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One of the most famous short-stories in the 20th century is Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. In it, we are told of a society where every year one person is stoned to death. This person is chosen randomly by lottery. Nobody knows why this is done, and very few people wish to live in it.
I mention this because this “that’s just how things are” ideology is one nationalists love having.
Take this article in Law & Liberty by Daniel McCarthy titled “Economic Nationalism As Political Realism.”
Just look at this from his opening paragraph:
“States are an all but ubiquitous context of modern life. They also provide the historical context in which sophisticated markets first developed: money, banks, stock exchanges, mass production, intellectual property, containerized shipping, the Internet, and most other institutions and features associated with market economies today arose within already existing political settings, and in many cases states themselves fostered these developments.”
Of course, a number of these things are wrong. Humans have existed for 550,000 years, states have only existed for around 5,500. Stock exchanges are done by private companies–the New York Stock Exchange is even owned by Rupert Murdoch.
The internet was created by government in the sense that they put the pieces together, however private enterprise was creating the pieces long before the state got involved. The internet was also made popular after heavy amounts of deregulation allowed Microsoft to create new ways of using computers. Is McCarthy going to ignore the overall decrease in innovation after Janet Reno tried to trust-bust Bill Gates?
But even if everything I said above was wrong, so what? Maybe, just maybe, modern society is not the best way of doing things. Just as maybe every way of doing things before now wasn’t the best, hence why we changed it. Why is it that progress suddenly reaches its end point when Daniel McCarthy sits down to write an article?
To McCarthy, if God had meant for man to fly he would have given us wings.
McCarthy continues his economic misunderstandings until the very end. His misunderstandings of free market philosophy are so obvious that anyone who has even glanced at Milton Friedman would take issue.
For instance, the WTO is now just magically unable to take on China. Ignore the fact that they spend most of there time giving loans to third world countries, and ignore that Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell have both criticized the WTO. Now not only are they capitalist, but they’re also bowing to communists.
Orwell worried of a day where all political dialogue would more or less become white noise because of the watering down of various terms, and McCarthy is a great example of this.
Throughout his entire article, his main argument basically boils down to capitalism is the reason communist China has power. We must therefore stop capitalism to stop the enemies of capitalism. Considering capitalism is considered to be freedom, I must ask, is freedom also slavery?
I figured to end this column, I would show that McCarthy has a hilarious lack of self-awareness for which side he’s on while trying to debunk the law of comparative advantage:
“Comparative advantage is yet another reductive philosophical construct with little real-world application. Just consider what comparative advantage would mean at the individual level: if Joe is a computer programmer and Jack is a janitor, comparative advantage would say that Joe should spend all his time programming, and Jack should spend all his time taking out Joe’s trash. If Jack started to learn programming, he would initially be much worse at it than Joe, and Joe would be wasting time by taking out his own trash. Oh, the inefficiency! But such short-term inefficiency would lead to greater long-term prosperity if Jack succeeded in becoming a capable programmer. ‘Comparative advantage’ only applies in a world of unalterably fixed skill levels. Needless to say, that is not the world in which we live.”
First off, who hires a person to take out their trash?
Second off, the fact that McCarthy chose to pick computer programming caused me to bang my head against a wall. As it was the globalists, not the nationalists, who have been mocked for encouraging people to enter this field.
Tell me, was McCarthy just asleep throughout all of 2019? Because that’s the only way someone could not see attempts by Congress to expand HB1 visas for STEM work being challenged by nationalists like Senator Josh Hawley and Rep. Matt Gaetz.
Does McCarthy also not remember anti-immigration crusader Michelle Malkin-who is also best friends with the staff over at VDare-writing an entire book about how we need to make sure less people (specifically from non-white countries) become computer programmers back in 2015?
In fact, it was the nationalists who promised that actually these people could not adapt or learn new skills. They mocked us for saying that former factory workers could become computer programmers-a point almost none of us actually made, by the way.
I agree with McCarthy when he says people can adapt and change. As such, I also can not bring myself to worry when he talks about the British losing the huge section of manufacturing they once had. After all, just as a janitor can become a programmer, so can a Brit become anything besides a factory worker.
In the end, nationalism spent another day reminding myself and others that it is a philosophy full of holes and built on anti-logic.
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Ephrom Josine is a libertarian political blogger/commentator, and a frequent contributor to The Liberty Hawk. In 2019, he published his first book Ramblings Of A Mad Man: Life As An Anarchist. You can find him on Twitter @EphromJosine1, writing near-daily on Medium @ephromjosine or weekly on Freedom First Blog.
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