, there are plenty of reasons to believe so. One obvious such is that the suggestion made the Chief Idiot in the economic profession – Paul Krugman – go ballistic. He even warns of another depression [7] as a result of the G20 meeting. Of course, Krugman is nothing but a Democrat talking head cheering every time government makes advances. He is actually very good at always being first to offer “economic” arguments for bigger government – and he consistently claims whatever government does is never enough. If there is a face of the enemy of liberty and mankind, it is probably the face of Paul Krugman.
But there are other and more scientific reasons to believe saving is a much better way to go than spending. We already know that business cycles are primarily the result of governments tampering with the value of the currency used in all trade agreements through increasing credit causing an unsustainable boom, which means the current horrible state of the economy is originally caused by government. It follows that more government is not and cannot be a solution to the problem, but will only make things much worse.
We should not go one step further, however. Claiming the “leaders” of the European nations understand that this is all their fault and that the best thing they can do is bugger off, is to give them way too much credit. As I stated in the beginning of this column, the outcome of the G20 meeting is but a small sign of hope.
There is hope, but the road to liberty is far from clear. That the “leaders” of the states of Europe understand they cannot solve the poor state of their union economy through further meddling with market actors and institutions is a sign of things having gone so far that increased government is deemed ineffective even by government junkies. Have we come to – or at least: are we getting closer to – the tipping point?
After a century of endarkening, it is definitely time to seek the light of liberty.
