Based Economics

  Every so often on the political side of the internet, one may come across a quote on a meme from Vladimir Lenin claiming that: “Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.” This quote comes from Chapter Five of his 1917 book   The State and Revolution . It is clear what Lenin and the people sharing this quote in agreement are trying to say: that in the market economy, as in Greek city-states, governments never look out for the interests of everyday people, but rather those of the rich, whether they be people voluntarily providing employment to people in mutually beneficial exchanges or people violently holding others in bondage and forcing them to labor for the gain of their captors. Putting aside the monumentally offensive comparison of chattel slavery and agreeing to exchange labor for money, as well as the absurd claim that there is just as much freedom for the average person in both economic ...

In their endless attempt to make Marxist exploitation theory hip with the kids, the Gravel Institute made a video demonstrating how, ostensibly, despite all the declarations of independence and their recognitions as being sovereign nations, French control of West and Central African countries never actually ended, and this conspiratorial notion can therefore be used to explain the lackluster performance of many of the economies of these countries in the decades following. As can be expected, this video includes the kind of socialist cope that neocolonial theory relies on. If socialist economics cannot be made to work, then that must be the fault of the former colonizer. All the work (and in some cases, outright war) for independence should be discounted, as the governments of the formerly colonized countries couldn’t centrally plan their economies, so there was no real independence. Of course, none of this is to say that France’s record in its former African colonies is impeccable or t...