How Capitalists Can Be Socialists

At the present moment, we are witnessing a phenomenon that to many people appears bizarre and inexplicable: the phenomenon of wealthy capitalists supporting socialism/communism.

Capitalists, we have been taught, are supporters of capitalism, indeed, the only supporters of capitalism, because they are allegedly the only ones who gain from capitalism. Everyone else is assumed to be a victim of capitalism’s alleged exploitation of labor.

The actual significance of this phenomenon is that it constitutes a living refutation of the doctrine of “identity politics,” according to which people’s ideas and actions are determined by their group membership in terms of economic class, race, or gender.

The truth is that what people advocate is determined by their ideas and values, not their membership in this or that group. This includes the fact that the policies that actually serve an individual’s self-interest is a matter of economic science, not group membership.

The beliefs associated with the alleged interests of this or that group, such as labor and social legislation, confiscatory taxation of the rich, and government ownership, being in the interest of the wage earners, turn out to be nothing more than unchallenged, frozen ignorance.  

They are a bundle of errors. In contrast, a wage earner who understands economics knows that his material well-being is served by capitalism and capitalists. For the capital of the capitalists is the source of the supply of the products that he buys and of the demand for the labor that he sells.

This, of course, means that the greater the number of capitalists and their average wealth, the higher are wages and the lower are prices.

Just as wage earners who understand economics, support capitalism, businessmen and capitalists who don’t understand economics but instead have accepted the nonsensical theories of Marx, stand with the enemies of capitalism.

This has been true from the very beginning, starting with Marx’s collaborator and personal benefactor Friedrich Engels, a wealthy cotton mill owner. Indeed, it goes back even earlier, to Robert Owen, a leading “utopian socialist” textile manufacturer early in the 19^th Century.

An interesting question for psychologists and psychotherapists is how anti-capitalist capitalists are able to live with themselves. They believe that what they are doing is robbing their workers and making them suffer, but they go on doing it.

Is it really sufficient for them to be able to say they are financing the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist system, while on the basis of their beliefs, they think they are causing massive suffering every day, while they themselves enjoy all kinds of luxuries?

I’m tempted to coin a couple of names for this condition: “double inverted schizophrenia” and “capitalists’ socialism syndrome.” The schizophrenic element is a socialist belief-system in opposition to one’s every-day capitalistic behavior.

The “double inversion” part refers to the fact that the actual behavior entailed in being a capitalist is profoundly beneficial to wage earners, while the atonement for that behavior is what is destructive and evil.

Another Global Warming

Melting Alpine glaciers are revealing a previous age of global warming 9,500 years ago. A race is on to retrieve artifacts from that era. (See https://www.sciencealert.com/melting-alpine-glaciers-yield-archaeologic-troves-but-clock-ticking) 

Somehow the world survived that global warming, just as we can survive the current global warming we are being urged to meet with panic.

Our global warming too is an act of nature. Any human contribution is at most the unintended by-product of the actions of billions of people over a period of 250 years.

The global-warming panic is the product of the philosophy of collectivism. It is assumed that the human race is an actual living, acting, responsible entity and that the individual human being is interchangeable with it.

Thus, an individual must be prohibited from driving his car, using air conditioning or refrigeration, or eating red meat if he is to avoid being charged with responsibility for global warming.

This is punishment of the individual for crimes he did not and could not commit. Each person is responsible only for his own, individual actions, not for the effects of the actions of others or of all human beings past and present taken together.

Collectivism is a product of intellectual laziness. The collectivist does not want to bother to distinguish between individuals and between individuals and the concept of man in general.

In the same way, he does not want to bother to distinguish between specific points in time. Thus, he sees and presents the prospect of a hundred feet rise in the sea level over the course of centuries as though it were to happen all at once next year.

Thus, collectivism predisposes people to be panic mongers, which is certainly what environmentalists and people terrified of global warming are.

To learn more, see my essay "The Toxicity of Environmentalism," available at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RZUJ5OU/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i7

“Progressives” Are Neanderthals

The use of the term “progressive” as a description of advocates of Left-wing policies derives from Marxism. Marxism claimed that socialism is the ideal economic system and thus that movement toward it constitutes progress and that those advocating such movement are progressives.

The truth, of course, is that socialism is not an ideal economic system or even any kind of economic system at all. It is nothing but the destruction of capitalism. It is merely the negation of capitalism.

In much the same way, socialism is not a system of economic planning. It is a system of the PROHIBITION of economic planning. Under socialism everyone is prohibited from engaging in economic planning who is not a member of the Central Planning Board.

Unfortunately for socialism, however, the successful functioning of the economic system depends on the thinking and planning of all of its participants, whose separate individual plans are harmonized, coordinated, and integrated by the price system.

In imposing a monopoly of a handful of government officials on the thinking and planning required to run the economic system, socialism commits an error comparable to demanding that the legs of the officials be able to carry the weight of all mankind.

For it demands that the brains of the officials take the place of the brains of all mankind.

This is not progress but destruction. It is the willful, forcible suppression of thinking and planning, which can result only in destruction. Socialists, “progressives,” in their forcible suppression of thinking and planning, are throwbacks to our savage ancestors.

All they know is to use force and violence to get what they want: stealing other people’s property and then compelling others to work to feed them. They should be called Neanderthals rather than “progressives.” Thieves and slavers, torturers and murderers, is what they are.

Scores of millions of dead bodies lie at their feet, the accomplishment of socialism in the 20^th Century.

To learn more, buy and read these two titles, which are available at https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ:

Columbus Day 2020 II

Columbus Day, which this year marks the 528^th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, is tomorrow.

Everyone who identifies himself as a member of Western Civilization should acknowledge the greatness of Columbus. He brought the Western Hemisphere into the orbit of Western Civilization and thereby correspondingly increased the civilized area of the earth’s surface.

Columbus is one of the greatest men in the history of our planet.

He played an essential role in the development of capitalism, with its science, technology, and industry that eliminate perpetual tribal conflict over scarce land and natural resources by making it possible for the earth to support everyone, ever more abundantly.

He helped make it possible for the average person in every First-World country to live at a level surpassing that of kings and emperors in the past. The same would be true for the average person everywhere if Western Civilization and capitalism existed everywhere.

My and Your Individual Preferences Matter

Here’s my preference: I prefer global warming and rising sea levels to socialism and a life of deprivation and poverty.

I prefer my car, my A/C, refrigerator, and all the other goods that fossil fuels make possible to holding down the global mean temperature a few degrees over the course of centuries. I have the same preference vis-a-vis a 50-100 foot rise in sea levels over 500-1000 years.

Capitalism can handle such problems, with minimal loss of human life. Against a backdrop of continuing economic progress, history will barely notice them.

The Left’s response to the Coronavirus should be taken as a mild foretaste of what life will be like when it is ruled by an obsessive focus on global warming/sea-level rise and the Left’s willingness to sacrifice modern material civilization in order to stop it. 

Columbus Day 2020

Columbus Day, which this year marks the 528^th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, is one week from today.

Some people ask, how can it be said that Columbus discovered a place in which people were already living and who thus knew about its existence before his arrival, and whose ancestors knew about its existence for millennia?

The answer is that Columbus discovered America by virtue of being the first member of Western Civilization to learn of its existence and make its existence known for the first time to all the other members of Western Civilization.

Membership in Western Civilization is achieved by anyone who makes it his intellectual home and sees the world from that perspective.

This includes descendants of the natives Columbus encountered, who have been educated and integrated into Western Civilization. The descendants of savages are routinely members of Western Civilization. Indeed, we are all ultimately descended from savages.

Western Civilization is a body of ideas and values, capable of being accepted and made their own by people everywhere, irrespective of race or ethnicity.

From the perspective of intellectual and cultural content, Western civilization represents an understanding and acceptance of the following: the laws of logic; the concept of causality and, consequently, of a universe ruled by natural laws intelligible to man;

on these foundations, the whole known corpus of the laws of mathematics and science; the individual's self-responsibility based on his free will to choose between good and evil; the value of man above all other species on the basis of his unique possession of the power of reason;

the value and competence of the individual human being and his corollary possession of individual rights, among them the right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness; the need for limited government and for the individual's freedom from the state;

on this entire preceding foundation, the validity of capitalism, with its unprecedented and continuing economic development in terms of division of labor, technological progress, capital accumulation, and rising living standards;

in addition, the importance of visual arts and literature depicting man as capable of facing the world with confidence in his power to succeed, and music featuring harmony and melody.

Wherever the intellectual substance of Western civilization is known, its imparting to the minds of students is virtually coextensive with the process of education.

For the intellectual substance of Western civilization is nothing other than the highest level of knowledge attained anywhere on earth, in virtually every aspect of every field.

If the purpose of education is to impart knowledge, then its purpose is to impart Western Civilization.

Those who denounce Columbus are not members of Western Civilization. They have renounced Western Civilization and fallen to the status of the “indigenous people” Columbus encountered. In other words, they are now savages or well on the way to savagery.

Some of them can be seen smashing windows, looting stores, burning down buildings, and beating and killing people. The root of the problem is a racist educational system that identifies civilization and savagery as emanations of race, just as did the racists of the past.

The only difference is that today’s racists prefer savagery.

To learn more, see my essay “Contemporary Education’s Racist Road to Barbarism.” It’s available for 99¢ at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00P4IT3JC/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i19 

Countering Support for Evil Causes and Canceling

A number of major firms have contributed substantial sums of money to Black Lives Matter. Others flee from sponsoring anyone whom the Left wants to cancel, such as Hannity or Carlson. Here’s a suggestion for how to help stop such behavior.

Find a printing company that would be able print a list of the names of the appropriate group of such companies on each sheet of toilet paper in a pack of, say, a dozen rolls. Give the rolls to friends and acquaintances, requesting that they too buy and distribute such rolls.

Perhaps then the gutless cowards who hoped to curry favor will learn what disgust and contempt people feel for what they have done. What people will be doing, sheet by sheet, with the cowards’ companies’ names should tell them. 

Answer to Elliot Temple

 I’d like to add an important additional point to the argument against the government’s policy of massive violation of individual freedom to combat the Corona virus.

Namely, if we had even a semi-proper monetary system, such as we had before 1933, the government would not have had the option of imposing a lockdown, unless it wanted to deprive millions of people of the ability to spend money.

If for every new and additional dollar issued, the government had to have in its possession a definite amount of additional gold, the government could not have financed its multi-trillion dollar expansion of the money supply.

It would either have had to relent or force millions into starvation for lack of money with which to buy food.

Soon we’ll very likely experience dramatic increases in prices as the result of the government’s massive inflation. Tens of millions of elderly people will be badly squeezed. The likely outcome will be still more inflation, to help them.

We’ve taken a big step toward becoming Venezuela even without electing Biden and Harris.

The Democrats Are Leading Advocates of Police Violence

The Democrats, who complain about police violence and want to “defund” the police, are among the greatest advocates of police violence.

Their solution for every problem is a new law or regulation. Yet every law or regulation is backed by the threat of physical force, ultimately the threat to kill you if you persist in disobeying it (e.g., if you resist arrest with a weapon).

The threat to kill law breakers is proper if the laws they’re breaking are laws against such things as murder, rape, robbery, assault, and arson, i.e., acts of the initiation of physical force.

But these are laws the Democrats don’t want enforced. They want to “defund” their enforcement. (Think of the riots.) The laws they want are laws that needlessly compel you to do what you don’t want to do or prohibit you from doing what you peacefully do want to do.

For more, see my “Gun Control: Controlling the Government’s Guns.” It’s at https://amzn.to/3jrCklL

I Refuse to Serve as a Conscript in Anyone’s Global Plan

The purpose of my life is my own happiness. It is not to serve as a conscript in anyone’s cockamamie scheme to “bend a curve,” hold back the seas, or hold down the mean temperature of the globe.

That is government central planning, which violates my individual right to plan and pursue my own goals, i.e., my right to the pursuit of my own happiness.

I, and everyone else, engages in individual economic planning that is aimed at making us happier, which often means, making us richer. Our individual plans are harmonized, coordinated, and integrated by the price system. (See chaps. 6-8 of my Capitalism  for details.)

The government, in contrast, cannot rationally plan. It can only restrict or prohibit the planning of individuals, ultimately leaving planning as the monopoly of inept government officials.

The results of government “planning” are as absurd as attempting to protect people from excessive heat by denying them the ability to use air conditioning and refrigeration, because the government’s plan to restrict global CO2 emissions has made electricity unavailable.

If all this were understood, perhaps there would be “peaceful protests” at such places as the headquarters of environmentalist organizations and pro-environmentalist media, to call these grievances to the attention of the world. 

Irresponsible Reporting Causes Needless Outrage Two Times Over

The Breonna Taylor case in Louisville, KY is an example of today’s media doing such an irresponsible job of reporting, that the result is needless outrage followed by rioting and destruction two times over.

First, the media allege, and then repeat ad nauseam, heinous crimes committed by the police, ignoring such major facts as were the police acting without cause or in self-defense?

For example, it was not until just a few days ago that many people, including myself, learned for the first time that it was not the police but Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend who fired the first shot, wounding an officer, after which the police returned fire.

As in this case, later, perhaps many months later, it turns out that there are no actual grounds for charging the police with any crimes at all or only with much smaller infractions than originally believed.

But having heard it so many times over from the media, the mob still believes that the police are guilty of the original accusations, and so any findings that exonerate the police are disregarded, with the effect being a new round of outrage, destruction, and devastation.

This outcome is likely to be repeated, probably on a vastly larger scale, when verdicts ultimately come in on the officers involved in the George Floyd case.

Self-Interest and Social Benefit

Capitalism is a system of voluntary social cooperation in which each benefits himself to the extent that he benefits others. He benefits himself by earning money which he receives from others who value his goods or services more than the money they spend in buying them.

Under capitalism, these others, in turn, have obtained their money by benefitting more than equivalently those who have paid them, and so on back to the first day of the chain of voluntary exchanges.

Capitalism actually gives the benefit of one’s work to others that altruism claims to seek, but propelled by the force of one’s self-interest rather than painfully extracted by self-sacrifice and physical force.

To learn virtually everything significant about capitalism, read my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, available in Kindle, hardcover, and paperback editions at https://amzn.to/2ZMZOK8.

  

Re: The 1619 Project

Ancient Rome, Greece, Babylon, Egypt, India, China, and Africa too, all had slavery. None of them created the Industrial Revolution. Great Britain and the United States did create the Industrial Revolution, on a foundation of economic freedom and respect for individual rights.

The great blemish of slavery played no greater positive role in the history of the US than it had played previously in the world, which is to say, virtually none. Ignoring its overwhelming negatives, its utmost positive contribution here may have been a temporarily larger supply of raw cotton.

But even that is probably not true. Free labor could have picked cotton. True, it would have had to be paid more than a wage equal to the price of a slave’s minimum necessities, but it undoubtedly would have been less expensive per pound of cotton picked.

Free labor would have done away with the cost of a system of overseers and the cost of acquiring slaves. It could easily have been accompanied by a system of piecework and thus eager competition among workers in picking more cotton and thereby earning more money.

Free workers would also have been motivated to find brand new ways to increase production, because they would have financially greatly benefitted from doing so. Thus, improvements in raw cotton production might have come generations sooner.

People who believe that slavery is an efficient system of production are people who are ready to impose 100% marginal rates of taxation in the belief that doing so is economically harmless.

The alleged economic benefit of slavery is a core belief of the Left both in current politics and in the interpretation of economic history. It sees no connection between freedom and production and no difference between work for positive gain and work to avoid pain.

Fundamentally, the Left does not recognize the distinction between human beings and draft animals, in that it believes the value of human beings derives from their muscles rather than their motivated minds.

So far is slavery from having been a source of gain in the United States that the actual truth is that had it never existed and had no African ever been involuntarily brought to the US, the effect would have been enormously positive economically, socially, and culturally.

Incentives to produce and save would have been greatly increased. No portion of accumulated savings would have been constituted by the market value of human beings but only by that of physical assets, implying the accumulation of more physical assets.

There would have been no need for a Civil War to free the slaves, a war that killed 600,000 Americans. And today there would be no racial animosities traceable to slavery.

The US would be more the country that its fundamental principles have designed it to be. A country in which the material self-interests of men function harmoniously, to the benefit of all, because they deal with one another by means of voluntary trade, not physical force.

Slavery is as much an economic benefit as holding up gas stations. Not only does the gas station owner lose what the robber gains, but both his motivation to produce and his means of producing are reduced. A world of robbery, which is what slavery is, is a world of great poverty.

This is why the standard of living of even the kings and emperors of the pre-industrial world was far below that of the average worker in any capitalist country today.  

To learn more, see my "Capitalism: The Cure for Racism" and then my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, both available at https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ

Why Trump’s Nominee to Scotus Must be Confirmed ASAP

Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski seem to think that respecting alleged canons of electoral etiquette is more important than strengthening America’s prospects for survival as a free country.

This is the meaning of their declarations that they will not vote to confirm Pres. Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court before election day. These ladies do not realize that election day and the weeks following, will be when our country most needs that Justice.

With its newly enacted mass mail-in voting susceptible to large-scale fraud, the Left is working to steal the election from Pres. Trump and turn the US into a one-party socialist dictatorship. Trump’s nominee seated on the Court will help prevent that.

If these ladies are worried about needing “the etiquette vote” in order to keep their jobs, they should realize that “the Trump/Patriot vote” is vastly larger than the etiquette vote and that they will lose it forever if they fail their country in this time of great danger to it.

Even if President Trump genuinely loses the election, nothing could be more important than having his nominee seated on the Court, to provide some remaining measure of protection for individual rights in a country being engulfed by tyranny.

Pres. Trump was elected to a four-year term. It is not yet over. So long as he is within the term of his office  he has the right to exercise all of its powers, above all, whatever powers he may have to hold back the onslaught of a virtual lynch mob. 

The False Distinction Between “Micro-“ and “Macro-“ Economics

Sound economics always considers the actions of the individual in relation to the rest of the economic system and the economic system as a whole in relation to the actions of individuals.

So-called "micro-economics” considers the actions of individuals as though divorced from the rest of the economic system, while so-called "macro-economics" considers the economic system as though divorced from the actions of individuals. It's a double error.

But it is so pervasive that it is sometimes necessary to use its terminology so that those who know little or nothing about sound economics will be able to feel a measure of the familiar.

Post is in response to a tweet by Mikiel de Bary, at https://twitter.com/mdebary/status/1307100397870473223?s=20

Replace Justice Ginsburg with a Strong Constitutionalist

The United States is teetering on the brink of a revolution or civil war. To move our country back toward peace and stability, Pres. Trump must immediately appoint a strong Constitutionalist to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court opened by the death of Justice Ginsburg.

He should give absolutely no consideration to fear of provoking more rioting by the Left. The Left will riot in any case. Better that they do it when there is an additional Constitutionalist on the Court than when there isn’t, or worse, another Leftist.

You do not gain anything from your enemy by making yourself weaker. That serves only to further embolden him. You must be stronger, not weaker, if you are going to stop him.

Are Marxists Scaredy-Cats?

Marxists and the other mindless morons they influence, have been running around picking fights with statues of long dead slave owners that they gleefully topple over and destroy.

 

What’s the matter, Marxists? Why do you need to pick fights with statues? In your dreck-bedecked world, there are plenty of present-day, living, breathing slave owners. You call them capitalists or “capitalist exploiters.”

 

And you call their employees “wage slaves,” by which you mean real live slaves.

 

What makes you confuse employees with slaves is your lunatic belief that under capitalism, wages are set at the same level as the remuneration of slaves, namely, minimum subsistence, and that all that the workers produce beyond that goes to the capitalists as profit.

 

Knowing how close you are to a psychotic break, I don’t want to name any specific targets for you to demonstrate against in the name of abolition, lest you burn down their houses and kill them. But you know who many of them are. They’re very prominent. And many of them fund you.

 

So why don’t you pick some targets on your own. Be sure to present a good, fat list of demands. I hesitate to call them “reparations,” because BLM and Antifa have already laid claim to those. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll work something out.

 

To learn more, everyone should buy and read “Marxism/Socialism…” 99¢ at https://amzn.to/2N44uTu.

In Aggregate Economic Accounting Most Spending Is Not Consumption but Is Concealed under Net Investment

Attention: all economics students. Perhaps the most prominent equation in macroeconomics is that national income (essentially the sum of profits and wages) equals net national product, which is the sum of consumption plus net investment.

Because consumption is much larger that net investment, it is almost universally assumed that it pays the bulk of national income. However, most spending in the economic system is actually not consumption. RATHER, IT IS CONCEALED UNDER NET INVESTMENT.

Net investment is the difference between two enormous sums: a minuend consisting of the total of business spending for capital goods and labor, and a subtrahend consisting of the costs that are deducted from sales revenues in calculating profits.

The minuend contains additions to asset accounts (plant and equipment and inventory and work in progress) while the subtrahend contains subtractions from asset accounts, notably depreciation and cost of goods sold. Selling, general, and administrative expenses appear equally in both the minuend and the subtrahend.

The difference between additions to and subtractions from asset accounts is the net change in those accounts, i.e., net investment.

The minuend in calculating net investment is where the bulk of spending in the economic system lies. I call this spending “productive expenditure.”

The concept of productive expenditure is not recognized in contemporary economics. It is believed that it is somehow included in consumption expenditure and that to recognize it separately would constitute the error of “double counting.”

For further elaboration and proof, including a thorough discussion of the issue of “double counting,” see Chapter 15 of my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. It’s available at https://amzn.to/2PM19ut

Read this chapter, tell your economics professors about it, and ask them to show you what’s wrong with my claim that most spending takes place under the head of net investment.

Marxists Topple Statues as a Step Toward Killing People

Marxists and the other mindless morons they influence have been running around picking fights with statues of long dead slave owners that they gleefully topple and destroy. 

What’s the matter, Marxists? Why do you need to pick fights with statues? In your dreck-bedecked worldview, there are plenty of present-day, living, breathing slave owners. You call them capitalists or “capitalist exploiters.”

 

And you call their employees “wage slaves,” by which you mean real live slaves.

 

What makes you confuse employees with slaves is your lunatic belief that under capitalism, wages are set at the same level as the remuneration of slaves, namely, minimum subsistence, and that all that the workers produce beyond that goes to the capitalists as profit.

 

So, you conclude that “capitalist” is just another name for slave owner.

 

Knowing how close you are to a psychotic break, I don’t want to name any specific targets for you to demonstrate against in the name of abolition, lest you burn down their houses and kill them. But you know who many of them are. They’re very prominent. And many of them fund you.

 

I do hope, however, that when you finally get around to killing them, you’ll thank them for having sold you the means with which to do it and for having actually freely given you the money with which to buy those means.

 

I know that in the group of capitalists we’re talking about, there are many productive geniuses. Despite their genius, in the areas of economic theory and political philosophy and of personal self-preservation itself, they speak and act like lobotomized, castrated zombies. 

For a thorough analysis and refutation of Marxism, everyone should buy and read my Marxism/Socialism…, 99¢ at https://amzn.to/2N44uTu, followed by my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, at https://amzn.to/2PM19ut.

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Reisman’s Final Year’s University Lectures Available for Download Without Charge

Recently, a reader of my book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, told me that he believed that he had been able to get more out of my book and do it more easily because he had listened to a series of lectures I had delivered over the years 1967-2007. 

On the basis of my discussions with him, I’ve decided to release recordings of the lectures I delivered in my courses in my final year at Pepperdine University, 2004-05. These lectures are very closely related to my book, which was the main text for the courses.

 

Try reading a chapter and then listening to the lectures related to it, or vice versa, whichever works best for you.

 

There are two 4-unit courses, which, in order to follow convention, I labeled “micro” and “macro” respectively.

Each of the courses had 13 sessions (not counting exams), typically recorded in two parts of more than an hour and a half each.

 

The chapters in Capitalism assigned in the “micro” course are the Introduction, 1-11, and 14. The chapters assigned in the “macro” course are 12, 13, and 15-19. In both courses there are also some supplementary readings as well.

 

All of the lectures are available on Google Drive and can be downloaded to your hard drive without charge. Here’s the link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MCwIHMDKrjYm0seEGWSZL7qhMKDlvnd8?usp=sharing

 

Consider these lectures as a work in progress in that I intend to make various revisions and additions over the next year or so.

Downloads for the courses include a syllabus and eight detailed syllabus supplements that describe the content of each of the lectures. 

The book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is available on Amazon.com in Kindle, hardcover, and paperback formats. Go to https://www.amazon.com/s?k=George+Reisman&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 to order it.

Slavery as the Cause of General Loss

While slavery enriched slave owners, it impoverished not only the slaves but also the United States as a whole. Its impoverishment of the US can be measured by the difference between what the slaves produced as slaves and the far greater amount they would have produced if free.

 

The effect of slavery on the slaves’ incentives was like that of a 100% income tax. They were motivated to do nothing but exactly what they were told, lest they suffer punishment. Everything over and above this, that they would have accomplished if free, was lost.

 

Slavery was particularly damaging to the South, because it created in the market value of slaves a fictional capital that made the accumulation of real capital in such forms as factory buildings and machinery seem unnecessary. It was thus responsible for the South’s economic backwardness.

 

In the North, a factory owner calculated his wealth as the sum of the values of his factory buildings, equipment, and inventories. In the South, a plantation owner counted as the main part of his wealth the mere presence of workers on his land, who were regarded as his property.

 

Thus, compared with the Northern factory owner, the Southern planation owner had a major deficiency of real capital. He was missing the factories, machinery, and materials that made up the Northerner’s capital. Instead, his wealth consisted mainly of the market value of his slaves.

 

Without slavery, Southern capitalists would have had to accumulate vastly more actual capital to be as rich as slavery gave them the illusion of being. And correspondingly, without slavery, the South as a region would have had to have accumulated far more real capital.

To learn more, read my “Capitalism: The Cure for Racism,” available for 99¢ at

https://amzn.to/3g2EJkh

The Meaning of Being “Green”

Two differences between “Lockdowns” and “The Green New Deal” are that under “The Green New Deal” you won’t have gas for your car if you want to drive somewhere. And you won’t have electricity for your TV.

But that’s alright. The purpose of your life is not your personal enjoyment, but higher, collective goods, such as “flattening the curve” and holding down the CO2 content of the atmosphere, say collectivists.

In fact, believe the Green New Dealers, the world would be a better place if a few billions of you weren’t alive in the first place, because then you’d cause much less CO2 getting into the atmosphere, and thus the planet would be a better, healthier place.

 

At least so say the implicitly homicidal maniacs who comprise the Green movement and are never censured for expressing this belief.

To learn more, read my “The Toxicity of Environmentalism” and Chapter 3 of my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Both are available at https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ

Lunatics In Charge

Why isn’t Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan under indictment for manslaughter and being sued for wrongful death? She withdrew any police presence from the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle. Result: businesses were looted, citizens were terrorized, four were shot, and two were killed. (See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/us/defund-police-seattle-protests.html?searchResultPosition=2)

Her action constituted reckless endangerment, since the results that occurred were precisely the kind that any reasonable person would expect.

Perhaps she hasn’t been charged because it’s assumed she’d easily “beat the rap” with an insanity plea. Early in the anarchy, speaking from somewhere in La La Land, she dismissed such concerns with the remark, “We could have the Summer of Love.”

At the very least, she and the city council of Seattle and the mayors and councils of many other cities need to be brought in to determine whether or not they are a danger. They certainly are and should be locked up. The problem is that these lunatics are running the asylums.

Hate Speech: When It Is Deserved and Morally Necessary

I hate Hitler, Stalin, and Mao for their scores of millions of murders. I’m glad they’re dead and I hope they suffered as greatly as possible both in dying and throughout their lives. My words are speech and they are as full of hate as it is possible for speech to be.

Whoever objects to this hate speech signifies that he believes that monsters should not be hated, that they should be able to go through life free of this consequence of their evil. He thereby gives aid and comfort to the monsters and thus deserves himself to be hated.

Who are the morons who have dared to attach a stigma to hate speech in and of itself? Who are the morons who have listened to them?

There are two types of hate speech: justified hate speech, as against Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and unjustified hate speech, as used by such monsters against the founding principles of the United States and their offshoot the capitalist economic system.

Our culture has become so filled with morons, that hardly anyone even notices that every day there is a massive campaign of hate speech carried on by Marxists/Socialists against the principles of individual rights and economic freedom.

Every day, Marxists denounce capitalists as “exploiters,” who steal their profits from wage earners, and urge the wage earners to rise up and seize the capitalists’ allegedly stolen property. Uneducated, brain-dead “intellectuals” never realize that this is hate speech.

The same intellectuals endlessly prattle on against “discrimination” and the need for “inclusiveness,” while simultaneously accepting the blatant discrimination implied in the slogan “Black lives matter” and its utter lack of inclusiveness of any lives but those of blacks.  

We live in a society that is essentially uneducated in the realms of economics and political philosophy. Fortunately, this great flaw can be rectified, by reading and studying the works of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, who provide the knowledge required to fill this void.

My membership in Mises’s graduate seminar for ten years concluding in the earning of my Ph.D. under him, and also in Ayn Rand’s “collective” for a comparable period, provided the foundation for my own contributions to the cause they lead and allow me to add my works to theirs.

So I conclude by recommending that everyone who wants to fight for freedom and capitalism read the works of Mises, Rand, and Reisman. Search under these names at Amazon.com.

Arbitrary, Sadistic Democrat Congressional Inquisitors

The other day, I watched a video of AG Barr being questioned by the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. I still can’t believe what I saw and so would like confirmation of it.

The Dems seemed to believe that Barr had no right to the use of the time he needed to answer their questions. The Dems held that the time he used belonged to them and again and again demanded their time back, an arrangement whereby they can ask questions, but he can’t answer.

To top it all off, the Chairman of the committee, Jerrold Nadler, actually denied Barr’s request for a 5-minute break (presumably to use the bathroom).

I have never seen such a clutch of nasty, vindictive, and downright sadistic, freakish-looking people. If they come to power it may not be long before our country is transformed into one vast concentration camp.

Don’t let such a thing happen. At the very least, arm yourselves intellectually by going to https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ and then buying and reading 

Mass Death But Never Trump

Today’s Democratic Party is the party of Marxism, Socialism, and Environmentalism. Yet “Never Trumpers” seem to prefer the possibility of our country being run by that party rather than by Trump.

Don’t they know that what stands behind these philosophies and the “Green New Deal” that reflects them is the goal of mass murder and death?

Don’t they know that the record of Marxism/Socialism is scores of millions of deaths and that the environmentalists openly call for reducing human population from 7 billion-plus  to as little as 100 million, and meet no criticism from their comrades when they do so?

Don’t they know that the only thing wrong with the coronavirus pandemic, according to the logic of environmentalism, is that it’s not strong enough to kill people on a sufficiently massive scale?

In sum, given the real-world situation, are the “Never Trumpers” out of their minds?

Listen to Socialists’ Public Confessions

Never trust a socialist businessman. As a socialist, he’s telling you he thinks profits are stolen from the wage earners. But as a businessman he’s trying to make profits anyway. With every sale, he’s confessing to being immoral by his own standards. Stay away from him.

Such hypocrisy characterized Friedrich Engels, the wealthy communist cotton mill owner who subsidized Karl Marx, who, for his part, was happy to be kept in this way, despite his belief that his subsistence came from the exploitation of labor.

Beware of those who prattle about the evils of selfishness and the morality of self-sacrifice. They are confessing every day that they view their self-interest as evil, but allege they just never act for it. What must happen if one day, just once, they do act for it?
Beneath the facade of self-sacrifice, lurks the potential for great evil.

Accountability

There’s been a lot of talk recently about making the police more accountable. There’s some legitimacy to that. But what about making mayors, city councils, governors and state legislatures, Congress, and the whole government more accountable?

Shouldn’t the mayors of Seattle, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and elsewhere be held accountable for the additional murders in their cities that they had to know would occur as a result of the inadequate police presence that they caused?

Given their decisions and knowledge of the consequences that would follow, it seems to me that these mayors deserve to be charged with manslaughter.

Mayors who allow things to reach a point where 911 calls cannot be responded to and who have not called their state governors to provide the assistance of the National Guard, should automatically be fired and replaced through a new election for the office.

To create a high barrier against unjust prosecution of the innocent, citizens left on their own to defend their lives and property should be immune from prosecution for any acts they commit in the course of doing so that are held to be less than first-degree murder.

July 6, 2020,  Nature 

While “Nature” may often be beautiful, it is also, very often, just one thing eating another alive. Nature needs lots of improvement. The primary improvement is Civilization.

Washington and Jefferson, Slavery and Marxism

Do not believe the claim made by the media morons that statues of Washington and Jefferson have been toppled because these Presidents owned slaves. Their statues have been toppled because they advocated freedom and created a country based on freedom.

In contrast, the Marxists/Socialists engaged in this desecration are advocates of slavery, out to create a totalitarian dictatorship. At the same time, as part of the same phenomenon, they claim that slavery exists all around us, in the very nature of capitalism.

They claim that the employees of capitalists are slaves: “wage slaves,” they call them. They do this on the basis of their lunatic belief that capitalists gain from the employment of wage earners in the same way that a slave owner gains from the ownership of a slave.

Namely, from the fact that a slave or wage earner is able to produce in a day more than is required to keep him alive and able to work the next day. The existence of this excess or “surplus,” they believe is the explanation of profit.

Thus, capitalists allegedly exploit wage earners in exactly the same way that slave owners exploit slaves.

This may no doubt come as a shock to many multi-millionaires and billionaires busy contributing to Marxist/Socialist terrorist organizations in the belief that doing so buys them protection. There is no protection except to expose these vermin.

And one simple and effective way to do that is to read and publicize this book, which is available in both Kindle and paperback versions at https://amzn.to/2N44uTu.

Among other major subjects, it explains the productive role of businessmen and capitalists and the actual foundations of profit.

Who Are the Supporters of Slavery?

Ever since the defeat of the Nazis in WWII, Marxists/Socialists have clearly been the world’s leading advocates of slavery. For elaboration, see Chapter 8 “The Chaos and Tyranny of Socialism” in my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Available at amzn.to/2PM19ut.

See also my June 28, 2020 blogpost “Socialism Is Slavery and Worse” at http://georgereismansblog.blogspot.com/2020/06/socialism-is-slavery-and-worse.html.

Nevertheless, Marxist/Socialist super-hypocrite-thugs dare to pull down statues of Washington and Jefferson on the grounds that these men owned slaves.

These men set forth the principle of individual rights and of government existing for no other purpose than to protect those rights, and fought a war to establish a country dedicated to their protection.

Their success was the indispensable precondition of the abolition of slavery in the Civil War.

To attack them for not having freed their own slaves is comparable to attacking Marx and Engels (a wealthy cotton mill owner) for Engels’s “exploitation” of alleged “wage slaves” and Marx’s willingness to be supported by it.

It would have been a good thing for all the parties to have abstained from actions that violated their principles.

Had Washington and Jefferson done so, their record would now shine with even more luster than it does.

Had Marx and Engels done so, scores of millions more people would have lived instead of being executed or dying of starvation. Hundreds of millions would have avoided the experience of life as torture.

The paragraph before last is a measure of the good accomplished by Washington and Jefferson. The last paragraph is a measure of the evil accomplished by Marx and Engels and their supporters, including the hordes of uneducated children today masquerading as college graduates.

(And very often even passing as professors, journalists, mayors, governors, and United States Congressmen and Senators.)

The remedy for our growing chaos begins with reading and studying the works of Ludwig von Mises, the greatest man of the 20^th Century, and of Ayn Rand, the greatest woman of the 20^th Century.

Having been a member of Mises’s seminar for 10 years and a member of Ayn Rand’s “Collective” also for many years, I think I have been able to add some major intellectual contributions of my own to those of these giants. See again amzn.to/2PM19ut.

We have the answers and all we are up against is a horde of semi-savages who are in process of withdrawing themselves from Western Civilization and its values. To reverse the process, read Mises, Rand, and Reisman.

Freedom of Economic Inequality Is Not Only Not a Problem But the Solution to Economic Problems

On July 1, the NY Times ran an article titled “Is Economic Inequality Really a Problem?” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/opinion/economic-inequality-moral-philosophy.html?searchResultPosition=1)

The author was unable to provide an intelligent answer to his question because, like virtually all “liberals,” he doesn’t realize that under capitalism and its saving and investment, one man’s wealth is the source of other men’s wealth.

For example, one man’s billions invested in auto plants are the source of tens of millions of average people having automobiles. And similarly for all other products.

The liberal ignoramuses think products come from nowhere and that the capital wealth that makes them possible resides in a heap of consumers’ goods that serves no purpose except to make capitalists immensely fat while everyone else starves.

These ignoramuses have created generations of other ignoramuses, who are now getting ready to destroy the capital wealth that sustains them. Whoever wants to know better can do so by reading my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Available at amzn.to/2PM19ut