Not With a Whimper but a Bang

 

The stock markets are crashing today. People are talking major recession. To follow Covid lockdowns, rampant inflation, and war in Europe. 

If they are right, this should be the final nail in the coffins of Kamala Harris and the Democrats in the US, and Justin Trudeau in Canada. They were set to lose anyway, but this could be historic, like RB Bennet or Herbert Hoover in their day. The left might be discredited for a generation. It may also be lucky for Farage in the UK and LePen in France that they were snookered, in part by political machinations, in the recent elections: that leaves the left holding this bag.

Meantime, in his most recent column, written before today’s news from the world’s stock markets, Xerxes the leftist columnist already comes out hard against “the system.” He quotes left-wing Anglo-Irish blogger Paul Kingsnorth: “We like to believe that we live in independent nation states run by leaders of our choosing, but this is a mirage designed to disguise the reality: The Machine is a giant, global, digitized web of commercial power and control, managed by transnational corporations and gatherings of elite powerbrokers, none of whom have very much interest in what ‘the people’ think.”

Strikingly, this is exactly what the right is saying. This is just what Trump and Farage and Poilievre have been saying. To be fair, it is not just the left that has shifted. A few years ago, the right would have resisted blaming transnational corporations. Not any more. Both left and right are now alarmed at elite powerbrokers and the trend to globalization. 

Of course, in the recent past, as soon as some leftist raises this alarm, he is declared by the left to be “far right”—see RFK, Jimmy Dore, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan. But even if this continues, if the shadowy elites sustain their control over the Democratic Party or the Liberals and NDP, the end result will be the same. The people are uniting against the powers that be.

Kingsworth and Xerxes think the problem is that things are getting more complicated due to technology, so that there is a greater distance between the elites and the common people. I think the exact opposite is happening: the new technology is levelling things, removing the need for an elite, and all its advantages. And making it easier for he people to seize control.

"Make the Rich Pay" -- The Rich

The rich tend to be on the political left.

Have you noticed?

Sure, you have heard about “the Koch brothers.” Or Conrad Black. But they are the exception. Conrad Black was one big newspaper proprietor who was on the right. He made news because of this. How many newspapers are on the right? Apparently, the owners of all the others are on the left. Rupert Murdoch makes news for running a TV network on the right. But this was also a huge profit opportunity, precisely because most media are strongly on the left, and a customer base was not being served. Other proprietors were so strongly on the left that they were prepared to let their businesses suffer for the sake of their politics.

Pick a posh neighbourhood in the US or Canada. Odds are, it votes left. Westmount—Liberal. Outremont—NDP. Rosedale—Liberal. Vancouver Quadra—Liberal.

The left claims to be “for the poor.” It is really for the rich. The poor in the last US election seem to have mostly voted for Trump. Not that the right is necessarily for the poor—but they do not make this their banner slogan, either.

This is how that works.

Everyone who has more money than they really need sees poorer people and, even if they do not feel a tad guilty about this, they at least fear envy. So there is always a market for some scheme that will “help the poor.” This allows the rich to point for vindication of their own wealth to the fact that they have publicly supported such schemes. They are “progressives.” It’s a less painful alternative to the alternative of either actually, personally, giving money to the poor, or admitting they are a little selfish for not doing so.

Not, let us note, that there is any positive moral obligation to give money to the poor. But that is a separate and more complicated argument. People do feel guilty, and do experience envy.

The standard and most popular tactic among politicians, to meet this client need, is to conjure up an imaginary class of “rich capitalists” whose responsibility it is to divest their wealth for the sake of the poor, and not us, we poor people in Rosedale or Outremont. After all, they have more money than we do.

No matter how rich you actually are, this is necessarily always true. You can always pass the buck up the chain to someone who has more and is not doing their share. Everyone can use the same logic, and make the same claim, all the way up to the one last person who actually is the richest soul in the land, or the world. “Why should I be giving up what I have? After all, Warren Buffet has more. Take his money first.”

But even at the very top, a lot of the madly rich, like the magnates in Silicon Valley, are also on the left. You can find all kinds of them calling for higher taxes—obviously on themselves.

“Heck, I’m for helping the poor. I’m not greedy. I think we should all pay more taxes.”

This works for the really rich, too, who cannot fool themselves into believing they will not bear the higher taxes. They are passing the buck back down the line, in effect. You think he should pay instead of you. He says he’ll pay if you pay too. The positions are actually contradictory, but both on the left. They both come out as “the rich should pay more taxes.”

There are other considerations. It is naive, in the end, to imagine that money going to government goes to the poor. Most of it, of course, goes into the pockets of bureaucrats, and bureaucrats can be among the very rich. Indeed, just about all of the richest neighbourhoods in the US are in the suburbs of Washington D.C.. Guess who lives there (and guess how they vote). Even money specifically earmarked in budgets for the poor goes, apparently, 70% on administration costs—to bureaucrats—and only 30% to the poor. The figures are reversed, on average, for private charities.

At the same time, big government is to the advantage of those who are now rich. More regulation restricts competition. More corporate welfare is available, more fat contracts are put out to tender for established businesses. There is no reason for a big business to prefer a free market.