Laudato Si
Recently, it has been said that Republicans are extreme for not wanting to raise the debt ceiling and put the country further into debt. It has been said that small-government proponents are extreme for not wanting a regulatory state, TSA that sticks its hands in your pants, a welfare state that furthers dependence, or an economic system that thins out the value of everyone’s money to the economic ends of the largest government ever to exists. How did our reasoning become so warped that extremism now means “moderation in reality”? Extreme? Extreme can be seen in any of the following commonly-understood fallacies:
- That the only sure way of protecting oneself against violence, aggression and coercion is to help institute and continually support a vast, monopolistic apparatus of institutionalized violence, aggression and coercion, whose representatives do not own any of the said entity’s assets, and yet arrogate to themselves the right to expropriate any private property owner for the purposes whose utility it is up to them to appraise.
- That the free market economy, whose participants – in order to prosper – have to supply one another with productive goods and services, as well as bear the full financial responsibility for the potential failures of their actions, can survive only when subjected to the regulation of a monopolistic group of non-producers, who can always shift the costs of their failures onto the shoulders of producers.
- That an institution which coercively imposes its protective services on others, unilaterally determines their price and forcibly excludes all competition in this area will not attempt to benefit from initiating conflicts or letting them develop rather them resolving them or preventing their occurrence, and that ceding the task of maintaining justice onto such an entity will not lead to it continually perverting justice in its favor.
- That economic development is primarily caused not by the processes which allow for and enhance value productivity – such as extension and intensification of the division of labor, investment in more roundabout production processes, and saving, which provides funds for such investment – but by the processes which drive value destruction, i.e., spending, consumption, and massive indebtedness.
- That printing large quantities of colored paper tickets or creating large numbers of virtual bookkeeping entries can, in all seriousness, not only reverse the effects of major financial downturns, caused by massive squandering of real, scarce assets, but also increase the amount of such assets, and thus the level of real social wealth, during normal times.
- That siphoning funds from the free market, i.e., that sector of social relations which is the sum total of mutually beneficial interpersonal transactions, guided by price signals and disciplined by the threat of incurring losses, and transferring them to the state apparatus and its clientele, i.e., that sector of social relations which is insulated from the profit and loss system and beneficial only to the transferees, can not only avoid plunging the economy into the quagmire of parasitic attitudes, calculational chaos and prolonged investment uncertainty, but can actually stimulate it into prosperity.
- That falling prices in a recession, instead of helping to restore the environment conducive to sound economic calculation, restructure the bankrupt firms, and generally ease the burden of readjustment, will actually further hurt the economy and thus need to be propped up by inflationary measures.
- That disasters, catastrophes, and cataclysms of all sorts, be it natural or man-made, far from being the destructive and crippling forces they so obviously appear to be, are in fact blessings in disguise, capable of lifting failing economies back into good times.
- That, to paraphrase a prominent “libertarian extremist”, there is nothing fishy, let alone straightforwardly contradictory and logically grotesque, about “the head of the world’s most powerful government bureaucracy, one that is involved in a full-time counterfeiting operation to sustain monopolistic financial cartels, and the world’s most powerful central planner, who sets the price of money worldwide, proclaiming the glories of capitalism”.
- That we live in a world of curious moral thresholds, where gathering a sufficiently large clientele turns robbery into “provision of social welfare”, Ponzi scheming into “provision of social security”, and counterfeiting into “provision of financial stability”.
Each of these neoliberal ideals is not only extreme, but idiotic. The laws of nature and the way the world works will never allow the above means to yield the ends they supposedly point toward. Extremism is typified by thinking that is beyond reality, of which all of the above qualify. Our thinking is astoundingly fuzzy these days…