The woke position rests on a fundamental fallacy. This is that there is a fixed amount resources, so that if the rich have more, the poor have less. But this is wrong. Resources in the free market are not a fixed sum. So long as the economy is growing, everybody can benefit. The ‘protected’ can do better without taking away what the rich have earned. The economist Paul Rubin, who died last month, gives a good account of the fallacy: “Karl Marx called his system ‘scientific socialism’ Modern leftists advocate a similar ideology and call themselves ‘woke’ to indicate that they understand the world better than the rest of us. Yet the worldview of Marxists and woke leftists alike is fundamentally primitive.

Folk economics is the economics of people untrained in economics. It is the economic view of the world that evolved in our brains before the development of the modern economy. During this period of evolution, the economy was simple, with little specialization except by age and sex, no economic growth, no technological change, limited trade, little capital, and warfare between neighboring tribes.

Zero-sum thinking was well-adapted to this world. Since there was no economic growth, incomes and wealth didn’t grow. If one person had access to more food or other goods, or greater access to females, it was likely because of expropriation from others. Since there was little capital, a ‘labor theory of value’—the idea that all value is created by labor alone—would have been appropriate, and there was little need to protect capital through property rights. Frequent warfare encouraged xenophobia.

Adam Smith and other economists challenged this worldview in the 18th century. They taught that specialization of labor was valuable, that capital was productive, and that labor and capital could work together to increase income. They also showed that property rights needed protection, that members of other tribes or groups could cooperate through trade, that wealth could be created with the proper incentives, and that the creation of wealth would benefit everyone in a society, not only the wealthy. Most important, they showed that a complex economy could work with little or no central direction.

Marx’s economic system was based on the primitive worldview of our ancestors. For him, conflict rather than cooperation between labor and capital defined the economy. He thought that the wealthy became rich only by exploiting the poor, that all income came from labor, and that the economy needed central direction because he didn’t believe markets were good at self-correction. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the largest and most expensive social-science experiment ever conducted, proved Smith right and Marx wrong.

Members of the woke left want to return to policies based on this primitive economic thinking. One of their major errors is thinking that the world is zero-sum. That assumption drives identity politics, which sees, among other things, an intrinsic conflict between blacks and whites. The Black Lives Matter movement and Critical Race Theory foment racial antagonism and resurrect xenophobia. Leftists vilify ‘millionaires and billionaires’ like Bill Gates and Elon Musk as evil and exploitative. They should recognize them as productive entrepreneurs whose innovations benefit us all.

Dislike of the rich makes sense in a world where one can become rich only by exploiting others, but not in a society full of creativity and useful inventions. Changing tax laws to soak the rich makes sense with a labor theory of value, but not with a sophisticated understanding of continual investment and technological change.

Adopting counterproductive woke policies such as racial job quotas, high taxes, excessive regulation of business, and price controls on some goods may not send us all the way back to the subsistence economy of our ancestors. But if policies that penalize saving and investing and that involve excessive government control are adopted, social capital, wealth, and real income will decline. If we bow to this primitive ideology, there will be increased racial animosity and conflict, slow economic growth, and fewer inventions.”

You might raise an objection to this. Even if the economy is growing, and the minorities can gain without taking resources from the rich, why should they be satisfied with what they get? Can’t they demand more of the growing economic pie? The answer is that doing this will hurt them, not help them. The way in which the economy grows is by capital accumulation, and the great bulk of this takes place through the investments of the well off. Confiscation of the income and wealth of the wealthy will slow down or stop the rate of economic growth. This will make the “protected” worse off. The great Ludwig von Mises proposes a thought experiment that brings out this point vividly: “A law that prohibits any individual from accumulating more than ten million or from making more than one million a year restricts the activities of precisely those entrepreneurs who are most successful in filling the wants of consumers. If such a law had been enacted in the United States fifty years ago, many who are multimillionaires today would live in more modest circumstances. But all those new branches of industry which supply the masses with articles unheard of before would operate, if at all, on a much smaller scale, and their products would be beyond the reach of the common man. It is manifestly contrary to the interest of the consumers to prevent the most efficient entrepreneurs from expanding the sphere of their activities up to the limit to which the public approves of their conduct of business by buying their products.”

There is another way in which the woke movement undermines our economy, and this may be the most serious one of all. The conjuring up of grievances encourages blacks to hate whites. Being white is regarded by many left-wing revolutionaries as evil, and murderous violence will result from this.  As the great black economist Thomas Sowell points out: “Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks, they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.

That includes a pattern of violent attacks on whites in public places in Chicago, Denver, New York, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Kansas City, as well as blacks in schools beating up Asian classmates – for years – in New York and Philadelphia.

These attacks have been accompanied by explicitly racist statements by the attackers, so it is not a question of having to figure out what the motivation is. There has also been rioting and looting by these young hoodlums.”

Let’s do everything we can to counter the woke plot to destroy our economy and to encourage the free market economic policies of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. That is the way to a prosperous economy in which all groups can live in harmony.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Not only do prices inform consumers about scarcity, they also influence consumption habits. Consumers defer their consumption when they perceive goods to be “too expensive.” They subjectively value the money they would have to spend more highly than the goods themselves. All this seems obvious, yet most people do not realize its implications.

Participants in the market convey their evolving preferences and conditions to one another by either making purchases or abstaining from buying at specific price points. Prices thus serve as a mechanism for coordinating the allocation and use of resources across a market. By accurately reflecting the relative scarcity of resources, they incentivize producers and consumers to use resources more efficiently.

In a capitalist system, prices are signals to entrepreneurs and consumers, determined by supply and demand. High prices due to resource scarcity restrict consumption and encourage savings and investment.

As its name suggests, capitalism is primarily about accumulating capital and capital growth. Notably, one cannot achieve this by consuming wealth. To the contrary, it is forgoing consumption that allows one to save and invest and thus accumulate capital.

So, if capitalism systematically discourages consumption, what causes consumerism? First, I should highlight that consumerism is a cultural attribute, distinct from the economic system in place. A capitalist society is free to be as consumerist or non-consumerist as the individuals living under it wish to be. Likewise, nothing necessarily prevents a communist society from being consumerist. People under communism are under the whims of the central planners, and one should not assume that could never lead to a consumerist society. At least capitalism does not rob the choice of the people!

Interestingly, the people who criticize capitalism for promoting consumerism tend to be the ones who argue consumption “drives the economy.” So, they are literally the ones arguing for more consumption. I am referring to the Keynesian, and unfortunately, all too popular argument that “consumption is the key to a healthy economy.” In reality, production precedes consumption and is thus responsible for driving the economy and creating wealth.

In 2010, as mainstream economists chastised the rich for not spending enough, Lew Rockwell succinctly summed up this point:

“The trouble is that spending is not the cause of economic growth. Investment, which begins in saving, is the root of economic growth. It doesn’t matter that consumption makes up a certain percentage of economic activity. That’s only the surface you are looking at. Spending and consumption without saving and investment is a prescription for devouring the prospects for prosperity down the line. In this case, the best thing that the rich can do for a future of economic growth is not to spend but to save toward investment.”

One reason for the existence of a consumerist society could be simply that its people like to buy material things as it gives them a sense of comfort or pride. A lack of financial literacy likely contributes to their materialist tendencies. However, governments can contribute to this trend by weakening the market-based reliable signals previously mentioned.

To “boost” economic activity, for instance, the government artificially lowers interest rates that guide consumers on whether to save or spend. High interest rates lead to less discounting of the future and more savings, while low rates promote immediate consumption of goods. To induce consumer spending in the short run, the government disrupts this equilibrium by forcing down interest rates. That leads to unsustainable consumer spending due to the distortion of these vital price signals.

Ironically, behavior induced by government intervention gets labeled as “consumerism,” yet the blame often erroneously falls on capitalism and free markets.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The widespread acceptance of ESG and DEI by American business giants is as concerning as it is eye-rolling. Large corporations routinely play games to attract stock buyers’ interest, but this is different. This is not a game. Many aspects of ESG and DEI eschew business and economic fundamentals, and challenge rational thinking by replacing fundamentals with dogmatic doctrines.

To make matters worse, the cult thinkers who monitor ESG and DEI scores want as much power as the credit-rating agencies, such as Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s. These obsessed “change makers” have passed off ESG and DEI as liberal progress, but, in reality, it is something far more sinister.

In America at least, ESG and DEI are not liberal, or centrist, political initiatives. Rather, they are well-capitalized leftist experiments.

What Is ESG and DEI?

While ESG and DEI began as separate components, since 2020 they have become more and more interrelated. If you are wondering what ESG and DEI are, “E” stands for the environment, and environmental welfare. Carbon emissions are the biggest target, but there are far more obvious solutions to combat environmental welfare than picking, and choosing, where carbon is to be reduced.

Habitat restoration is one of them; so is protecting the ocean and fisheries. On the contrary, however, Norway is considering opening up its waters to deep-sea mining, all in the name of independence from fossil fuels.

What about wind turbines? The rush for wind turbines has led to shoddy workmanship, including instances where 700-foot turbines have literally fallen over. Wind farms have also been placed in the middle of bird migratory flight paths, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of birds.

Yet the ESG change makers rarely discuss such anomalies. When they do, it is hidden in discussions about the “rapid innovation” green technology is experiencing. It seems innovation is so rapid, they are unable to avoid destruction and crucial mistakes.

The “S” in ESG stands for social. The social aspect in ESG is literally double dipping when you factor in DEI. More on that soon. The “G” is for governance, and this is one category the change makers have the most trouble with. When you take a closer look at governance policies, let’s look at the simple metric of how many boards can a director sit on.

According to BlackRock, an asset management firm, that number is a maximum of four boards, but BlackRock breaks its own rules. They have an Ivy league dean on 69 boards, while another one of Blackrock’s directors sits on 71 boards.

What About Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity?

On the surface, it seems harmless to incentivize corporations, and markets to hire people from diverse backgrounds, and to employ people with disabilities. However, much like ESG, the mandates and guidance behind DEI is far different than it suggests.

DEI is really just an extension of CRT (critical race theory), and because of DEI, CRT is now being taught in K-12 schools through a program known as social and emotional learning (SEL).

Proponents of SEL will disagree with my statement, but SEL is no longer as “neutral” as it used to be. In recent years, SEL has become more and more a tool of the left. To better explain, think of CRT as the ideology, DEI as the marketing gimmick, and SEL as the vehicle in which this is delivered. Teaching this at the K-12 level is a dangerous development that must be overturned.

The ‘E” in DEI means equity—not equality—which means equal outcome. In other words, tearing down the free market and forcing a redistribution of wealth. Yet there’s no such thing as equality of outcome in the free market. The “I” means inclusivity. I am at a loss for words with inclusivity, because I question what “social” and “diversity” means, if it doesn’t already check the box of “inclusivity.”

How Can America Stop the ESG–DEI Industrial Complex?

How can America stop this? Citizens can lobby their representatives to pass laws to prevent money managers from influencing theories that usurp our nation’s economic system. They can pass laws that prevent collusion. Remember separation of church and state? Now we need the separation of ideological cult thinking from business and education.

Congress and state legislators can put forth legislation to break up the asset management quasi-monopolies that exist (Vanguard and BlackRock, for example, control just shy of $20 trillion in assets). There should be a law preventing money managers from choosing ideological theories and aligning themselves with certain ideologies unless the client expressively demands so.

Congress and state legislators can also continue to push laws that limit ESG and DEI interference in that state. America has plenty of intelligent adults. We need more of them to speak against totalitarian agendas.

All Americans need to see that these top-down instructions from unelected theorists are not doing anything for the environment, for society, or for diversity, apart from creating a larger cultural divide.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

This is the claim made by the World Economic Forum in a recent video describing their intention to create a more “democratized” stock market.

Obviously, the truth is the opposite; talent and intellect are not equally distributed, but every person is given the opportunity to take a shot and attempt to succeed.  Any democratized economic policy would seek to change all of that.

The WEF program seems to run parallel to the ESG related woke ideology that has been spreading like a cancer into major corporations and western governments.  While promoting fairness in investing, the WEF addresses theory while ignoring practice.  How would such fairness be achieved?  What is the WEF definition of fairness?

If we go by the common ideological mantras of globalists and the political left, fairness for them means equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.  There are no significant barriers to the average person buying stocks, but nearly half the population of countries like the US stay out of retail markets.  Why?  Is it a lack of “equity”, or is it something else?

The WEF seems to address this issue without directly admitting the problem.  Trust is in fact the issue, and people distrust markets because they are openly rigged to a certain extent.

The WEF glances over this concern as if it is unjustified or requires more government intervention.  Yet, over a decade of government and central bank manipulation of markets is proof enough that certain corporations and certain financial mechanisms are protected while others are not.  At least, not until recently…

It’s interesting that the WEF is announcing its goal to make investing more democratic at the very moment that western banks are on the verge of an unprecedented credit crunch.  With the implosion of SVB, the buyout of Credit Suisse, the crash of First Republic and Signature, the financial system is fast approaching a reckoning.

U.S. corporate bankruptcies are rising in 2023, with the first two months of the year registering the highest total for any comparable period since 2011, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data.  In other words, bankruptcies are on pace to hit a 12 year high.

Echoes of the crash of 2008/2009 are ringing in people’s ears and they are rightly suspicious of markets.  But what about short selling?  Can the public make money through shorts?  Well, that’s not allowed.  While globalists want more investment activity at a time of major risk, they are also adamant that people only be allowed to buy in, rather than going short.

This double standard has culminated in the mass chastising of investors that went short on failing banks like SVB, as regulators and elitists like Jamie Dimon partially blame social media driven short selling for the crash and demand that people who do such organizing be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

In a completely interconnected world, how do the globalists plan to get billions of people to invest in stocks without them organizing, data sharing or engaging in activism, and with equal outcome?  Either everyone wins, or everyone loses within their theoretical investment democracy.  How do markets function without both winners and losers?

The dynamics that are being established seem to be designed to encourage or perhaps even force the public into market participation.  The WEF’s goals would not be met unless wages were somehow garnered through government regulation and invested without people’s consent or oversight.  Otherwise, skepticism will continue to rule the day and half the population (or more) will continue to bow out.

Or, maybe the goal is not to save the system as it exists, but to lure the populace in today, bounce stocks for a time, and then let the bottom drop out tomorrow while destroying everyone’s wealth simultaneously (except the wealth of insiders and bailout recipients, of course).  It’s hard to say.  What we do know is that ESG related programs are a major contributor to the decline of US banks like SVB, so how would ESG programs for stock markets possibly help?

Article cross-posted from Zero Hedge.

Yet “common good capitalism” is marred by an even deeper problem: it rejects the liberalism from which true capitalism springs, the absence of which makes impossible the operation of a dynamic market order that maximizes the prospects of individuals to achieve as many as possible of their goals.

The defining feature of liberalism — by which, of course, I mean the liberalism of scholars such as Adam Smith, Frédéric Bastiat, F.A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman — is the freedom that it accords to all individual adults to choose and to pursue their own goals, constrained only by the requirement that each person respect the same right of everyone else to pursue their individually chosen goals. The common good, as understood by liberals, is nothing more — or less — than a stable institutional and cultural environment in which this diversity of goals can be chosen and pursued with maximum possible prospects for success.

In his important new book, Living Together, the liberal philosopher David Schmidtz describes (although he doesn’t use the term) the common good for liberals as being an effective system of managing the “traffic” of countless individuals interacting with each other in pursuit of their own diverse goals:

Justice [as understood by liberals] is our way of adapting to a miraculous feature of our ecosystem; namely, our ecosystem is populated by beings with ends of their own – highly plastic animals who choose (and sometimes second-guess) not only means but ends themselves…. Liberalism’s defining insight is that effective traffic management is not about agreeing how to rank destinations. Liberal justice does not task travelers with even knowing other people’s destinations, much less with ranking them….

When travelers respect each other in that easily understood and profoundly egalitarian way, implicitly treating the values of their respective journeys as presumptively (even if not necessarily) on a par, they do what it takes to constitute their society as a place that promotes value. Society depends less on people knowing how to promote value than it depends on people who share the road reading signs, seeing whose turn it is, and in that way knowing how to respect value.

If the economic system implied by this kind of common good — a common good that is real and remarkable — is all that is meant by Marco Rubio, Oren Cass, and other “common good capitalists,” then nothing distinguishes “common good capitalism” from capitalism unprefixed. But of course Messrs. Rubio, Cass, and other “common good capitalists” do have in mind an economic system profoundly different from that which is championed today by liberal scholars such as Vernon Smith, Thomas Sowell, Bruce Yandle, Deirdre McCloskey, Robert Higgs, and my colleague Pete Boettke. What each “common good capitalist” wants is an economic system engineered to serve his or her preferred set of concrete ends. Gone would be the liberal freedom of individuals to choose and pursue their own ends. Under “common good capitalism,” everyone would be conscripted to produce and consume in ways meant to promote only the ends favored by “common good capitalists.”

Note the irony. The economic system that, say, Oren Cass claims to advocate as a means of promoting the common good is, in reality, a means of promoting only the good as conceived by Oren Cass (which, for him, consists largely of an economy with more manufacturing jobs and a smaller financial sector). The hubris here is undeniable. “Common good capitalists” not only presume to have divined which concrete ends are best to guide the actions of hundreds of millions of individuals, nearly all of whom are strangers to them, but also are so confident in their divinations that they advocate pursuing these with the use of force.

The liberal doesn’t object to attempts to persuade others to adopt different and, hopefully, better ends. By all peaceful means, do your best to persuade me to embrace, as the lodestar for my choice of concrete ends, Catholic Social Teaching, economic nationalism, Marxism, veganism, or whatever other teaching or -ism you believe best defines the common good. But do not presume that your sincere embrace of a specific system of concrete values provides sufficient warrant for you to compel me and others to behave as if we share your particular values.

To the extent that the state intrudes into market processes in order to redirect these toward the achievement of particular ends, it replaces market competition and cooperation with command-economy dirigisme. Income earners are not allowed to use the fruits of their creativity and efforts as they choose. Instead, consumption ‘decisions’ will be directed by government officials. The result will be a reallocation of resources achieved through the use, mostly, of tariffs and subsidies. And by so redirecting consumption expenditures, the pattern of production will obviously also be changed from what would prevail in a free market. (In fact, the specific goal of most “common good capitalists” seems to be the achievement of a particular manner of production — for example, more factory jobs — than would arise with markets left free.)

While its insistence on obstructing consumers’ freedom to choose is, alone, enough to disqualify “common good capitalism” as genuine capitalism, a more serious disconnect becomes evident when we ponder what this faux “capitalism” implies about production decisions.

The most profound observers of capitalism have noted its inseparableness from innovation. As Joseph Schumpeter described in a famous chapter of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy titled “The Process of Creative Destruction,”

Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary…. The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.

Later, Julian Simon explained that economic challenges, which will always be with us, spark creative human minds in market economies to innovate in ways that literally increase not only supplies of consumer goods and capital goods, but also supplies of resources (including resources labeled “nonrenewable”). In the same spirit, Deirdre McCloskey identifies innovation as the very essence of capitalism, which she proposes be renamed “innovism.”

Innovation, however, is utterly incompatible with an economy that is centrally directed or constrained to pursue particular ends. By offering new and unexpected opportunities for consumption and production, innovation threatens to upset any collective agreement on — or acquiescence in — a particular set of ends imposed in the name of “common good capitalism.” All those jobs in factories that produce washing machines — jobs that today appear oh-so-lovely — will tomorrow appear much less lovely if someone invents affordable self-cleaning clothing. Ditto for all those jobs in paper mills, as innovators devise even more ways to convey information and documents electronically.

Whatever is the particular set of ends chosen today by the specific “common good capitalists” who manage to seize political power, those ends can be served only by a relatively small number of different patterns of resource allocation. Because innovation is destined not only to reveal new ends that must be fitted into — and, hence, disrupt — the “common good capitalist” plan, but also to create new and unanticipated means of pursuing ends, innovation must be suppressed if any “common good capitalist” plan is to be seriously imposed.

The capitalist economy, by its very nature, is not and cannot be a tool for achieving particular concrete outcomes. The capitalist economy, instead, is the name that we give to that ongoing, ever-evolving, organic order of production and exchange that arises spontaneously whenever individuals are free to pursue diverse peaceful ends of their own choosing and to do so in whatever peaceful ways they think best. That the results serve the common good is clear, if by “common good” we mean the highest possible chance of as many individuals as possible to achieve as many as possible of their own individually chosen goals. But let the state attempt to constrain and contort economic activity in the pursuit of a particular set of “common” concrete ends that everyone is compelled to serve, and capitalism disappears. It is replaced by what is more accurately called “[fill in the blank]’s-particular-notion-of-the-good statism,” with the blank filled by the name of whichever “common good capitalist” happens currently to be in power.

Article cross-posted from AIER.

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, the billionaire discussed those views, lamenting the current state of the U.S. economy and sharing his concerns for the future.

“I’m worried about capitalism,” Marcus told the Financial Times. “Capitalism is the basis of Home Depot, [and] millions of people have earned this success and had success. I’m talking manufacturers, vendors, and distributors, and people that work for us [who have been] able to enrich themselves by the journey of Home Depot. That’s the success. That’s why capitalism works.”

Marcus founded Home Depot alongside co-founder Arthur Blank in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1979 after the pair were unexpectedly fired from another home improvement chain. Since then, the store has expanded to more than 2,300 locations across North America.

In Marcus’ view, however, the company could not have achieved the same level of success if launched in today’s market.

“We would end up with 15, 16 stores,” he said. “I don’t know that we could go further.”

That change, along with a general lack of work ethic among the younger generation, can be attributed to the rise of socialism, according to the retailer.

“[N]obody works,” he said. “Nobody gives a damn. ‘Just give it to me. Send me money. I don’t want to work—I’m too lazy, I’m too fat, I’m too stupid.’”

It’s A Woke World

Marcus further lamented an increasing lack of respect for the First Amendment, noting: “We used to have free speech here. We don’t have it. The woke people have taken over the world.”

The nonagenarian also acknowledged that, given his age, he is less susceptible to cancelation attempts, though that hasn’t stopped certain groups from trying.

In both 2016 and 2019, Marcus’ political support for former President Donald Trump angered some shoppers to the extent that they threatened to boycott Home Depot stores.

In 2019, while noting that he did not agree “with every move” Trump makes, Marcus told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he intended to donate to Trump’s reelection campaign because the then-president had “produced more than anybody else.”

Marcus also praised Trump for his “businessman’s common sense approach to most things,” holding that the United States was better off under the 45^th president than it had been under the previous administration.

But while Home Depot sought to distance itself from its retired co-founder’s comments, Trump jumped to Marcus’ defense, urging his supporters to do the same.

“A truly great, patriotic & charitable man, Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot who, at the age of 90, is coming under attack by the Radical Left Democrats with one of their often used weapons,” Trump noted on Twitter in July 2019. “They don’t want people to shop at those GREAT stores because he contributed … to your favorite President, me!”

“Fight for Bernie Marcus and Home Depot!” Trump added.

Ultimately, those boycotts appear to have been unsuccessful, given that the company has an estimated annual revenue of $150 billion.

Republican Support

Marcus has been outspoken in his conservatism for years, attributing his views to a love of the United States and the freedoms Americans enjoy.

“I think there are two big reasons why this country is so great,” Marcus said in another 2019 interview. “The first is our Constitution, which guarantees a freedom of speech and expression. The second is our free market system.”

“The free market system has been the biggest creator of wealth and prosperity the world has ever known, lifting billions of people out of poverty and far more superior than any government program could ever be,” Marcus added. “The free market is the tool that allows many to reach out and grab hold of the American dream.”

Given his love of capitalism, the entrepreneur’s past support for Republican political campaigns—including the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and John McCain—should not come as a surprise.

And Trump is not the only Republican candidate to have recently earned Marcus’ support. As a Florida resident, the entrepreneur has also donated to the state’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“I give money to [Trump and DeSantis] because I hope they’re going to do the right thing,” Marcus told The Financial Times.

While adding that he thought Trump’s policies as president were “spot on,” Marcus demurred on which Republican he would like to see replace Joe Biden in the oval office.

“It’s going to be very interesting in ‘24 because I think that DeSantis will challenge him [Trump],” he said. “And may the better man win.”

Article cross-posted from The Epoch Times.

Despite the fact that leftists today often attack conservatives as “fascists” because of our desire to protect national boundaries and western heritage, the truth is that all fascism is deeply rooted in leftist philosophies and thinkers.

Mussolini was a long time socialist, a member of the party who greatly admired Karl Marx. He deviated from the socialists over their desire to remain neutral during WWI, and went on to champion a combination of socialism and nationalism, what we now know as fascism. Adolph Hitler was also a socialist and admirer of Karl Marx, much like Mussolini. It is actually hard to find where Marx, the communists and the fascists actually differ from each other – A deeper sense of nationalism seems to be one of the few points of contention.

Though Marx saw the existence of nation states as temporary to the proletariat and to the ruling class, he noted that the industrialists were erasing national boundaries anyway. Marx argues in the Communist Manifesto with some optimism:

“National differences and antagonisms between peoples are already tending to disappear more and more, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, the growth of free trade and a world market, and the increasing uniformity of industrial processes and of corresponding conditions of life.”

Marx saw the development of corporate power as useful and the next necessary step towards socialism, noting that joint-stock companies (corporations) and the credit system are:

“The abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself.”

In other words, corporations are viewed as a tool for the eventual transition to a socialist “Utopia” and the death of free markets. Once again, we see there is very little difference in motive between the political left and the fascists. The natural progression of every form of Marxism, communism, socialism, fascism etc. all ultimately lead to a kind of globalist ideology and erasure of cultural separation. The methods might differ slightly but the end result is the same. Some think this is a good thing, but it is actually quite poisonous.

Globalism requires an overarching social dynamic, a single hive mind, otherwise it cannot survive. If people have the ability to choose or create better options (or different options) for living then globalism loses significance. The existence of choice has to be erased. This is a behavior that the political left has fully embraced and they are more than happy to work hand-in-hand with corporate oligarchs to make their ideal system a reality. Long gone are the days of the anti-corporate progressive – They LOVE corporate dominance, but only if those companies promote and enforce leftist models for society.

Mussolini’s fascism is at the root of the very corporate governance that leftists applaud and lust after today. They have far more in common with fascists than they realize.

The new fascism is a re-branded philosophy best represented by something called “Stakeholder Capitalism.” It is a term often used by globalists at the World Economic Forum and the head of the WEF, Klaus Schwab. The media friendly definition of Stakeholder Capitalism is:

A form of capitalism in which companies do not only optimize short-term profits for shareholders, but seek long term value creation, by taking into account the needs of all their stakeholders, and society at large.

But who are “all stakeholders” in the opinion of the WEF?

Well, according to Klaus Schwab they are all of human civilization, now and in the future. In other words, the goal of SHC is for corporate leaders and globalist bureaucracy to take responsibility for the entire world, not just their own employees, shareholders and profits. And such leaders would not be acting as individuals, they would be acting as a collective. In other words, SHC requires all major corporations to act as a single unit with a single purpose and a unified collectivist ideology – An ideological monopoly.

As Klaus Schwab states:

“The most important characteristic of the stakeholder model today is that the stakes of our system are now more clearly global. Economies, societies, and the environment are more closely linked to each other now than 50 years ago. The model we present here is therefore fundamentally global in nature, and the two primary stakeholders are as well.

…What was once seen as externalities in national economic policy making and individual corporate decision making will now need to be incorporated or internalized in the operations of every government, company, community, and individual. The planet is thus the center of the global economic system, and its health should be optimized in the decisions made by all other stakeholders.”

The SHC concept is deceptive on its very face because it pretends as if corporations will be held accountable by the public within some form of “business democracy,” as if the public will have a vote on what the corporations do. In reality, it will be corporations telling the public what is acceptable to think and do and corporations in conjunction with governments using their power to punish people who do not agree.

The great magic trick is that these same unified corporations use the shield of “private property” and business rights as a means to control society without repercussions. After all, a primary principle of conservatism and the US constitution is private property rights. So, stepping in to disrupt corporate governance would be violating one of our own beloved ideals. It sounds like a Catch-22, but it’s really not.

As mentioned above, corporations are at their very core a socialist concept: They are created through government charter, handed legal personhood and given special protections from government. They are NOT free market entities, and Adam Smith, the originator of most free market ideals, stood against corporations as destructive and prone to monopoly.

As long as they receive protections from government including monetary stimulus and bailouts, corporations should not enjoy the same private property protections as regular businesses do. They are parasitic creations, alien to the natural business world. In a freedom-based society they would be dismantled to prevent authoritarian outcomes.

Stakeholder Capitalism is also an incredibly arrogant premise because it assumes that corporate leaders have the wisdom or objective intelligence to expand their role beyond business and into social and political spheres. This has already happened in many respects with much chaos created, but open corporate governance is the end game and it is anything but objective or benevolent.

What are some examples of this kind of corporate/political governance (fascism) in action?

How about Big Tech social media censorship leaning HEAVILY against conservatives and liberty activists? How about evidence of collusion between Big Tech companies and government, such as the Biden Administration and the DHS working closely with Twitter and Facebook to actively remove voices and viewpoints they don’t like? How about corporate leaders colluding to destroy conservative based social media competitors like Parler?

How about ESG loans funded by corporate backers such as Blackrock or globalist non-profits like the Rockefeller Foundation?

If all corporate lenders applied ESG to their loan practices, all individuals and businesses would have to adopt leftist social ideologies and dubious environmental claims in order to have access to credit. ESG is a monetary incentive created by corporate elites to keep all other businesses in line. If it continues, ESG could wipe out political opposition to globalism in the span of a single generation.

And, what about the Council For Inclusive Capitalism? This is the most blatant expression of open global fascism I have ever seen, with money elites and politicians working in concert with the UN and even religious leaders like Pope Francis. Their goal is to institute a single centralized world governing platform built around the same agendas outlined in ESG and SHC, making corporations members of a new global council which they refer to as “The Guardians.” They aren’t even trying to hide the conspiracy anymore, it’s right out in the open.

Klaus Schwab takes special care to mention often that global crisis events are the “opportunity” that is needed to push the public into the arms of Stakeholder Capitalism through a nexus point called “The Great Reset.” Meaning, he thinks that widespread fear and desperation must exist (or be engineered) to perpetuate the SHC framework quickly.

Obviously, the globalists are on a shrinking timeline, though it’s hard to say why. They are tearing off the mask faster in the past two years than they have in the previous decade. More than likely they understand to some degree that if they go too slow the public will have time to mount a defense against them.

They will conjure all kinds of distractions and scapegoats to prevent liberty minded people from hitting them back. They’ll aim us at Russia, they’ll aim us at China, they’ll aim us at useful idiots among the leftists. They’ll aim Russia, China and the leftists at us. They will try to send us to war, they will call us insurrectionists, they will call us terrorists, they will say we started the whole collapse and that we are to blame for the world’s ills. None of this matters. What matters is that the globalists at the top pay the price for the harm they cause.

When the head of the snake is removed, only then can we sort out who is to blame; who were the heroes, who were the villains, and who were the idiots. Only then can we rebuild with true freedom in mind.

Article cross-posted from Alt-Market.

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all. – John Maynard Keynes

An economic crisis looms. When the brown matter hits the proverbial fan, the blue-check commentariat will blame “capitalism.” So we have to remain vigilant.

In fact, they’ve already started.

I use scare quotes because so few clearly define what “capitalism” is, and fewer still know how it works. Particularly when they use the F word.

As with neoliberalism, “capitalism” is more or less a smear used by those who hate that which they neither understand nor have a hand in creating. Ignorance as a rhetorical strategy works mainly because the masses have become more credulous and ignorant with each passing year. Critics simply have to indicate some socio-economic phenomenon they don’t like and blame the c-word.

Intervention, the C Word, and the F Word

When I use capitalism I have a specific set of features in my mind, as we’ll see. Because capitalism is Marx’s term, we could use other less loaded words, such as entrepreneurial markets. But these can come across as esoteric or imprecise. Detractors frequently have something else in their minds, and there is no incentive to determine any common reference frame. Sometimes their very identity is caught up in being anti-capitalist. It’s one thing to challenge their positions. It’s quite another to challenge their identity.

What’s worse, the politically powerful actively destroy the ideal features of an entrepreneurial market system, often to compromise with anti-capitalists. They then blame capitalism for every failure of intervention. This process began long ago. Now, the best we can say is interventionism creates ideal conditions under which corporations and authorities may collude. And boy they do. The extent to which entrepreneurs ally with government officials is the extent to which the system becomes less capitalist, less liberal, and more corrupted by degree.

But what beast does this corruption spawn?

Intervention gives rise to either cronyism or fascism. The difference between cronyism and fascism lies only in the authorities’ objectives. Cronyism is designed to shore up the incumbency of individual politicians. Fascism is more about directing the interests of corporations to authority’s ends on behalf of the so-called national interest, and cronies benefit anyway.

Author David Boaz points out this inconvenient truth when he writes:

On May 7, 1933, just two months after the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New York Times reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote that the atmosphere in Washington was “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan.… America today literally asks for orders.” The Roosevelt administration, she added, “envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy.”

Don’t today’s progressives envisage a federation of industry, labor, and government?

Ain’t it funny that those who are so quick to call others fascist are in full-throated support of authorities directing corporations to do the state’s bidding? Like Keynes, they justify this vaguely in terms of the “national interest” not the rights of the individual. And Mussolini agrees:

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts The rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. And if liberty is to he the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State.

Whether that means threatening social media companies to silence dissent, mandating experimental vaccine products, or rewarding banks for their risky behavior, the real fascists get off scot-free.

If that weren’t enough:

Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.

Thus, we can no longer allow people to blame capitalism for fascism, particularly when unwitting fascists advocate for these policies. So when it comes to playing the blame game for the next major crisis, we have to call a spade a spade—courageously, consistently, and unrelentingly.

A More Perfect Capitalism

But first, we need to identify some of the main features of capitalism.

1. Requires private ownership of the means of production, including extensive property rights in land, capital, and profits.
2. Involves patterns of production and trade in which any collaborative venture (however organized) earns revenues in excess of costs due solely to customers’ willingness to pay.
3. Includes legal agreements that allow founders, workers, and investors to cooperate in service of a mission. (Such agreements can include worker cooperatives.)
4. Operates according to agreements between or among parties to exchanges.
5. Includes arbitration systems based on the Common Law, in which parties settle disputes where injured parties can be made whole.

Capitalism also means a highly competitive system defined by the absence of state intervention.

6. To the extent they exist at all, governments should function as referees neither subsidizing nor taxing organizations.
7. To the extent they exist at all, governments leave individuals to pursue their associations freely, so long as those associations are peaceful.
8. To the extent that government or private courts making rulings, their rulings should be restricted to adjudicating frictions between parties, identifying sources of injury or contract violation, and determining/enforcing fair recompense.
9. To the extent state regulations exist, these become the product of impartial courts who make decisions based on evidence and case law, not statutes nor fiat regulations.
10. To the extent state-sanctioned central banks exist, their role should be limited to ensuring sound and relatively stable money.

Some will argue that the above list is too Utopian–that is, it’s not politically feasible to discard the topheavy layers of our intrusive bureaucracies and their corporate supplicants. That might be true but that also means the system we have ain’t capitalist.

That’s Not Capitalism

Remember, interventionists will blame capitalism for the problems of interventionism, especially if the intervention involves corporations.

• When legislators shut down businesses for months based on COVID histrionics and then pass five pork-laden “emergency” spending bills with money the government doesn’t have, none of that has to do with capitalism.
• When Marxist professors blame capitalism for inflation, we have to remind them that money printing causes inflation, which is not a feature of capitalism per se. Instead, central banking is the government’s legal counterfeiting scheme that benefits the powerful.
• When Central Banks engage in quantitative easing, interest rate manipulations, capital controls, or yield curve inversions, that’s not capitalism. It’s been progressive technocracy since 1913.
• When a President first tightens the screws on domestic energy production – all while blaming our enemies for “price hikes” compounded by the economic sanctions he ordered – that’s not capitalism. (Note Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is not capitalism either.)
• When a President fails to reform a government sanctioned and subsidized student loan scheme, but forgives the debts of those adults who freely chose to avail themselves of that scheme (sending the rest of us the bill), that’s not capitalism.

The problems we must now face flow from politicians and central bankers trying to stick their (visible) hands into our economic ecosystems, which they refer to as interventionism—i.e.managing the mixed economy. (Keynesianism will also do.)

“These two systems, capitalism and collectivism,” writes economist Sandy Ikeda, “organized according to two diametrically opposite principles — spontaneous order and deliberate design — mix as well as oil and water.”

No wonder it’s hard for people to disentangle market failure from government failure.

“Trying to blend them,” adds Ikeda, “produces chaos because it’s impossible to combine two contradictory organizing principles into a coherent system.”

You can see how easy it is to blame the failures of the mixed economy on capitalism. Indeed, to the extent “neoliberalism” is the incoherent doctrine of the mixed economy, we might one day find common cause with those who bandy that term about unreflectively.

But I doubt it.

Most of what passes for commentary about economics today amounts to bleating from herds who think that the cure for every social ill is to tax more resources from the billionaires or the corporations. But as our friend, economist Antony Davies, reminds us,

The 550 U.S. billionaires together are worth $2.5 trillion. If we confiscated 100% of their wealth, we’d raise enough to run the federal government for less than eight months. (Updated figures might get you to nine months, says Politifact.)

Of course, if the state succeeded in such confiscation, it would be catastrophic.

Government Debt and Intervention

The problem isn’t capitalism. The problem isn’t greed per se–or maybe it is. Too many people want to live at others’ expense or charge the national credit card, which – at 138 percent of GDP plus unfunded liabilities – is maxed out.

So when it comes to laying blame, we have to start getting more specific. Yes, there are bad individual actors, bad corporate actors, and bad government actors. But instead of blaming entrepreneurial capitalism, which is just a system for people sustainably to serve each other, it’s time to blame those who keep intervening to “save capitalism” or those who keep trying to save us from capitalism. And it’s time to blame those whose failures of imagination always end up in one of interventionism’s ideological ditches: regulation or redistribution.

The trouble with interventionism is that you can’t have it in any form without bundling in some measure of fascism. That’s because these two ideologies are kissing cousins. Unless the people regulate the government and redistribute its power back to individuals, we will lurch from crisis to crisis that interventions cause. And our fascist/socialist enemies will just double down.

Article cross-posted from AIER.

It is believed that the reasoning of the crabs not letting any others escape the bucket can be best described as “if I can’t have it, neither can you.” Even if this results in them being turned into crab soup, the crabs will remain in the bucket.  It’s where we could the term “crab mentality.”

Like crabs, anti-capitalists desire to keep society inside the bucket, even if that leads to disastrous ends. This can be seen through large scale socialist projects, such as that of the Soviet Union or Maoist China which were hell-bent on punishing the rich, even if that meant the poor had to suffer along with them. In addition, personal accomplishment and profit are punished under socialist regimes as it goes against collectivism and worker solidarity. It doesn’t matter if their five-year plans lead to food shortages and economic inefficiency. As long as everyone is inside the bucket, the crabs can all suffer together.

This mentality can also be seen through modern day anti-capitalists on a personal scale. Capitalism enables those who are skilful and hardworking to rise, leaving it up to the individual to decide their own fate.

As Ludwig von Mises states in The Anti-Capitalist Mentality:

“The sway of the principle, to each according to his accomplishments, does not allow of any excuse for personal shortcomings. Everybody knows very well that there are people like him who succeeded where he himself failed. Everybody knows that many from whom he envies are self-made men who started. And, much worse, he knows that all other people know it too. He reads in the eyes of his wife and children the silent reproach: “Why have you not been smarter?” He sees how people admire those who have been more successful than he and look with contempt or pity on his failure.

This individualism leads to personal responsibility, and those who are unable to accept personal responsibility try to blame others for their personal failures. Perhaps the crab is worried that he’d be unable to leave the bucket even if he tried. Perhaps he’s resentful that the other crab thought to leave the bucket before him. He projects his insecurities and grows jealous of anyone who does well. Instead of personal reflection on how to achieve his goals, the anti-capitalist pulls everyone else down. He does this by assuming anyone successful has achieved it through wickedness and trickery. He frames making a profit as selfishness. He advocates for policies to drag the successful down for the sake of equality.

This can be seen most notably through the income tax, which takes money away from productive members of society and uses it to fund the welfare state. This punishes successful people in order to provide services and funds for people who did not earn the wealth themselves.

Why should somebody who works hard to lift themselves outside of the bucket be pushed back down because others are unable to do the same? Anti-capitalists spend their time searching for excuses that these people aren’t deserving of their income, whether that be landlords, bankers, or business owners. They love to smear those who contribute to society more than them.

Through the crab mentality, anti-capitalists are keen to use the state to drag the successful down by advocating for encroaching legislation that punishes them. They sneer at those who want to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and they promote dependence on the welfare state.

The problem is, by removing the incentive to work hard, they handicap productivity and innovation, and the whole country suffers as a result.

Unfortunately, there’s no happy ending for the crabs who stay in the bucket.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.