Is This The Right Camp?
For much of my life I’ve been a Democrat. There was a long period when I had no party affiliation, and even some several years when I thought I was a libertarian. But that was before I realized libertarianism is a fraud, and while I was still under the influence of a misunderstanding of self-sufficiency.
And voting for Jimmy Carter in 1980, I got swept up in Reaganism enough to vote for him in 1984. I was, I admit, a fool about politics and power, and suffered from Dunning-Kruger, although I don’t think that term was yet to be coined by those gentlemen.
My infatuation with libertarianism was behind my registering as an independent, and it took some years to overcome it. I give all the credit to my discovery of critical thinking and skepticism. This gets more important as I go on.
It is important because prior to that it was fairly easy to persuade me of anti-government positions with the rhetoric of the tea party. The hidden cabals of international power, the deep conspiracies behind the Federal Reserve System, and even sovereign citizenry were topics that grabbed my attention with the power of religion. And really, it was like religious belief that it held me.
Eventually I recognized a lie. And when I looked deeper the walls cracked, and the new tool of critical thinking led me to skepticism. It was during that time I came to realize that I had no real means of telling truth from lies, or fact from fiction. Apart, that is, from who was telling me. And since I was predisposed to distrust the government, whomever was the opposite gained credibility. I was truly amazed at what looking things up could tell you. That is, looking things up with a checklist to guide me.
It is the usual agents of who and what, and why one should be trusted. It is verifiable data and consensus of experts. And it is seeing yellow and red flags.
The first one that really started to break me free was about the Great Depression. In learning about the gold standard and sound money, I read a lot written by people from the Austrian School of Economics. And there is much of what they think that is right, especially if you consider inflation the greatest evil in economics. I don’t. But really it is simply an economic agenda for the libertarian wealthy. And to say that it opposes Keynesian Economics is a gross understatement. The Austrian School loathes the Keynesians.
I won’t dwell on the economic differences between them, partly because I am unqualified to do so with any grace, but mostly because it isn’t important to this paper. Suffice it to say that our re-emergence from the Great Depression and the robust economy of the world in the decades since is the result of Keynesian economics. What is important is what one of those libertarian economists wrote about the Great Depression. (No, I can’t remember with certainty who said it.) He wrote that most people did very well during the Great Depression. Butter sales went up. Yes, he used butter sales as an expression of good times.
We all are familiar with the Great Depression. It began shortly after the Wall Street crash of 1929, and as the market value of so many companies collapsed, businesses closed and laid off workers. Since they had no income to make purchases, the businesses they frequented also suffered, leading to more layoffs. Soon a quarter of the entire American workforce was without income.At the time there was no widespread unemployment insurance, no Social Security program for seniors, no government food stamp or welfare programs. The people who lost in that cycle, tens of millions of them, were left at the mercy of the grace of charity of individuals and private organizations, such as churches.
Government spending, following the economic advice of Kenneth Galbraith (A Kenyesian), gradually pulled the country from the pits of depression. World War II came along and soon everyone was working more than they wanted.
The Austrian School was largely Laissez-faire. Let this natural cycle work itself out and eventually the problem would go away. Of course, while we waited people were dying. Those opposed to government intervention wanted the problems to be solved by the private sector, and voluntarily at that. That didn’t and wouldn’t work. The path they were on would lead to civil unrest and likely end (as it did in parts of Europe) with authoritarian government.
So you can see that for the Austrian School to be right, the story of the Great Depression had to be different. The idea that people’s lives were less important than the unregulated markets and no holds barred capitalism, was a bit too cold a sales pitch for the public. Better to make the depression sound more mild. Tell the people that it only affected a few, and well, perhaps it was their own fault.
And since some stats showed that butter sales had gone up, and butter is something that seems as more a luxury than a necessity, it follows that the Great Depression was good for most people.
There were many other points included in the argument, all crafted and cobbled together to create the impression that things were better than we were told, and that perhaps we were lied to about the horrors of that depression. Lied to by a Keynesian government that was trying to control you and take away your freedom! (Insert sarcasm emoji here.)
And here’s where critical thinking really took a-hold of me. It grabbed me by the collar and demanded that I see it for what it could do, and especially how it could show me the error of revealed truth. You see, the story I was being told was convincing because it was enlightening me to the story of the global bankers and their plot of world domination. (See Rothschilds, International Jews, and maybe even the Illuminati.)
It began as revealed truth. A story with a plot, some villains, and a way out.
But they needed to address the Great Depression, which was decidedly defeated by Keynesian economics and support directed at the bottom of the economy.
But I grew up hearing first hand accounts of the horrors of those times. And had read and studied a great deal about how FDR had pulled us from the brink. The story the Austrian economists were telling didn’t seem to reflect what I knew. But the mention of butter was really a red flag. Well, all farm products really.
World War I ate up (pardon the pun) a lot of food resources, as wars will. Great amounts of food were sent overseas to feed the troops, as well as to support the allies. And to meet this greater demand, farmers seeded more land. And with that came new and more modern equipment that could increase the amount of food that could be raised. Farmers took advantage of this and bought expensive equipment, planted more crops, and bred more animals. Diary animals. Have you smelled where I’m heading?
For some years after the war we continued to export some of this produce, but in the 1920s, those markets diminished. The abundance that was welcome less than a decade before, had no market now. Prices began to collapse, and many dairy farmers threw away some of their crops. Butter was cheap. And butter also had competition from oleomargarine. This was a new product made from vegetable fat. It was a double whammy. (As a side note, Wisconsin, America’s Dairyland, passed laws prohibiting oleomargarine from being sold in a yellow color. Butter was yellow, margarine was white. The margarine producers had to include a packet of yellow food coloring the customer could mix into the margarine to get the butter color.)
Butter had never really been a luxury item per se, but it wasn’t free. But when prices tanked it became an easy source of cheap calories. For the three-fourths of the workforce who still had jobs, and for that smaller percentage whose income had not gone down, butter, and food in general, was cheaper. This was compounded when you add the huge numbers who had little to eat.
And here’s where this red flag has meaning: The people telling me this were economists. They knew why butter sales were up, but still tried to suggest it was something different. While they weren’t lying exactly, they were certainly using this economic reality to suggest the Great Depression was a positive.
When you find the people you are listening to resort to deceit to make their point, you have good reason to be skeptical of their message.
As I mentioned earlier, I was swept up in conspiracy theories at that time. The whole concept of an international cabal of bankers working as puppet masters to the world governments was presented as an explanation of why the average person wasn’t getting ahead, or even at times, not even keeping up. International organizations, both NGO and governmental, were pilloried by those I was listening to. The United Nations, The World Bank, The Trilateral Commission, and others were all lumped together as examples of the One World Government that the masters were trying to create. Once achieved, this government could enslave all the people. (So the story went.)
Amongst the NGOs, the Bilderberg Group was lambasted by writers and conspiracy advocates.
The Bilderberg Group is an annual meeting of business, NGO, and governmental leaders that meet annually. They are represented at a two-thirds, one-third ratio of Europeans and Americans respectively. They are named after the hotel where the first meeting was held. I’ll get to what they do in a bit.
And it was from Alex Jones that I became aware of them. Alex Jones runs a website called InfoWars. Always loud, always bombastic and seemingly on the edge of panic about these international devils, Jones showed up at the entrance to their conference sticking microphones into car windows and asking them loaded questions that they ignored. Jones then portrayed them as a cabal meeting in secret to plot their evils for the coming year. They would be manipulating markets and creating crises they could use to gain power and wealth. Jones told us that this group was completely shrouded in secrecy. Few of the members were known, their meetings were moved annually to hide them, and everything discussed was a secret.
I ate it up. For a while.
Then critical thinking kicked in. If this was all so secret, how was Jones showing up, and how did he know what they talked about?
I looked them up. You can too. The Bilderberg Group has a website. They formed in the early cold war period in an effort to build international cooperation as a check against future war. After seeing Europe suffer through two world wars, the first one the worst war ever, but only until the second one. And that second world war ended with the clear understanding that a third world war would likely end civilization and could wipe out humanity.
The people who started these meetings sought to promote western style capitalism, trade, and democratic governments as the best check against future conflict.
But are they lying? Is this just a cover as Alex Jones tells us?
Well, they tell us when and where the next meeting will take place. They tell us who the permanent members are, and who is invited to their next meeting. And the subjects they discuss are not secret.
Where’s the secret part? Chatham House Rules.
Chatham House Rules are a set of rules covering meetings that encourages contemporaneous speech and open dialog. This is best achieved if the speakers don’t have to worry that they will be misrepresented in the press at home. So no one is quoted. The attendees make tell whomever they like what was talked about, but not who said what.
So, it became clear to me that Alex Jones was either the most incompetent researcher ever, or he was lying to further his agenda.
In any case, what is clear is that Jones is not a reliable source of information. And it is also clear that this grand conspiracy that he pitches doesn’t hold much water.
Yes, world and business leaders from various NATO aligned countries meet annually to discuss the best approach to build a future free from the threat of large scale conflict. Particularly the type that would result in a thermonuclear exchange.
If I haven’t laid the path I’ve followed well enough, I apologize. But perhaps the reader will get the idea that in using critical thinking and skepticism, I’ve begun to see that those who complain most about the economics of Keynes, or the motives of international organizations, are quite willing to mislead and even lie to promote their agenda. Once someone does that, it is a pretty good sign that their message isn’t that good.
When the great thinkers spoke about the Marketplace of Ideas, they were addressing free speech mostly. The idea is that in such a marketplace, truth will prevail. This goes back to poet John MIlton in the 17th century, and followed the discourse of many great people through to today. Thomas Jefferson said we can tolerate “error of opinion […] where reason was left free to combat it.”
But lies? Mark Twain offered that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has its shoes on, or something like that. That so many people are credulous to conspiracy and sheer nuttery is maddening.
Back to the point about the Great Depression, and The One World Government conspiracies, and all the rest of those conspiracies. They’re all promoted from the libertarian right. The libertarian right thinks we should have a strictly limited government, if any at all. They think that they should be left to pursue their agendas and their profits and their quest for power unchecked by the mass of the people. But this is a hard sell as straight talk. The late 19th and early 20th century was called the Gilded Age, and the most gilded of the people were the robber barons. The unfettered capitalism of that time led to widespread poverty and suffering. It led to a great disparity of wealth between the richest and the rest of the people. And ultimately, it led to the Great Depression.
Look around us today, and we have tent cities all over the country and great, long lines at food pantries. And it is only the injection of money from governments along with some charity that keeps the current crisis from exceeding the Great Depression in its effect.
A stat released the week I began this paper said that 10% of the people own 89% of the stocks in American business. And it is the stock markets that lead and end the economic reports on the news.
This is the result of capitalism without checks.
We went through this at the turn of the previous century and we got horrific poverty for many, and astounding wealth for a few.
Then reformers and progressives like Theodore Roosevelt muscled up and checked the power of the few, pushing it back to the people. A decade later the few took the power back, and we got the Great Depression and horrific poverty for many, again.
Then FDR and the New Deal brought the people back into power, and spread the wealth around. Poverty declined, the middle class grew, and average people got a better share of the national wealth that they had helped create.
This lasted through a few decades and along came Reagan to give the few back the power, and create a larger gap between the rich and the poor.
Since then few of the elected officials have done enough to check this. Even some of the Democratic party leaders coddled the wealthy.
And again we have astounding wealth for a few, and horrific poverty for many.
And here we have that wealthy segment of the population agitating racial wars and left/right identity politics.
For decades now, the wealthy have convinced half the working class population that their suffering is the fault of other working class people.
They foster a culture war, while we should be fighting a class war.