Eeeevil Empires

Eeevil empires and the Liedeologies that Support Them

This little essay might be a bit too hot for the liberal left, but since I am an anti-celebrity I figure it cannot hurt putting it out in public. If you violently disagree, or wish to add nuance, please write to me.

The Russian People

I was listening to one of Nima Alkorshid’s “Dialogue Works” episodes for lunch, and one of his guests was talking sensibly about Russian people and their culture. Although we can overplay this card, it is fundamentally true that the Russian people have a deep cultural aversion to Nazis.

This is true despite Russian culture also having an anti-woke strain and authoritarian streak, although one can play that card until it wears out it’s usefulness too. Talk to a random Russian person and they are almost certainly not homophobic nor racist. They also will have a core of bolshevism still in their blood. (These are my gross guesstimates, if you have statistics do share. Maybe this “Russia” concept is a fiction all in my mind.)

Continuing with this possible fiction. Talk to a random one of their oligarchs or bosses and you’ll get the same statistical distribution of racist and sexist bias Cretanism${}^\dagger$ as you would in the UK, USA, Canada or anywhere, even lovely New Zealand.

${}^\dagger$Not congenital hypothyroidism.

Which brings into question the whole media/normie culture war nonsense, and pseudo-Identity politics cockroach-like infestations of liberal culture. People get discriminated against unfairly for all sorts of reasons, some downright nasty, and some banal and systemic. You cannot blame a stressed worker for failing to correct the entire system they are working within. Who has time in the evenings to work on workplace politics and legitimate based social justice activism? (Not me, for sure. I can barely manage to eat a decent diet. Fudging sugar cravings from all the work stress and threat of unemployment${}^\ddagger$.)

${}^\ddagger$Sometimes even the threat of being unemployed from unemployment $\Rightarrow$ wining a bullsh$\ast$t job.

Empire in Decline?

First, I do not want to put a damper on all the neo-marxists and leftists, and right-wingnut accelerationists, out there who believe the US Empire is going to evaporate in 20 to 30 years. I just do not see how that is possible in the way those talking heads are imaging.

It is possible. But these leftiepols and righties are getting future egg on their faces, little do they know it, because they basically all have gold commodity or fixed exchange rate thinking. Moreover, and this is something fellow MMT’ers do not realize, they also all have inflation bogeyman mythology, which is the more persistent brainworm. (I write this with an article sent to me by GhostOnTheHalfShell about inflation that I still need to read, and it might attenuate my bullishness on inflation.)

Inflation will never be the bogeyman that brings down an empire.

Neoliberalism has a simple banal way to keep itself going. Basically we just get used to the misery and become nihilists (and you are in some respects whether you admit it or not, just admit it! LOL). It does not even have to be planned or by design, it is all automatic social pathology under neoliberalism. Yet because people need to work to eat, the entire world economy will just keep chugging along.

I hate nihilism and Nietzsche with a vengeance. Two sides of a totally debased coin.

Neoliberalism, the way I see it today, has evolved under selection pressures, and it is a semi self-sustaining system that has a cycle of misery, but it has built-in stabilizers that prevent utter destruction and immiseration. How? Basically because even though neoliberalism wastes human lives, it never wastes them entirely. There is always an adjustment after a crash where a relative few workers (say 40% of the available labour force) are just able to survive to produce the real output for themselves, the rentiers and the unemployed. This was probably not possible in the 19th Century or before. Today it is possible thanks to widespread semi-automation of many shit jobs${}^\S$. It is the policy choice of using an unemployed labour buffer. The wrong policy choice.

You now see why inflation from wage demands and full employment is not an economic problem? It is political false psychology, and that creates social problems that can turn into economic problems. The inflation does not create the economic problem, the ignorance of the source of the price level is what creates the socioeconomic problems. Mainly via completely ass backwards policy responses.

${}^\S$((Though I relish and will celebrate the day when a sanitation worker does not have to come within olfactory nor bacterial pick-up range of a dumpster.))

Why 40% not 60% of the labour force? I am not counting all the bullsh$\ast$t jobs. Fudge them. If you have a bullsh$\ast$t job I do not begrudge you personally, I just hope the spiritual suffering is worth it for you. But you are wasting your life.

What is the half-truth about the inflation bogeyman? There has to be sliver of truth, right?

Maybe. It is, in my opinion, the fact that if the government loses the ability to collect taxes, then the state currency goes to zero purchasing power. Why? Because failing to collect taxes — you may readily infer — implies one or more of a few basic events have occurred,

• maybe the state lost a war, and got replaced,
• maybe an asteroid struck the nation, obliterating the tax department HQ (and construction workers forgot how to rebuild a tax department HQ?),
• maybe a famine or drought or plague wiped out the tax department. And kept wiping it out whenever it got rebuilt — by divine decree? or Quantum Many Worlds Boltzmann Brain freak probability?).

You might think of a few more. But under these scenarios I think you will agree the empire has collapsed.

It is never going to be because some million workers demanded, and got, a higher wage for doing honest work. Bet you anything.

True Revolution

The way out of this cycle of misery is spiritual. If the core rot and crud is lack of spiritual wisdom, the cure is not going to be a dose of Marxist-Leninism or Anarchy. No political economy that needs to be imposed by violent force of a minority is going to ever win the hearts and souls. Not even Cutrone’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” — a total fantasy. You have to instead meet people where they are. Everyone deep down knows love and honesty, can recognize these attributes, will fight to protect them, and will not condition some political choices upon sacrificing them.

But no political activists of the right nor the left are working to spread such wisdom. They all want their cartoon system to prevail. It’s a political econ sports contest. So… wrong idea!

By the way, I personally love the cartoon idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat. If there is a “natural ruling class” then it is the class of people who make things for others to enjoy.

I strongly suspect at some stage we will have a few governments with politicians who are mostly proles. Will they form a dictatorship? Han! Are you mad? When you are a decent person you are not a dictator, and “emergence” in a complex system cannot make the collective into a dictorship either. We can euthanize the rentiers without depriving them of the America’s Cup regatta. I refer you to Mosler’s slide deck on how to Deep Six/Bin Off the Financial Sector .

((The America’s Cup is (potentially) legitimately revolutionary yo. It proves MMT holds for a small piddly open economy. Moreover, it proves government investment even by neoliberals who do not grok MMT one iota still enables a pathetic nation with some decent agriculture to waste real resources on rich guy sports without collapsing the economy. There is even a rich girls regatta now. All cyclor power to them.))

The decline of the evil empires (plural) is greatly exaggerated. You cannot just cut off their hydra heads. Because deep to the core the seed that spawns modern empire is neoliberal politics, plain and simple. Until that core is irradiated with naked truth, kindness, love and wisdom, it will continue to spawn the brainworms of neoclassical/monetarist economics and “eek out survival” of the rentiers by collecting trillions of $ from the working class via rents.

How MMT Helps

We can rage until we are purple in the face like an US Olympics swimmer, that MMT is not the solution! But is is part of the solution. MMT knowledge is a small part of the solution, but it is a lot like a key to opening the main door., Without it you have squat. You have no honest demands. You fail to know the capacity of the State to address social pathologies. You fall prey to nihilism and Nietzsche.

Governments are never currency constrained, they are constrained only by real resources. This is why neoliberals — who ironically utterly fail to understand the monetary system — will be able to eek out survival despite huge demos hatred of them and their centre-right politics.

Under such absence of currency/spending constraint the simple decency you can have in a society is from ethical political choices of how and where to spend the tax credit into the economy. You want that to be on the poorest and on the real workers, not the financiers and rentiers. So you have to stop basic income schemes for people who already have money in proportion to how much money they already have; i.e., stop issuing government bonds: Inject currency into the economy instead by paying workers to run meaningful social services, which lower the costs of doing business for firms. Also stop spending on M.I.C. jobs except for legitimate collective defense work (which means paying a whole lot more sensible diplomats who are far cheaper than weapons). (

Know that government spending is not conditional upon tax receipts, it is the other way around entirely. Ability to pay your taxes is dependent upon government net spending, otherwise someone somewhere is in (needless) terrible debt to a private bank, by accounting identity.

How Spiritual Economics Does the Hard Lifting

I’m exhausted. Just writing this little essay should be sufficient for today. If you cannot figure out why spiritual virtues do all the heavy lifting after MMT opens the doors, then I cannot help you. You need to be able to figure it out.

It is so obvious.

Can I just say that no matter how much a government net spends, if it all trickles up to the rentiers then someone somewhere is still unable to pay their tax liabilities and the economics rents foisted upon them by the rentier class (so they are unemployed, by definition).

But the government has no spending constraint. And nominal inflation has nothing to do with this, if the real wage is rising.

Does that suggest political policy choices might be best made with a spiritual lens (meaning not ghosts and New Age crap, but good old honesty, wisdom, honesty, humility, sense of justice, kindness and love for all) not just an MMT lens?

If that is not suggested to you, then I suggest you work on the proof for homework. A lesson is learned best when you work it out for yourself. If you need tutoring write to me.

Defeating Nihilism (and Nazis)

The nihilist is self-defeating. Nihilism has no decision procedure: you can say, “Screw it, we are all doomed, let’s party and screw the workers.” Or you can equally say, “Screw it, we are doomed. Let’s at least help someone for no good reason since it is the least we can do to sleep better at night.”

Either way, but in particular taking the “let’s help others” choice, there is always a more robust, more logical, realism for motivating such a decision. It is the spiritual reason. Or as Chris Hedges is fond of saying, “I do it not because I will win, but just because it is the right thing to do.”

Naïve? Well, if it is naïve give me some more naïveté brother.

Considering this entire little essay, would you like me to prove any of my claims? I am prepared to do so if you give me a standard for your desire for reasonable proof of anthropological and sociological claims. (Hint: there are none.) I recommend you read political economics like a story. If it seems interesting and plausible, absorb it into your neural net weights. It might help you emit some semantically accurate strings of words. lol.

Postscript

(Sadness warning.)

By the way, speaking of Nima’s Dialogue Works podcast, he had on a guest Diane Sare recently. Red flags of lunacy! She may be anti-war (so props to her) but she is a libertarian goldbug who has no clue about macroeconomics and has strong Lyndon Lerouche vibes. Disgusting. DuckDuckGo that guy… or maybe save yourself some vomit cleanup work and don’t!

((Do I need to write that the ideas are disgusting, not necessarily the person? Yeah, I probably need to write this, such is the gutter level of discourse today requiring such obvious caveats. I do not know what goes on inside people’s minds.))

Which all goes to say even if you find an interesting semi-trustworthy independent news source, be afraid of the brainworms, be very afraid. That goes double for anyone paying attention to what I write. Do your own research. It would be the spiritual thing to do.