“We are not a fad or a fashionable movement. We are not a “faux-crusader” hobby for people too lazy to work at anything (going green, PETA, veganism, etc.) We are a backlash against the biggest psycho-social atrocity foisted upon a people. You destroyed our lives, our country, our economy and our people. And without those things in our lives, we have nothing else to do but exact our toll of revenge.”
Now, the dear Captain is not talking about any sort of violence, nor any sort of mistreating of anyone. We are, since we are enlightened men, much more civilized than that. What the Captain is talking about is the fact that we are going to write mocking and ridiculing texts about every last piece of garbage that the mainstream douchebags try to feed us, and thoroughly rip the worldview of the egalitarian, collectivist (most specifically feminist) bullshit that has tormented this part of the world for four decades to tiny little irrelevant pieces. Men are going to stop taking crap for wanting a somewhat more fair, and dare I say traditional society.
And by the looks of it, things have started. Time will tell, if this was the point in time when we started seeing The Manosphere Rising. The generation of ’68 would shudder if they knew what is moving in the undergrowth. Their world is about to end. This is not your leftist revolution where all things good and decent will be thrown out. This is a reaction, where all things bad you have idolized for decades will be thrown back into the mud, were they belong.
Exciting times.
Off topic, but here’s a guy trying to rationalize spending more on education and claims that the US debt is a myth. Are you familiar with Mike Norman? By the way, he’s being pretty dishonest about the dollar index in the second video. Look at the overall 10 year trend after the second link. I was wondering what your thoughts were on this man and how he’s trying to get MMT into the mainstream. I don’t buy any of the ideas for a minute. No, I have not read The 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Dollar_Index.png
Anyways, the Manosphere Revolution is taking place. No more having to deal with psychotic feminists and the State trying to tell us how to run our lives. It’s an exhilarating feeling.
Mike Norman is of course a douche-bag. There are two main ways these arguments can be counted :
1 ) Sure, the US won’t default, it’ll just pay back its debt in devalued dollars. In time, this will mean that no one wants US debt because of the rapidly devaluing dollar. Of course, they can just have the Federal Reserve monetize all of it (which is, scary enough, almost what is happening. The majority of new issuance of Treasury Bonds is being monetized). This will make the dollar fall even faster. They can continue to do this until the dollar is completely worthless. Now, it won’t all happen at once, of course. The main reason that the dollar is not falling more rapidly is because all other currencies are being devalued at the same time. Looking at commodities, and especially gold and silver, all currencies are falling. It’s all about relative value. The thing that should scare anyone who has read a bit of monetary history is that first, the currency devalues slower than money is being created. Then, at some point when inflationary expectations take hold, the devaluation starts accelerating faster than the monetizing of debt, at which time you get what Mises called “The Crackup Boom”. At that point, you have to do what Paul Volcker did in the early 80′s – drag interest rates up so high that the devaluation stops. This is the point where the US will get to choose between default or currency collapse. However, the US can probably muddle on for quite a few years with medium-to-high inflation but without hyperinflation. What is important is to figure out what happens in the mean-time, namely :
2 ) As long as people are buying Treasury bonds (and some still are) this means that capital that would otherwise reach the private sector is instead consumed by the government. This hollows out the economy because less resources are available for wealth producing private enterprises, and more is consumed by government. While the illusory GDP-statistics may show that the economy is doing somewhat OK, this is only due to government spending. The private sector shrinks (the US private sector has yet to reach the size it hade before the financial crisis – it may never do so again until policies are reversed). This will in the end mean an accelerating collapse in the private economy, which means that it becomes harder and harder to hide the recession, unless you keep escalating the money-printing. And then you have stagflation – unemployment increases, industrial production falls AND you have prices rising rapidly. This is the Keynesian endpoint, which the US met in the 70′s. There is no reason to think it won’t meet it again, with the difference that this time the debt burden is so high that either the US defaults (at least on its internal obligations, perhaps not on its external debt), or the dollar becomes yet another failed banana-republic currency.
What I’ve outlined above is undeniable, but we cannot say when it will happen. What Mike Norman doesn’t get is that just because it hasn’t happened it more than 30 years doesn’t mean it won’t happen again. Unless the laws of economics have been broken, this will happen. If it can’t happen, then why not just stop taxing people and only print money to hand out? Monetarists and Keynesians alike like to talk about “output gaps” and the fact that the economy is not running “at full speed”. What they do not get is that the more they monetize, the lower the potential output of the economy will be because of capital drainage. Thus, the economy will never pick up to the level where they would like it to be so they could start raising interest rates and for the Federal Reserve to start “winding down” on its balance sheet. Such a wind-down will make the US government insolvent, unless the economy is a multiple larger than it is today. This won’t happen, because of exactly what they are doing. So, all we are really waiting for is for inflationary expectations to pick up, in a combination of falling output from the private sector because of the print-and-spend policies, and then it is game over.
The scariest part is that we do not know what happens if the worlds largest bond market, or the worlds largest currency fails. Time will tell. These guys will not be working in finance when this is over. In fact, they may not even be able to get a job as a garbage collector. Some day, in the coming years, it will be reckoning day for Wall Street.
Excellent response. I knew there was something fishy with Norman’s thinking when he started talking “education” spending in the first video. Now I have even more reasons not to take anything he says seriously. He really does seem like a complete, unlikable douchebag with a lot of hubris, arrogance and a cocksure personality to go with those traits. I had never even heard the firm John Thomas Financial before. If you look up the firm on Google, the second suggestion already mentions complaints and you’ll find a bunch of questionable stuff about the firm Norman works at.
Based on what I’ve read, it seems to me that MMT is heavily influenced by accounting. Lots of people have criticized it but the problem is that when people try to refute the ideas, their objections can easily be mistaken for these straw man arguments, as you can see in this post. I think this blog is one of the most well written of any left wing oriented blog I’ve come across, but I still don’t agree with what he’s promoting.
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2012/12/robert-murphy-on-mmt-unimpressive.html