I don’t know where else to put this so here it goes.
I have been thinking about a phrase that free market advocates use quite often (or used to, when I read them regularly until 5 years ago): ‘it hurts the very people it is supposed to help’.
They will say this for example about minimum wage laws or price controls. They are usually right – but only if your only consideration is material wealth alone. This wouldn’t be a big problem if economics stayed economics – but since the connection with libertarian/classical liberal ideas in general is pretty much unavoidable and seems to be joined at the hip with ‘austrianism’ and other ‘free market’ schools, it must bring up the question of what is the higher goal, the higher value that society should strive for. They can and will say that ‘economics’ is value free, and that their prescriptions are separate statements – but this can never really be the case. What happens is they take the higher goal of material wealth as a given and go from there. Economics tells us how to do it – and they prescribe those solutions for higher material wealth.
Consider modern day developed countries. We have never been richer in material terms, and yet our societies are disintegrating. People have never been more depressed, atomized, suicidal, on drugs, etc.
The free marketer will pose that we just need more freedom. That markets should be allowed to operate. We can grant, for example, that there is no ‘true’ free market, that trade agreements with thousands of pages are not really ‘free trade’, that there’s a host of regulations hindering economic productivity, etc. But all we have to think about is: are the problems our societies are experiencing due to: 1) a lack of material wealth and economic progress; 2) existing despite this wealth and progress; or 3) because of increased wealth and progress?
It never seems to be questioned if economic progress is in itself always good – it’s just assumed to be. I think it’s pretty clear by now that our societies have turned upside down, to a large extent, by the conditions created by economic progress. It's not from hardship we're falling; it's from comfort.
All the societal problems we see today, from feminism to LGBTism to immigration to moral relativism to obesity are characteristics of wealthy societies and economic progress. This is not only observed in the modern world, but has happened many times before, even if those societies had significantly less wealth than we do. They still had the same problems.
I have alluded to this in the Yang thread because of automation. What freed women from the kitchen was technological advances brought on by economic progress; what freed men from manual labor and transformed them into soyboys, same. Furthermore, to cater to increased population due to improved technological advances the society must more and more enforce this type of unnatural living – and any step backwards will result in famine, because people are no longer able to provide the basics for their survival. Consider the amount of toxins, plastics, etc that modern humans in developed societies consume – because to keep this many people alive in this environment, it must necessarily be done this way.
LDN has stated recently something very true, which was something like this: a lot of guys here are looking for traditional girls in third world countries, not because of something innate in those peoples, but because their societies have not yet reached the level of technological and economic progress that transforms them into feminazis. This is why once you transplant a girl from a traditional society into a cosmopolitan one, without a strong hand, she will fall prey to the same vices.
If you are worried about immigration and globalism, you should also be necessarily weary of economic progress. Globalism in theory is only a rationalization of globalism in practice: the international free market. Consider that before the industrial revolution and capitalism, there were things that were sacred, that could not be bought and sold, or reproduced cheaply and transported across vast expanses of land; tied to specific cultures and places and peoples – and this is what gave them value above economics. This ability to reproduce, transport and sell however changed everything. When you have people across the world consuming the same type of food, watching the same entertainment, etc, it becomes hard to argue against homogenization taken to its next logical level: mass migration and mixing of peoples. After all, you already mixed their cultures, technologies and economies – and everyone seems to be happy to eat the same BigMac brought by UberEats while watching HBO. Isn’t this proof that the system is grand?
So, in other words, economic and technological progress as such – if not controlled and steered, not necessarily by government but by a set of morals and ideals – can and will ‘hurt the very people it’s supposed to help’. While raising people’s standard of living, it will necessarily converge everything into one single entity. They seem to subscribe to the definition of democracy from HL Mencken: that people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
Even if this system was controlled by the nicest, most virtuous people around, instead of satanic psychopaths, the system itself produces this result by destroying the natural bonds between men and land, men and women, family and children, community and trade, etc. I suspect that it’s the very reason why such a system cannot be led by righteous people – because the end goal of it is in itself unrighteous in the long run.
