Friday, 20 August 2021 — Poitou, France

By Bill Bonner Editor, The Rum Rebellion

[5 min read]

Dear Reader,

‘The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy and drive him before you. To see his cities reduced to ashes. To see those who love him shrouded and in tears. And to gather to your bosom his wives and daughters.’

Genghis Khan, first Great
Khan of the Mongol Empire

It’s easy to criticise the Biden Team for its breathtaking incompetence in Afghanistan.

So that’s what we’ll do.

But the debacle illustrates far more than just the failure of one president, one party, or one administration.

It shows us how the whole elite scam works…

…from the delusion that the rest of the world wants to be like the US…if it could only get the chance…

…to the fantasy that its experts know what they’re doing…

…to the ‘exceptional nation’ vanity…and misplaced faith in high-tech, super-expensive US firepower…

…to the kind of misadventure you get up to when you can pay for it with fake money…

…to the collaboration of Wall Street and the US’ leading industries…

…to the complete lack of historical perspective or intelligent political leadership…

…to the bovine-like acceptance by the public of the elites’ con job…

…and the toadiness of its leading media.

Classic elite scam

As we pointed out earlier, the US never really got the hang of imperial finance.

Early empires must have been exhilarating…and rewarding. The conquerors raped the women, made slaves of the men, and carried off all the treasure they could get their hands on.

The Roman Empire was more sophisticated. Victorious troops won slaves and booty, and then the captured people paid regular tribute to Rome.

The British Empire was a more modern, commercial variant, taking raw materials from colonies and using them to make finished products in Britain, which were then sold at a profit.

But the US empire was a money-loser from the beginning. The elite enjoyed the thrill of playing World of Warcraft with live ammunition. They also got the jobs…the contracts…and the power.

But they never figured out how to make it pay, except for themselves…and only by taking the money from their own people.

It was a classic elite scam, in which the rewards go to the people at the top…and the costs (including most of the fatalities) fall upon the public.

Eyes on the money

Yes, in the Afghanistan debacle, it’s all there…right before our eyes, like a corpse dumped on the highway.

And now we ask: What other incompetence are the elites hiding? What other lies are they telling?

And…will the lies and bungling continue for years…and then come crashing down in a matter of days?

Our beat here at the Diary is economics and finance. So we will ignore the war against COVID-19, the war on drugs, diversity, democracy, anti-racism, climate control, and the rest of the claptrap. We’ll keep our eyes on the money.

And we note, again, that it’s amazing what you can’t see when you’re paid to be blind.

Investors have made fortunes by not noticing that their stocks are priced nowhere near what they are really worth…

Statisticians are paid to miscalculate the inflation rate…

Economists build careers by ignoring the basics of economics…

Politicians win office by promising to spend more than we can afford…

And Federal Reserve Chief, Jerome Powell, becomes the most famous public servant since Pontius Pilate by closing his eyes to the destruction caused by his phony interest rates and trillions of dollars worth of fake money.

Delayed reaction

The fake dollar was introduced 50 years ago last Sunday. It probably would have disappeared long ago had not then-Fed chair Paul Volcker given it a new lease of life in 1980.

Thereafter, the US held together fairly well for the next 20 years.

So we can probably date the real drift into fantasyland to about the same time as the invasion of Afghanistan…in the early 2000s.

‘Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter,’ said then-Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003.

Of course, deficits do matter. But not necessarily right away.

And by the time you realise that they do matter, you are trying to take off from a crowded runway…with dozens of people clinging to your wheels.

More to come…

Regards,

Bill Bonner,
For The Rum Rebellion

Adelaide, Australia

When I was in the US for the 2016 Trump election, I was astounded by polling that showed a majority of young Americans preferred socialism over capitalism.

Thanks to the education system, I suspect that most young people don’t have a clue what socialism actually is. They probably think it’s just other people paying for stuff that you want for yourself.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Socialism replaces your private and personal rights with the rights of the state. People may argue about whether that’s communism, Marxism, or some other hard left ‘ism’, but that is sheer sophistry.

Whatever term you use, they are all shades of the same black.

They all replace the tenet of private property with state ownership. The market pricing mechanism is replaced with state-determined rationing and private enterprise is subsumed by nationalised monopolies.

Even the ability to choose the work you want to pursue is replaced by work allocations. This is hardly the system of self-determined happiness and history demonstrates the continual failure of these top-down socialist societies.

While the human spirit craves a sense of security and belonging, it also values freedom and personal choice. That we can think outside of eating and reproducing is the essence of what makes us different from other species.

We thrive on personal challenges and great advances are made through the ingenuity of human intellect. For maximum benefit that requires an autonomy that no socialist system can ever provide.

Since 2016, when Donald Trump said to a cheering crowd, ‘America will never be a socialist country’, the seduction of socialism has grown stronger.

And this time, it’s not just the uninformed young people rushing to embrace it. A majority of registered Democrat party voters are now also in the hard-left tent.

Here are the results of a Fox News poll.

‘The real US party switch.

‘Just change the name already, Democrats you ain’t, Socialists you are. #Traitors#socialismkillspic.twitter.com/XbzadREIhA

‘ — Julian Conradson (@JCConradson), 14 August 2021’

Astonishingly, the support for socialism has grown since Biden took office and the repression of civil rights and liberties, the debasement of the currency, porous borders, and the authoritarianism of questionable health policies has come into being.

And I bet it’s not just in the US that this is happening.

While many sensible people may reject the word ‘socialism’ because of its historic failures, they too seem to embrace the socialistic approach by supposedly centre-right governments.

We see apparently normal people conforming with ridiculous cultural Marxism while they surrender their own critical thought. They accept every media headline without having a clue what stands behind it.

They seemingly enjoy being told what to do, how to act, and what to think.

Think of the Australian context. Half the country is locked down and any dissent is categorised as unpatriotic disloyalty and a threat to life. The promise of a vaccine pathway to freedom has been exposed internationally as a lie and yet we repeat the same mantra here.

Our democratic cheques and balances have been ditched for ‘emergency measures’ and we are now told to cover our faces wherever we go.

It’s insane and what’s even crazier is that so many people seem happy to go along with it. Others are being ‘dulled’ into compliance.

I have a number of friends who doubt the efficacy or safety of the vaccines. Yet they are also making appointments to get vaccinated because they think it’s inevitable they’ll have to at some stage.

This is exactly what the authoritarians want; people to act against their better judgment to comply with the public demands of the authorities. We’ve seen it historically in some public social issues (redefining marriage, for example), now it is being played out as a national health requirement.

However they want to dress it up, this is a propaganda war that has all the hallmarks of how socialist governments have emerged through history.

Like the rest of them, this one too will ultimately fail, but that failure could still be a generation or more away.  

Regards,

Cory Bernardi,
For The Rum Rebellion

PS: To sign up to Cory’s free weekly email, Cory Bernardi Confidential, click here.