Trickle-Up Economics

Since the 1980s, the solution to all questions of distributive justice has been “trickle-down economics”. The logic is that if we give all the money to the rich, they will spend it, and in doing so the money will trickle-down to the poor.

In actuality, the rich hoard the money, and use it as leverage to further impoverish and enslave the poor. They mostly do this by buying housing that the working class would otherwise have bought, and then charging rent to people who would otherwise have owned property freehold. The term ‘trickle-down economics’ has thereby taken on bad connotations for working-class Western people. It invokes visions of being pissed on.

After almost half a century of trickle-down economics, housing has never been more unaffordable. The average house in New Zealand costs ten times the average household income, and Australia, Britain and Canada are almost as bad. Wealth has become so generationally entrenched that many people now feel they’re living under a feudal-style system – except neo-feudalism has none of the community warmth and connection, nor any protection from a liege. In neofeudalism your village is the planet and your lord is the invisible government.

This outcome is inevitable. The rich already have enough money to meet their own needs. If they get more money, then, there’s nothing to spend it on except assets. These assets will usually draw rent in some form, so the rich end up with even more excess money, which buys more assets, capturing even more of the economy etc. The poor see more and more of their money going on rents; eventually they have to go into debt to meet rent obligations. At that point many of them reason that they have nothing to lose through political revolution.

So far, the existing arrangement in the West has not broken out into violence against the ruling class. This is possibly because Huxley was correct when he predicted the ruling class would have us too drugged up and confused to resist them. It’s possibly because the will to violence is still building. I believe that resentment has built to such a point that mass violence is only avoidable if drastic measures are taken soon. This is a similar situation to the one headed off by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

What I am proposing is a complete and total inversion of trickle-down economics: a universal basic income.

Because trickle-down economics has failed so totally, the reasoning is that the opposite of it is most likely to succeed.

The logic of trickle-up economics is that poor people have to spend everything they get in order to survive. I’ve been poor – you aren’t hoarding any money, because you needed to spend it already yesterday. Any windfall you might have is already earmarked for something else. That money gets spent on goods and services, which are usually sold by companies, which redistribute profits to shareholders. Much as with rent, the poor can’t avoid spending money on goods and services. Thus an upwards flow of money is unavoidable.

Therefore, if money was given to the people at the bottom of society – the poorest – it would “trickle up” to the wealthy again. The assets (not labour) of the wealthy would then be taxed to pay for the next round of universal basic income. The greedy among the wealthy will object to this, with the usual whinging about laziness, but the intelligent among them, being fully aware of the risk of civil war, will understand that only trickle-up economics is sustainable in the long term.

A universal basic income would have the practical advantage of relieving a great deal of personal economic stress. In the past there was much less such stress; a part-time job was often enough to make rent in a major city. Today the average worker works long hours with little left over after rent. With a universal basic income it would be possible to move to areas of cheaper housing and find part-time work, alleviating much of the demand pressure on housing in urban areas.

Other advantages are economic stability and efficiency. Businesses would be able to count on a set level of spending per unit of time from the communities they service. They could then deploy their goods and services to match.

Perhaps the best advantage of this system is that it would dampen the endless whining about who deserves what. The idea that someone “deserves” to eat and someone else doesn’t is antiquated, a remnant of the days when an excess love of leisure threatened the viability of communities. It’s tiresome to hear wealthy Boomers argue they have earned endless free money when young people are stressed to the limit just making ends meet. Let’s simply declare that everyone deserves enough money to meet their basic needs.

Our current system is set up to make the worker dependent on the employer. This is the logic of trickle-down economics, which continues because people continue to accept it. It’s time to stop accepting it, and demand something suited for the 21st Century: trickle-up economics!

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Good Riddance Jim Bolger, You Evil Bastard

I was overjoyed this week by the news that former New Zealand Prime Minister Jim Bolger finally did something decent and died. Predictably, the hagiographies have already begun to flow, the most absurd of which claiming that he was a champion of the underdog. I want to state the viewpoint from the bottom of society.

I was nine years old in 1990, when Bolger came to power. I supported National in that election because their logo was blue, and blue was my favourite colour. Some of my family voted for him because the television told them to. We soon regretted it.

Because my family was working-class, we were impacted heavily by the reforms of the Fourth National Government. My father abandoned our family when I was two, and so my mother had to raise my brother and I on welfare. This wasn’t much. When Bolger and the Fourth National got in, they gave us Ruthanasia. This involved cutting welfare support, including the Family Support, which was the difference between our family making it and not making it. The stress of balancing the household budget drove my mother into a mental institution a few months after the cuts.

The stress of my mother being in a mental institution caused my own latent psychiatric problems to break out as insomnia. This was at age nine and my nervous system is yet to recover at age 44. There are thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of us whose lives were destroyed in such ways by Bolger and his government of neglect.

Bolger personified everything evil about Anglos in general and New Zealand in particular: titanic greed mixed with indifference to human suffering. His Fourth National Government taught me that National voters and supporters get off on cruelty. Like a child pulling the wings off a fly, causing harm to the vulnerable makes them feel powerful, and that’s why they do it and will keep doing it.

I do not hate Bolger completely, however, because he taught me a lot of valuable lessons.

The most valuable lesson I learned was my value to New Zealand’s ruling class, which was nil. The Fourth National Government’s utter indifference to the poor, like we were an inconvenience the country would be better off without, is something I never forgot. Thus I have always done what I felt like in my life, with little consideration for wider society. This has not been criminal, but only because I did not want to be a criminal. Many other people I know from families that got Ruthanasiaed (including my own) became criminals. They, like me, reasoned that they don’t live in a society, just a big snake pit, so why not put their own needs above everyone else’s?

Schooling and media, together with government, create the impression that we’re all on one great team, and therefore sacrifices you make for the collective will be repaid by the collective. But in reality we’re cattle on one great tax farm. The system tolerates you as long as you’re paying in, but, when you need a payout, the system would rather you disappeared.

Many people read about events like World War One, and read about how working-class men were fed to enemy machine guns, and assume that things are different now and that no such thing could happen again. Thanks to Jim Bolger, I am aware that the contempt of the ruling class for the working classes is a permanent fixture of politics. The ruling class truly do hate the poor. They would feed us to machine guns tomorrow if they thought they would profit from it.

Thanks to these lessons, I have not been surprised by the actions of other National Party governments. I was not surprised when John Key slashed funding to mental health care, consigning hundreds of Kiwis to deaths by suicide and thousands of others to lives of despair. Neither was it any shock to me when Judith Collins forced the other National MPs to bloc vote against cannabis law reform at the referendum. I knew that the harm caused to medicinal cannabis users was a feature, not a flaw, of cannabis prohibition. And when Luxon got in and cut benefits under urgency, shovelling billions into the pockets of wealthy landlords, it was about what I expected.

Because of my opposition to mass Third World immigration, I am often pegged as right-wing. But, because of Jim Bolger, I have never voted for a right-wing party in my life, and I never will. I will never even vote for a centrist party that I suspect might support National (such as New Zealand First). I may or may not vote for the mainstream left either, but they aren’t automatically ruled out like National and co. are. The thought that my vote might help another Fourth National Government come to power evokes horror.

There is a wave of dark nihilism passing through New Zealand because of Jim Bolger. Many of the under-40s feel that society doesn’t exist, and that life is every man for himself. These people are essentially psychopathic in orientation, and the blame for this lies on Bolger and the harm he caused to this country. These youngsters have just internalised the selfishness of their elders.

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The Fourth Rejection Of Alternative Centrism

The Fourth Rejection of alternative centrism is the rejection of cruelty. The Fourth Rejection is the contention that an excessive focus on truth leads to cruelty.

The Alternative Right is initially made up of people rejected from the Establishment. This does not mean the peasantry but those unjustly rejected from the ruling class. Those people have peculiarities that those within the Estabishment don’t have. Understanding the Alternative Right is a matter of understanding those peculiarities.

Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction theory is relevant here. The problem with the Establishment (as suggested in the Third Rejection) is that it comes together to keep out elite individuals from non-Establishment families. This corruption leaves those elite individuals with a stark choice: submit to the corruption – and accept a lesser place – or revolution.

This is a brutal choice which leads to much resentment and bitterness, which leads to cruelty. This cruelty is magnified by the desire to crack down on perceived degeneracy, as per the Third Rejection. The Alternative Right sees an Establishment that has failed to impose a correct order. The resulting disorder threatens the viability of society. Thus it becomes a moral imperative to overthrow that old order and bring in a new, healthy one. Cruelty is justified under the “if you want to make an omlette, you’ve got to break some eggs” principle.

In Alternative Right discourse one sees a lot of extremist rhetoric. “Gas the Jews” is a common sentiment. So are sentiments about killing all non-whites. These sentiments might seem cruel, but those who express them are simply reflecting the cruelty of the political Establishment in rejecting people who it would have accommodated, had it not been corrupt. Like so many who have suffered cruelty, the Alternative Right has lost inhibitions against inflicting it themselves.

This tendency towards excessive cruelty is what is rejected in the Fourth Rejection.

The increased level of antipathy towards their enemies is the principal difference between the mentality of the Establishment Left and the Alternative Right. The main enemy of the Establishment Left are those born into privilege; the main enemy of the Establishment Right are traitors. If the Establishment Left are a revolution of the middle class, who are looking for accommodation, the Alternative Right are a revolution of the excess ruling class, who are looking to replace the existing ruling class entirely. Thus the revolution of the Alternative Right is more vicious.

Alternative Centrism accepts, as per the Fourth Acceptance, that truth is a virtue. Truth is always good, but there are cases where people are just not ready for it. Exposure to truths that a person is not ready for leads to trauma.

In the same way that it’s (kind of) cruel to tell a child that Santa Claus isn’t real, and it’s cruel to expose children to graphic gore and pornography, it’s also cruel to expose some adults to certain ideas about death or the ruthlessness of the control system. A person who isn’t fully self-realised might not have the psychological fortitude to withstand a blackpill of such magnitude. The Fourth Rejection rejects the paranoid and depressed aspects of truth-seeking, and the dark energies associated with those aspects. It is cruel to inflict such energies on people when they are not prepared or ready for them.

The search for truth needs an element of compassion or it fixates on material truths at the expense of spiritual ones. Dispassionate truth-seeking may have given us the Internet and the HIMARS rocket artillery system. But it also gave us the nihilism of positivism and a centibillion-dollar pharmaceutical apparatus that mostly exists to numb people to the horror of their own spiritual ignorance (of course this is widely denied). To seek truth without compassion is robotic, computer-like, inhuman.

The Fourth Rejection, then, in rejecting the uncompassionate nature of an excess focus on truth, also reflects the First Rejection of excess order. Both rejections are movements away from the excess masculine and towards the feminine.

The Alternative Right speaks the truth about human biodiversity, especially regarding race and IQ. This truth – that some human populations have significantly lower IQs than others for mostly genetic reasons – is a particularly cruel one for those lower IQ populations. It might be true that the facts of this biodiversity ought to inform immigration policy. But it might also be true that egregious trumpeting of these facts is cruel. No-one likes to hear they’re from a dumb race.

The Alternative Right also speaks the truth about immigration in general and the Muslim rape gangs in Europe in particular. The Western Establishment has told lies for decades about the prevalence of sex crimes by immigrants from primarily Muslim and African countries. Although speaking the truth here is good, there is a cruelty inherent in the obsessive focus on these crimes. It reflects a will to blackpill others, which is a form of sadism.

A degree of xenophobia is natural. It’s a tough world and a there’s lot of evil in it. But the “kill all outsiders” mentality of some of the Alternative Right is unhelpful. The Alternative Right will read Karl Schmitt and come to apply the friend-enemy distinction, but the more one dwells on this distinction the more enemies one will create. Moreover, consideration of those outside the immediate in-group will build allyship, and any successful political movement will have to make as many allies as possible.

A sophisticated approach to outsiders is to lead with mild friendliness, and then to increase or decrease this friendliness depending on whether it’s reciprocated. This is the Alternative Centrist approach.

The Alternative Right also has the Establishment Right’s mindset of imposing order on others whether those others like it or not. Thus they have the same tendency to create enemies. The cruelty of the Alternative Right makes them particularly indifferent to the suffering of those disadvantaged by any proposed new order. It might be possible to appeal to the magnanimous side of the Establishment Right. But the Alternative Right are too lean and hungry to be magnanimous.

There is a sense in which the Alternative Right is an attempt to re-establish the pre-civilisational natural order, the civilised order having become corrupt and degenerate. Absent an inherited order, people will manifest an instinctual order. This is why the Alternative Right so readily leads to gangs and criminality, as well as to active clubs. This manifestation explains much of the attitude and approach of the Alternative Right: it’s easy to imagine them as pack hunters on the prehistoric savannah.

It might be pointed out that the Establishment Right is also very cruel. The difference is that the Establishment Right has to be cruel in order to impose the order necessary for society to exist. The cruelty of the Alternative Right, by contrast, is often egregious. There is something adult about the cruelty of the Establishment Right and something juvenile about the cruelty of the Alternative Right.

In rejecting cruelty, the alternative centrist foreshadows the importance of justice, and therefore foreshadows the rise of the Alternative Left.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms! https://linktr.ee/vjmpublishing
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books! https://www.amazon.com/author/vincemcleod

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

The Fourth Acceptance Of Alternative Centrism

The Fourth Acceptance of alternative centrism is the acceptance that the Alternative Right is correct when they speak of the importance of truth.

It’s a broadly accepted truism that truth is the first casualty of war. This is because a propaganda campaign begins as soon as any war does; all sides in the war are forced to do propaganda to maintain morale, to attract allies, and to demoralise the enemy.

The process described in the previous six chapters of this book is war by any other name. The three positions of the Establishment jostle for relative control over the masses, fighting and killing each other to win that control. Eventually they realise that they have more in common with each other than with the masses. So the fulcrum of war shifts: from one of the Establishment against itself, to one of the Establishment against their own people. This is the beginning of totalitarianism.

The process described in the previous six chapters of this book also explains why there are so many lies in modern politics. If the Establishment is waging a war against the people it is ruling over, it follows logically that they are also lying to them. And it does.

The Establishment tells all kinds of lies in shoring up its position in opposition to those they rule over. Everything from the divine right of kings to the need for mass digital surveillance is a justification, however flimsy, of Establishment rule. But all of these narratives serve one singular purpose: to entrench the power of the Establishment at the expense of everyone else.

After a while, the people who have been shut out of the Establishment come together. In the same way that the different people within the Establishment realise they have more in common with each other, so too do the people shut out of the Establishment. Those initially shut out of the Establishment are usually motivated by anger at having been lied to. Hence the Fourth Acceptance of Alternative Centrism is the acceptance of the importance of truth.

For obvious reasons, the Establishment doesn’t admit that it’s waging a war against its own people. But the people figure it out anyway. Perhaps the best ever exposition of the war of the political establishment against its own people is 1984. Orwell’s magnum opus has variously been mistaken as a critique of Communism or Nazism in particular. In truth, it’s a critique of totalitarianism is general.

In 1984, the resistance against Big Brother is similar to the Alternative Right in reality. They are courageous, free-thinking desperadoes. In 1984, nothing happens: O’Brien helps break up any resistance before it can get anywhere. In reality, a variety of outcomes are possible (although it must be noted that most revolutions fail; the Establishment starts with the strongest position and usually wins).

In any case, 1984 describes how the Establishment lies to people about almost everything, reasoning that the more ignorant the people are, the stronger the position of the Establishment. ‘Ignorance Is Strength’ is one of the three mottos of Big Brother. The more lies the Establishment can tell the people, the more confused and off-balance those people are, and the less able to get the sure footing needed to mount a resistance.

The initial formation of the Alternative Right is a reaction against this cathedral of lies.

The Alternative Right is more masculine than the other positions for a variety of reasons. For one, the right itself is more masculine. Order is primarily a male concern. For another, it’s the masculine which is the revolutionary. The feminine tends to be passive and more accepting of tyranny (as has been noted as far back as Aristotle). Yet another reason is that those who stand up against the Establishment are hated, at least initially. So those who first rise up have to be willing to endure hate.

These reasons are why the Alternative Right today is characterised by active clubs. Those reacting to the failure of the Establishment to impose an acceptable order feel the duty to impose that order themselves. Thus they seek to recreate what the Establishment Right should ideally have been: masculine, in the sense of possessing both the ability and the will to impose order upon chaos. The paramilitary nature of active clubs shows they are alternative power structures in embryonic form.

This masculinity is also why the Alternative Right is obsessed with degeneracy, the concept of degeneracy and correcting popular moral philosophy. They aren’t merely looking to reimpose a lost physical order, but also a lost spiritual one. Thus they are metaphysically masculine as well as physically. This quality of masculinity, taken to excess, is why the Fourth Rejection arises.

The metaphysical masculinity is why the Alternative Right has a deep appreciation for occultists, wizards, prophets and knowledge-workers of all kinds. Anyone who seeks the truth with such fervour that they must pay a price is considered a hero. Socrates and Odin are two prime examples here. Getting killed by the Establishment for speaking the truth, as Socrates did, is ultimate.

If the First Acceptance is about the importance of order, the Alternative Right is the reaction to what they consider disorder. The Alternative Right considers that the Establishment is in dereliction of duty, in that they have failed to impose an acceptable level of order. In this sense, the Alternative Right is as much a reaction to the chaos of the Establishment Left as the Establishment Centre is.

Questions of order are why immigration is such a particular sticking point. The most elementary form of order, on the national level, is the national border. The globalist establishment of the West today is running a policy akin to open borders. This has convinced the Alternative Right (primarily) that the elementary order is now lost, which inspires much of their rage. The lies told to maintain open borders policies are particularly infuriating to the Alternative Right, hence why the Alternative Right prioritises truth so highly.

In the revolutionary sense, the Alternative Right has a lot in common with the Establishment Left. This reflects a paradox within both the Alternative Right and Alternative Left: they freely adopt parts of the opposite if they feel like it (a process that leads inexorably to Alternative Centrism). The reason for the shared commonalities is that both the Establishment Left and the Alternative Right are, in a sense, reactions to the Establishment Right. The difference is in the proposed solution: the Establishment Left proposes chaos, the Alternative Right proposes a new form of order.

The Alternative Right also targets many of the same supporters as the Establishment Left: the young revolutionary who wants action and excitement. The “Beefsteak Nazi” phenomenon is a classic example of this.

The Alternative Right doesn’t respect the Establishment Left though, seeing them as dishonest failures who sold out. They see the Establishment Left as claiming to represent the working class, but actually representing a degenerate middle class. The Alternative Right aspires not to wage class warfare, but to be a new aristocracy. They are not ashamed of this and are honest about it.

The uncompromising emphasis on truth, to the exclusion of other considerations, can seem cruel to those of the other positions. Thus, as with the other Acceptances, the Fourth Acceptance leads to the Fourth Rejection. The neo-masculinity of the Alternative Right is countered by the neo-femininity of the Alternative Left.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms! https://linktr.ee/vjmpublishing
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books! https://www.amazon.com/author/vincemcleod

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!