Ramzpaul: Communism Sucks

I think Ramzpaul is responding to us in this video.

I did make that joke about how he was posing as John Galt in an empty restaurant in the Ozarks. The point was that Arkansas never had a stay-at-home order and the lockdowns followed the shift in public behavior. You can’t really “reopen the economy” with 30% of the public on board.

I’ve never thought of myself as a communist before. The banner of this website has been “Nationalism, Populism, Reaction” for years now. As anyone who follows this website knows, I was criticizing liberalism and free-market capitalism long before the coronavirus. I’ve always been a dissident in the sense that I do not believe in liberalism which is the root cause of most of our problems in the West. I’m a nationalist because I believe the nation is a collective good that is worth caring about and preserving. The family is another collective good. Public health would be another collective good.

A year ago, no one in our circles imagined that this is where we would be in 2020. We were zeroing in on the flaws of liberalism though which is the belief system of conservative liberals and libertarians. The ideology is built on selfishness, individualism and materialism and for that reason is incapable of recognizing and mobilizing to deal with collective challenges like, say, preserving “Happy Homelands” for Europeans or maintaining a healthy culture that can be passed on to future generations. Indeed, it has been highly instructive to watch conservative liberals and libertarians rise up as individualists and start a second Tea Party to defend a collective good for once. We now know that they trust the expertise of billionaires and economists, not doctors and biologists, and value the economy, but not public health. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson also ignored the coronavirus until the stock market crashed. This puzzling behavior makes sense from a selfish, individualist and liberal perspective.

In East Asia, we have noticed that it has been the opposite regardless of the system of government there. In China, North Korea and Vietnam, there have been 4,633 deaths. If the official figures are to be believed, no one has died from COVID-19 in North Korea or Vietnam. 7 people have died in Taiwan. 21 people have died in Singapore. 259 people have died in South Korea. 678 people have died in Japan. Every country in East Asia appears to be collectivist, authoritarian and practical. They have all deferred to science and medicine, worn masks and prioritized public health over the economy. Not only has there been significantly fewer deaths in East Asia than in the United States, the economic damage is less severe. China, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan also appear poised to survive this century as nations intact.

Does collectivism, authoritarianism and developmental capitalism lead to economic backwardness? Is liberalism and free-market capitalism the way to go? This is what conservative liberals and libertarians grew up believing in the Cold War. In the 21st century, Arkansas exports poultry to China which is a world leader in artificial intelligence. Taiwan exports semiconductors to Arkansas which has some of the worst levels of poverty and underdevelopment in the United States in the Ozarks and Mississippi Valley. Walmart and Tyson Foods are the pride of Arkansas corporate capitalism which is reflected in the sheer number of devastated small towns all over the state and the illegal aliens working in its meatpacking plants. In contrast, South Korea has gone from being one of the poorest countries on earth to having high speed internet underground. It now makes the Samsung flatscreen televisions on sale in Walmart which used to be made in Arkansas in the 1950s when Americans still made consumer electronics.

The story of the last 50 years has been American conservatives becoming infected with libertarian nonsense based on works of theory and fiction like Atlas Shrugged. In the real world though, development in most of the rural South has become synonymous with a new Dollar General or fast food restaurant opening up as the balance of global wealth and power has shifted inexorably to East Asia. The conservative self image hasn’t caught up with the current state of the global economy.

If you notice a decline in the posts here over the next few weeks, it is because I woke up this morning feeling a sharp pain on the left side of my chest. I’m hoping it is not the coronavirus, but if so, it will be just one of many long term collective challenges that our system has failed to meet because it is hopelessly biased toward short term thinking. There are no liberal individualist solutions to collective goods like public health or preserving a White ethnic majority. Both require government planning.

Note: I have nothing personal against Ramzpaul. I just don’t believe that liberalism and free-market capitalism can be reconciled with collective goods. The liberal Right is an exercise in futility because every collective good is neglected and declines under a liberal order.