patrick.net

bgamall4 says

I write satire and I know some can't tell, although in fairness, I put a disclaimer at the bottom of my articles.

You should put an apology.

mell says

You're wrong - why not address gsr's post instead and the numbers in there which speak for themselves.

Sure. The US spends about the same on military as the rest of the world combined. I'm all for cutting it.

Indigenous' Article:
http://mises.org/daily/6959/War-Making-and-Class-Conflict

All governments past and present, regardless of their formal organization, involve the rule of the many by the few.

Okay, sure. Hard to have a vote as to whether the firefighters are dispatched to a burning house each time a house catches on fire.

In other words, all governments are fundamentally oligarchic.

But Private Owners submit every decision they make for public approval first.

But, Seriously. This is like an anti-gun argument that "all guns are evil." Guns are used to commit robberies, guns are used to prevent robberies, guns are used to kidnap people, guns are used to liberate people.

So it is with government.

The reasons are twofold. First, governments are nonproductive organizations and can only subsist by extracting goods and services from the productive class in their territorial domain.

Is your public water authority "unproductive"? How about your fire department? Does it actually produce anything? What about enforcement of contracts? What does the enforcement of contracts actually physically produce? Gallons of Beer? Pet Rocks?

Thus the ruling class must remain a minority of the population if they are to continually extract resources from their subjects or citizens.

Like the Koch Brothers? The various companies now pumping Fox News full of horror stories about kids' lunches (notice they never show the offerings on the lunch line, only the plate that some finicky and probably obese kid who is used to normally eating pizza and fries and cookies has on it)

Genuine "majority rule" on a permanent basis is impossible because it would result in an economic collapse as the tribute or taxes expropriated by the more numerous rulers deprived the minority engaged in peaceful productive activities of the resources needed to sustain and reproduce itself.

For example, in past ages - including for most of Britain's Parliamentary history - wealthy landowners voted taxes on the poor, and only they voted.

This was what was originally meant when that guy said "Vote themselves largess from the public till." He wasn't talking about sans-coullettes, but bourgeois armorers, tax farmers, contractors, etc. - you had to have land and/or money to vote back then. Joe Six Pack could not vote.

But this is definitely not the point the author would like to make.

Majority rule would therefore eventually bring about a violent conflict between factions of the previous ruling class, which would terminate with one group establishing oligarchic rule and economically exploiting its former confederates.

Which we've totally seen in the UK, Sweden, Canada, etc. etc. I mean, ever since the vote was universal in the early 20th Century, these societies have been racked by constant revolution and violence.

The second factor that renders oligarchic rule practically inevitable is related to the law of comparative advantage. The tendency toward division of labor and specialization based on the unequal endowment of skills pervades all sectors of human endeavor. Just as a small segment of the population is adept at playing professional football or dispensing financial advice, so a tiny fraction of the population tends to excel at wielding coercive power.

By coercive power, the author means majoritarian governments requiring life insurance companies to actually pay out.

Malcolm X's father was tied to a railroad track by the Local Decency Brigade. The Insurance Company declared it a suicide.

The inherently nonproductive and oligarchic nature of government thus ensures that all nations under political rule are divided into two classes: a productive class and a parasitic class or, in the apt terminology of the American Slave-owning Traitor [and] political theorist John C. Calhoun, "taxpayers" and "tax-consumers."

Who was the "States Rights" author of the "Fugitive Slave Act", that enforced Southern Slave Laws in Northern States - the very opposite of States Rights.

Calhoun was a "Cast-Iron" opponent of Abolition.

John C. Calhoun's most Famous Speech was Titled: Slavery Is a Positive Good
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Slavery_a_Positive_Good

The author does not want you, his dear reader, to associate John C. Calhoun, with his "productive class" of "minority" slaveholders, but rather the abolitionists of the Lincoln Administration (and his popular vote majority) with a "nonproductive class".

The king and his court, elected politicians and their bureaucratic and special-interest allies, the dictator and his party apparatchiks — these are historically the tax-consumers and, not coincidentally, the war makers. War has a number of advantages for the ruling class. First and foremost, war against a foreign enemy obscures the class conflict that is going on domestically in which the minority ruling class coercively siphons off the resources and lowers the living standards of the majority of the population, who produce and pay taxes. Convinced that their lives and property are being secured against a foreign threat, the exploited taxpayers develop a "false consciousness" of political and economic solidarity with their domestic rulers.

See the petty landholders and whip cracker white poor of the South for "false consciousness". And guess who made up the bulk of the Confederate Army and paid a disproportionate share of taxes? Not the plantation owners!

A second advantage of war is that it provides the ruling class with an extraordinary opportunity to intensify its economic exploitation of the domestic producers through emergency war taxes, monetary inflation, conscripted labor, and the like.

The Dixie Nation was the first to draft via conscription.

We thus arrive at a universal, praxeological truth about war.

Oh, Prax, FFS. It certainly isn't going to be the wealthy private interests encourage it, that would make do much damn sense...

War is the outcome of class conflict inherent in the political relationship — the relationship between ruler and ruled, parasite and producer, tax-consumer and taxpayer. The parasitic class makes war with purpose and deliberation in order to conceal and ratchet up their exploitation of the much larger productive class

*whew* Oh, wait a minute...

Thus, a permanent state of war or preparedness for war is optimal from the point of view of the ruling elite, especially one that controls a large and powerful state. Take the current US government as an example. It rules over a relatively populous, wealthy, and progressive economy from which it can extract ever larger boodles of loot without destroying the productive class. Nevertheless, it is subject to the real and abiding fear that sooner or later productive Americans will come to recognize the continually increasing burden of taxation, inflation, and regulation for what it really is — naked exploitation. So the US government, the most powerful mega-state in history, is driven by the very logic of the political relationship to pursue a policy of permanent war.

That's right folks, it's your faceless "Government Employee" that pushes all these things. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain: The billions of dollars thrown into Think Tanks, Propaganda, and Political Donations by 1%ers has nothing to do with it. It's all Marge Simpson's sisters in the DMV parasiting off everybody else while lobbying to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.

PS Oligarchs don't come from strong government, they come from weak ones.

To crush the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party made a deal with the PLA. The PLA got control of the SEOs and made a fortune. Post-Cold War Russia was in chaos; mafiosos who smuggled under Glasnost and had ready hard currency got "nonproductive" Soviet-era, Government built oil rigs and coal mines for a song and a dance. John D. Rockefeller and JP Morgan flourished under Laissez-Faire policies.

Whenever the class of wealthy people (esp. Landowners) get too uppity, and the government gets too weak, chaos, war, and Oligarchy ensues.

I won't even get into the myth of the "Peaceful South" which before the war plotted to get the US involved in every kind of war, from an invasion of Cuba to the Mexican War - anywhere "tropical" enough, that indigo, cotton, and tobacco could be farmed - by slaves. To say nothing of the Border Ruffians or Bleeding Kansas, which was caused by Missouri and Arkansas Plantation Owner-funded* bandits crossing the border to terrorize free farmers to stop the state of Kansas from becoming Free.

* AKA "poor, productive minority" in the above Austrian spiel. It's NOT an accident that Confederate Types and others love and work with the Von Mises Institute.

thunderlips11 says

Is your public water authority "unproductive"? How about your fire department? Does it actually produce anything? What about enforcement of contracts? What does the enforcement of contracts actually physically produce? Gallons of Beer? Pet Rocks?

My objection to this is that there is no price discovery for their services.

thunderlips11 says

By coercive power, the author means majoritarian governments requiring life insurance companies to actually pay out.

Either one, through cronyism or being elected, either way it is beyond what price discovery would pay them.

thunderlips11 says

but rather the abolitionists of the Lincoln Administration

Lincoln was not an abolitionist any more than Calhoun was.

thunderlips11 says

See the petty landholders and whip cracker white poor of the South for "false consciousness". And guess who made up the bulk of the Confederate Army and paid a disproportionate share of taxes? Not the plantation owners!

Your conjecture is out of place as you are bringing up anachronistic points. What created the conflict in the first place was a raising of the tariffs on the South.

thunderlips11 says

Oh, Prax, FFS. It certainly isn't going to be the wealthy private interests encourage it, that would make do much damn sense...

Almost all of the wars in the past 100 yr have come from Democrat presidents. You bet the government and the cronies start the wars for the benefit of keeping them in power.

thunderlips11 says

PS Oligarchs don't come from strong government, they come from weak ones.

Your rambling post does not demonstrate this. The leaders of the south exploited their own people as well, that is not the point of the article.