Kiev, Ukraine - February 2014
One of the more amusing, albeit pathetic
observations of a lot of left-wingers is the inane idea that the call for
smaller, less intrusive government (“anti-government”) is uniquely American.
Never was and never will be.
People the world over revile tyranny...especially
that of “do-gooder” politicians and government workers looking to restrict
their liberties “for their own good.”
The ONLY difference between the U.S. and the rest of
the world is that the people of the USA are LESS capable of the kind of rigid
conformity and allegiance to a central authority than those in places like
Russia, Germany, Japan. It is impossible, for instance, to “copy the conformity and centralized authority that works well in such
places,” here. Although there is no evidence that the conformity and
allegiance to a central authority ever worked better in ANY of those places
than even outright anarchy would have.
I once lauded the former USSR’s auto industry as an
example of a “Command economy that works,” that is UNTIL I found that the
entire Soviet auto industry was pretty much built by Ford Motor Company and
that Western industrialists like Armand Hammer and others set up a Corporatist
economy with veritable government sanctioned monopolies within that state.
In other words, Adolph Hitler, once regaled as “the
greatest true socialist that ever lived” (probably thanks to ideals like, “We are socialists, we are enemies of
today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically
weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being
according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and
we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." - Adolf Hitler...Speech of May 1, 1927.
Of course, Hitler too abandoned the Command economy
(because it COULD NOT work) and opted for the SAME sort of mercantile
Corporatism that Stalin and the USSR did, along with the liberal use of slave
labor...SAME as Stalin and Mao both did.
However, Hitler DID, however, gain the gratitude of
the working classes in German by reducing the work week to 40 hours (the first 40-hour work
week anywhere) and the work day itself to a tolerable norm of eight hours. The
forty-hour week in Europe, was first initiated by Hitler and beyond that legal
limit, each additional hour had to be paid at a considerably increased rate. As
another innovation, work breaks were made longer - two hours every day in order
to let the worker relax and to make use of the playing fields that the large
industries were required to provide.
Prior
to Hitler’s socialist government, workers' rights to job security were virtually
non-existent. Hitler saw to it that those rights were strictly spelled out. The
employer had to announce any dismissal four weeks in advance. The employee then
had a period of up to two months in which to lodge a protest. The dismissal
could also be annulled by the Honor of Work Tribunal.
What
was the Honor of Work Tribunal? It was a council with one of the seats occupied
by management, another by labor and the final seat by an appointed government
official, it was also known as “the Tribunal of Social Honor,” and it was the
third of the three great layers of protection that were to the benefit of every
German worker. The first was the Council of Trust. The second was the Labor
Commission and the third was the Honor of Work Tribunal.
Few
today would argue that Hitler’s socialism was “to the good.”
People the world over deeply distrust the political
class and for good reason. EVERY single large scale mass murder was conducted
by governments and the political classes, every war was arranged and conducted
by the SAME political classes.
Today we see large scale violent protests in both
Kiev in the Ukraine and in Venezuela AGAINST government tyranny and abuse.
Slave owners once argued that “freedom didn't fit
the nature of the slaves,” and that “freedom would mean literally throwing them
to the wolves into a market they didn't have the skills to compete in.” The political class makes the very same arguments today, that “freedom pits the
poorly educated and unskilled against those with far greater abilities and
advantages, so freedom is just NOT in the best interests of most regular
people.”
I did the math on the Russian auto industry in 1974
and it shook me to the core. I've done the math on the claims of the political
class today and can find absolutely NO EVIDENCE that abject economic freedom
that would toss both the highly skilled and the unskilled into the SAME
marketplace would place any significant disadvantage upon the less educated and
unskilled. It’s been proven time and time again that literally ANYONE can learn
to speculate very successfully on commodities and currencies.
Victor Niederhoffer (the man who ran George Soros’
Quantum Fund) was self-taught, as are many of the most successful commodities
and currency speculators. In fact George Soros himself, who initially made his
own fortune speculating on various European currencies after the Second World
War, was entirely self-taught.
The idea that economic freedom (the free market)
puts the poor and less well educated at any distinct disadvantage is NOT borne
out by the facts.
Moreover, people the world over yearn for MORE
freedom, NOT more protections and security.
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