
“Are you a capitalist or a socialist?”
I’m often asked this. It’s not a fair question and the truth is, I don’t know nor do I really care. I don’t know because I’m convinced that the majority of such words (especially ones that end in “ism”) are utterly meaningless. They have little intellectual import and serve only to stoke the emotions of whomever hears them, in either a passionate fervor for or against.
So while I’m not an outright “capitalist”, I do find myself having many disagreements with those in the Alt. Right who are passionate “socialists”. They’re so passionate, in fact, they’re actually advocating for “universal basic income”, hopping on the bandwagon of the radical socialist democrat presidential candidate Andrew Yang. These misguided Alt. Right lads are, perhaps rightly so, burnt out on Trump and all his false promises, so they see a guiding light in Yang who may have more of a chance to usher in the socialist state they desire.
But despite how many of these Alt. Right guys claim to be “former libertarians” or former “free market conservatives”, they seem to accept these socialist ideas at face-value…as if they’ve either forgotten all the free-market criticisms of such positions, or, more likely, as if they never understood them to begin with. Government-school kids, after all, run after trends and aesthetics rather than any legitimate policy convictions.
The level of double-think is amazing. Richard Spencer, for instance, can proclaim, in the same podcast, that the more of a product is supplied, the less demand there will be for it, while, a few minutes later, seriously advocate for universal basic income. One-thousand dollars a month for all? Even the most average Rush-Limbaugh-listening conservative knows this will dramatically reduce the spending power of money while, on the “back-end” as it were, remove more income from tax-paying workers, robbing us of our ability to spend and invest according to our perceived interests.
“Well, I would have hired an extra worker and/or given my existing employees a raise, but now that extra cash is being taken by the state to fund the universal basic income and my workers will have to make due without a pay-raise, despite the rising cost of living.”
It’s absurd! What socialists always want on the front end, they end up destroying on the back end. And the average socialist is, usually, (and I’m speaking anecdotally) some sort of ivory-tower, or at least, arm-chair, intellectual with very little knowledge of how to manage his own money, let alone that of all his neighbors.
Another similarity these Alt. Right kids share with Yang is their unfettered faith in the demigods “science” and “progress.” On this view, we’re just a few decades away from Kurzweil’s transhumanist “singularity” where artificial intelligence and machines will either take over life as we know it, or merge with humanity to create a new evolutionary species – onwards and upwards we’ll go into the universe, unharried by death, decay, or…common-sense.
On this view, “machines” will replace labor, and, as socialists are always ostensibly the friends of “labor”, wish to institute economic or social reforms to avoid the poor worker having to lose his job to a machine. Self-driving big-rigs are alluded to as the case-in-point here – a technology that will inevitably put thousands of dejected truckers out of work. But, as usual, their proposed resolutions will, inevitably, cause more heartache and trouble to the truckers than any self-driving big-rig (and, without doxxing myself, I’ll add that this is a subject matter I have some level of professional expertise in).
Unfortunately, the heartless free-market advocates, genuinely heartless in this instance, reply with the whole “learn to code” meme, implying the age-old capitalist talking-point that whenever a new technology renders some career-field obsolete, those involved in the career, after being fired, will eventually find new employment in the ever-expanding market. In this case: they could “learn to code”. This emphasis on market forces at the very-real expense of workers in a certain industry is a problem with “capitalism” when “capitalism” becomes a philosophy instead of merely a tool for analyzing markets.
Still, what of the socialist conviction that “machines” will destroy countless jobs? It’s completely false. Emphatically false!
Consider the classic essay “I, Pencil” in free-market literature. The essay outlines the massive labor force required to generate one, humble, pencil. The rubber factories for the erasers, the lumber mills for the wood, the graphite production, not to mention all the highways and transportation industries required to facilitate the production. Each of these supporting industries, themselves, require massive infrastructure. Likewise, consider a cotton-picking tractor. Did this replace all the slave labor in the old South? Hardly, when we consider the massive labor market required to maintain the tractor (fossil-fuels, alone, require thousands of man hours to produce).
Machines never *replace* labor, they only ever *reallocate* it.
Still…a Christian government (as opposed to a soulless capitalist market) would have mercy on those being “reallocated”. In fact, the malicious reallocation of labor in today’s markets is a major source of outright attack on white working-class people. It’s bad enough to have to retire early or learn a new trade late in life, but when the new labor created by the new technology is “reallocated” to non-whites or those not even citizens of the nation, it becomes a very real problem indeed.
In fact, this is *the* problem that free-market advocates in pro-white circles need to address in my humble opinion. My solution is radical, but I’ve said it publicly in many venues: we ought to seriously reconsider the merits of a decentralized, privately-owned, slave-labor market. Given technology today, we could even avoid having to live near the slave class – having plantations in South America or Africa, for example.
For anyone recoiling in horror, know that we already have a system like this in place, but the slavery is not formally recognized as such, nor is it presided over by individual, Christian, owners of capital. Far better individual Christian aristocrats, than faceless, international billionaires with no emotional connection to those slaving away on their plantations.
…more on the particulars of this in a future post. Suffice it to say, for now, the naive “Yang Gang” advocates in the Alt. Right would do well to dust off the old free-market literature they claimed to have mastered so long ago, and allow it to restrain their unfettered passion for the building of impersonal, economic, machines.