Posted on 05/19/2019 8:31:21 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
Progressivism has been with us for just under 120 years now, destroying the country. Since day one, these people have staked their claim on the purity that they always have and always will stand against monopoly. Not so fast. Public posturing and the resulting public policy compared with the core ideological belief are two very different things.
Progressives stand for and are ardent believers in the absolute regulation or complete nationalization of everything in sight, believing that government is the only entity that has any responsibility to be engaged in this, that, or the other thing. How dare they claim they oppose monopoly. It's in their blood. They have written it. Two years ago, I completed the recording of a rather short 1922 work called "The Challenge of Waste", by Stuart Chase. Chase was an ardent progressive, and was even the guy who coined the phrase "New Deal". What does Chase believe to be so wasteful?
On page 5, Chase cites British economist Leo Chiozza-Money and makes the following observation:
Sir Leo Chiozza-Money, the noted English statistician and economist, has written an exhaustively documented account of how the British Empire co-ordinated its industrial life as the one method of avoiding defeat and humiliation. He constructs a telling outline of a whole nation turning from the play-things of stock exchanges, haggling of markets, and competitive advertising, to the stark, underlying realities of producing and delivering food, coal, clothing, ships and munitions — on the principle that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
His usage of this phrase "a straight line is the shortest distance between two points" is key. Oh, before I forget, in case you did not catch the footnote that lists the title of the book that Chiozza-Money wrote, the book is called The Triumph of Nationalization. No really, Chase is worshiping monopoly here in this book. When progressives speak of "waste", what they mean is competition. They mean market forces. Chase is very clear about this. On page 6, he makes no bones about defining "waste" as such:
when all is said and done, this type of waste is only a drop in the bucket from the standpoint of an aeroplane view of the whole industrial system.
Business men think of waste as synonymous with "inefficiency," connoting in turn all the hue and cry of the past ten years in pursuit of the goddess efficiency. How many youths have knelt — their correspondence school books in their hands — before this deity. Pep, efficiency, success — the holy trinity.
But efficiency, thus pursued, is only another method of increasing profit under the price system.
The industrial system. That's 1920s era lingo for capitalism. He's talking about the free markets. You see, pursuing profit is in itself wasteful, when it would make much more sense to efficiently and evenly distribute any said gains to all people everywhere. He says this, quite plainly. A large portion of this book is devoted to attacking "luxuries", which he deems entirely wasteful, then he gets to this:
If we only produced basic wants and distributed them equally, there would only be about enough to go around on the basis of the minimum budget.
This goes back to the earlier parts of the book when he was lauding Chiozza-Money, the only things that should be produced (keep in mind this was an emphasis on wartime) are food, coal, clothing, and war supplies. Centralized planners will guarantee this. In peacetime, just produce the three: food, coal, and clothing. For the purposes of a 21st century progressive, just replace "coal" with "solar panels" and the formula is exactly the same. You see, if only these inefficiencies of over production (page 21) could be eliminated, then it would be much easier for the government to come in and nationalize our lives.
it follows relentlessly that the elimination of that waste would double the capacity of the country to make sound goods and services — goods which really mean the satisfaction of human wants. And this would operate to banish poverty, to raise the last family above the line of the minimum budget, and at the same time to provide for moderate luxuries and comforts, and a reasonably wide range of income levels.That is the challenge which the problem of waste presents to those of us who dream of a high central tower directing and simplifying the economic destinies of men.
Yes, he really wrote about a high central tower directing the entire economy. He did so four times in only 32 pages. What is a high central tower? It's a monopoly. So when progressives demand the nationalization of healthcare under medicare for all, or laud the fact that they nationalized all food inspection as early as 1906; they nationalized the railways in 1917. Never forget that the demagogue of monopolization is the biggest monopolist of them all.
Let's also not forget the real definition of a "monopoly", which I put out separately last week. A monopoly cannot be a monopoly without the "sole" legal framework alien to free markets. This is the indictment of progressivism.
Progressives must have sameness and conformity. It is within the monopolist profile. Competition and alternatives is just too wasteful. Their complete system of regulations serves the same purpose. Chase, again, wrote in the 1940s about "Political System X", and had this to say as one of the goals:
17. not much "taking over" of property or industries in the old socialistic sense. The formula appears to be control without ownership.
When progressives say "regulation" they intend to calm your nerves that its only going to be a small amount of rules but then after that the blue sky is the limit. What they mean is total absolute control like what you would find in a marionette and there is no sky, only limits. Regulations can destroy those wasteful competitors Chase so ardently wrote about. He felt so strongly about the evils of wasteful enterprise, that Chase wrote yet another book titled "The Tragedy of Waste" to expand on the theme.
Nationalization = monopoly, as does a complete marionette "you cannot escape" system of regulations.
Amazon, Wal-Mart, ect. Part of the plan of fewer people controlling the world’s wealth and in turn they are controlled by those who give out the money.
Of course socialism is heavily biased towards monopoly. Socialism is all about redistribution. Government cannot redistribute what it does not control. And since free market arrangements will tend over time to be far more productive than bureaucratic command and control systems, and since profit maximizing people are far more energetic and productive than drones standing in line for their allocated benefits, a socialist government cannot permit people to vote with their wallets, or with their feet.
“the core of progressive ideology”
It’s not so much their objectives as it is their willingness to meet them “by any means necessary”. Keeping them from meeting those objectives is not enough when the situation calls for absolute elimination of their means and their belief that they would be in the right to destroy this country as it is still intended to be.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
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