Looking back at my libertarian days, it isn’t hard to see the appeal. Libertarianism offers a simultaneously simple yet complex economic theory that makes a lot of sense if you imagine life in a high trust, homogeneous society. It also helps if you set aside everything you know about human nature.
In theory libertarian economics makes a lot of sense. The more free people are to engage in economic activity, the better off they will be. Of course that system doesn’t exist anywhere in the world in any sense and hasn’t for more than a century. What I have also come to realize, contra the prevailing opinion in American conservatism, is that economic systems must be secondary to the people and culture. Trying to build an economic system and then populating it with whichever economic units happen to end up working in a particular nation doesn’t work.
More and more people on the Right are waking up to the realization, that the unrestrained marketism that has been one of the bedrock principles of American conservatism is actually a rigged system that is destroying what we thought we were conserving. The Zman has a great podcast on this. Foremost among those who are calling out marketism is Tucker Carlson and he had a great segment on this topic and billionaire Paul Singer….
If you missed the show, please watch our investigation into one American town decimated by Paul Singer’s hedge fund. Here’s the video. https://t.co/Tlis8U3AGk— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) December 4, 2019
I have been shopping at Cabelas for as long as I can remember. I’ve been to the two original stores in Sidney and Kearney, Nebraska and was interviewed for management positions twice. In fact, I am typing this wearing a Cabelas sweatshirt that I got online on Black Friday. When Bass Pro Shops bought Cabelas, it seemed like an odd move and at a whopping $4 billion likewise seemed like it was overpriced. Now that I have watched that video, the whole thing makes more “sense”. I reposted the video to my Bitchute channel and got this reply.
That is classic libertarianism. Economic activity is an unqualified good. Lower prices and greater “efficiency” is the pinnacle of human achievement. The nearly 7000 residents of Sidney had it coming because they didn’t attract new businesses to their tiny town in the middle of rural Nebraska. Yeah, maybe they should have been trying to get new companies for their “spare labour”, and I love how people are reduced to simple units of labor instead of American people with families and homes and dreams. On the other hand, they had good jobs at a good company but they still find themselves out of work. Not because they couldn’t compete, Cabelas was doing great and building new stores. No, they are out of work because some Jewish billionaire in New York who has never been hunting and probably never has been in a Cabelas decided he wasn’t quite rich enough so he did a little financial hocus pocus and garnered himself a tidy profit.
Paul Singer is often referred to in the financial press as “The world’s most feared investor”. This is a misnomer.
Singer is not an investor, he is a manipulator. He doesn’t buy an interest in a company because he thinks they have growth potential, he is buying shares to manipulate the stock price, sell out and make a huge profit. People like him don’t add anything to the economic well-being of America, they simply shuffle make-believe money around and profit by their manipulation, and if the cost of a billionaire making a few tens of millions of dollars more is destroying towns full of rubes in Nebraska? So be it. He also has a habit of buying up bad debt from third world nations and then squeezing them to get the full value back. Singer really epitomizes the notion that something can be technically legal while still being pretty immoral.
People like Singer, Mitt Romney and other financial manipulators are parasites. They don’t build or create or add value. They “make” money via financial maneuvering that again is legal but doesn’t benefit anyone but themselves. There is no sense of a greater obligation to the society that has made them wealthy. They got theirs and the rest of us can go pound sand. Paul Singer started his company, Elliott Management Corporation, from scratch in 1977. Good for him! Of course Singer started this fund because he was able to raise almost $2 million from “friends and family”. It is nice to have relatives who can loan you a cool couple of million.
Being financial manipulators that wreck towns and ruin lives is bad enough but what they do with the vast fortune they amass via trickery is just as bad. When you are a billionaire, it affords you the opportunity to gain access to the most powerful people in the world. Being passionate about an issue doesn’t mean putting a bumper sticker on your car, it means buying influential people to ensure your passion becomes a reality. Money can’t buy you happiness but it sure can buy you public policies.
While Republican politicians pander to us and pretend to be on our side when it comes to pro-life issues or the 2nd Amendment, they take their marching orders from people like Paul Singer and the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson. They need our votes but they need money more. GOP party apparatchiks know a little pandering, a little fear-mongering and we will show up to vote for whoever they tell us to. It didn’t work as planned in 2016 but whatever is left of the GOP after 2020 won’t make that mistake again.
What are these incredibly influential financial wizards passionate about?
Paul Singer is a big proponent of “gay rights”. Oh, and Israel. The Koch brothers were big on open borders. Sheldon Adelson, also a big supporter of Israel. Back in 2014 we got a little sneak peek at what the big dollar donors were doing:
Exclusive: Mega-donors plan GOP war council
A group of major GOP donors, led by New York billionaire Paul Singer, is quietly expanding its political footprint ahead of the midterm elections in an increasingly assertive effort to shape the direction of the Republican Party.
The operation was launched discreetly last year, with the previously unreported formation of a club called the American Opportunity Alliance to bring together some of the richest pro-business GOP donors in the country, several of whom share Singer’s support for gay rights, immigration reform and the state of Israel. Around the same time, Singer and his allies also formed a federal fundraising committee called Friends for an American Majority that raised big checks for a select list of the GOP’s most highly touted 2014 Senate hopefuls.
Those candidates are among the big names expected at a two-day retreat organized by the American Opportunity Alliance set for the last week of February at a swanky Colorado resort. The closed-door event — which is also expected to draw House Speaker John Boehner and New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, according to Republicans familiar with the plans — is seen in GOP finance circles as a grand debut of sorts for Singer’s still-amorphous club.
More…
Singer, who founded the hedge fund Elliott Management, has long been a key player in GOP money circles, espousing a nontraditional brand of conservatism that includes aggressive backing for gay marriage and immigration reform, as well as more traditional GOP stances like lower taxes and less government regulation. Contributors to the joint fundraising account for Senate candidates — a list that likely dovetails at least partially with the American Opportunity Alliance’s member rolls — include a mix of gay marriage supporters like Todd Ricketts and billionaire investor Cliff Asness, as well as more conventional fiscal conservatives like brokerage titan Charles Schwab and real estate developer Harlan Crow.
Ever wonder why the staunch conservative opposition to “gay marriage” shriveled like George Castanza in a cold pool and now we have “gay conservatives” and MAGA trannies parading around “conservative” events even though the vast majority of grassroots Republican voters are disgusted and horrified by this? Simply put, people like Paul Singer just made it go away as an issue.
“Gay rights”, “immigration reform” and Israel, plus some tax breaks.
Think back to the run-up and immediate aftermath of the 2016 election. Was Trump talking about “immigration reform”, which is code for “mass immigration of cheap labor”? Was he talking about expanding “gay rights”? Not anywhere I saw. Israel? I am sure that came up but the slogan wasn’t “Make Israel Great Again”.
62 million or so Americans went to the polls and pulled the lever for a man they thought was going to build a wall, crack down on enforcement and put America first. What they got for the last three years is a guy stumbling from one controversy to the next, squabbles on social media, Ivanka and Jared setting the agenda and bupkis on immigration control. Trump chases the white rabbit of black votes while his own base looks around and wonders what happened.
Rich hedge-fund billionaires get richer. White life expectancy is diminishing. Trump’s voters are dying every day and the people who will elect a Democrat in 2020 turn 18 every day. No wall, no immigration reform (meaning reducing it). We are still in Afghanistan, still meddling around the Middle East and now are talking about sending another 7000 troops to defend against Iran, which really means provide a threat to the Iranians at the demand of Israel. Trump’s supporters are doxxed, attacked, slandered and censored but he is monitoring the situation.
You can trace it back in large measure to the ultra-powerful cabal of billionaires who manipulate the system for profit and then use that profit to work at odds with the desires of the same people who foolishly show up to vote for candidates who will betray them in favor of the donor class.
My wife and I were talking about these issues this morning and she mentioned Occupy Wall Street. Far-left, anti-corporate groups like OWS think the solution to these out-of-control globalist corporations is greater government control but they fail to understand that the people in charge are all basically the same people. There is a revolving door where people from the elite institutions of government, globohomo corporations and academia move seamlessly from one job to the next, making contacts and running the country. The sham elections and the kabuki theater in Congress and the White House are mostly meaningless. The real power in America is behind closed doors, powerful and connected people contacting one another and all of it funded by people like Paul Singer. They let you vote because they know it doesn’t change anything. But I suspect they are starting to realize that the pot began to boil when they weren’t looking and now they can’t turn down the heat. Paul Singer, Sheldon Adelson and Michael Bloomberg can afford an army of armed private security and homes behind fortress walls but even the tallest walls can’t keep out angry people forever.
To paraphrase Doc Holliday in Tombstone. There’s a reckoning coming.
"Any former libertarians in the house?"
(shyly raises hand)
We've all been there brother.