Clown World Chronicles: What is 'Neoliberalism'?

Clown World Chronicles: What is ‘Neoliberalism’?

In the financial sections of the world’s news websites, the reader often finds reference to “neoliberalism” or even “the prevailing neoliberal paradigm.” This is something so all-pervading that its necessity is taken for granted. It’s very important to understand neoliberalism, because the neoliberal mindset is the one in which things get done. This chapter explains.

In short, neoliberalism is the prevailing economic paradigm of Clown World.

The ‘neo-‘ prefix denotes that this is not the first time we have lived under this economic paradigm, and the ‘liberal’ root means that this economic paradigm is characterised by a lack of regulation of business activities. The liberty in question isn’t your liberty from coercion by capital; it’s the liberty of capital to coerce you.

As anyone who has played a game of Monopoly will be aware, the problem with economic liberalism is that it ends up with massive inequality. Absent a system of wealth redistribution, the ability of landowners to charge rent means that they eventually end up with all the money. Their ever-increasing ownership of capital leads to ever-increasing rents until the masses are as impoverished as any medieval peasant.

In the real world, economic liberalism led to the Great Crash of 1929, and from there to the Great Depression. This always happens under liberalism, because once all the money ends up in a few hands then no-one but them have any spending power. One no-one has any spending power, the economy slows down, workers get laid off, and recession begins.

The original liberalism was ended by American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who brought in the “New Deal“. This was a drastic reorganisation of the economic system, intended to reverse all the advantages accrued by what Theodore Roosevelt had earlier called “the representatives of predatory wealth.” Decried as both Fascism and Communism by FDR’s opponents, the New Deal ended the Great Depression in America.

The Great Depression ended much more violently in Europe. The anger and paranoia brought about by the terrible economic conditions saw many people cast about for a scapegoat. This desire to find someone to blame for the desperate problems made it possible for an opportunist like Adolf Hitler to come to power, and the consequences of that are known to all.

After World War II, Western politicians became extremely cautious about allowing a return of the economic conditions that they believed were the ultimate cause for the bloodshed. Absent extreme and desperate poverty, they reasoned, the people would have no cause to give their power to a supremacist who wanted to conquer their neighbour.

As a result, those politicians allowed the workers to get a fair deal. Instead of all the economic power being held by a few people who ruled the others like kings, it was widely distributed across the population. This egalitarian economic arrangement continued for almost 40 years. This time period encompassed some great decades – the 50s, 60s and 70s allowed for freedom and creative expression to flourish all over the West.

It was too good to last.

Neoliberalism arose in the early 1980s, after the ruling class realised that it had been 40 years since the end of World War II, and the hard-won lessons about solidarity had been forgotten. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, no less opportunistically than Hitler himself, came to power promising a shake-up of the existing economic paradigm. Their recipe for greatness was low taxes, low welfare and free markets.

The influence of America and Britain is such that practically the entire Western World is now neoliberal. Arse-licking dogs like David Lange forced neoliberalism on an unsuspecting New Zealand public after 1984, laying the economic foundations for the Clown World era. The demented Ruth Richardson piled on the pain by slashing the Family Support allowance. Helen Clark opened the immigration floodgates and John Key kept them open.

This obsession with money, at the expense of society itself, led us to here. Neoliberalism is to consume, mindlessly and without end. All higher culture and all spiritual traditions are to be destroyed because they prevent people from consuming. The borders must be thrown open because every new immigrant – regardless of what crimes they commit – is a new consumer.

By 2020, neoliberalism has, much like the original liberalism, led to the concentration of wealth in extremely few hands. Although society has become shittier in a great many ways, this increasing shitness has brought with it vast profit potential, and those profiting greatly are putting enormous energy into perpetuating the system. This combination of increasing diversity and increasing inequality is one of the major causes of Clown World phenomena.

All over the West, economic desperation is now standard for the youth. A study showed that the average wage in New Zealand has less than 40% of the house-buying power that it had 26 years ago. The youth suicide rate is skyrocketing, and the individual despair felt by these unfortunates is starting to become a generational malaise.

Much like the original liberalism, neoliberalism has set the scene for totalitarian extremists to come to power in the West. Although Donald Trump isn’t the one, a new Hitler could easily take advantage of the worsening economic conditions to channel the people’s desperation into another paroxysm of violence. The Weimar Republic was the original Clown World, and our current iteration of it could end in a similar fashion.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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How To Get Rid Of The 5% Threshold Without Empowering Extremists

New Zealand runs elections under a Mixed Member Proportional system, meaning that parties contesting the election win a number of seats in Parliament proportional to how many votes they receive. This system has advantages and disadvantages, one of the latter being that it facilitates extremists coming to Parliament. Various methods have been adopted to counter this, such as a 5% threshold – this essay suggests a more elegant solution.

As John F Kennedy warned us, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” Although it’s never admitted, the purpose of the democratic system is to pre-empt the violence that inevitably follows when people are not given a say in their own destiny. The problem with totalitarianism is that people resent it, and if they resent it enough they end up killing their rulers.

Democracy is a charade in which the ruling class pretends to take the opinion of the working classes seriously, in exchange for a dampening of revolutionary sentiments among those working classes. If the ruling class can successfully placate the workers, then they can continue to do as they please. If they cannot, then resentment will arise, and this will eventually lead to radical extremism.

Kennedy might have warned us that a 5% threshold to get into the New Zealand Parliament creates a number of problems.

It is set so high that no new party has ever crossed it. In 24 years of MMP elections, the only parties to achieve representation apart from National and Labour were parties that broke away from them (New Zealand First and United Future from National, ACT from Labour, the Greens from the Alliance that itself broke from Labour).

The ruling class considers this a win, but the people consider it a great loss. It has meant that no opinion, other than the mainstream ones, can find expression in Parliament. Only those opinions that have been so thoroughly vetted and curated by the Establishment that they pose no threat are allowed into the House of Representatives. This does little to soothe the people’s feelings of frustration.

It could be argued that having a 5% threshold leads directly to outcomes like the Christchurch mosque shootings. The mass immigration of the last half a century has caused immense resentment among the many who have lost out from it, but their voices are silenced by a system that profits heavily from the cheap labour. Sentiments like these are liable to boil over into xenophobic violence on occasion – a pattern that has been seen all around the world.

There is a possible solution to these tensions – one that has never previously been tried. This is to firstly scrap the 5% threshold, and secondly for each voter to have three votes instead of one. Two of the votes can be cast for any candidate or party, much like the current system, but one vote can only be cast against a candidate or party. This anti-vote cancels out one of someone else’s votes for that candidate or party.

Having two positive votes, one negative vote and no threshold means that (in theory) small parties who do not engender hatred can still achieve representation in Parliament, while the extremists who do engender hatred get eliminated by the negative votes.

Parties like the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, Social Credit, or The Opportunities Party, who have unfashionable ideas but who are not malevolent or extremist, ought to be able to take some seats in Parliament. The ideas that these parties represent are long overdue for serious consideration, but the 5% threshold has prevented them from ever being represented.

Other parties like the New Conservatives, who combine popular ideas like ending mass immigration with horrendous human rights abuses like increasing penalties for cannabis use, are the reason for the 5% threshold in the first place. It was precisely to keep aggressive, narcissistic, Bible-thumping morons like them away from power that it was invented.

In practice, we could expect that parties like the New Conservatives would attract a high number of negative votes. If the total number of negative votes for a given party was greater than the total number of positive votes, they would receive no seats in Parliament. Therefore, the ability to cast a negative vote would mean that human rights abusers could be kept out of Parliament, but not at the expense of other small parties who have ideas the country needs to hear.

Then again, Germany has a 5% threshold (our version of MMP was modelled on theirs) and they have six parties currently polling well over that. So it could be argued that the New Zealand political class severely lacks imagination, which is the reason why no party other than Labour, National, Greens or New Zealand First has ever presented a compelling enough case to get over the threshold.

The positive/negative vote model would allow our electoral system to not only measure and weigh the sympathy of the public for the various political platforms, but also to measure and weigh their antipathy for those platforms. The biggest advantage with this suggestion is that platforms that inspired disgust, hatred and contempt would now find themselves judged for that, instead of getting away with it.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Understanding The Psychology Of Police Officers

As New Zealand becomes more and more of a Police state, it has become more important than ever to understand the psychology of our oppressors. If someone’s trying to put you in a cage for offending the ruling class, it’s important to know how they operate. This essay explains.

The easy way to understand the psychology of Police officers is by analogy to dogs.

For those of you who have never observed or studied the behaviour of dogs, the key to understanding canine psychology is understanding the anxiety of hunger. A dog will do absolutely anything, no matter how immoral, to take those feelings of hunger away. It doesn’t care who or what it has to attack or rip to pieces. It’s an animal.

Humans were able to domesticate dogs because we learned that if we provided them with food, they would respond with loyalty. As long as we were able to maintain their food supply, the dogs would attack or rip to pieces anyone or anything we told them to. The dogs happily did this out of gratitude, because we permanently took away their hunger anxiety.

For a Police officer, those feelings of hunger are removed by one level of abstraction. The officers are not fed directly by their masters, but indirectly in the form of wages. Nevertheless, the same basic logic applies. On account of the fear of hunger, the Police officer will obey any order from its master, no matter how immoral, in exchange for their wage.

Many New Zealanders believe that their Police officers are significantly different in mentality to the officers of the Police forces of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. This is a grievous error that betrays a fundamental naivety regarding human nature. The Gestapo and the NKVD may have had a different organisational structure, and their leaders may have subscribed to a different ideology, but the psychology of the basic officer is almost precisely the same.

Gestapo officer, NKVD officer, modern Police officer, feudal-era sheriff, American Gilded Age strikebreaker, it doesn’t matter. There is a niche in human society for people who are willing to commit any atrocity against any other person in exchange for relief from hunger anxiety. This niche will always be exploited by the wealthy and powerful, who need sycophantic abusers in order to force their will on the world.

If you doubt any of this, try to find an example of a Police officer refusing an order on account of that following it would entail a human rights violation. You won’t be able to find a single example of this in the history of New Zealand policing. Even finding a single example in the history of the world is difficult.

For all the hundreds of thousands of Kiwis who have been given criminal convictions for the “crime” of medicinal cannabis, there wasn’t one single Police officer who publicly came out and said that it was wrong to put people in cages over a medicine. Not a single one. There isn’t one currently serving Police officer anywhere in New Zealand on record as opposing the War on Drugs, despite that this War is one of the worst human rights violations since the end of World War II.

In the same way that a dog will never turn on the person that feeds it, Police officers will never go against the people paying their wages. It doesn’t matter what the orders are; it doesn’t matter who they are told to destroy, or how they are told to do it. They will obey any order, no matter how justified it is, and no matter who has to suffer for it.

The fact is that if the New Zealand Police were given orders to put you, the VJM Publishing reader, in a cattle cart to be shipped off to a concentration camp to be gassed to death, they would happily obey those orders. They wouldn’t question them for a second. They would come to your house, politely and calmly ask for your whereabouts (not kicking doors down like in the movies), and then drag you away to be murdered.

Then they would cash in their paycheck, buy some pies for dinner, and go to sleep satisfied with a hard day’s work fighting crime.

All their masters would have to say to get them to liquidate you is “In the wake of March 15, blah blah blah…” and the nation’s Police officers would leap to readiness. The same people who refused to investigate Jimmy Savile or the child rape gangs operating in Rotherham and other places, because they were ordered to stand down, would destroy you in an instant if commanded to do so.

Their masters would simply have to give the order.

As with the Gestapo and NKVD officers, the Police that hauled you away would have the support of all of the authoritarians within the population. For every Police officer eager to smash some wrongthinker, there are a hundred bootlickers eager to rat out their enemies. This Reddit thread provides ample examples of this kind of thinking, and how readily they support their fellow citizens getting smashed (as long as it’s not them!).

So if a Police officer comes to your house to “check your thinking,” you will not be able to reason with them. You will not be able to logically convince them that the Police themselves are more dangerous than any Internet poster. They simply don’t care whether the person giving them orders is evil, or whether those orders are evil. You don’t pay their wage, so you don’t get their loyalty, that’s all it amounts to.

The way to treat them, therefore, is the same way that you would any other dangerous dog that has wandered onto your territory. Don’t show fear or anger, as either might trigger the prey instinct and provoke an attack. Stay calm, speak firmly, and ask if they have a warrant. If they don’t have a warrant, they have no right to be on your property, and you can ask them to leave directly.

Give them as little information about yourself as you can, because anything you say will be passed on to their masters, who will use it to justify more attacks against you. They will tell you that you are not a suspect – this is absolutely false. Give them as little as if you were an enemy soldier being interrogated for intelligence, because in their eyes you are (do note, however, that you are legally obliged to give the Police your name, date of birth and address if asked).

Unfortunately, there is no way to override the loyalty that the Police have towards those who pay them. As is the case with dogs, the only option is to replace the master. The ruling New Zealand Establishment must be replaced with people who have an entirely different mentality to the mindless, money-grubbing rapists who have ruled New Zealand for decades. An approach based on the Sevenfold Conception of Inherent Human Rights would be ideal.

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Would Andrew Yang’s Universal Basic Income Scheme Work In New Zealand?

Of all the candidates for the Democratic nomination for the American Presidential Election later this year, none have the intellectual pedigree of Andrew Yang. From the demented Joe Biden to the snotty Elizabeth Warren to the weakling Bernie Sanders, the Democratic field seems mediocre in comparison. This article discusses one of Yang’s most popular ideas – the Universal Basic Income – and whether it’s applicable to New Zealand.

The maths is hard to escape.

Let’s assume we directly adopt Yang’s proposal of $1,000 per month, no questions asked, for every qualifying adult, with no adjustment made for the exchange rate. This equals $12,000 per year per person over 18. As there are at least 3,667,000 such adults in New Zealand, a UBI would require an expenditure of around $44,000,000,000 per year. This a hefty sum of money – but it’s a good deal for New Zealand if the costs of not having a UBI would be greater.

Yang suggests that he would pay for a UBI mostly by consolidating welfare programs and by introducing a 10% VAT on all goods and services.

Something that many UBI opponents fail to consider is that the introduction of a UBI would obviate the need for almost all benefits, which could then be scrapped. The unemployment benefit, the sickness benefit, the invalid’s benefit, the student allowance and the pension could all be shitcanned in one go. This means all the bureaucracy and expense associated with them would also go.

The Government spent $34,000,000,000 on welfare last year, a figure that includes the cost of running the welfare bureaucracy. The Ministry of Social Development, in a manner of speaking, is the welfare bureaucracy – it employs public servants in over 200 different locations around New Zealand. It’s a titanic institution.

With a UBI, all of those public servants would be made redundant, the bureaucracies that employ them would be wound down, and the 200 locations that currently house them sold off. As the Ministry of Social Development costs $27,000,000,000 a year to run – and that’s only the core expenses – getting rid of all this would provide 70-75% of the required funding for a UBI.

The Government brought in around $22,000,000,000 last year from the Goods and Services Tax, currently set at 15%. The GST is a tax beloved of modern Governments because it’s hard to avoid – pretty much every legitimate business has to account for it. Also, being a consumption tax, it’s all but unavoidable even for the most miserly person. Even if you only spend $200 a week to keep yourself alive, you will pay $30 in GST that week.

America doesn’t have a federal GST, so the introduction of one at 10% would be the equivalent of New Zealand raising ours from 15% to 25%. Most European countries have GST rates of between 20% and 25%, so this would be nothing extraordinary.

It’s not guaranteed that increasing GST to 25% (i.e. a relative increase of 67% compared to the 15% it is now at) would necessarily increase GST take by a proportionate amount. Higher taxes may lead to increasing rates of tax evasion (although, as mentioned above, GST is difficult to avoid).

If it did, however, then 67% of $22,000,000,000 would mean a further $14,700,000,000.

Add this to the sum of $27-34,000,000,000 for obsoleting the Ministry of Social Development, and we have somewhere around $42-48,000,000,000. This is enough to cover the cost of a UBI mentioned above. Once Yang’s other revenue-gathering measures (such as a transaction tax) are accounted for, there might even be enough to grant slightly more than $1,000 per month (which would otherwise only be about as much as the current unemployment benefit).

All of this is before we try to estimate the economic benefits of what would, in practice, amount to a powerful stimulus. The economic benefits of empowering individuals to turn down shitty working conditions, coupled with the physical and mental health savings accrued from sharply reducing the financial stress among the population, could be worth several billions in their own right.

In the end, Andrew Yang’s proposal to get rid of the American welfare bureaucracy could be applied in New Zealand wholesale. We also have the problem that we spend billions of dollars on office staff merely to determine who’s worthy of being allowed to eat and who isn’t. Scrapping the Ministry of Social Development, along with increasing GST by 10%, would allow us to fund a Universal Basic Income for all adult Kiwis.

New Zealand has already embarrassed itself by having less enlightened cannabis laws than 70 other nations. Hopefully we won’t have to wait for 70 other nations to introduce a UBI before the merits of such are understood in New Zealand.

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