Based Economics

A humorous and most likely satirical Minion meme went around a few years ago showing two images: the top one was a Minion appearing happy in front of an American flag with a gold cross over it and the caption was: “Your Child (age 6) before public education”. Below it was a depiction of a gruff-looking Minion, sporting a mustache, with a cigarette hanging out of its mouth, wearing a ushanka, with the Soviet Union’s flag in the background and the caption read: “Your Child (age 7) after 1 year of public education”. The joke here was clearly to poke fun at how religious zealots in America today, such as then Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, generally dislike public education because a religious education is not included as it would violate the First Amendment and the unions of public schools often donate money to the Democratic Party, so hyperbolic parents might therefore try to argue that they are thus teaching communism to children at said schools. While the meme was almost certainl...

  As in commonly taught in schools, the People’s Party, usually referred to today as the “Populists”, comprised a movement of indebted farmers who, among other things, wanted both an increase in the money supply by the coinage of silver and free trade. They wanted the former so that their debts could be more easily paid off due to the price inflation that increasing the amount of money in circulation would create and they wanted free trade so that the products they purchased for their agricultural work would be less expensive and not burdened by the sky-high tariffs that America had in place in this period. They were originally a third party, who won certain western states in the Electoral College in the 1892 election and they then managed to co-opt the Democratic Party in 1896 with their candidate, William Jennings Bryan. He lost this election, but the plight of the farmers eventually died down, due to the increase of gold in the world from mines in Alaska, Australia, and South Af...

  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...

              Being of mostly Irish ancestry myself, having visited Ireland, and having walked through the Famine Memorial composed of six life-size victims of the Great Hunger, the tragic events in 1845-1852 Ireland have always been a subject close to my heart. All that being said, I find people today who cynically exploit the tragedy in order to push their politico-economic agenda of abolishing capitalism to give off much the same energy as those English Protestants who said that God had sent the famine to the Irish Catholics to “teach them a lesson”. In both cases, people had their conclusions, capitalism needing to be abolished by leftists and Irish Catholics being the scum of the earth by English Protestants, ahead of time, and used the tragedy beginning with the potato blight as the ad hoc “evidence” to support that after the fact. While such blatantly bigoted English Protestants seem to be largely a thing of the past, ...

       Having recently passed the centennial of the end of the Russian Civil War, it is hard not to lament the fact that the Red Army ultimately won and it wouldn't be until 1989 that Russia had any prospect for liberty. All the same, this does not mean that the war's fate was sealed by the time the Bolsheviks first took over. Far from it. The main opposition force, the White Army had numerous heroes, such as the Black Baron, General Pyotr Wrangel, who worked valiantly to keep Crimea out of Bolshevik hands and helped 100,000 people flee for their lives when it tragically fell to the Reds in November 1920. Nestor Makhno's Black Army were a mixed bag in some respects due to their far-left economics, but at least the average rural Ukrainian could feel free in the Free Territory, and the fight they put up against Leon Trotsky could certainly be described as heroic. The Green Armies were certainly the most blameless group in the war, as they were simply fighting...

  In a Politico article that seemed to be more about promoting interventionist government policies than it was about honestly explaining history or economics, Professor Jacob Soll of the University of Southern California recently made a hackneyed comparison between now former Prime Minister of the U.K. Liz Truss’s proposed tax reform that has since been largely reversed and the decision of 1775 France’s Minister of Finance, Jacque Turgot, to liberalize the economy with regards to grain trading and the events of the Flour War that same year which were ostensibly created by his actions. The fact that markets were “reeling” from Truss’s diabolical plan to lower the U.K.’s top income tax rate bracket from 45% to 40% is rather cynically compared to the real hardship that occurred in France in 1775. Whether the former is even the actual cause of Britain’s current problems is a very contested theory, as the expansionary monetary policy, high taxes, and large budget deficits of the last de...