I hear you, but on the other hand, so what?

There are no good statistics, but I believe that far more people are killed and injured by police during the enforcement of laws on eviction and foreclosure. Why are there no mass protests on this? Why does not the mass media cherry-pick some egregious case and demand that we stop enforcing these laws ‘to stop the barbarity’? Because the billionaires who run this country want those laws enforced. If people get hurt in the process well hey, stuff happens.

This is not about some ‘liberal’ whack job. This is about the power of the ruling elite to shape a narrative, to use media control and funding of ‘left’ organizations, to create a mass movement. Like the ‘color revolutions’ the CIA is so fond of. And it’s because (most of) the current ruling elite want open borders, because historically that drives wages down for the few, and rents and profits up for the many.

If for whatever reason all of the elites wanted the border closed, illegal immigrants could be machine gunned at the border and nobody in power would shed a tear, and there would not be mass protests, and no selection of a chosen ‘martyr.’ Count on it.

Read closely, and learn, boneheads: ““It bears no resemblance whatsoever to the capitalism we were promised in school.”

Yeah, because nothing ever does, ever can, ever will resemble the “capitalism” you were promised in school. There is no such thing. There is just crookedness and the battle against it.

Libertarians are fucking complete idiots.

Completely missing the point.

In a country of (nearly) 400 million, the police are a necessary evil, and with so many people sometimes bad things happen. When they do, it should be investigated. If the police officer involved behaved badly, then (depending on the severity of the infraction), they should be variously charged with murder or assault, or demoted or disciplined or fired. If the police officer involved behaved correctly, they should be exonerated. But this has nothing at all to do with the laws the police are charged with enforcing.

A large fraction of current US billionaires want open borders in order to drive wages and living standards down for the many, and rents and profits up for the few. Period. So if anything bad happens during the enforcement of our immigration laws, they will viciously try to conflate this with making the enforcement of immigration laws (e.g., laws against foreign invasion) immoral. Let’s not fall for this con.

Imagine some group of poor people try to trespass on the private island of a billionaire. Of course, the police will stop that. Suppose that a policeman over-reacts and kills a trespasser in a way that was egregious. OK that’s bad. Does that mean that enforcing the laws against trespassing on a billionaire’s private island is immoral? Of course not. The issue will never be raised, because the billionaires that run this country want THOSE laws vigorously enforced.

We are told that the laws against illegal immigration cannot be enforced if it involves separating an alleged minor from their alleged parents. Has anyone else noticed that this ONLY applies to illegal immigration? For every other law the police will separate minor children from their parents for as long as required (weeks – months – years) and nobody in power will shed a tear.

“They have the right to do anything that you can’t stop them from doing.” Joseph Heller, Catch-22.

The core of the rot is that our ruling elites not only don’t care about the average person – it’s not clear that they ever have – but that they no longer care about the overall health and stability of the nation as a whole. IMHO what gave us the New Deal was the elites’ fear of communism, then Nazism, then communism. Right now our elites fear nothing, and even if the entire country went up in flames they can just get in their yachts and sail away with their stolen loot. Where’s a Stalin or a Hitler when you need one? They just don’t make monomaniacal world-conquering despots like they used to.

Triple kudos! Such an intelligent and well-reasoned piece.

I am an old-school yankee. I pay my bills. I paid my way through college back in the old days when it was possible to do that with a minimum wage job. When my own kids got to college age, we shopped around and I sacrificed to make sure they graduated without debt. But. Not having sympathy for the current generation saddled with unplayable debts is unconscionable. The founders of this republic – no socialists them – did not believe in debt-slavery or debtor prisons, and neither should we. And demanding that working class kids be saddled with unpayable debts, when routinely billionaires walk away from bankruptcies, or are bailed out and subsidized with trillions of taxpayer dollars, makes me sick. What was that saying in the Bible, about not complaining about the mote in your neighbor’s eye until you have removed the beam from your own?

Richard Parker for Secretary of Education! Or maybe, President.

An interesting yet schizophrenic post. One the one hand Mr. Rall warns the Democrats about claiming a “mandate” and purports to give them advice on how to ‘not mess it up,’ on the other hand he is more down-to-earth when he points out that’s it’s all a charade and the two parties just alternate as one screws the voters over, they get voted out, then the opposition screws the voters over, rinse, lather, repeat.

I think I am about done with voting. It really doesn’t much matter, does it? The only thing that does seem to have happened is that Biden’s handlers opened the border to a foreign invasion, and Trump has stopped it. Sure, he has done it tone-deaf to optics, and exempting his billionaire buddies, and there is no way he is going to deport the numbers of foreign invaders that he claims he will (although the publicity surrounding these rather crude deportations may actually serve a useful deterrent purpose). But that is a major non-trivial difference.

Of course, if Trump keeps this up we may eventually start to get some power back to labor (supply and demand being what it is), and it’s likely that under pressure from his fellow crony capitalists and their eternal lust for cheap labor, he may re-open the border. We will see. But in the mean time, the 2024 election did actually matter in one major way. Maybe I won’t stop voting, at least for a bit longer…

An American is an American because they are an American citizen. Period.

I mean, you have a family? What defines who is a member of your family? Not any political opinion, but only that they are a member of your family.

The rich want to destroy nationality because it makes it easier for them to import cheap foreign labor, and export our industrial heritage to cheap foreign countries. End of story.

But if one wanted to ask, more philosophically, what is an American? Obviously, it is someone who thinks that they are an American. Someone that believes, in their soul, that the American nation is where their loyalty lies. Someone who does not favor foreign nationals over American citizens, even if that profits them from cheap labor. Regardless of whether they are ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’

Vivek Ramaswamy could be an American, but is not. He prefers foreign nationals of his own ethnicity over his fell0w citizens. He cheerfully throws his fellow citizens under the bus and gives jobs and money and industrial secrets to foreign nationals, because it profits him personally and also apparently because he despises Americans. He is not – in his heart – an American. Or perhaps: he is de facto an American, but also a traitor.

An interesting post. Kudos for pointing out the obvious fact that importing foreign works lowers wages. It has long been pointed out that periods of high immigration are periods where workers lost ground, and vice versa. Supply and demand.

But as regards raising the minimum wage: yes and no. The problem is that it’s hard/impossible to fight supply and demand, you can only work with it. When there are 1000 desperate workers competing for every new job opening, their wages will be low and it will be impossible for unions or statutes etc. to reverse this. The only real advantage to an actually enforced minimum wage is that it would remove much of the incentive for employers to import foreign workers: if they HAVE to pay $20/hour, and this rule is enforced in workplaces everywhere, there is no point in importing illegals etc. to work for $12. But this only sets a floor that must be consistent with actual production: if you go to Bangladesh and set a minimum wage of $20/hour it won’t bring prosperity, because they just don’t have the economic output relative to their population.

Unfortunately, I just heard that the Trump administration actually cut the wages for legal foreign agricultural workers by $4/hour, which of course will ripple through the citizen workforce as well…

And I have always been a bit insulted at the term ‘consumer’. I’d prefer citizen, or maybe person. End-user? We need a better word.

The rich want to use massive immigration for one over-riding purpose: to force the population up, to drive wages and living standards down for the many, and rents and profits up for the few. But that doesn’t sound good, so they cloak their true purpose in any number of mis-directions.

Please don’t give me that ‘we are a nation of immigrants’ propaganda. Once the frontier closed in the middle of the 19th century, periods where there was limited immigration are periods where workers made progress, and vice versa.

Did some of these Afghans fight on the side of the US? Sure. Were some of those who fought “on our side” really working for the other side, or perhaps, not involved at all? Count on it. And count on our elites to not much care about finding out.

One wonders: how much of a role did the current Afghan government play in who was allowed to evacuate and who was not? How much of the documentation that is relied on to vet Afghani immigrants coming from the current Afghan government? Has anyone else asked these questions?

There might have been a few hundred Afghan interpreters who legitimately should have been evacuated, and the press made a big deal of it. But the reality was that we just shoveled as many people as we could into cargo planes no questions asked, and let a lot of the interpreters hang. The interpreters were never more than a fig leaf for yet another avenue to boost the population.

When Nancy Pelosi was told that we had evacuated 70,000 Afghans, she replied that oh no, we need at least 200,000. She didn’t care about any specific Afghans that might have helped us, she just wanted to meet the target for growing the herd for the benefit of her wealthy patrons.

200,000 here, 2 million there, 10 million over there, and pretty soon you are talking about big numbers. Especially when you factor in their young age distribution (‘demographic momentum’) and likely very high fertility rate, at least for the first generation or two.

Follow the money. Cheap labor uber alles.

Milton Friedman is one of the most evil people to have ever lived, exceeded only by Julian Simon. The misery and suffering that these two intellectual whores played a major (if not sole) role in creating a level of misery and devastation that will ultimately make Hitler, Stalin, and even Mao, look like historical footnotes.

Indeed.

Did anyone else find it odd that somehow – after the death toll got around 50,000 or so – the Palestinians somehow magically evolved the ability to be immune to bullets, and to be able to exist without food or water? It’s a miracle.

Ralph Nader has some intelligent writing on this. Love him or hate him, he is essentially incorruptible and intelligent.

https://nader.org/2025/10/10/palestinians-fate-victims-of-genocide-while-alive-vastly-uncounted-by-the-media-when-they-are-killed/

My only complaint: I am not on the side of the Palestinians. I think they are toxic, as every Arab nation that was stupid enough to host large numbers of them as refugees has learned to their detriment. But surely you don’t have to be pro-Palestinian, to be anti-genocide? I am annoyed that these two issues are so routinely confounded.

Indeed, well said.

But. Under sock-puppet Joe Biden, the United States suffered a massive foreign invasion. Yes, it was an invasion. It wasn’t done for moral reasons, it was done specifically to drive wages and living standards down for the many, and rents and profits up for the few. To me this was the single biggest issue, and the reason that I voted for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump stopped the invasion. Oh sure, he’s still replacing our scientists and engineers with foreign nationals. He’s still bringing in foreign agricultural workers (he recently cut their wages by $4/hour). He’s not doing mandatory e-verify, and he is largely not raiding the workplaces of politically-connected large-scale employers of illegals. But he stopped the invasion.

Perhaps, under pressure from his fellow billionaires, Trump will betray us yet again and re-open the border. But for now he has not. And that’s not nothing.

“Hell of a time to be alive.” But isn’t it always.

Indeed. Well said. But.

But “Keynesianism,” when it was fairly tried in its entirety, was a raging success. It worked! In the 1940’s, 1950’s, and the first half of the 1960’s, the United States exploded into the greatest industrial power the world had ever seen and with the highest standard of living. It was only ended because the profits for the super-rich were limited relative to what can be had with Neo-liberalism.

Many “isms” fail – communism, neoliberalism, etc. – and always we hear the excuse that it’s not the “ism” that is the problem, but that we don’t have enough “ism” or our “ism” isn’t pure enough. But Keynesianism actually worked in practice! That’s the record.

And you forget another waste: forced population growth. When the rich dump more people into an economy, they add nothing until after massive investment in new infrastructure is built and new resources developed. This stimulates massive economic growth but it’s only to get back to where you were, so it’s entirely a negative achievement that profits only the rich but at best only allows the average person to avoid getting poorer – or more typically, to avoid losing ground too fast.

There are some intelligent points here, but I take issue with “the government can’t cut the cost of goods and services.” Of course it can!

How can government cut the cost of goods and services?

– Stop using excessive levels of immigration to force the population up at an excessively high rate. This will reduce rents, and ultimately many other costs such as water and energy. Of course, it wall also increase wages – but that will take money from profits, which is clearly racist.

– Go back to enforcing the anti-trust rules against monopolies. Example: can you spell “Ticketmaster”? Get rid of that disgusting parasite and the cost of performances instantly drops.

– Stop businesses from employing ‘personalized’ pricing algorithms.

– Stop medical businesses from fake charging like 50 times the true rate of a procedure. I mean, “Insurance” is just a protection racket, where you only pay a little more than the true cost of the procedures – but don’t pay protection and the medical companies can charge anything they like at all. Regulate ambulance services nationally.

– Get rid of the stupid student loan racket, allow those Americans saddled by educational debt to clear it via bankruptcy. Without the gravy train of government-sponsored near-unlimited debt, colleges would not be allowed to charge ridiculous amounts for tuition, and therefore they would not, and educational costs would drop to what it used to be when I was a kid when you could put yourself through school by working a summer job (I am not making this up I was there).

OK sure the government mandating low prices by fiat would be a bad idea – but – there are money other ways that would work just fine thank you.

–

“the strongest force in politics is spite, and how mass immigration, racial resentment, and demographic replacement are fueled by power rather than empathy.”

I respectfully disagree. The strongest force in politics is money. As Bernie Sanders said before he was forced to recant, mass immigration is a tool of the rich to drive wages and living standards for the many down, and rents and profits up for the few (I do agree that empathy is not in any way a motivating force for our elites, who have the morality of sharks). Demographic replacement is just a cost of business, nothing personal, but cheap labor is where you find it. Racial resentment is the rich playing divide and conquer.

I mean, when black slaves were imported into the United States, was this due to empathy, or spite? No, it was the desire of southern plantation owners (and some big banks etc.) for the easy profits of cheap labor. Period.

Interesting. First: I have no real idea what is going on, anymore than anyone else here. But let me try another angle.

This ia about the corrupt and evil western elites trying to destroy and destabilize Russia (and also China eventually), first so they can loot it like the did under Boris Yeltsin, but also to eliminate a potential rival power. Look at how the western powers are working in the Middle East: not conquest, but destabilization, fragmentation, corruption.

The entire “SMO” as brutal and awful a slugfest as it is, is just one front in the war. The western elite will not stop. They will not honor any treaties. If ‘defeated’ in Ukraine they will simply continue pressing on other fronts, which are not just military. I think the west just mostly ‘conquered’ Romania and Moldava and other countries, and these will be used as further springboards to attack Russia. IMHO Russia does not fear NATO missiles on its borders, but NATO propagandists and color revolutions and other destabilizing means.

Look at Syria. For a time it looked like the central Syrian government, with Russian aid, had “won.” But the west did not give up, they continued to wear away at the Syrian economy, to arm and assist rebel forces, to lie about their intentions… and now Syria is a fractured mess, exactly as desired.

Putin may well “win” his SMO. But will that mean the matter is settled? I suspect not. Perhaps Putin is slow-walking the SMO to keep the west tied up. I mean, even if Russia conquered all but a rump part of Ukraine, that part could still be supplied with missiles to shoot at Russia, even if rump Ukraine is a wasteland. And if Russia conquers all of Ukraine, they will be fighting a guerrilla war against an enemy far more intelligent and resourceful than anything they faced in Afghanistan.

Of course I can’t read Putin’s mind, but I speculate that the real issue not his military advancing in Ukraine but how to shape the aftermath.

Indeed. But IMHO this is more about money than anything else. The rich want to force the population up, to drive wages and living standards down for the many, and rents and profits up for the few. At core the only reason white nations are letting in so many non-white immigrsnts, is because currently there just aren’t enough dirt poor whites in the world to significantly drive down wages. All this talk of ‘multiculturalism’ is misdirection, because it sounds better than ‘we need the working class to be larger, poorer, and more profitable.’ Basically, the rich are treating us like cattle.

“Eat the rich?” That’s stupid. How about, stop the rich from eating us?

The Ivory Coast used to be pretty prosperous for that part of Africa. The rich brought in huge numbers of refugees from poorer countries to lower their labor costs. After this policy had effectively doubled the population over what it would have been (i.e., half the population was of recent immigrant stock), the resulting poverty tore the country apart in a bloody civil war. Last I checked the immigrant faction had won. So the native Ivorians lost their prosperity, their peace and finally their nation, but the rich made a lot of money. Do you really think that the Ivorian elites did this because of ‘multiculturalism’?

Triple kudos! Well said!

As far as progress goes: In modern India there is chronic hunger and malnutrition, I believe that currently one-third of children grow up physically stunted if not outright wasted. This is basically the Malthusian catastrophe where population growth is finally limited by available food. I mean, if the average Indian has two kids, and they are chronically malnourished to the point of being physically stunted, it is simply impossible for them to average six kids each, like the did just a few decades ago. This is actually worse than late medieval Europe! The idea that capitalism has lifted all boats – that there is an inevitable arc of progress – is just nonsense.

A recent report claimed that there are a billion people in India with ZERO purchasing power (and most of the rest are not much better off). They are surviving and nothing else. And you can’t do worse than subsistence (at least, not for very long). This is not progress. This is not an achievement.

There can indeed be progress but it is not inevitable, it can be strangled in its crib, or it can be cancelled out – most typically, by excessively high rates of population growth. Beware of all pundits claiming we don’t need to worry about anything because progress is inevitable.

In 1980 Iraq had about 13 million people. Today it has about 50 million people. And of course, this is to a great extent due to government pro-natalist policies.

Forget the lies of Milton Friedman and Julian Simon: the productivity of an industrial society does not instantly and automatically scale with population growth. If the population had been allowed to merely double during this time, there would today be twice the per-capita precipitation, and perhaps just as important, twice the per-capita water storage capacity. I think that would have helped.

Starting with Saddam Hussein, the government gave cash allowances and bonuses to women with large numbers of children, and outlawed contraception. Now you don’t have to be ‘anti-child,’ to think that the government deciding how many children we should have is abusive. It’s treating us like cattle. The record is pretty strong: when governments force the population up at a rate faster than what the people themselves would have likely found reasonable given current circumstances, it never works out well for the average person.

But we can’t talk about that, because then maybe people in places like Iraq and India etc. would get ideas, and wages would go up, and Elon Musk might not become a trillionaire without all that lovely cheap labor, and that would surely be a crime against humanity.

Of course the US leadership knew perfectly well that Iraq didn’t have WMDs. I say this with certainty because we invaded. We don’t invade countries like North Korea or Pakistan that really do have nukes, now do we?

Indeed, well said.

Consider a hungry man sitting on one side of a closed room, and on the other side is a table with food on it. Obviously the man should walk to the other side of the room and eat.

But suppose that the man is convinced that he cannot afford to pay himself enough to get up and walk to the other side of the room, so he starves? That’s madness. As John Maynard Keynes once said, we can afford what we can do.

Now suppose someone else comes into the room and says that he’ll give the hungry man enough money to let the hungry man pay himself enough to get up and get the food, with money the other person created out of thin air, but in return the hungry man will owe this other person a huge debt. That’s not fiscal prudence, that’s a scam.

The practical record of public banks is positive. But any in principle good idea can be ruined by bad practice or corruption. The success of the BND may be due as much to the people of North Dakota as to public banking per se. If Mandami tries to fund everything, if he gives subsidizing a never ending stream of illegals and throwing money at every problem without regards to limits, if he pushes for nonsense programs at the expense of useful infrastructure etc, then it will fail. That to me is the real issue, not public banking per se.

Kudos. Well said.

But IMHO, the real villain is not “capitalism” (i.e., market forces), it’s the rich forcing the population up. The rich are literally breeding us like cattle, via pro-natalist policies, excessive immigration, and overall lying about the idea that it is essential that people breed like rodents or civilization will collapse..

I mean, sometimes a building stands strong and tall, and sometimes it collapses into a heap of rubble. Both are consistent with the laws of physics.

Sometimes there are more job openings than workers, and competition for workers drives wages up and profits down. And sometimes there are a thousand desperate workers competing for every job opening, and competition drives wages and living standards for the many down and rents and profits and political power up for the few. Both are examples of ‘capitalism’ in action.

Supply and demand, baby, supply and demand. It’s not enough to know that the system is unfair, we need to see the core mechanic that the rich use to achieve their ends.

Indeed, well said.

And yet… “political suicide?” Sorry, in this day and age “political suicide” would be actually addressing the core concerns of the working class. Such a candidate would variously be ignored, delisted, defamed, ridiculed, debanked… you get the idea. As you point out, with both parties actively attacking the working class, there is no choice. The Democrats will screw the workers, the Republicans will eat their lunch, then the Republican will screw the workers, and the Democrats will eat their lunch… rinse, lather, repeat. And the “losing” party will be rewarded with funding, fawning press coverage, cushy retirement jobs on the board of director of various companies, if not outright bribes- and for their family members as well, etc.

The core of the rot is not politics. The core of the rot is cultural, and I don’t mean LGBTQAEIOU-dipthong-ampersand rights, but the fact that the ruling elites in this country have given up caring about the nation as a whole. If that continues no amount of political tinkering will mean anything.

Over a billion people with a physical standard of living inferior to late medieval England, 500 years of western technical and economic progress more than wiped out by massive population growth. Yes, the fertility rate in India is now low but only because they don’t have enough food to provide for any more. A few decades ago the average Indian had six kids, they were chronically hungry with about a third being physically stunted. Today the average Indian has two kids, and they are still hungry with about a third being stunted. That’s not progress! This is the Malthusian catastrophe, which is not global apocalypse but where population growth tracks food production at/near subsistence (note that the Indian regions with the lowest fertility rate have the worst poverty. Yes, really). But think of the profit potential should this vast pool of low-cost labor be efficiently harnessed by the global elites. Hence the lie that limited population growth had no impact on lifting the Chinese people out of poverty, because the rich don’t want people in places like India to get ideas.

Oh, and I don’t blame the Indian people for this: I blame globalist oligarchs like Elon Musk, and their intellectual whores like Julian Simon and Milton Friedman, who scream and froth the people simply MUST breed like rodents. There is no free choice without knowledge of the consequences.

Now in the past, Malthusian catastrophes like India could never become industrial powers, because everything is tied up in keeping people barely alive and there is no real investable surplus. But perhaps with modern mobile capitalism India can use its grinding poverty to attract capital from overseas? Perhaps. Or perhaps India will finally drain the aquifers and the whole society will collapse.

Agree with Jus’ Sayin’. Kudos.

Indeed, the rich want nothing more than shoveling in more warm bodies, so that they can have a larger, poorer, and more profitable herd. And they will corrupt and bribe and deflect anything that stands in their way, such as their buying out the Sierra Club.

In the early civil rights era, it was mostly about letting blacks unionize and get decent wages and benefits. We can’t have that! So the rich changed the subject, American blacks were replaced with Mexicans (nothing against the Mexican people, it wasn’t their fault, but it is what it is), and it was all about things like school desegregation – which the rich could give a fig about, but which helped suck the oxygen out of issues like money and wages and benefits…

The Sierra Club sold out twenty y or thirty years ago, when it dropped its traditional ZPG stance, after a billionaire bribed the Club with hundreds of millions of dollars in return for which the Club began promoting uncontrolled immigration of cheap labor for the billionaire’s many money-making enterprises.

“Nigel Farage wants us hating chiefly on the immigrants” – excuse me. Nigel Farage – whatever his other faults – does not want the rich to force the population up, in order to increase rents and profits for the many, at the expense of driving wages and living standards down for the many.

In every case that the rich have used government policies to force the population up – China under Mao, Japan before WWII, Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran under Khomeini, Brazil, The Ivory Coast, etc.etc. – it has been bad for the working class. Even in the United States, periods of high immigration are periods where the working class lost ground, and vice versa.

Why do you think the rich want, more than anything else, to open the floodgates to the overpopulated third world? Why do the rich always want more people, regardless of circumstance? The idea that ‘hating immigrants’ is somehow ‘right wing’ is absurd, look at how no matter what happens in England, the border remains open. That’s by elite design, yes?

Indeed it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book for elites to exploit the natural herd instinct of people to support the tribe in times of conflict.

I get sick every time I hear that we need to ‘support our troops.’ I mean, I have nothing against our soldiers, but it’s not like they are fighting for me and my family and country. When the billionaires used their puppet Joe Biden to open us up to foreign invasion, did the US military defend us? No, they just stood around and dithered with foreign stuff that had nothing to do with defending the country (Smedley Butler was right).

I am sure that there are a lot of patriotic courageous soldiers in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, but I don’t thank them for their service because they are not on my side. So why should I thank a US soldier? Nothing against them personally, and they aren’t in charge, but they aren’t sacrificing for me, are they? They are sacrificing for the big banks, and Israel, and to get a paycheck and benefits, and maybe because some of them are stupid. So what.

“China did not have all of these regulations” – uh, excuse me.

China does not allow billionaires to bribe government officials to let them loot the public treasury. China does not allow Chinese companies to export key technologies and infrastructure to other countries with cheaper labor or laxer regulations (nota bene: Mexican wages have been lower than Chinas for decades now). China does not let the big banks strip mine the real economy for bailouts for egregious financial nonsense. China does not allow financial parasites like George Soros et al. to loot their nation (Cry me a river. Oh, the humanity!). etc.

The Chinese economy is quite seriously regulated. Kind of like the US economy was seriously regulated back during the New Deal era.

I confess to just skimming this, but I think there is a serious misconception on both sides here. The idea that abortion is all-or-nothing is just wrong. If you bother to ask the question correctly, the overall answer from most people – and the overwhelming majority of western societies – is that late-term abortion when the fetus looks and acts like a baby is creepy, but early term abortions – when the fetus looks like a soap bubble or a fried egg – is acceptable. That was Roe v. Wade, and it was overturned not for any legal or moral reasons, but because the rich wanted some issue other than money to distract the proles. The rich don’t care about abortion (or transgender bathrooms, or systemic racism, etc.) one way or the other, but they are glad that you do.

I mean, a fertilized cell is just a cell. I can scrape the inside of my cheek and it’s teaming with individual live human cells, any one of which under the rich conditions is a potential human being. But of course, a potential human being is not a human being, hence the word “potential.” I shed mere human biological life in the countless thousands every day and think nothing of it. But I recently asked a strong advocate of abortion rights what she thought of late-term abortion and she was shocked that anyone would even consider such a thing.

So now we have states where a mere cell is a legal human being – and conceivably in vitro fertilization is murder, and also states where you can kill a fetus at nine months. This is chaos, and it’s by design. Perhaps you disagree with my analysis, but at least accept that the strict dichotomy between pro-life and pro-choice is artificial, keeping the proles at each other’s throats while the elites rob us blind.

They say that power corrupts. The science fiction author Frank Herbert said that rather, power attracts the corruptible. I would rather say that allowing individuals to accumulate unlimited wealth (and power) will select for those individuals who are entirely focused on attaining more wealth (and power) at the expense of of any other consideration.

To paraphrase the character Ash from the first Alien movie, one can admire Elon Musk’s purity. A survivor in the business world, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. Let the world burn if only he can be worth a trillion dollars.

“Satan II” – if you liked the Prince of Darkness in his feature debut, you’ll love the sequel!

I must take issue with your use of the term “demonization of immigrants.”

As Bernie Sanders said briefly before he was forced to recant, open borders is a far-right plan by the super-rich to drive up rents and profits for the few, while driving wages and living standards down for the many. It’s what classical economists termed “forced population growth,” treating people like cattle. It’s a completely amoral policy aimed at crushing labor. There is nothing wrong with the average person having sympathy with the individual immigrants themselves (who typically are not responsible for the policies that created so much misery in their own countries), yet wanting the total rate at which we accept immigrants to be moderated to a level that does not crush what we have achieved.

In the United States, as with basically every other country, periods where the rich forced the population up at excessive rates are periods where the working class lost ground, and vice-versa.

Disagree? Then take the locks off your windows and doors, invite anyone and everyone into your home to help themselves to all that you have. But you’re not going to. And neither are the rich with their private islands and gated estates. And neither should the American people.

There is much to agree with here. But.

You mention “islamophobia” like it’s a bad thing? Well, I am “islamophobic,” – and cancer-phobic, and getting-shot-in the-head phobic, you get the idea.

What is the core of modern Wahabbist Islam? They breed like rodents, they treat their women like slaves and their children like cattle. They turn their own societies into screaming miserable overpopulated hellholes where people only dream of escaping. They hate everyone – women, christians, jews, atheists, other minor variations of islam – and are a pox on every place they lay foot. They ban music and alcohol and fraternizing with the opposite sex and give young impoverished men no outlet other than mindless violence. You don’t have to love what the jews are doing to the Palestinians, to recognize that most modern ‘islamic’ societies are total shit.

As the old saying goes, if you would be loved, first be sure you are lovable. If Islamic people don’t want the rest of the world to be ‘islamophobic,’ perhaps a bit of introspection is in order.

I am an old-style Yankee. I work hard I pay my bills I have never taken assistance. I strongly believe in a society that values hard work and responsibility.

But.

Anyone who sneers at proles dependent on government assistance, who does not acknowledge the tens of trillions of dollars (and counting) of post-2008 government bailouts and subsidies etc. for the super rich bankers, is at best missing the point, it not being totally hypocritical. The money we are paying on assistance for people whose livelihoods have been destroyed by specific government policies (NAFTA, MFN for China, open borders immigration flooding the labor market) is hardly a rounding error compared to what the rich are sucking out of the government.

Yeah I’d like to see these rich bankers practice what they preach, and go bankrupt when they drive their businesses into the ground. But not gonna happen, is it?

What was that old saying, about not complaining about the mote in your neighbor’s eye, until you have removed the beam from your own?

Excellent article. Kudos.

As an aside, everything the neoliberals say about Hong Kong is a lie.

Hong Kong benefitted from being a toll booth between the (then) slave labor factories in mainland China and the West. For some time everything labelled “Made in Hong Kong” was really made in the mainland (I know people who grew up there trust me). The Hong Kong elites massively increased the population via immigration to ensure that the profits of this trade flowed upwards only, and was not shared with dockworkers etc.

‘Freedom to choose to employ slaves’ – because neoliberalism is all about freedom.

You can look this up: for a time manufacturing in Hong Kong was like 30-40 percent of the economy. The instant that China could export directly to the west, this fraction plummeted to near zero. Where are all the abandoned factories in Hong Kong? Nowhere, because they never existed.

Now while on paper Hong Kong has a high GDP/capita, the reality is that most of the inhabitants live in what are effectively chicken coops. Recently in wikipedia I read that many people in Hong Kong need to decide between adequate living space and having an adequate diet. At least until recently, the average worker in Canada could have a big house, and a lake house, and a car, and a boat, and a snowmobile, and grill thick steaks in the backyard – things the average non-billionaire Hong Kong resident can only dream about.

I admire the people of Hong Kong, they are industrious and intelligent, but the idea that Hong Kong is a success story due to neoliberal economics, is garbage.

Cheap labor uber alles.

After realizing that not even sending in the military to crush strikes could defeat supply and demand (in the so-called gilded age wages actually went up substantially), in 1900 the US ruling elites opened the borders to an excessively high level of immigration. This drove wages and living standard down for the many, and rents and profits up for the few. It was justified on the basis of making the country more white.

After (AFTER) the Wall Street crash, the elites shut the door to mass immigration. After the economy got back on its feet, wages soared, America became the most powerful military and industrial nation in history – and profits to the top were limited.

Around 1965, the elites increasingly opened the borders to excessively high levels of immigration, which – as before – drove wages and living standard down for the many, and rents and profits up for the few. It was justified on the basis of making the country less white.

I think there’s a pattern here. Certainly as a white person I am not happy about the anti-white pattern of much of what is going on, but above it all, is good old fashioned class war.

What, you don’t believe in class war? That’s OK, because class war believes in you.

I would welcome truly partisan political parties. Let one party honestly represent super-rich bankers, and the other party honestly represent everybody else. We kind of had that with the New Deal Democrats, and it was mostly pretty good while it lasted.

Well said, I agree. But for one thing.

The billionaires controlling Biden opened the borders to a full-scale foreign invasion. We will never know the full numbers but easily this could have been 20 million or more in all categories shoveled in. And that’s not counting the demographic momentum from the fact that most of these third world breeders have a young age distribution: even if they only have two kids each, the total increase in the population would be about double the total numbers of immigrants. 40+ million people is a lot! We don’t have an open frontier any more, think of the pressure on energy, water, housing, roads, etc.etc. At best it will take a lot more than four years for us to catch up with the damage that collective Biden has done to this nation. If that had continued for another few terms, the United States would be well on its way to being at best another Brazil or Mexico, and at worst, another Pakistan or Bangladesh.

What, you say we need immigrants to avoid a “labor shortage”? ROTFL. There is no such thing. There is only prosperity: where wages go up because employers complete for workers – and mass poverty: where there are a thousand desperate workers competing for every job opening.

For whatever reason, the billionaires backing Trump really do seem to be closing the border. Will Trump eventually cave to the cheap labor lobby and re-invite the invasion? I don’t know. But for now, I voted for Trump ONLY because I thought there was a chance that he would stop/slow the invasion, and so far, that’s been OK.

Here’s the bottom line:

The rich are flooding the country with ‘immigrants’ (i.e. foreign invaders) for a specific purpose: to crush labor, to drive wages and living standards down for the many and rents and profits up for the few. End of story. This notion that defending the border from a foreign invasion is somehow fascist – well – I generally respect you Mr. Rall, but in this case: F*CK YOU.

If a horde of desperate third-world breeders tried to invade the private islands or gated mansions of the super rich, they would be brutally and effectively removed. And if that meant separating alleged minor children from their alleged parents, too bad, it would not get reported on, no elitist judge would block it, and no ‘liberal’ would shed a tear, count on it.

Check out the life of true patriots and allies of the working class like Samuel Gompers.

One should also note William F. Buckley’s betrayal as regards immigration.

The National Review used to be pretty strongly opposed to using massive immigration to force the population up so that the rich could get richer (and if everyone else loses grounds well, just suck it up). In 1997 I believe he fired Peter Brimelow – a staunch immigration restrictionist – and pushed the magazine to either being pro-mass-migration, or actively downplaying it. I suspect this was done in response to a bribe, I seem to recall rumors of Buckley having financial trouble around that time – but I don’t have a hard reference (anyone else have solid data on this matter please speak up).

So yeah, in aiding and abetting a foreign invasion of this nation, I would say that Buckley betrayed not just ‘conservatism,’ but the nation.

Will Chinese weapons work in a real war? Of course, as pointed out here, it would be folly to bet against them but who knows. Certainly if China ever enters a large-scale hot war against a peer enemy, there will be many initial glitches and mistakes and failures to integrate the systems – there always are (remember the initial days of the US army in WWI and WWII). It’s how fast they adapt that matters.

It’s also worth noting that countries with long military experience have an edge that lasts long after their nominal power has faded, due to institutional intelligence. Britain is now a third rate military power aspiring to be second rate, but the skill of the British leadership at using their existing assets should not be underestimated. A lot of the nasty tricks the Ukrainians have played on the Russians in Ukraine seem to have been run by the Brits.

But I do point out that as the United States de-industrialized under the false mantra of ‘free trade’ (look up the “American System (economic plan)” on Wikipedia), we didn’t just lose the ability to mass produce most consumer level goods – we lost supply chains and research and design expertise. Do we really think that high-tech military products can exist in a vacuum? Couple this with the absolutely disgusting new economic mantra that “greed is good” and the consolidation of defense contractors, and the institutionalization of cronyism and corruption, sooner or later the United States may not be able to make much of anything military at all, no matter how many trillions of dollars we spend.

“Nobody can pay me as little as little I can work” – I think I prefer the old communist saying “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

OK there may be kernels of truth here, but really, modern Russia is not a hellhole. Consider that in wonderful “Democratic” India most children are chronically malnourished, with a third growing up physically stunted. Things are so bad that the fertility rate has fallen only because most people are simply too poor to have more than two children at any level of misery. A recent report indicated that over a billion Indians have zero purchasing power – as in nada, zilch, absolutely nothing. Even the late unlamented Soviet Union was better than that, and modern Russia, way better.

Worshipping “the market” is silly. There is a hierarchy of economic levels:
1. A carefully regulated market economy, like the United States during most of its time. Present day China is at least trying to go this way (early days yet).
2. Orthodox communism is way less productive than #1, but life is not impossible. Compare images of East Berlin circa 1970 with modern day Yemen or Afghanistan.
3. Completely unregulated Neo-liberal type Milton Friedman type capitalism is rock bottom. Remember Russia under Yeltsin? Yes really, there are worse things than communism…

Good points, but I have another angle.

While Reagan was a pretty-boy mindless pawn who did what his rich backers said, the real rot started with Bill Clinton. Clinton knew exactly what he was doing, and sold out the nation – famously shipping our industrial base, the work of centuries, to communist China – and also deregulating media etc.etc. and then getting paid like 100 million plus for services rendered. George W. Bush was of course a retard and doesn’t count. Obama was a total whore, selling out the nation to bail out the big banks with TRILLIONS (with a “T”) dollars and then basking in wealth on Martha’s Vineyard. Biden was perhaps the worst of them all – his entire career consisted entirely of selling out to the rich and powerful, how do you think an obvious brain-dead corpse gets elected? And then – in a first for a US president – he aids and abets a foreign invasion because his wealthy patrons want cheap labor.

You know, compared to these bastards, the grift of Trump etc. doesn’t look that bad. Just saying.

Hmm… interesting, if a bit politically incorrect (kind of like saying that the interior of the sun is warm).

Indeed “the Jews” are not a monolith. Surely. But. Does it matter?

I have a hard time being anti-semitic, because I personally know and have worked with many Jews who have been wonderful people, and have helped my career. How can I hate them as a people?

And yet… when the Nazis controlled Germany, the Jews did not have a fun time. Certainly the Nazis were not a monolith (different factions would slaughter each other on occasion), and many Nazis were probably decent people who would have been fine to co-exist with Jews under different circumstances… but… if you were a Jew being dragged off to a concentration camp, so what? The Nazis were your enemy, period.

And today: when the Jews took over leadership positions from the old Wasp elite, things went down. Maybe it was just a few Jews. Maybe the bulk of the Jews are just the innocuous base of a pyramid and only the apex is toxic. And maybe that doesn’t matter.

“Market failure” is the term used by people who insist that the market cannot fail, for when the market fails. These people use this term a lot.

Although we should be more precise: in a narrow sense “the market” cannot fail any more than the laws of physics can fail, but that doesn’t mean that a building can’t collapse, or that “the market” cannot deliver a disastrous result.

“They have the right to do anything that you can’t stop them from doing.” – Joseph Heller

I don’t know what the best anti-air weapon system is, but I do know what the worst one is. It’s the one that gets turned off when you actually need it.

One notes that when a bunch of third-world invaders were dumped onto Martha’s Vineyard, the good and noble billionaires and demi-billionaires of that enlightened municipality lost no time in having the national guard remove said third worlders post haste. Indeed, they claimed that attempting to force all these third worlders on them was immoral, as this uber-wealthy municipality somehow had no resources to handle all these desperate penniless refugees.

Of course, if a working class city like El Paso said that they just didn’t have the resources to handle all these refugees and would the military please remove them, that would be instantly judged a crime and any number of elitist judges would put a stop to that.

But here’s a thought: when the National Guard removed the third-worlders from Martha’s Vineyard, how did they know who to target? Did they check the ID of everyone on the island? Or did they just target everyone who looked like a third world refugee?

Um. Well OK as far as it goes, but here’s another angle.

Ignore the pretty-boy sock-puppets like Macron etc., the true western elites aren’t stupid. Vile, amoral, caring only about their own profits and power, certainly, but not stupid.

The elites don’t care about NATO expanding into Ukraine per se, they want to collapse Russia, take it back to the Boris Yeltsin years and this time make it permanent. To this end they are infinitely patient, they have not lost, they maintain their power, and they will keep pushing. The actual elites are not impoverished by this, they are actually profiting off the immiseration of their populations. They don’t just fight with armies, but with propaganda, and infiltration, and co-optation, etc.

Not that long ago it looked like Russia had “won” agains the western elites in Syria. But the western elites never gave up, and eventually they did in fact achieve their goal of crushing and fracturing Syria so that it can never act as a unified force in the national interest.

Maybe Russia will not go the way of Syria – but – this war will go on for a very long time, IMHO.

“People who get ahead by making money are responsible and hard-working.”

Yeah, right. Like all those bankers that got bailed out during and after 2008 (it’s still going 0n) to the tune of I-don’t-know-how-many trillions of dollars.

Indeed. I don’t want huge prisons full of illegal immigrants – I want the immigrants deported, even more I want there to be sufficient pressure that they feel compelled to leave on their own, I want the asylum laws repealed, and mostly I don’t want them let in in the first place.

Why are not the public officials of the Biden administration that aided and abetted a foreign invasion of this country charged with treason? Is there a better definition of treason?

I will say this though: perhaps (PERHAPS) these miserable detention centers could serve a purpose. Don’t invade the US or you will end up in a hellhole. Or perhaps: give the illegals a choice: formally renounce their request for asylum, take a few hundred bucks and a free one-way plane ticket and leave, or end up in a miserable supermax private prison for an undefined time.

As another aside: sure, the free market is very nice, but there are some things that should not be in the private domain. Indeed, private prisons have an incentive to imprison as many people as possible as cheaply and miserably as possible. Private tax collectors? Private legal courts? Private police forces? Unless you are one of the billionaires in charge, good luck with that.

One should be reminded that blacks were brought to the United States as slaves for one reason only: because a handful of rich people wanted cheap labor. The rich didn’t bring blacks here because they loved them, they didn’t enslave them because they hated them, they just wanted the easy profits from cheap labor. And that action caused massive suffering – the Civil War, among other things – that endures to this day.

The Bible tells us that the lust for money is the root of all evil. I would be more specific, and say that the lust of the rich for cheap labor is the root of most evil.

“There is a mathematical proof that maximizing return on investment by shifting productive resources to areas where they make the most profit is the most efficient way to produce goods for the entire society.” I must disagree.

The American System of managed protectionist industrial development took the United States from a backwards agricultural colony to the greatest industrial and military power the world had ever seen, and with the highest standard of living. And yet all industrial countries that shift to ‘free’ trade inevitably decline.

It’s like the old joke about economists: ‘yes, it works in practice, but does it work in theory?’

I think Churchill’s quote was that Russia had two major disasters: the first was when Lenin was born, the second was that he died when he did.

Give Lenin some credit, brutal mass killer though he was, when he saw that his initial philosophy was wrong, he tried to move to something new to see if it could be made to work. How many times do we hear that the problem is not communism/free markets/whatever, but that we don’t have ENOUGH communism/ free markets/whatever? We will never know, but perhaps if Lenin had survived and he could have continued and further developed his New Economic Policy, Russia/The Soviet Union could have gone down the path that China is going post-Mao, and not been the miserable state that Stalin created.

OK but you need to remember that if someone overstays a visa in China, they don’t get de-facto permanent residency, they don’t get to have ‘anchor babies’ with full Chinese citizenship etc. They will be tracked down and deported, count on it. And everybody knows it. So that’s very very different from the United States. Yes, Trump appears to be trying to change this – maybe, at least this week – but if he is sincere, he has a very long road to travel to get anywhere close to the Chinese system of dealing with visa overstayers.

As an aside, for a while now China has an island on the south, “Hainan,” that is visa free to attract tourists etc. There was a major international scientific meeting scheduled there recently, but it turns out that it’s almost impossible to fly there without transiting in an international airport in the rest of China. Which you couldn’t do without a visa. A lot of foreign scientists got sent back home because of this. Is this fixed now for Americans? Not sure.

Kudos. Well said.

Triple kudos! Yes all this transgender stuff is just a shiny object to distract the working class. Well said!

I also note that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade was similarly motivated. Whatever your personal feelings about abortion, the status quo of Roe vs. Wade – abortion on demand in the first trimester when the fetus looks like a soap bubble or a fried egg – and not typically allowed later on when the fetus looks and acts like a baby – was widely accepted by the general public, is consistent with basically all other western nations, and workable as public policy. “Stare decisis” is a core judicial doctrine to don’t upset established precedent on a technicality or whim. The Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade had nothing to do with legal scholarship – and I assure you the rich don’t care about babies one way or the other – it was a ruthless act designed to throw the corporate Democrats a bone, and it worked like a charm.

The rich will always push issues that don’t cost them money or power either way.

The war, really, is one of keeping the plebes divided and bickering. Smack them upside the head with a rainbow flag, repeatedly, then remove it for a bit and all the while their pockets are being picked, their nation subsumed, and their rights abrogated.

Everyone gets a flag, gay, trans, ISIS whatever, so it can be waved in front of the dumb as bollocks masses to get them charging and snorting in the dirt of the arena – and all around them the machinery of the abattoir grinds on.

What an excellent post. Kudos especially for noting that mass immigration is primarily focused on driving wages down and rents and profits up, I get tired of all the ‘scapegoating immigrants’ stuff.

You should have noted that Mao’s “Strength in Numbers” pro-natalist policy set the ground for the largest mass famine in history. Sure, Mao made some terrible economic decisions and there was some bad weather, but even at the peak of the great famine food production was greater than when the communists took over. Without mass forced population growth, there would have been hardship but not famine. Also: the one-family one-child policy – harsh as it was, and even then only needed because of Mao’s previous disastrous policy, was essential (though not I think sufficient) for the rise of China’s working class. I mean, the idea that China’s population could double in 20-25 years, and then double again, and at the same time China could raise its per-capita food production from subsistence to its current level of 3-4 times subsistence, is physically impossible. All the resources and all the technology and all the intelligent market regulations in the entire world could not have sustained that – so if they had continued on that path China would have HAD to have ended up like India, with a large population stabilizing because there is no longer enough food for people to physically have more than 2 kids or so (FYI contrary to popular propaganda, the Malthusian catastrophe is not global apocalypse but subsistence level poverty, and yes, it’s real).

Yes I know Obama technically deported lots of illegals – but he let in a lot of other third-world refugees, legal and illegal alike.

The real bottom line is: what is the net intake minus the net deportations? Sadly I don’t know that number – it’s not publicly available – but at least in principle, Trump might still be doing a whole lot better than Obama.

A very interesting and thoughtful article. However, I have two caveats about having a centralized “eugenics” program.

1. There is an old saying, that if a committee of gorillas tried to design a super-gorilla, would they design a human being? Other than obvious single deleterious genes, the issues of genetics are in many ways beyond our understanding. A cultural system that emphasizes sexual selection for success, and that applies moral pressure limiting the fertility of people with known genetic defects to zero or at most one child each, is about as far as we should go, I think.

2. Be careful what you wish for. If we ever do get a state-run system of eugenics, I GUARANTEE that the rich will hijack it and turn the working class into genetic slaves. They’ve wanted this since the development of agriculture, more than anything else, and if a formal eugenics system is ever put in place then before too long they will manipulate it to their own ends. Be nice if your descendants are on top, but what are the odds of that?

As Malthus and John Stuart Mill etc. pointed out, the issue is not to stop having kids, but to only limit yourself to having a number of children that you can support at a REASONABLE level. If times are good, sure, have 3 or 4. If times are bad, have fewer.

Both logic and history are clear: societies where people breed like rodents – that is, where they have the physical maximum number of kids as soon as they are fertile, with no restraint – rapidly are reduced to substance level poverty, and population stabilizes because the maximum number of children they can have even at bare subsistence falls to 2.

Consider India. Over a billion people with a physical standard of living inferior to late medieval England, 500 years of western technical and economic progress more than wiped out. Yes, the fertility rate in India is now low but only because they don’t have enough food to provide for any more. A few decades ago the average Indian had six kids, they were chronically hungry with about a third being physically stunted. Today the average Indian has two kids, and they are still hungry with about a third being stunted. That’s not progress! This is the Malthusian catastrophe, which is not global apocalypse but where population growth tracks food production at/near subsistence (note that the Indian regions with the lowest fertility rate have the worst poverty). And if the Aquifers are finally drained, for a time the average Indian might bot even be able to have 2 kids each…

An interesting article, but I must strongly disagree with one thing.

“Open borders” immigration is NOT based on any sort of morality or sense of social justice or antiracism etc. It is a vicious, amoral policy that treats workers as cattle, that is aimed like a laser at driving wages and living standards down for the many, and rents and profits up for the few.

When the rich enact policies that make them richer at the expense of making everyone else poorer, claims of moral superiority should be rejected with outrage. All this ‘liberal’ and ‘humanitarian’ dogma is just putting lipstick on a pig, a blizzard of useful idiots and mindless propaganda to distract and deflect from the true hard cold rational selfish motivations behind it.

“Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.” – Joseph Stalin

Wow – I have no idea of the factual correctness of much of this, but the idea that widespread blackmail has to be ‘voluntary’ is a kick in the head. All these powerful people voluntarily getting caught on film have underage sex just to ‘prove’ their loyalty to wealthy financial interests? But there is no way that this many clued-in people would all get stuck in the same trap, is there? Wow.

On the other hand: as others have pointed out, as one taboo after another falls, perhaps eventually this sort of ‘blackmail’ will no longer work? Perhaps it will have to be like alleged mafia, where aspirants will have to kill someone on tape to be “made.”

Or perhaps the (soon) ability of AI to fake anything with utter realism will make any sort of video or audio evidence inadmissible? Or we will only believe videos from ‘trusted’ sources – so the ‘trusted’ sources will be able to destroy anyone they want, regardless.

“there came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.”

― Iain M. Banks, Excession

Sadly it’s an old story. But I don’t think this is about ‘multiculturalism’ this is about money. The rich want to treat us like cattle, to force up the size of the herd, so that wages and living standards can be driven down for the many, and rents and profits driven up for the few. Oh, the foot soldiers of the rich may believe this whole multiculturalism thing, but the rich are vicious and amoral and focused only on money.

The Ivory Coast used to be fairly prosperous. This means relatively high wages, and we can’t have that can we. So the rich imported tons of immigrants from poorer countries to work the fields, and by the time this policy had effectively doubled the population, the resulting poverty tore the country apart in a bloody civil war. Last I checked the immigrant faction had won. Did the elites of the Ivory Coast do this because of humanitarian concerns? Rubbish. They did it for money.

The ancient Roman Empire had a low fertility rate, which the elites complained about terribly. Odd, this low fertility rate did not stop Rome from being the dominant force on the planet for about five centuries. But the rich hate high wages, and while slavery will suffice in a pinch, nothing makes cheap labor better than 1000 desperate people competing for every job opening. So Rome imported massive number of immigrants, and by the time that supply and demand had driven down wages such that slavery was no longer necessary, why somehow Rome fell apart. But the elites purged their security services of all non-ethnic Romans, and fled with all the gold to Constantinople where they lived in luxury for 1000 years so it’s all good.

Cheap labor uber alles.

It is frequently said that states with larger populations are more powerful. Indeed, India has more military and economic power than Bermuda – but where would you rather work for a living? The average worker has no stake in this. But even then, it is often not true. Consider that at the start of WWII, the population of the United States (after a prolonged period of low fertility and low immigration) was about 150 million. At the same time, the populations of China and India were about 500 and 400 million, respectively. Yet the United States went on to become the greatest miliary and industrial power the world had ever seen, and also with the highest standard of living (low wages are not needed for industrial supremacy). At the same time, China and India were extremely weak. Hundreds of millions of chronically malnourished peasants can be very profitable for landowners, but they cannot produce the kind of investable physical surplus that can be turned into new industries or militaries. There are many examples of governments trying to force the population up, not just for profit, but for power, only to discover that a massive impoverished population often leads to weakness and chaos and potential collapse. China under Mao, the late government of Syria, Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Japan before WWII, all come to mind.

If the American fertility rate is low, I would trust the American people. They are telling us that right now, circumstances are not good for massive population increases and maybe a modest decrease would be advisable. But the rich DEMAND that they know better than the American people, and are using excessively high rates of immigration to cancel the effective decision of the people themselves. Why do so many people always accept that the rich somehow magically know how many children we should have? Or perhaps the rich don’t know better, perhaps they just have different goals. Like the easy profits of cheap labor and automatic asset price inflation.

We are told that rapidly growing populations have a “demographic dividend”, because they have more workers than retirees. This is utter rot.

Compare Japan with Yemen. Yes, Japan has relatively more retirees per worker than Yemen. But Japan also has relatively fewer children per worker than Yemen: the dependency ratio is roughly similar. But because of past investment due to expensive labor, productivity per worker in Japan is orders of magnitude greater than in Yemen! Compare a 60 year old Japanese operating a 400 horsepower bulldozer with a 20 year old Yemeni with a rusty shovel. Note also that Japan does not need massive capital investment to maintain the status quo. Even as a homeowner can live better with less after the mortgage is paid off, this gives Japan tremendous slack. On the other hand, just to feed people at subsistence Yemen would require massive capital investment, even though it has very little investable surplus. Yemen will have to either borrow money to import food, somehow get donations of foreign food, or allow chronic malnutrition to stabilize the population the hard way.

Just look at how the average person lives in Japan, and in Yemen. Who are you going to believe, Julian Simon, or your own lying eyes?

A declining population could in principle offer many advantages, as long as it does not decline too fast or too much (and of course, as long as it is not due to limited food). The big problems are transitioning the financial system from one based on debt-driven growth to pay-as-you-go stability (in principle solvable but in practice the details are not well understood) and the determined existential opposition of the rich whose very status as rich would be threatened by such a transition.

We note the example of Europe during the Black Death. No, I am not advocating the bad science fiction of releasing a super-virus to cull the human herd (both evil and not needed), but as an example of the economic effects of a population that declined for reasons other than lack of food, it is instructive. The Black Death in Europe was unusual in that it did not just reduce the population transiently, but it came in waves and held the population down for a long time. Instantly, the average worker did very well – better in physical terms than many modern ‘developing’ countries. The rich suffered a massive decline in their fortunes. The rich tried to limit workers’ pay with “sumptuary laws” but short of chattel slavery supply and demand cannot be overcome and these attempts by the rich to limit wages via statute failed. And even more: this allowed Europe to accumulate large physical surpluses, which could be reinvested. The case has been made that the decline in the European population during the Black Death was the launching pad for the last 500 years of (for now) Western ascendency.

Remember when all those third-world refugees were dumped onto Martha’s Vineyard? The great and noble of that place lost no time in having the National Guard show up and escort these third-worlders out. You see, the billionaires and centi-millionaires in Martha’s Vineyard simply don’t have the resources to accommodate all these extra people (poor little billionaires).

Suppose a working-class town like El Paso tried the same stunt? Suppose they announced that they were closing all of their homeless shelters etc., and requested the National Guard to remove all the third world refugees because – like Martha’s Vineyard (!), they just don’t have the resources to support them all. That just would not be allowed.

If these illegals/third world refugees in any way threatened the prosperity or security of the rich, they would be machine gunned en masse and none of the elites would shed a tear.

Don’t believe that the rich are that amoral and hypocritical? You are aware of what’s happening in Gaza?

I hear you, but here is another angle.

They say that Trump is ‘dictatorial’. OK sure.

But consider what the billionaires telling Biden’s staff was to do, did. They opened the border to a foreign invasion, they flooded the country with (we will never know the exact numbers for sure, and you need to include demographic momentum effects) tens of millions of third world refugees. This has nothing to do with humanitarianism, but was a vicious amoral policy aimed at driving wages and living standards down for the many, and rents and profits up for the few.

And the public didn’t ask for this. The public didn’t want it. But it was jammed down our throats, protest was effectively banned, the people were given no recourse. If this is not dictatorial I don’t know what is.

As bad as Trump is, he is at least not aiding and abetting a foreign invasion of the country (at least, for now).

On comment about rent control.

With the government forcing the population up faster than we are actually building new housing units, of course rents are going up, to the great benefit of landlords and wealthy financial interests. They get increasing profits without actually having to do anything.

I would like to suggest the example of Singapore. A tiny country, it should have sky-high rents and the same housing pressure as Hong Kong. But no: if the Singaporean government decides to import a bunch of immigrants, they plan in advance, make sure the housing (and water systems and sewage treatment etc.etc.) is in place before the population is increased. It is also the case that most people live in government subsidized housing: the government of Singapore is very capitalist but they see no need to allow competition for limited housing to inflate the profits of landlords and impoverish their working population. And Singapore seems to work just fine.

Mind you, the current proposals for rent control in NYC may well be disastrous – the devil lives in the specifics – but the principle that allowing massive unearned rents for a wealthy few should be limited stands.

What, high prices are an incentive to build more housing units? ROTFL. Why should landlords pay a fortune in capital costs just to increase capacity and cause their rents to fall? When they can continue to make huge profits by doing nothing/very little? I assure you, the big financial interests will – are – making very sure to not build enough new housing units to drive rents down.

I also note that people routinely disparage any kind of rent control as communism, but somehow a growing nationwide cartel of landlords fixing rents and stopping competition, that sort of central control is apparently fine. Why is rent control by a massive centralized bureaucracy OK if it’s done by corporate interests, but not OK if done by governments?

I hear you. Yes, Trump is terrible in so many ways. And yet…

The people controlling Joe Biden initiated an outright foreign invasion of the United States. The border was effectively open, the Wall Street Journal says about 12 million got in, but I suspect the true numbers are much higher. Then factor in demographic momentum and multiply by (at least) two.

This was an attack on the working class of the United States, it was an attack on the American citizenry, its goal was to impoverish and disenfranchise the American people. And there was nothing we could do about it.

Trump has (for now) stopped the invasion. He’s enforcing the law even if it means calling out the national guard and marines on US soil against massive elite resistance (FYI I think the military can be used to repel a foreign invasion). Only someone as bombastic and narcissisitic as Trump could have done that. Will he continue? Or will he flip-flop and re-open the borders to placate his billionaire buddies and their insatiable lust for cheap labor? I don’t know. But even if he does get us into an unwinnable forever war against Iran, if (IF) he continues to actually defend our own border I will not apologize for voting for him.

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As an aside, I have always wondered: homosexual pedophilia has been reported to be common in many muslim communities (‘women are for making children but boys are for pleasure’), I have heard that the American troops occupying Afghanistan had issues with this. And yet muslims are typically very anti-homosexual, at times throwing gays off the tops of tall buildings for sport (at least I’ve read that somewhere). Seems like a disconnect? Maybe it’s only homosexual relations between adults that are forbidden? Thoughts?

It also seems interesting to me that in the west, the slightest whiff of anti-jewish behavior is career suicide, yet muslims openly hate jews and nothing happens. A lot of this is likely due to the reliance of the Western European elites on muslim immigrants as a source of cheap labor, and we know the rich love cheap labor more than anything else, so nothing must interfere with the flow of warm bodies, but still. Also seems like a disconnect.

Of course none of us here really know what’s going on, but certainly this piece gives food for thought. I do agree that the idea that Israel/USA will actually invade Iran is absurd, no, the plan (I would think) is to do to Iran what was done to Syria and Libya. Destabilization and neutralization, not formal conquest.

It does bear consideration that Israel’s assassination program is not just getting rid of high-ranking Iranian officials, it may well be opening the door to replacing them with Israeli assets.

When Israel activated the exploding pager attack in Lebanon against Hezbollah, some thought it pointless as Hezbollah quickly replaced their losses. But: how many of the replacements were working for Israel? Was the real point not so much to decapitate Hezbollah, as to replace the leadership with one working for Israel? Certainly Hezbollah seems to have become a lot less effective after the pager attacks, at least from what I read in the news.

“Los Angeles has been invaded, in part, because the Europeans were low in negative ethnocentrism. They were individualists who covertly played for status by signalling their concern with the marginalised and runaway virtue-signalling led to their favouring foreigners over their own. They identify with the genetically dissimilar as this allows them to collaborate better with foreigners and treasonously gain power over their own people.”

I respectfully disagree. Los Angeles has been invaded because wealthy Americans wanted the quick and easy profits of cheap labor – and nothing makes cheap labor better than forcing the population up, because nobody beats supply and demand. All that multicultural posturing was never believed by the elites, it was just a distraction. I mean, when the wealthy enclave of Martha’s Vineyard had some third world refugees dumped on them, the locals had the national guard escort them far away no muss no fuss no moral qualms. Look what’s going on in Gaza: do you really think that our elites have any concern for morality in any way shape or form? It’s all fake.

“It may appear to be the interest of the rulers, and the rich of a state, to force population, and thereby lower the price of labour, and consequently the expense of fleets and armies, and the cost of manufactures for foreign sale; but every attempt of the kind should be carefully watched and strenuously resisted by the friends of the poor, particularly when it comes under the deceitful guise of benevolence…”
T.R. Malthus, “An Essay on the Principle of Population”, 1798

Oh come on now – this is absurd. Who cares if Joe Biden was or was not brain dead? He was doing what he had always done throughout his career: enact the will of his wealthy patrons. He could have died, been freeze-dried and nailed to the chair in the Oval Office, who cares. I mean, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were each very smart, and they each did exactly as their wealthy paymasters requested. George W. Bush and Joe Biden were hardly aware of what year it was, and they each did exactly as their wealthy paymasters requested. I don’t see a lot of daylight between them.

The president doesn’t matter per se, it’s the team that comes into the executive office, and whose side they are on.

The entire issue of Joe Biden’s senility is a distraction, a shiny object to distract us from how both parties are allied with the elites against the rest of us. The Democrats didn’t lose the last presidential election because of Biden or Harris, they lost because the tech billionaires decided to go in with Trump and they stopped the election from being stolen. If the ruling elites had been solidly against Trump, he would have lost – the Democrats could have elected a ham sandwich as president in that case.

State planning and market competition!

Sounds a lot like… FDR and the New Deal Democrats! Which took the United States from rock bottom to the greatest industrial power the world had ever seen!

But the rich didn’t become super rich. So the New Deal had to go. The nation a a whole is losing ground, in the personal standard of living, in the overall strength of the nation – but Elon Musk is he richest man in the world! So it’s all good.

This was an interesting article with a lot of intelligent points.

However, the difficulty of actually invading Iran is not, I think, relevant. The goal is not occupy Iran, but to destabilize it. Think Libya and Syria. Crush the economy, bribe officials, arm rebel factions, take out centers of government, flood it with misinformation, etc. Have it fall apart into warring factions incapable of wielding centralized power, and unable to withstand looting from western financial parasites. I’m not saying that this would be easy, or even that it would work, but that surely is the plan. How much damage could Iran do western interests in the meantime? A lot, probably. Unless they are so involved in fighting internal factions that they lose sight of the external enemy…

Indeed. There is a lot of intelligent stuff here. But the lack of consideration for the power of demographics remains a crippling blind spot.

Adam Smith claimed that economies of scale and division of labor mean “the more the merrier” – more people are better than fewer. It is true that in the middle of a vast wilderness, a thousand people can live better than one, and a million better than a thousand. But past a few million or tens of millions these factors are subject to diminishing returns, and past that, to dis-economies of scale. Thus, Adam Smith was not technically wrong, it is only that today he is completely irrelevant.

The “fallacy of broken windows” is that if we break everybody’s windows, the necessity of replacing them will increase the size of the economy. The fallacy is that we would be expending massive effort and resources just to get back to where we were before, which is of no material benefit. Unless you are in the business of selling windows! Then it becomes very profitable indeed – even if it turns out that there are not enough resources to replace all of the windows. And even better if you can also reduce the wages of the people replacing the windows, and inflate the asset prices of windows.

For an industrial economy without an open frontier, the production of real goods is set by the amount of developed resources and infrastructure. Dumping in more people cannot increase production, though it can shift/spread the work around, and will lower wages and increase rents. Now surely more resources can be developed and new infrastructure built, but this is not instant and not automatic – it requires time, and the diversion of existing resources and infrastructure from other uses – and it might not happen at all, there is no guarantee. In addition, past a certain point, you get diminishing returns and you might need to do more than proportionately increase infrastructure, but also rebuild the entire industrial base to a higher level of efficiency – a truly colossal expense. A rapidly growing population can indeed cause significant economic growth, but the benefits flow to the top, the average person has no stake in this. At best, with massive effort and resource consumption, the status quo can be maintained, but even this is often not the case. It depends on circumstance, but for an already developed industrial society, a population growth of just 1%/year can easily cause the average person to lose ground, even if the increase of financial GDP per capita is much greater.

It is true that some economic and political systems are more efficient than others. A moderately regulated market economy is far more productive than a centrally planned Stalinist economy, which turn is far more productive than a completely unregulated Milton-Friedman type Neoliberal economy (remember Russia under Boris Yeltsin?). But even the most efficient are still just real people using real stuff to do real things. Past a certain point demographics has an absolute veto power over anything that real people can achieve.

To paraphrase the late MIT economist Lester Thurow, the Iron Law of Development is that FIRST people have fewer children than their current physical maximum (i.e., they limit their children to to those that they can support at a reasonable level), and only then is it possible to slowly accumulate real per-capita wealth. Absent an open frontier, there are basically no exceptions to this rule. It is based on physical reality and is independent of the social or political or financial structure. But the rich want, more than anything else, a larger and poorer and more profitable herd, so this utterly simple principle has been buried in lies of omission and lies of commission.

Oh please. China does indeed have many problems, and if their current low fertility rate stays that way for more than a generation or two indeed that can be an issue, but the idea that workers just MUST breed like cattle or the world will fall apart is absurd. Potentially, a China with a population of (only!) 500 million could be an industrial and military colossus.

In 1940, the population of the United States was about 150 million. At the same time, the population of China was about 500 million, and India, about 400 million. But while the nominal economic output of China and India at that time was quite high, most of it was dedicated to keeping huge populations barely fed. They had no investable surplus. A million chronically malnourished peasants wallowing in the mud, or a billion, there is no innovation or progress.

In contrast, the United States – after a generation of low fertility and near-zero immigration – had a modest population and abundant resources, and a huge surplus that could be reinvested, and went on to become the greatest industrial power the world had ever seen.

More people are not alway better. If immigration forces the population of the US up to around a billion within the span of those now living, the US will look a lot more like India and Pakistan.

Singapore is a small and densely populated country. The government does not allow rents to rise to all-the-market-can bear prices. The government of Singapore regulates rents, and I think most people live in subsidized/government supplied housing. Because otherwise competition for housing would jack up rents, and landlords would get a windfall in UNEARNED rents. Last I heard, Singapore was doing pretty well. Just saying.

The wisest words here are “I don’t know.”

Nevertheless. It seems to me that under Yeltsin, Russia had been ground into the dirt and was on the verge of being carved up and looted by the western oligarchs. At least from what I can tell, Putin managed to stop that and made Russia stronger again. I mean, if Putin had really been working for the western elites, we would not have seen the Russian standard of living bounce back up, would we?

Why is Putin taking his time with Ukraine? Again, I don’t know. It would surely have been more humane to have just pulled out all the stops, done a full mobilization, and crushed Ukraine. But then there is the little matter of starting WWIII. And what to do with a guerrilla war in a suddenly totally ocupied Ukraine that would make the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan look like a tea party. And while the west wants the war to continue in order to bleed Russia, it’s starting to look like it’s Russia that’s bleeding the west. I have heard reports that the true spending of the west on the Ukraine adventure is a lot bigger than reported – like possibly (?) hundreds of billions of dollars in classified US discretionary military spending? And while Russia could probably have more easily fought Ukraine ten years ago, could they have then withstood the sanctions and economic warfare as well as they are now? And if Putin is a stooge for the west, why is Russia (I think?) becoming stronger and more prosperous and more independent? As a rule I don’t believe in 37 dimensional chess, but Putin’s slow-walk strategy might ultimately get Russia into a really strong position while devastating the west. Remember also, the slow-walk conquest of Ukraine makes assimilating and rebuilding conquered territory a lot easier.

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

As ugly as this all is, it’s an old story.

But as far as sparing the fit young men: yes. If you wipe out the children and the women, the rest will take care of itself. When the young American nation was trying to get rid of the natives, they found that actually tracking down and killing the Indian warriors was very hard work. Getting rid of the women and children, herding them into reservations with limited food that would eventually limit the populations – that did the trick. There were roving bands of young male marauders but without the rest of their society they eventually got old or died off.

An interesting and intelligent post. But. I must emphasize that the idea that more children is somehow always better than fewer, is vile propaganda from people Like Elon Musk, who desire nothing more than an endless supply of cheap labor and crushing poverty, the better to boost their profits.

To paraphrase the late MIT economist Lester Thurow, the Iron Law of Development is that FIRST people limit themselves to a REASONABLE number of children given current circumstances, and only then is it possible to slowly and patiently acquire real per-capita wealth. If people do like Elon Musk et al. demand – if they have the physical maximum as soon as they become fertile (could be as high as an average of eight, but the current physical maximum in India is just two), then they and their descendants will live and die like rodents.

Trust the American people. The fertility rate fell after the frontier was closed, and America boomed. The fertility rate fell further after the Wall Street crash, and immigration basically stopped – and from this base America became the greatest technological and military power the world had ever seen. Because you see, once things got going there was a huge investable surplus not swallowed up by ever more mouths to fee. In the baby boom Americans averaged three kids each – but times were good, this was an appropriate number for the time, and still less than half the physical maximum.

Now it’s harder for young people to raise a family, the rich are forcing the population up via mass migration, and the fertility rate has fallen. Trust the American people. We have more than enough people for all practical purposes. If we cut off immigration and the fertility rate stayed low for a time, that could be a boon for the nation – as it has in the past – though of course, Elon Musk might run out of cheap labor. Cry me a river.

It bears remembering that India is yet another example of the Malthusian catastrophe, which is NOT global apocalyptic famine but “misery and vice” – crushing subsistence level poverty that eventually makes it impossible for people to have large numbers of children.

A few decades ago when India achieved a massive increase in food production, the average Indian had six kids and they were chronically malnourished, with something like 40 percent of them physically stunted or wasted. Today the average Indian has just two kids each – and these are still chronically malnourished and stunted/wasted to about the same extent (why do you think the Indians win so few Olympic medals?). It is impossible for the Indians to have more than two kids each, they just don’t have the food.

Now all that mass poverty is very nice for the people at the top, but historically societies like India can’t industrialize because most of the output is just going to keep people barely fed, there is no investable surplus. On the other hand, today perhaps with globalism India can use its vast supply of cheap labor to attract multinational companies and get access to the industrial capital they could never create themselves. On the other hand, while mass poverty is very very nice for business (Elon Musk is a fan), outright famine can be destabilizing. India is draining its aquifers, and demographic momentum means that even with just two kids each the population could easily double. There is a chance of a collapse, as we’ve recently seen in Syria and almost saw in Mao’s China. We will see.

“After all, many people, including many whites (even in South Africa), profit from the status quo. The “Open Society” supplies the markets with cheap labor and a mass consumer base through large-scale immigration and promotes short-term consumption over long-term investment and thrift.”

Kudos for this at least. Yes indeed, behind all the froth about multiculturalism and human rights blah blah blah, there is the simple brutal fact of money.