There is a proper way to run an economy, and a stupid way to run an economy. The proper way to run an economy is maximum freedom, as measured by the Heritage Index, alongside a citizen's dividend that distributes 1/4 of the country's GDP evenly between all citizens of a nation as our collective 'stake' and safety net.
If everyone benefits from a higher GDP, then no one will complain when we take steps that raise the GDP overall but hurt various minority special interests who previously enjoyed taking advantage of market inefficiencies to further their own goals. The only way to get people to sell in to maximum freedom and the removal of market inefficiencies is if they personally benefit from it more than if they had criminally exploited a market inefficiency as a special interest member. The citizen's dividend cuts the gordian knot of how do you get everyone to buy in to a system that primarily enriches the rich? Market efficiency will naturally lead to a rich-take-all system, even though this also maximizes productivity and total GDP and therefore indisputably is a good thing in economic terms.
Instead of a citizen's dividend, the alternative right wants to double down on parasitism based on restricting people's economic freedoms so they can enjoy government force backed monopolies that gouge the customers for higher prices than their labor is actually worth.
This of course will lower the size of the overall pie because everyone will be less productive and everything will cost more than before. But the alternative right doesn't seem to care about this, so long as 'they get theirs.' This is no different from a more sophisticated version of direct welfare, so I have no idea why the alternative right sniffs at blacks and hispanics receiving direct transfer payments when all they want is an indirect transfer payment instead. Are we seriously to believe that it is better to pretend to be doing something productive while extracting money by force with the help of the government, just like as if you were a direct mugger, so that people can deceive themselves into a sense of self worth instead of feeling guilty like God intended them to feel for their obvious crimes against humanity?
Life isn't about playing tricks and games in order to raise your self esteem. People need to find value in themselves for things other than their economic productivity (the vast majority of people never make as much money as they consume so any such system that measured people by their economic worth would invalidate 80% of mankind immediately by any fair accounting method.)
Here is what the heritage freedom index has told us works economically. This is the best possible free market which produces the most productive economy possible for people to live in:
Rule of Law -- property rights, freedom from corruption.
Limited Government -- government spending, fiscal freedom.
Regulatory Efficiency -- Business freedom, labor freedom, monetary freedom.
Open Markets -- trade freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom.
Property Rights
The property rights component is an assessment of the ability of individuals to accumulate private property, secured by clear laws that are fully enforced by the state. It measures the degree to which a country’s laws protect private property rights and the degree to which its government enforces those laws. It also assesses the likelihood that private property will be expropriated and analyzes the independence of the judiciary, the existence of corruption within the judiciary, and the ability of individuals and businesses to enforce contracts.Read More
Freedom from Corruption
Corruption erodes economic freedom by introducing insecurity and uncertainty into economic relationships. The score for this component is derived primarily from Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2010, which measures the level of corruption in 178 countries.Fiscal Freedom
Fiscal freedom is a measure of the tax burden imposed by government. It includes both the direct tax burden in terms of the top tax rates on individual and corporate incomes and the overall amount of tax revenue as a percentage of GDP.Read More
Government Spending
This component considers the level of government expenditures as a percentage of GDP. Government expenditures, including consumption and transfers, account for the entire score.Business Freedom
Business freedom is a quantitative measure of the ability to start, operate, and close a business that represents the overall burden of regulation as well as the efficiency of government in the regulatory process. The business freedom score for each country is a number between 0 and 100, with 100 equaling the freest business environment.Read More
Labor Freedom
The labor freedom component is a quantitative measure that looks into various aspects of the legal and regulatory framework of a country’s labor market. It provides cross-country data on regulations concerning minimum wages; laws inhibiting layoffs; severance requirements; and measurable regulatory burdens on hiring, hours, and so on.Read More
Monetary Freedom
Monetary freedom combines a measure of price stability with an assessment of price controls. Both inflation and price controls distort market activity. Price stability without microeconomic intervention is the ideal state for the free market.Trade Freedom
Trade freedom is a composite measure of the absence of tariff and non-tariff barriers that affect imports and exports of goods and services.Read More
Investment Freedom
In an economically free country, there would be no constraints on the flow of investment capital. Individuals and firms would be allowed to move their resources into and out of specific activities, both internally and across the country’s borders, without restriction. Such an ideal country would receive a score of 100 on the investment freedom component of the Index of Economic Freedom.Read More
Financial Freedom
Financial freedom is a measure of banking efficiency as well as a measure of independence from government control and interference in the financial sector. State ownership of banks and other financial institutions such as insurers and capital markets reduces competition and generally lowers the level of available services. In an ideal banking and financing environment where a minimum level of government interference exists, independent central bank supervision and regulation of financial institutions are limited to enforcing contractual obligations and preventing fraud. Credit is allocated on market terms, and the government does not own financial institutions. Financial institutions provide various types of financial services to individuals and companies. Banks are free to extend credit, accept deposits, and conduct operations in foreign currencies. Foreign financial institutions operate freely and are treated the same as domestic institutions.Freedom in all of these fields is imperative for the proper functioning of the economy. It also is essential for the cause of Truth. People should live honest lives and not rely on force or fraud to pretend to have a high status, high income job when in fact they're no better than bandits and thieves. The citizen's dividend can take care of all social welfare and social justice arguments and be done with the whole issue forever, while maintaining maximum freedom in all other categories. As a result, we would be living in not only the richest, but also the most virtuous country on Earth as for once in the history of mankind money was made instead of taken as the routine economic activity.
Anyone who wishes to restrict trade freedom, financial freedom, or labor freedom is not really a member of the right. They are just a different mutation of the left wing of politics, welfare wannabes who think the system should be changed so that they end up with the goodies instead of the previous special interest groups that are currently gorging at the public weal. They shouldn't call themselves the alternative right, but the alternative left, since they have more in common with the left's wish to restrict freedom than the right's wish to be free.
Endless statistical studies have shown that countries are always better off the freer they are. Wealth and the IQ of Nations for instance narrowed down a country's economic well being to merely two factors, the extent of economic freedom in a country's laws and the IQ of its populace. The heritage index list, which objectively quantifies a country's legal policy and how free it is, also passes the obvious 'eye test' of whether the countries listed as the best according to the freedom index are indeed the best countries on Earth. Everyone can agree that living in Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia or Switzerland is not a bad deal. Everyone knows these places are virtual utopias, the jewels of the world and the envy of the world. The fact that they just so happen to be the freest countries according to the Heritage indices proves that what they are measuring is valid and is indeed the absolute best policy position our laws could hold.
The United States is the 12th freest country on the Heritage list, just behind Denmark. This proves that you can have a high freedom index even whilst maintaining high taxes and high spending in a country (like my citizen's dividend would be.) My support for high taxes and spending in no way imperils my overall support for the heritage freedom's ideal -- if Denmark can do it, so can we.
What does imperil a free country's free market is the alternative right, who wants to slam down trade barriers, make it impossible to fire people, re-introduce union labor that extracts outsized wages via threats of sabotage, keep banking from the financial flexibility they need to take advantage of profit making opportunities, stopping businesses from expanding overseas or stopping overseas businesses from investing in America, etc. These people would kill the free market. They're to the left of Obama, who is in favor of the TPP. Free trade with the entire Pacific Rim, including most of all Japan for the first time. What could possibly be better than the free exchange of good between our good friends and ideal partners the Japanese? And yet the alternative right is rallying against it right alongside Hillary Clinton. It's despicable.
Right-wingers should know better. We got this far by relying on freedom. That's what our ancestors and our constitution were all based around. America is a shining beacon of success because of our freedoms, compared to Europe, Russia, and China who all have the same IQ as us (or higher) but are all much poorer than we are. The secret to our success is our freedom. Even liberals have largely understood this and are trying to negotiate free trade agreements around the world. And yet here we are, like cavemen, pining for the good old days when unions and tariffs meant Americans could soak each other like bandits recounting their famous exploits of rapine and pillage in the good old days before the roads were guarded in some remote wooded path. We should not be aspiring to become thieves. We should be aspiring to create truth, beauty and love in our own lives and if we can produce money too, great, but if we can't well there's always the citizens' dividend to look after us so oh well. Great fortune, status and success are not for everyone, they're for the chosen few. They are for the lucky, the brilliant, the creative, the hardworking, the pain tolerant, the risk takers and the ambitious. A good life does not require great fortune or status. In fact, you're more likely to live a good life as an ascetic than as a rat racer. For the people who want to take that course, more power to them! They're a blessing to the rest of us and they're making inordinate sacrifices the rest of us really want no part of. A mild stipend that can handle everyone's basic needs is more than enough to make everyone happy. Let the strivers shoot it out for the rest of the pie. It's not our concern and it's none of our business. Like Atlas Shrugged said, just get the hell out of their way. Let them succeed, and then share their bounty with us twofold -- directly, in terms of taxing their profits and redistributing the income to all, and indirectly, by getting to enjoy the new products and services they invented because we didn't stop them from using the tools they needed to make a better world for us all.
Economic freedom and restrictions on libertinism are not contradictory. On the contrary, just as it disgraces and discredits human dignity to steal from others and shackle others into lying, contortioned jobs where they pretend to work while actually just using government guns to extort money from the real producers, it is disgraceful and a discredit to human dignity when people cheat on their significant others, substitute the marvels of the human intellect for animalistic chemical rushes, resort to violence over every little slight or disagreement, neglect or abandon or betray the very people they promised to love the most in their lives, etc.
Economic freedom and traditional morality go hand in hand. They both assert the Kantian imperative that people be treated as ends in themselves and not a means to someone else's end. The right to own your own property and make your own economic choices in order to earn your own way through life is an assertion of human dignity, it's treating individuals as sacred and pinnacles of purpose. For the same reason, banning alcohol, drugs, prostitution or adultery is likewise upholding human dignity. It's saying that people are better than that, that they are not allowed to lower themselves to beneath that floor, and they must treat their fellow human beings with the respect a divine creation enjoins. There's no point banning slavery if we are going to let people trick and use each other, or let the vicious parts of people's brains gain ascendancy over their angelic halves. The two policies, economic freedom and moral discipline, are in fact one single principle and they go together like peanut butter and jelly.
In fact, I find it impossible to believe that anyone could be for economic freedom without also being against licentiousness. Because if individuals shouldn't be the playthings of the state, morally speaking, it inherently follows that they shouldn't be the playthings of their wives or their base instincts either. If people are meant to be titans bestriding the Earth and remaking the universe to their glorious triumphs of the will, why on Earth would you let them sell the act of love, of the ultimate affirmation one person can give another, for ten dollars on a shaded street corner? Does that sound like a titan to you? Does that sound like the economic maker of money who is a master of their own body and their own rights that economic freedom puts forward as the ultimate ideal?
Conservatives, the real right wing, must be for both economic freedom and traditionalist lack of freedom. Anything else and you may as well go whole hog Communist and yuk it up with Mao. The moral principle of individuals being ends in themselves is the only bulwark of the entire society being enslaved and micromanaged forever, boots to the face forever, and all that jazz. The moment you say unions should be allowed to trump individual rights, why not just join the Red Guard and be done with it? We know what principles you serve, and they are not ours.
The 'real' alternative right is the group of rightists who realize the truth about Nature's impact on the world as opposed to Nurture. Alternative Right argues from the viewpoint of Nature, and not Nurture, and certainly not scripture, for why things are the way they are and why things ought to be different. The alternative right is different from regular Republicans and conservatives who still rely on outdated biblical quotes and feel-good meaningless pablum like 'blacks just need to work harder and get a better education' as the solution to inequality in America, which cannot work and will never work because they are genetically distinct from us. Our end goal of economic freedom is the same though, or we are no longer the right wing. We are the left wing, and should be going by the title 'alternative left.' The Alternative Right as a different understanding of the world, but not different priorities from normal right wing people. We have a coherent ideology, not a ridiculous and absurd one that quotes dead people from 2000 years ago performing miracles. We can defend ourselves against liberal arguments, because we're armed with the truth, whereas normal right wingers can only splutter and grow sheepishly silent when challenged on why blacks have different life outcomes than whites even when, for instance, they come from higher income homes, live in stable homes and have the same college degrees as their white competitors. Normal right wingers have no answer to the charges of sexism, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, blah blah blah, because they fundamentally accept the liberal premise that everything is a blank slate and everyone is the same aside from minor superficial external differences. Like being a fan of red or white wine, in the end it doesn't matter at all. According to the normal right wing, that's everyone on Earth. No real differences, just silly meaningless distinctions we shouldn't notice or care about. Alternative Rightists realize that everything matters, and our differences are much wider and more meaningful than whether people like red or white wine. That the future of the world depends on making sure the right people inherit the Earth because virtually everyone else is intent on driving it over a cliff.
But when the right wing champions economic freedom, the alternative right has nothing to add or amend. We should just march in step with them, because Ayn Rand was right and history and geography proves it. Australia and Switzerland are better countries than Cuba and North Korea. This is just a fact. Case closed. Anyone still disputing this issue, still wishing to turn our free market into a totalitarian hellhole, should just be shot. No intelligent and honest person could still hold these beliefs in the face of the overwhelming evidence the heritage freedom index has put before us. Therefore anyone still not in favor of economic libertarianism is just evil and needs to die as soon as possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment