Happy New Year, with caveats

 

Happy New Year!  (To anyone who possibly might ever access this obscure monthly blog.) 

2020 was a crazy year in so many ways, but maybe we can, eventually, recover from it – because humanity has proven remarkably resilient through time, with the West surviving the profoundly stupid and irrational medieval Dark Ages that followed the collapse of ancient Classical Civilization and then reigniting and carrying the torch of Reason and Liberty through to our own times.  Human history, in overall sum, is a magnificent success story.  As a cynical optimist, I do see light ahead. 

I probably won’t see, within my own lifetime, radical Individual Freedom, and the strict limitation of any coercive power by governments, restored to the levels that America’s Founders (mostly) intended, but I am confident that later generations will discover it again.  Young people are always the shining hope.  History, for all its many disappointing regressions, implies that rationality often can gain the upper hand against ignorant superstition, emotional impulses toward surrender to tyrannical statist controls, and against the idea that some of us have the (fatal) conceit that we can dictate what others can do, peacefully, with our lives, liberty, pursuits of happiness, and with our justly acquired property. 

And America has regressed, egregiously.  For over a century and a half, civil and economic liberties have been violated by populist-demanded government decree. 

(Socialism, whether strict Marxist or of the “democratic” flavor, is not the main threat, since pure economic socialism demonstrably impoverishes all the citizenry except for the government elite.  E.g., think, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, the former USSR, Africa, etc.  It is economic idiocy and always crashes.  “Social ownership” of the means of production – outside of small cooperative ownership arrangements by consenting individuals within a free enterprise environment – almost always means government ownership.  And government control of the economic “means of production” has never worked.  But letting free individuals make their own economic decisions, under a rule of law, encourages cooperation, innovation, and such increased productivity that it raises the masses out of crushing poverty, and Marx even admitted this in The Communist Manifesto.  This is what history demonstrates.  “Counter examples” such as Sweden, are not valid, since Sweden realized their mistake, reversed course, and abandoned socialism; Sweden is now a predominately Free Market economy, albeit with heavy welfare-state tax burdens; they allow individuals to own the means of production and to freely trade with one another.) 

America’s regression from free market individualism for the last century has not been “socialism” per se.  It is a sub-species of socialism more accurately called “Fascism”.  (And I see Fascism, in its essence, as both a right-wing and left-wing ideology.)  Mussolini, a renowned Marxist in his youth, saw the failures of pure socialism (and its sub-species, Communism in Russia).  He saw that “social ownership” fails.  He drew upon his reading of the one hugely successful economy, that of the USA.  He studied the American Pragmatist philosophers, who said to disregard theoretical principles and just go with “what works”.  He saw that American capitalism worked, creating vast economic improvement for the entire society, especially including the working classes.  He also read and admired the American “Progressive” intellectuals and their (regressive) advocacy of greater government control over the stupid masses. 

(Interlude:  Why do I say that the American Progressive movement of a century ago was actually a “regressive” movement?  Woodrow Wilson had complete contempt for the US Constitution’s limitations on government power.  His, and other Progressives’, racism was evident, e.g., in America but also on their despising and blocking foreign immigrants.  Eugenics, coercively controlling individuals’ reproduction because they didn’t like their cultural presence.  War lust – leading Wilsonian Progressive Herbert Croly, in The New Republic (1917) urged the entry into the insane meatgrinder of WWI, because, “America needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure.” WTF?   Prohibition of alcohol – and the start of the War on Drugs, an outrageous act of puritan nanny state hubris that still unjustly criminalizes millions of Americans for peaceful, free enterprise individualistic activity.  The Income Tax, which countless Supreme Court decisions earlier had seen as unconstitutional; yet the Progressives got an Amendment passed.  The major sin of the Progressives was that they were elitists who thought they had both the wisdom and the right to legislate over the rest of us common folk and make us fall into line because it was for “our own good”, whether we knew it or not.  The obscene hubris of those who crave government powers.  The Progressives’ program of the seizure of immense government coercive power was actually raw Fascism, even as Mussolini was codifying it with a name.  Mussolini, before war broke out between the US and Italy, publicly admired FDR’s New Deal programs, writing that Roosevelt was “a good social-fascist.”) 

Re:  Is it socialism or is it fascism?  Before WW2, when Hitler had gained complete control of Germany, a European socialist journalist interviewed Hitler.  He asked (and I paraphrase): “You call yourselves National Socialists [NAZI], yet you have not socialized/ nationalized private property or industries under government control (social ownership).  How can you still call yourselves socialist?”  Hitler replied: “We don’t need to nationalize/ socialize private property under social ownership.  We have nationalized-socialized the people, therefore control of their property just follows naturally.”  Fascism is just a more “practical” species of socialism that allows its serfs to produce more by their pretended ownership and free agency, while the governing elite still expropriates their product. 

Thus, the relative economic successes of socialist regimes who have gone over to Mussolini’s model of social-fascism:  e.g., the People’s Republic of China, whose “social ownership” ideal of Marxian socialism still maintains their grotesque one-party dictatorship grip on everyone, while at the same time being “pragmatic” by learning from Hong Kong’s spectacular economic success when being by far the most free-enterprise economy in the world for a brief time.  Red China allows people to (nominally) own, to hugely produce and to profit (to a degree), and their economy has ballooned spectacularly.  But not so much their civil liberties, since they are still under the socialist “social ownership” principle.  Individuals there do not own themselves.  The government is the ultimate social owner. 

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In other news:  Thailand has recently suffered a significant Second Wave of Covid infections, after many months of remarkably holding the line on increases.  A nation with a population size comparable to the UK, we have only had 61 Covid deaths this entire year, and our hospitals are never overly busy.  We wear masks and follow medical advice.  The most recent Covid death was the first here in two months. 

This Second Wave has mainly been from people coming into Thailand.  When they come legally, they are put into a two-week quarantine with testing before being let loose.  But many others sneak across borders.  Legal migrant workers are often crammed together in unsanitary lodgings.  The two biggest centers of infection this month were among Burmese migrant workers in a seafood processing center and other Thais in an illegal gambling den. 

The virus has spread quickly, and we are expecting the government to have drastic restrictions return on any group activities, as they did last spring.  Time to stock up on necessities and hunker down.  Dukkha – the shit just keeps raining down – such is life. 

Happy New Year to all, nonetheless. 

-Zenwind. 

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