Ex-Soviet Economist on Comrade Hillary
A Stark Choice
By Yuri N. Maltsev
June 25, 2016
Today we have two presumptive candidates and it is obvious to anyone with the ability to think clearly that Trump’s opportunity cost is Hillary. It is not Gary Johnson or any other candidate.
Whether you dislike his style, his arrogance, or whatever else you cannot stomach about him, it is time to realize that the choice is as stark as the choice between the Whites and the Reds in Russia in 1917. As bad as you think that the last Russian Czar Nicholas II, Chiang Kai-shek of China, or Fulgencio Batista of Cuba were, they were all “humanists” in comparison to the socialist bloodbaths that succeeded them.
The nightmarish nature of socialism was well exposed by Ludwig von Mises:
“A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.”
Obama’s tenure in the White House proves every word of this analysis. “The disintegration of society” is unprecedented, with the government undermining the basis of the market economy and limiting our human rights, with the property rights being already in the crosshairs of our socialist masters. To solidify their grip on society our central planners manufacture all kinds of imaginary crises from climate change to white privilege and Christian bigotry. They are succeeding in pitting Americans against each other on the basis of class, gender, skin pigmentation, religion, sexual preferences and many other false “identifiers”.
For any student of history, it should be obvious that today we have an anti-American, anti-Constitutionalist, and anti-capitalist Hillary Clinton facing a businessman who has created value all his life. It is amazing for me to hear from some well-known economists, who claim to belong to the Austrian school of economics, that Trump has never created any value and is just a speculator! A speculator does not create value? I hope that they do not teach this Leninist garbage in their economics classes. How about Trump Towers and other real estate developments? Even Marx would approve these investments as highly productive.
It is also alarming that many of our fellow libertarians are displaying almost animalistic hatred towards Trump and are eagerly repeating whatever they hear about him on NPR or PBS. The anti-capitalist mentality honed by our educational system has become so pervasive that many conservatives and libertarians are almost exploding with the class hatred and social envy they have picked up from the social and print media.
In the referendum over whether to “leave” or “remain” in the European Union, British voters have chosen to leave. Only Donald Trump had backed the campaign to leave. The British defied not only the leaders of the British ruling duopoly, Cameron, and Corbyn but also Barack Obama, who had urged Britain to “remain” in the EU. Hillary Clinton also recommended that Britain should remain in. Trump predicted that leaving the EU would not put Britain at the “back of the queue,” and said: “I think if I were from Britain I would probably want to go back to a different system.”
The Brexit results also showed that the trend of opinion polls was wrong as these showed “Remain” in the lead. As many times before, public opinion polls proved to be a propaganda device—not telling us what people think but rather what we should think. According to the Independent, “When Basildon [a working-class suburb of London] yielded 69 per cent for Leave, it was even louder. So loud, who could barely hear the TV, relaying the chants from the crowds of ‘$#@! off Brussels.’ The United Kingdom Independence Party’s Nigel Farage almost echoed Trump: “We will get our country back, we will get our independence back and we will get our borders back.”
Trump is far from being an angel. He says what he thinks and the whole two-party duopoly is against him.
House Speaker Ryan, called Trump’s charge that the judge is biased toward him because of his Mexican origin “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” Where was Ryan when Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor told us that: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life”? I do disagree with both Trump and Sotomayor but I do not see anything “racist” in their comments.
It sounds like Paul Ryan’s “textbook” is similar to the ones that we were brainwashed with in the government schools of the USSR. Trump’s suggested a moratorium on Muslim immigration (until the government can vet immigrants well enough to sort out the terrorists) was immediately blasted by both parties as “racist” as if Islam were a race rather than a religion. Natsu Taylor Saito, a professor of law at Georgia State University told HuffPost that Trump’s proposal mirrored the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. “I don’t think this is significantly different,” Saito said. “It is targeting people on the basis of religion rather than national origin.
But we all know that this particular targeting of Muslims is highly racialized and tied to national origins. So I think it’s very similar.”
No “we all” do not know these progressive dogmas and have difficulties in understanding comrade Saito’s Newspeak jargon of this proposed measure being “highly racialized.”
Another vital issue is our judicial system. Hillary will appoint Obama or Sanders or someone even worse to the Supreme Court and make it another “engine for change”. It was just one vote that preserved the Second Amendment in 1996. Scalia departed and Thomas is planning to retire; guess how she will pack the court. Roberts is not a friend of liberty—just a second coming of Souter.
For libertarians, it should be a pretty easy choice—Trump is for the gold standard, for low taxes, for a non-interventionist foreign policy; he is also against what he calls “the manufactured climate change hoax” and government broadcasting. He has promised to repeal Obamacare, keep the Second Amendment intact, and appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court—his list of eleven candidates is pretty impressive.
Trump’s anti-free trade stand is similar to Hillary’s, but unlike her, he is not a hostage of the unions.
Trump’s campaign package comes in a somewhat unattractive wrapping for many people, but the content is way more important than form. It is a stark choice between freedom and socialist slavery.
The Best of Yuri N. Maltsev
Yuri N. Maltsev, senior fellow of the Mises Institute, worked as an economist on Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reform team before defecting to the United States. He is the editor of Requiem for Marx. He teaches economics at Carthage College.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/...mrade-hillary/
Copyright © 2016 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are provided.
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