In numerous posts, I have argued that CRA affirmative action caused the economic crisis that is happening now. Vdare provides a far better post than any of mine, giving us case histories and numerous horror stories of bank?s proudly pissing away stupendous amounts of money, and boasting of their wonderful CRA compliance in so doing.
The bank?s boasts of trillions of dollars gives the lie to the much repeated claim that CRA was tiny, supposedly much too small to cause a world economic crisis.
creditors came to believe that their loans to unsound financial institutions would be made good by the Fed — as long as the collapse of those institutions would threaten the global credit system. Bolstered by this sense of security, bad loans mushroomed.
Of course any crisis is multicausal. I have been blaming affirmative action loans. But instead of pushing back against government pressure to make bad loans to protected minorities, lenders eagerly embraced bad loans – because of an entirely correct expectation that they would be bailed out
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Constant drew my attention to the fact that Fox news, originally created to provide an alternative to the Mainstream Media orthodox ideology, is joining it, which led me to reflect on the tendency of big corporations to go left authoritarian and support socialism, gun control, political censorship, government health, and so on and so forth – as for example, the failure of the owners of shipping lines to allow deadly arms on their ships to meet the problem of piracy.
The Smallest Minority drew my attention to this:
There are some lies that lie so deep in the hopes of man that they can never be killed, no matter how many are executed to make the lie true.
Martin Malia, in “The Soviet Tragedy”, page 50, summarizes the core ideals of left versus right:
And so, by 1914, a dual process of amalgamation had occurred: on the Right were aligned capitalism, unbridled individualism, nationalism, militarism, and social hierarchy; and on the left were arrayed socialism, economic rationality, internationalism, peace, and equality. The stage was thus set for the great Auseinandersetzung, the world historical clash, between capitalism and socialism that would dominate our short twentieth century.
Now reflect that all large organizations are, by definition, internally socialist. Capitalism is what you get when independent actors pursue their individual interest – instead of someone’s vision of the greater good being imposed on all. But in a large organization, everyone is supposed to pursue the greater good of the organization, team players and all that. Team players are automatically inclined toward the left side, the left as defined by Martin Malia, the left that leads to terror, slavery, and mass murder. Organization man is basically a leftie.
And that brings me back to the interesting fact that merchant ships are not defending themselves on the high seas against pirates. The kind of people who run shipping companies simply do not feel in their guts that it is right for ordinary seamen to kill pirates.
My intuition would be that someone who owned just one ship would have no hesitation in stacking it with whatever weapons it takes to keep the ship safe, but that someone who owns a shipping line would be horrified by the idea
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“The people’s alliance for democracy” is in fact the Thai middle class alliance against democracy, as Cown observes. Democracy in Thailand has produced bad results nowhere near as bad as Venezuela, but bad enough. Indeed, world wide we are seeing democratic elections produce governments that are increasingly corrupt, increasingly tyrannical, increasingly bureaucratic, increasingly destructive, and increasingly anticapitalist.
Yet the middle class has no ideology to justify its demands – the name of the movement furtively and shamefacedly denies what it is doing, and their proposed solution (military appointees) is not really going to work. The military are bureaucrats with guns. A middle class revolt that professes itself faithful to democracy is like all those peasant revolts that professed themselves faithful to the king. Doomed.
For two thousand years, it has been claimed that democracy inherently self destructs, that democracy destroys the conditions that make democracy possible. The fact that democracy worked pretty well during the twentieth century would seem contrary evidence – but a century is not a long time for such a test.
Newt
tells it how it is: This crisis was caused by politicians. He tells how
to reduce fuel costs in the short run, and the long run. “you want
energy now” he tells us. And then he tells us how to get it.
How do we solve the energy crisis? Answer. Let businessmen extract oil. Drill here. Drill now. Pay less.
Michael Totten quotes a Serb:
“If Americans said they were no longer interested in Europe, it would be a catastrophe here.”
“You think?” Sean said.
“Yes,” David said, “because Europe can’t stop anything.”
The military weakness and incapacity of Europe in Serbia startled the Serbs, even more than America’s capacity stunned them. Since then, Europe’s martial weakness has been on display in one humiliating debacle after another. Recall Britain’s startling display of fear, weakness, cowardice, and dhimmitude in the Persian gulf.
All that wealth, and no capacity to defend it. The vultures are circling.
For a state to exist, it has to be able to destroy those that oppose it, or might oppose it, to inflict famine and ruin on hostile populations, has to be able burn the crops and flatten the cities, after the manner of General Sherman, and has to have confident belief, a belief shared by officers and men, that it is right to do so.
To do this, it needs some source of cohesion. It cannot provide its own cohesion. Pay and threats will not work to motivate soldiers, for when things go bad, when your soldiers most need motivation, these motivations cannot function, for nothing will motivate people impose the discipline.
The usual source or cohesion is ethnic identity: the nation state. Other sources of cohesion are religion, as for example the various theocratic states, such as the caliphate, and ideology, as for example the American revolution and the various communist coups.
So if a state’s cohesion came from ethnicity, then when it goes multicultural, then its soldiers and police are fighting for pay and pension and nothing more, and then it is are doomed. Similarly, when the last shreds of liberty are crushed out in the US, when the second amendment is utterly gone, and little left of the first amendment, US troops will be fighting for pay and pension and nothing more and then the US will be doomed.
Global Guerrilas reports that Mexico and Nigeria are falling, as bandits, revolutionaries, and suchlike take possession of the Mexican drug trade, and bandits, revolutionaries, Islamists, and suchlike take possession of Nigeria’s oil. But there is a lot more available for the stealing in Europe.
If the Nigerian or Mexican government goes, the Pentagon should secure the oil, but will not be able to do so without will and belief that it is right to do so. That would require an ideology that it reasonable to protect the private property rights of American and allied businessmen – which argument will not fly when they threw them to the wolves long ago, when long ago they allowed the oil and the oil rigs to be stolen by governments that are now failing.
The presidents that have done the most to smash capitalism have never been Democrats, because anti capitalist Democrat presidents have always found themselves paralyzed by gridlock – the pro capitalist faction unites along party lines, and the federal government system locks up, as it was designed to do. The founding fathers intentionally constructed the federal government so that it would be slow and inefficient at making large controversial changes.
The greatest catastrophes for capitalism have come from the anticapitalist Republican presidents, Nixon and Hoover, because they could get “bipartisan” anticapitalist measures through congress.
Environmentalists have always intended global warming as a justification installing a socialist command and control economy. McCain has just unveiled a global warming plan, theoretically market based, but in fact not in the slightest market based, a command and control plan which is the socialists wet dream. He calls it market based, but this merely means that bureaucrats will be able to blame markets for the chaos they create. The only role of the market in the plan is to be the guy that takes the fall. As Brutally Honest says, McCaine has drunk the koolaide
Maybe Obama is just as anti capitalist, or even more anti capitalist than McCain, but if he is, he will face gridlock.
Today, a lot of people are going hungry because of an energy crisis.
When we look at businesses that are attempting to address the energy crisis, for example Linc Energy Systems, we see that ninety percent of their effort, energy, and thought, is addressed to the political problem of getting permits and approvals, and very little to the merely technical details of collecting energy from nature and making it available in usable form.
Linc energy systems plans to use UCG-CTL to produce liquid fuel from coal. They set up a test plant. The major function of the test plant was not to test the technology, but to test the environmental impact of the technology. But the only acceptable outcome was no impact, which result no genuine test could ever produce. Fake environmental science manufacturing fictional crises is met with fake environmental science supposedly avoiding these nonexistent hazards.
And so, while this game is being played, people starve.
Bryan Caplan has bet $300 that Europe, and every state of Europe, will survive to 2020. I don’t make these kind of bets, because outcomes tend to be ill defined. What constitutes surviving? But I expect that around 2040, people will look back to around 2020, and say that some substantial portion of Europe, fell back then.
The nation state derives its cohesion from the nation, and the nation is not a patch of land but a people, united by something – perhaps an ideology of governance, economics, and law, but more commonly race and culture, or religion, or some such.
Nation means, still today means, a mutually supporting group of people, not a territory – a people united by culture, or by language dialect, or by race, or by ideology, or religion, or some such. Jews are a nation, Israel a nation state, Kurds are a nation, but Kurdistan is not (yet) a nation state. Iraq is a state, but evidently not yet a nation.
If a state is united by race or religion, the nation state has a disturbing tendency to commit mass murder. Even before the rise of the nation state, even back in the days when nations seldom corresponded to states, the nation was an important and vital part of Europe’s history, leading to lots of disturbingly efficient slaughter – and not just the easy slaughter of disarmed obedient sheeple that we saw so much of during the twentieth century, but the highly successful mass slaughter of armed and united peoples.
Thus a nation state inherently derives its cohesion, its strength, its military prowess from what is now called ethnocentrism, or racism, or bigotry, or ignorant superstition or capitalism/imperialism/exploitation etc.
The transnational progressives are attempting to use the power of the state to suppress that which gives the state cohesion, sawing off the branch on which they stand.
And because they have in substantial part succeeded, Europe suffers from extraordinary military weakness. Europe could not defeat the Serbs, could not defeat the Taliban. The British could not hold the most crucial oil port in the world against Sadr’s forces.
Hence the inclination on the right to predict the collapse of the EU or some of its component states. The prediction seems absurd. The states of Europe have police, tanks, bombers and an immense budget, whereas the various threats to their existence are tiny and have nothing much – but the threats have internal cohesion, and the states of Europe do not.