politics – Page 95

Is Being A Worker in 2019 Preferable To Chattel Slavery?

The school system and the mainstream media put a lot of effort into convincing us to be grateful for our lot. An entire apparatus of propaganda is devoted to pre-emptively quell rebellious impulses, so that our ruling classes can go about their business unaffected. As this essay will discuss, the overall quality of the lives of many of us today may be lower than that of chattel slaves in times past.

Although it is not acknowledged today, there are many advantages to being a chattel slave that are not enjoyed by modern workers.

The physical body of the slave is an expensive asset. The joke is that slaves are antique farm equipment, but there’s truth to it. In relative terms, spending on maintenance to keep the bodies of the slaves healthy is one of the largest expenses borne by a plantation owner.

One thing about the modern system of employment is that responsibility for the maintenance of the body of the worker is placed back on the worker. The worker is paid when the slave is not, and this single fact alone is supposed to entail perfect freedom. But this means that the worker themselves have to bear the cost of maintaining their body so that they can continue to work.

In today’s economy, there are many workers who are also homeless. This doesn’t happen under a system of chattel slavery, because under such a system the slaveowner is obliged to provide shelter to his valuable assets, lest they become sick and unproductive. This incentivises the slaveowner to build and provide adequate housing.

The modern employer has no such concerns. The worker themselves is responsible for their housing, and if they have to go homeless then tough shit. The employer doesn’t need to care because, if the homeless worker becomes sick or dies, they can just import some more cheap labour from overseas.

The modern worker is also responsible for their own food and medicine. One might argue that the range of food choices available to the modern worker greatly exceed that available to the slave. Against this, it has to be pointed out that the slave ended up eating more nutritious food on average – as evidenced by lower rates of obesity and diabetes. The slave may not have had a banquet every night, but their owner did have an interest in maintaining their body.

This interest in maintaining the body of the slave, on account of that it was a valuable asset, is why slaves were not beaten and whipped as much as is often supposed. The degree to which this happened would seldom have exceeded the point at which it cost the slaveowner money. A slaveowner isn’t going to beat a slave to death any more than a farmer is to set his own combine harvester on fire. It would just cost too much.

This disinclination to abuse underlings does not apply to the modern working environment. Although corporal punishment is illegal, in practice any amount of psychological abuse is legal. Bullying and threats are considered normal and acceptable ways to establish compliance.

So those who say that a slaveowner wasn’t punished for working a slave to death have to balance that with the fact that a modern employer isn’t punished for working an employee to suicide.

Some might make the argument that the modern worker is free to choose another workplace if they don’t like their arrangement at the current one. At least the modern worker is not bound to one physical area like the slave is.

The reality, however, is that all employers within a country collude to make sure that labour costs never rise above a certain point. This they primarily achieve by lobbying the government to allow, and by propagandising the population to accept, the mass importation of cheap labour. This has the effect of driving labour costs to the floor. Therefore, it doesn’t matter where the worker goes – he can only earn a pittance.

If the worker wants more than a pittance, then fuck him out the door and replace him with an immigrant who lives thirty to a house and who is (ironically) supporting a family in their homeland with their remittances. They will be happy to be earning minimum wage because they’re not trying to raise a family here.

Others might make the argument that the modern worker is free to upskill if they don’t want to take a position where they are treated poorly.

For one thing, this ignores the fact that many people are not capable of upskilling to the middle class on account of that middle-class jobs almost invariably require an IQ of 100 or higher – and only 50% of the population has that.

For another, it ignores the fact that mass immigration has been so intense in recent decades that even wages for skilled labour have been driven to the floor. Realistically, in our modern society, there are owners and the owned – and the owners feel they have the right to staff their properties with whoever they see fit.

A further advantage to being a chattel slave on a plantation is that it was possible for your work to get done. A cotton plantation only has a certain acreage, and the harvest only occurs at certain times. Outside of these times, if there’s no work to do then no work gets done. When it was time to work the days would have been long and arduous, but the shifts wouldn’t have been longer than those worked by oilmen or hospital staff today.

This contrasts with the modern workplace. In the modern workplace, the employer has their systems optimised to squeeze every last second of productivity out of their worker, who works to an industrial schedule. The average workplace is no longer supporting a local industry, but is now part of a globalised network of industries that pillages the local area for the profit of someone who lives on another continent.

Perhaps the foremost advantage to being a chattel slave, however, is that it was possible to have someone to hate. The slaveowner might expect that you will work a certain number of hours for no pay, but at least you could hate him and talk to the other slaves about how terrible and evil he was, and you could expect them to agree.

The modern workplace offers no such simple pleasure. Hating your employer will see you fired nine times out of ten, and even confessing such a hatred to a workmate is liable to see you sacked. You’re expected to absorb psychological abuse and remain grateful for the fact that you’r able to eat.

All in all, the modern industrial worker might have many reasons to feel envious of a chattel slave from bygone times. That kind of life would not have been easy, but at least the suffering inherent to it would be limited by what was technologically possible for the time. The advanced and sophisticated psychological cruelty of the industrial system would not have been a factor.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 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 2017 is also available.

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Could The Government Fund Itself With A Georgist Tax?

One of the great political problems is how to fund a government. Governments cannot realistically be funded by donations, so they have to levy taxes. No matter how you slice it, levying taxes on the people will always create discontentment, and not levying them is often no better. This essay discusses whether Georgism might work for New Zealand.

Georgism is a political philosophy named after American theorist Henry George. The essence of it is the belief that, while people should own the value they produce themselves, economic value derived from land (often including natural resources and natural opportunities) should belong equally to all members of society. Income provided by things that are part of the natural world, and which do not depend on human activity to have value, should be the common property of the citizenry.

Georgist ideas were very popular a century ago, before the rentiers used their ownership of the apparatus of propaganda to persuade the population that government should be funded by taxes on labour and consumption. Since then, the mainstream media has normalised the idea of taxing labour and consumption, mostly by not allowing any discussion of Georgism, and by restricting discussion to a narrow range of pro-capitalist models.

Alt-centrism finds much in common with Georgist ideas. Georgism is a very alt-centrist approach to funding a Government, because it rejects the Establishment, and their focus on taxing labour. Georgism stands directly opposed to the Establishment because it is precisely the Establishment who profits the most heavily from charging rent. In taxing the Establishment the most heavily, Georgism accords with alt-centrism the most closely.

An Australian study suggested that heavy taxation of rents could provide up to 87% of the funding necessary to run the Australian Government. The remaining money could be raised according to a similar philosophy – i.e. it could tax other properties whose value did not depend on human labour inputs (such as oil and mineral royalties), or it could charge fees to use common property such as the electromagnetic spectrum and fishery stocks.

Georgism rejects the idea of levying taxes on economic activity that is the result of a direct human labour input. The idea is that tax on ground rents ought to be enough to fund the Government, and therefore that taxes on income would no longer be necessary. For a modern state like New Zealand, the numbers don’t quite add up, but a Georgist tax could be enough to slash income taxes.

According to the New Zealand Household Expenditure Statistics for 2016, rent costs comprised 31.8% of New Zealand’s total weekly housing costs, which were themselves 25.6% of the total weekly household expenditure of $1,300.

31.8% of 25.6% of $1,300 is $105, the average weekly household rent expenditure. Multiplying this by 52 weeks equals $5,460 every year per household on rent. Multiply this by the 1,500,000 households in New Zealand, and we arrive at a figure of $8,190,000,000 charged in rent money every year. This is just from household rents – it does not include commercial rent, rural rent, mineral royalties, banking license fees or fishing licenses.

The Australian study linked above found that the total resource rents of Australia were over two times the size of just the household rents – in fact, household rents are only about 40% of the total resource rents charged in Australia. $8.2 billion divided by 40% gives us a figure in the ballpark of $20 billion dollars every year.

The total operating costs of the New Zealand Government run at about $76 billion per year, so a Georgist tax of 90% on resource rents wouldn’t cover more than a quarter of this.

However, it’s notable that individual income taxes bring in about $37 billion every year to the New Zealand Treasury. A Georgist tax of 90% on all resource rents would therefore provide the leeway to slash individual income taxes by a half.

Another way to look at it is that New Zealanders pay tax of around $7,400 on income up to $48,000. So if there are 2,500,000 taxpayers in New Zealand, this suggests that a Georgist tax on resource rents in New Zealand could replace all income taxes up to $48,000 per annum.

Eco-Georgism is a variant of Georgism that gives special consideration to the environmental challenges facing humanity this century. This involves heavy emphasis on making polluters pay for the externalities that they introduce to the environment. This would combine the heavy tax on resource rents discussed above with e.g. carbon taxes.

21st century Georgism for New Zealand, then, would be the political philosophy of funding government activity through two primary means: heavy taxes on resource rents, and heavy taxes on all activities that cause environmental destruction.

In particular, ground rents on urban locations, such as city-centre shops and rental apartments, would be taxed the hardest. This is because such economic activity amounts to little more than parasitism. Shifting the burden of taxation to this kind of extortionate activity, and shifting it away from labour, will also make the economy not only more fair, but also more efficient.

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The Cult Logic Behind Modern SJW Culture

A 1981 entry in the Harvard Mental Health Letter describes the basics of cult psychology. Describing cults as “ideological fundamentalism”, the letter by Dr. Robert J Lifton lays out the characteristic qualities of cult psychology and cult formation. As this essay will examine, there are many parallels between cult psychology and the psychology of modern Social Justice Warrior culture.

According to the Lifton paper, “milieu control, mystical manipulation, the demand for purity, a cult of confession, sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over person, and dispensing of existence” are the typical ways that cults seek to control the thoughts of their acolytes. An investigation into the nature of the SJW culture shows that it tries to achieve exactly the same thing.

The desire for milieu control involves “the control of all communication within a given environment”. This is commonly referred to as ‘brainwashing’ because it features the targets being soaked in cult propaganda. Cult members must be exposed to lectures, seminars, news reports, websites and Internet forums that all say the same thing. This milieu control makes it possible to normalise any idea, no matter how crazy.

Modern SJW culture achieves this through Internet echo chambers. Websites such as Reddit commonly ban anyone who thinks differently, which creates communities of people who continually reinforce each other’s prejudices by parroting back to them everything they say – an echo chamber.

This is also achieved through the common cult tactic of excommunication. People who deviate too far from the SJW orthodoxy are shunned, their reputations smeared and their social support networks deliberately destroyed. This creates a fear of wrongthink among cult members. This fear of wrongthink prevents them from disrupting the milieu with novel thoughts.

Many SJWs are astonished to meet a person who believes, for example, in the genetic basis of intelligence. Despite the fact that the science clearly demonstrates that intelligence is mostly hereditary (i.e. genetic), the milieu control of SJW culture means that few of them have ever been exposed to the actual science. Consequently, they respond to people who talk about the science with mockery and abuse.

The demands for purity can be seen in the never-ending escalation of virtue signalling. Inside SJW culture is a constant struggle for social status, where the most pure of heart is thought to rise to the top of the hierarchy. Indeed, the great conceit is that the top of the SJW hierarchy is also the most virtuous, and not the one who most successfully lowered the social status of their competitors by shaming them into submission for wrongthink.

Because the Nazis were nationalists, purity of thought requires that SJWs be globalists. Consequently, any kind of national loyalty must be completely rejected. Open borders must be embraced, because any nationalist sentiment is impure. The strongest bonds of loyalty, in SJW culture, are with those as different to you as possible. This is as true of race and religion as it is of nation.

SJW culture has gone so far in its demands for ideological purity that they even attack people who say it’s okay to be white. Even expressing a will for the continued existence of white people is equated with supremacism and a desire to exterminate other races. This bizarre logic inevitably leads to a purity spiral, and this inevitably leads to cult members becoming unhinged from reality entirely.

Part of this drive for purity is emphasis on confession. This is the origin of the commonly expressed sentiment that “we’re all a little bit racist.” The purpose of saying this is to instigate a moral self-flagellation session. One confesses to harbouring lingering racist sentiments (or other wrongthink) as a kind of public ritual humiliation. These ritual humiliations serve to strengthen the bonds of solidarity among people who have been through them.

The irony, of course, is that the only other people who think like this are other people in the SJW cult. The demands for purity are so stringent that only those with plentiful leisure time to devote to understanding the ins and outs of the etiquette can ever meet the standard. This has led to the absurd outcome of SJWs who virtue signal all day hanging out only with other white and middle-class people.

SJW culture also has its own sacred science. This sacred science has a number of cherished truths that cannot be questioned (lest one get shamed into silence). These cherished truths often run entirely contrary to the established science, because they are determined by expedience, not by truth (here it is meant expedience to globohomo values).

Actual science, which states clearly that intelligence is mostly hereditary and therefore genetic, is rejected. The sacred science of SJW culture dictates that evolution stops as the neck. The great variety of physical environments, although they have clearly led to a great variety of physical expressions, have not led to a commensurate variety of psychological expressions. All human subgroups are precisely identical in every behavioural measure.

Likewise, the sacred science of SJW culture dictates that the mass importation of cheap labour has no impact on the wages of the native working class. Despite the fact that a high schooler could tell you that increasing the supply of cheap labour will reduce the price of said labour – in other words, it will destroy working-class wages and the ability of working-class people to have families – SJWs are happy to support it.

This suicidal masochism is perhaps the defining feature of the cult mentality that possesses the average Social Justice Warrior. In any case, it’s clear from looking at the logic that underlies religious cults that the entirety of SJW culture follows it. Not only do they practice milieu control and possess an obsession with purity, but they also have their own sacred science distinct from mainstream science.

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The Second Tenet of Anarcho-Homicidalism

The Second Tenet of Anarcho-Homicidalism is known as the Iron Tenet. It’s called this because, like the Clay Tenet, it lays down a cold law of human moral reality: you’re allowed to kill anyone trying to enslave you. This essay takes a closer look.

The Iron Tenet is the step after the Clay Tenet. Once it’s established that violence is the basis of self-defence, the next step is to determine when it’s permissible to use such violence. The Iron Tenet lays down the iron-hard law that it’s always morally permissible to kill anyone trying to enslave you – but the flipside is that you’re never allowed to kill anyone not trying to enslave you.

Enslavement is the same thing as death, because to be enslaved is for one’s life to be dependent on the whims of another. Therefore, everyone has the inherent right to take any measures necessary to avoid enslavement – up to, and including, killing the enslaver.

This means that if someone tries to assert a position of authority over you, and you have not consented to it, they are trying to make you their slave, which means that you have the right to kill them.

The beauty of anarcho-homicidalism is that, if everyone agreed to the four tenets of it, abuses of power would be minimised. Tyrants and dictators, knowing themselves to be subject to the Iron Tenet, would be extremely cautious before trying to subjugate a population of anarcho-homicidalists. They would rightly live in fear of the people they tried to rule over.

This flipside to the Iron Tenet, as mentioned above, means that you can’t kill anyone who isn’t in a position of power over you, or who is not trying to assert a position of authority over you. This means that certain actions taken by individuals in the past, although they might bear similarities with legitimate acts of anarcho-homicidalism, are not legitimate themselves.

For instance, killing immigrants simply because they are immigrants cannot be an act of anarcho-homicidalism. The Christchurch mosque shootings did not target people who were trying to assert special authority over anyone. An attempted synagogue shooting this week was also not an act of anarcho-homicidalism.

Anarcho means “without rulers”. Therefore, you cannot homicidalise a person who has not set themselves up as ruler over you. An everyday person at a mosque or synagogue, although they adhere to an evil ideology that seeks domination, is not an enslaver. Following an ideology of hate is not enough, because the correct first course of action in such an instance is to persuade a person to give that ideology up, not to attack them.

There is no doubt, however, that people who follow ideologies of hate are led by enslavers. These leaders might be legitimate targets – politicians who push ideologies of hate are legitimate targets, if anyone is. The typical pleb at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, however, is not a legitimate target for anarcho-homicidalist action, on account of that they don’t rule anything.

The assassination of a politician like Walter Luebcke, on the other hand, may have been a legitimate act.

Luebcke was an outspokenly open-borders politician, and this led to him being killed in protest earlier this year by a German man named Stephen Ernst. The killing of Luebcke was not categorically different to the assassination of British politician Jo Cox, who was also outspoken in favour of open borders. Like Luebcke, Cox was assassinated by a working-class man who stood to lose heavily from further mass immigration.

Both of these politicians died because of their support for open borders.

Supporting open borders is to support genocide. The reason why the subject evokes so much rage is because it’s the same thing as supporting the destruction of the nation, and the identity of the people of that nation. This is a crime under UN law, which defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

Supporting open borders is to support genocide because, without a border, no national, ethnic, racial or religious group can maintain the necessary integrity to continue existing. It’s patently obvious that if a nation such as New Zealand would let ten million immigrants in it would no longer be New Zealand. Therefore, the support of open borders is an act committed with intent to destroy a national group.

Luebcke was trying to enslave the German people by shackling their nation to the designs of the globalist elite, who see Germany as little more than one great car factory to be populated by the cheapest labour possible. Cox was trying to enslave the British people to those same globalist elite, who also have designs for Britain, and who don’t care at all if the British people object to them.

If Brenton Tarrant and Stephan B. had targeted people trying to enslave them, as Stephan Ernst and Thomas Mair did, there would be little cause to criticise their actions. As it is, there is no reason to consider either man different to a common murderer.

The Iron Tenet has so much power because, if its adoption were widespread, it would make any putative enslaver think twice before going through with their evil actions. If politicians understood that certain actions were considered enslavement attempts by their subjects, and that those subjects believed themselves to have the right to kill in order to avoid enslavement, the abuses committed by those politicians would be minimal.

This is why it can be fairly said that anarcho-homicidalism is an ideology of peace.

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