economics – VJMP

Where The Millennial Generation Won – And Lost

We oldest Millennials are now in our mid-40s. This affords us enough of a vantage point to look back and see where it went right for our generation, and where it went wrong. Where we won and where we lost.

Economically, our situation was clearly worse than for the Boomers but better than for Gen Z. Looking at the long-term home price to income ratio trend, it can be seen that Boomers enjoyed the best of times when it came to affording the necessities of life. The hardest times are now and the future.

Finding housing is hell for people today, but it wasn’t so bad 20 years ago. At the turn of the Century, when we Millennials were young, housing was plentiful and cheap. Finding good quality student flats was easy. Gen Z have it very hard by contrast. Compared to previous generations, very few of them are married and homeowners by the age of 30. This is the main reason fertility rates are crashing.

The days of the Boomers being able to land a job with a firm handshake are long gone. Millennials, however, have managed to scrape ourselves into a position where most of us are doing okay. For Gen Z the situation is so precarious that mental disorders are surging. The combination of housing uncertainty and precarious employment has made life hellish for the generations after us.

Education has been extremely mixed. On the one hand, the ease of access to higher education is excellent thanks to the Internet in general and YouTube in particular. This has made it possible to receive university-tier lectures without needing to move to a university city.

On the other hand, the education system is now full of Marxists. It’s very difficult to get an education today without also being brainwashed into hating white people. The Long March Through The Institutions has been completed, and now one cannot get into a teaching position without being a Marxist. This has ruined the quality of mainstream education and turned it into propaganda. So that high-quality material, although it can be beamed directly into your house now, is harder to find than in previous eras.

Arguably we Millennials had the best women. Millennial women were post-Christian in the sense they generally didn’t have the same religious hang-ups that Boomer women did. They were up for it – the popular belief was that sex was a fun and positive thing. Millennial women liked having boyfriends. The gender discourse was not yet totally poisoned.

Gen Z seems to have a preponderance of sexually unresponsive women owing to mass antidepressant and antipsychotic uptake. This was only a small problem for Millennials. Gen Z also appears to suffer from a new form of puritanism that suggests sex is immoral. Even approaching a woman is considered offensive by some of these new ascetics. The net result is that love and romance is much less fun for young people today.

Millennials also arguably had the best relation to technology and video games. The Silent Generation had the radio and the cinema. The Boomers had the television. We Millennials got all of that as well as (what seemed like at the time) incredible video games. But we didn’t also suffer the invasive panopticon that Gen Z did.

It was possible for Millennials to party and cut loose without the fear of being recorded that Gen Z currently operates under. We could do dumb stuff without it ending up on the Internet for the whole planet to gape at. Gen Z is imprisoned by technology in a way that we never were; history has truly vindicated Ted Kaczynski.

Entertainment and culture was very good for Millennials. The music may not have been as great as it was for the Boomers, and the literature may have been significantly worse, but the film was as good, and in all cases much better for Millennials than for Gen Z. We mostly had the same drugs as the Boomers, i.e. alcohol and tobacco with the occasional bit of weed. Gen Z has access to a much wider range of recreational drugs and has to deal with much less stigma.

Social cohesion is much worse for Millennials than for Boomers. The Boomers got to grow up in white societies in which politeness and consideration were normal. Their neighbourhoods were mostly safe and full of people who looked out for each other.

The Muttening kicked in for Millennials, who had it much worse than the Boomers. But Gen Z will have it much worse again. Gen Z is growing up in conditions closer to a zoo than to a civilisation. Whether our societies have still avoided collapse by the time Gen Z are pensioners is anyone’s guess. But the early stages of collapse can be seen in white flight from big cities.

When it comes to spirituality, we had it about the same as the Boomers in that we were also pinned by the Clown World Fork of Christianity or atheism. Almost all of us got the mainstream scientific atheist narrative throughout our school years, and many of us came to adulthood watching the Four Horsemen of Atheism, who seemed logical and reasonable. Those of us who suspected there was more to life than materialism usually ended up on psychiatric medication.

Gen Z may live to see a genuine spiritual resurgence, even if we don’t. This is because materialism is no longer satisfying to people in general. There’s now an awareness that materialism correlates with nihilism and thereby with all kinds of degeneracy and misery. This has led to a revival in the perennial spiritual philosophy. Whether this is the much-prophecised dawn of the Age of Aquarius and another Satya Yuga remains to be seen. But the early signs are promising.

The general rule is that Boomers had it the best, Gen Z the worst, and we Millennials somewhere in the middle. This accords with society’s general decline into Clown World. However, Millennials did have it best in some limited ways.

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The Alt Centrist Approach To Taxation

Taxation is symbolic of the imposition of order, and therefore of the Establishment Right. Everywhere there was a king, there was also a taxman. For a political body to operate on a higher level, there have to be taxes, as anyone who doesn’t successfully collectivise gets wiped out by those who do. Thus, the kind of natural selection that operates at the human group level has selected for groups that can successfully levy taxes.

Without taxation, it’s impossible for a political entity to impose the order that it needs to survive at the collective level. Thus the Alternative Centrist has no time for the argument that taxation is theft. This is the narrative of a child who doesn’t want to share its toys. It’s a fundamentally unserious narrative for people who have never thought about things.

Related to this, the Alternative Centrist believes that it’s morally impermissible to tick up a debt today and pass it down to one’s grandchildren. All the bleating about taxation being theft doesn’t mean it’s okay to pass the theft onto one’s descendants. Taxes must be high enough to cover government spending, currently some USD7.1 trillion in the case of America and NZD183 billion in the case of New Zealand.

The Fourth Acceptance of Alternative Centrism emphasises the importance of truth. The truth is that some ways of earning, investing and spending income are more prosocial than others. The Alternative Centrist buys the argument that taxation is a useful tool for modifying behaviour: in fact, it’s almost as good as the law. If some ways of gaining money are borderline criminal, there’s no shame in taxing them hard.

Most people can agree that working a normal job is prosocial. Some jobs are dirty or dangerous and the people doing them are really at the coal face of society. Many jobs are downright depressing, but need to be done. Other jobs are tedious in a manner that is harmful for mental health, but also need to be done. People who do these jobs generally don’t get paid much, so they also ought not to get taxed much.

The usual approach here is a progressive income tax system. The two problems with this are: progressive income tax systems are disorderly (i.e. expensive to administrate) and they tend to hammer the hardest workers.

The Alternative Centrist solves these problems in two ways.

The first is a moderate tax-free threshold, roughly equal to what a person would get on an unemployment benefit (i.e. the minimum one can live on). This is mostly for the sake of order: there is no point in taxing someone to just give the same money back in services that people wouldn’t have needed if taxation hadn’t impoverished them. Most Western countries do this, but it’s pointless and inefficient. Much better to have a tax-free threshold near the amount of money that a person needs to survive.

The second is a flat tax. Flat tax proposals appeal to the Alternative Centrist sense of justice, because they do not penalise hard workers and high achievers. A so-called progressive income tax system penalises working long hours, which is in theory the sort of prosocial activity that ought to be encouraged.

The argument that low taxes (a typically right-wing concern) are pro-freedom (a typically left-wing concern) is rejected as money worshipping. However, the Alternative Centrist approach is to tax labour lightly, on the grounds that it is the most prosocial way to make an income. This is in accordance with the Fifth Acceptance.

The Alternative Centrist approach also suggests that unearned income should be taxed much more than earned income, on the grounds that earning an income is more prosocial than receiving one without earning it.

Unearned income in the form of rent is the most antisocial. The French economist Jean-Baptiste Say observed that “Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery.” The argument that landlords “provide” housing is summarily rejected: it’s like claiming that armed robbers provide health. As the most antisocial legal way to make money, rental income needs to be taxed heavily.

The Georgist solution to rental income is excellent.

Residential and commercial rents in the United States are estimated to bring in USD$2.2 trillion every year. If we assume that the ground rental value of these rents is about a third of that, an 80% tax on those ground rents ought to yield some USD$600 billion p.a.

Existing land tax proposals (c.f. that of New Zealand’s Opportunity Party) often make the error of taxing the family home. The error here is in destroying security of household tenure. If the household is the basis of society, then security of household tenure is the basis of the order of that society. This goes against the First Acceptance. The Alternative Centrist would rather see massive taxes on income from ground rents than taxes on a family home.

Wealth taxes are discouraged by the Alternative Centrist. Unlike land taxes, wealth taxes can be avoided by taking the wealth overseas. Thus they are rejected on the grounds they lead to disorder. Inheritance taxes on family homes are rejected for the same reason: breaking up family homes to pay inheritance taxes is grossly disorderly (inheritance taxes on investment properties would be severe though).

Earning money from investments is still prosocial, but not as much as working. Thus, dividends on stocks and shares would be taxed moderately under an Alternative Centrist system. Capital gains would also be taxed moderately under this logic. To get around the problem of tax havens, the Alternative Centrist approach is to work towards international minimum corporate tax agreements.

Moderate consumption taxes are supported by the Alternative Centrist. Consumption isn’t antisocial, but an excess of it is, and therefore taxes on consumption ought to be moderate. They can also bring in significant amounts of money, lightening the burden on workers. Transaction taxes are also considered good when and if they are workable. The concern is that they can be easily avoided, which is both disorderly and stupid.

Following the reasoning that taxation can guide behaviour, the Alternative Centrist approach to taxation involves heavy vice taxes.

Alcohol taxation brings in USD11 billion for the American federal treasury every year. Texas brings in USD1.6 billion in alcohol taxation annually for a state with around 9% of America’s population, and this revenue is generally considered typical per capita alcohol tax revenue for an American state. Extrapolating that across 50 states, and adding federal revenue, suggests some USD30 billion p.a. is currently gathered through alcohol taxes.

The examples of American states that have already legalised cannabis suggest that every million people can yield USD50 million in annual cannabis taxes. So a population of 350 million could yield over USD17 billion p.a. Taxes on cannabis consumption could bring in NZD490 million p.a. in the case of New Zealand, according to the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research.

Significant gambling wins would also be heavily taxed. There is no need to tax gambling wins below a certain threshold, but professional gamblers would be taxed moderately and those receiving huge windfalls would be taxed heavily.

These vice taxes would not bring in that much money, perhaps 2% of government spending at most. The point of them is primarily to use the tool of taxation as a way of imposing good order upon society; there is more to taxation than just government revenue.

Realistically, even with all of these measures, much of the tax burden will have to fall on workers. Even with AI and mass automation, this is inescapable. On account of the sheer volume of the masses, the bulk of economic activity consists of everyday workers. This will have to be taxed to some extent to keep the national machine running. But, with all the measures outlined above, the tax burden on workers should be minimal.

The general principle is threefold: light taxes on labour, moderate taxes on investment and consumption, heavy taxes on vices and unearned income.

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!
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The Alt Centrist Approach To Welfare

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle introduced the concepts of corrective and distributive justice. Corrective justice is the form that we’re used to: commit a crime, and you get corrected with punishment. Distributive justice relates to who justly gets how much of the boons of society. Aristotle believed that people ought to get rewards and honours in proportion to their contribution to society. He was emphatically not a communist, believing that those who contributed more ought to get more. But neither was he a capitalist, preaching that the poor deserve suffering. He promoted the Golden Mean between the two extremes.

Ancient Rome is often characterised as a cruel, sink-or-swim system, but they had an institution known as the annona, or the grain dole. After centuries of military expansion, many wealthy landowners had replaced Roman workers with foreign slaves. The resulting impoverishment led to constant rioting and civil unrest. So Gaius Gracchus introduced the grain dole in 123 BCE, resulting in free food for the Roman citizenry. Later emperors added pork and wine.

The concept of distributive justice barely exists in the modern West. In our system, which can be called whorehouse economics, whoever has the money decides. People are conditioned to believe that a person is entitled to what the money men give them, and no more. Anyone who doesn’t work for a capitalist deserves to starve. This is because the merchantry have long since driven the Establishment Right out of effective control, so concepts like noblesse oblige are long forgotten.

This approach is transparently cruel and therefore is rejected under the Fourth Rejection.

The Establishment Left’s argument for welfare is that it maximises freedom. The logic here is that poverty itself is the first and primary source of enslavement. Poverty makes people desperate, which enslaves them to landowners and other wealthy people in the hope of a paycheck. So raising the floor of poverty through welfare promotes freedom generally.

The Establishment Right counters with the observation that if the masses are allowed to vote themselves infinity free money, they will do it, and the economy will collapse. Tiberius is recorded as stating that if everyone would be granted everything they petitioned for, the treasury would soon be empty, and the state would have to extort or steal money to stay operational.

Therefore, distributive justice needs to find the mean between impoverishing the masses and impoverishing the treasury.

The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck was one of the first Establishment Centrists. He championed a welfare state as a way of ensuring peace between the various classes of Prussian society, and to forestall the rise of Communism. His reasoning was that if people who couldn’t work had a safety net to fall back on, society would be much stronger.

Over time, other countries adopted similar systems. As decades passed, and more and more was handed out in exchange for votes, these systems became bloated. Tiberius’s warning applies to society in 2026 as well as to his time.

By today, disability insurance fraud in America is estimated by the FBI to cost USD40 billion per year, and in Australia is believed to cost up to AUD4.6 billion per year. These vast sums require further vast sums to investigate and police. This is one of the fundamental problems with the current approach to welfare: if you only give it to the “deserving”, following the belief that everyone is obliged to work unless disabled, it costs billions to determine who is deserving and who isn’t.

A universal basic income is an elegant solution. It maximises freedom and minimises cruelty (as well as expense).

The alternative centrist doesn’t buy the right-wing argument that everyone needs to “earn” a living. For one thing, that kind of moralising is the exact kind of slave morality that alternative centrism exists to oppose. For another thing, the UBI will not provide a high standard of living. Elon Musk’s idea of a universal high income is not realistic, because so much of wealth is about controlling other people, and that’s a zero-sum affair.

The UBI would be low, not generous, and there would be very little government largesse over and above this. Private charity would still be available, as it is today, but there would be no accommodation allowances, temporary additional support, disability bonuses or any other spending over and above the UBI (one might consider paying a half-UBI to mothers of under-18s for nationalist reasons).

The UBI would lead to all of order, freedom and peace for a variety of reasons.

One is because it would enable forward planning. Even if a UBI recipient only got $500 per week, they would know they were getting $2,000 in the next month and $25,000 in the next year, and could plan accordingly. This would open up opportunities for securing rental tenancies or business financing that did not exist previously.

The second is that it would minimise resentment. As of right now, young Westerners working the average job in their locale cannot afford housing. They watch half of their wages disappear in rent and are left with little after food and transport are paid for. It feels like a bitterly cruel rip-off. A UBI would let younger people also feel like they were getting a share of the bounties of modern society.

The third is less pressure on desirable housing. Most young people, upon finishing their education, find themselves forced to move where the jobs are. This is usually the big cities. The enormous demand for housing in urban areas is the prime driver of the housing affordability crisis. A UBI would make it possible to survive in low-cost, low-opportunity areas. This would release pressure on urban housing and make it more possible for younger people to afford the housing they need to raise families in, even if it meant taking a less ambitious job.

The fourth, and perhaps major reason, is that it would remove the desperation that is often the cause of crime. No-one would wonder where their next dollar was coming from: they’ll get $500 next Wednesday evening. This would promote orderly conduct. It would also make it politically feasible to introduce severe punishments for antisocial behaviour, the reasoning being that, absent desperation, people would only commit crimes out of malice. Therefore it’s justified to bring the hammer down on criminals.

It might be argued that a UBI will lead to degeneracy, as it pays people to do nothing, but that is countered in other ways (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Society).

The alt centrist approach to welfare is simple, neat and long-sighted: a moderate amount of distributive justice plus a high amount of efficiency.

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!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

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Economic Zone Mentality

Social observers in places like New Zealand, America, Australia, South Africa, Argentina etc. have noticed that the mentality of the New World is different to the Old World when it comes to co-operation. Although individuals in the New World are at least as friendly as individuals in the Old, the societies of the New World are much nastier. How to explain?

The usual story is that people in the New World are rugged, pioneering settlers and homesteaders. Although they might be willing to lend a hand personally, they are suspicious of government assistance, which they see as a loss of independence. People in the Old World, in comparison, are a bit soft and lazy. Hence they vote for a generous safety net.

In truth, New Worlders vote for low levels of government assistance because they are afflicted with something known as Economic Zone Mentality.

This essay contends that Economic Zone Mentality is a manner of approaching politics and justice that is characteristic of economic zones and not true nations, and is particularly common in the New World. It’s not necessarily selfish, but usually is, reflecting an every-man-for-himself psychology that is anathema to true civilisation.

An actual nation is like an extended family. Examples are Japan or Finland. In an actual nation, the logic is that the Establishment exists to provide for the people. The people might have to pay into the Establishment in the form of taxes, but they can expect to get out more than they put in, because the Establishment will provide services at scale. Thanks to economies of scale, members of actual nations get to enjoy high standards of living, even if they’re poor.

An economic zone is like a plantation. The people who live in it aren’t family. Some of those people are the owners, and the others are there on the graces of the owners. In an economic zone, the Establishment exists to facilitate wealth extraction. The happiness of the people who live there is not an important factor.

In an economic zone, all that matters is economic production. The logic is that the Establishment exists to take, not to give. There may or may not be economies of scale, but it doesn’t matter if those living in economic zones enjoy high standards of living. They are there to work. As a result of all this, there is massive economic inequality.

In actual nations, governments do a lot more to take care of their own people in comparison to economic zones. Welfare support is much higher in Europe than in America, Australia or New Zealand. Higher education is usually free, and when it isn’t student loans are usually interest-free. Healthcare tends to be universal. The logic is that public goods benefit the nation, and therefore are universal goods.

Actual nations take measures that are unthinkable in economic zones, such as the upcoming Swiss referendum on whether to cap the population. In economic zones, it’s well understood that the size of the economy is primarily a function of the size of the population. To cap the population, in Economic Zone Mentality, is like throwing money away. Only people in actual nations could see the merit in it.

A particular characteristic of economic zones is that production of anything non-industrial is considered worthless. Cultural production is worthless; you can’t eat literature or music. Intellectual production likewise, unless it has direct industrial applications. Spiritual production has the least value. Anyone engaged in these three pastimes is considered a thief of actual production. This attitude is the main reason why New World countries are considered cultureless by Old World ones.

In Economic Zone Mentality, a person’s job is their identity. Engineers are the highest status, because they do the most resource extraction. Healthcare workers are the lowest status, because the well-being of people is not important. And without a job, you are no-one. To be unemployed is to be a criminal. It is a violation of the social contract. In a nation, the social contract is that sometimes you give, sometimes you take. In an economic zone, the social contract is that you work in exchange for being allowed to exist.

In Economic Zone Mentality, all criminals are forgiven as soon as they get jobs, and all decent people are criminals as soon as they stop working. Crying about one person on the dole, and ignoring landlords sucking out a hundred times more unearned income, is typical.

Much confusion arises when people expect natural, national mentality in an economic zone.

In all societies, your right to criticise society comes from your social status. In proper nations, many social critics are artists, who have high social status. But in Economic Zone Mentality, artists are low status. So when Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize, many expected that she would have earned a certain degree of respect for the achievement, and that this would have conferred some right to comment on society. But media maggots like Sean Plunket just called her a “traitor” and an “ungrateful hua” (ironically, Catton was criticising Economic Zone Mentality in New Zealand). She now lives overseas.

Economic Zone Mentality is to act as if a person’s net worth and their merit are the same thing. In proper nations, a person gets respect for being wealthy, but no more than they get for being honourable, or educated, or physically fit, or disciplined. In economic zones, a person’s portfolio value is like a scorecard. Honour, education etc. have no value in and of themselves, only to the extent that they enable resource extraction.

It’s becoming apparent to many Westerners that they live, not in actual nations, but in economic zones. Their countries are workplaces and not homes. This is why housing is severely unaffordable in New Zealand and Australia: rather than being homes for the Anzac people, these countries are workplaces for international banking and finance interests. Housing is becoming severely unaffordable in America and much of Europe for similar reasons (Europe didn’t start with Economic Zone Mentality, but is developing it as it becomes more multicultural).

The end result of Economic Zone Mentality is to turn everywhere into a pile of slag and garbage. The only solution is to develop and support genuine cultural initiatives.

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

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

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