Interesting article: History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump
This passage stood out:
Indeed, many takes on the effects of the Black Death are that it had a positive impact in the long term. Well summed up here: “By targeting frail people of all ages, and killing them by the hundreds of thousands within an extremely short period of time, the Black Death might have represented a strong force of natural selection and removed the weakest individuals on a very broad scale within Europe
Too bad America has a system of ‘reverse Darwinism’ where billions of taxpayer dollars are spent every year keeping the least fit alive.
This article was recommended 5,000 times on Medium , which is a huge amount, indicating that topics of such as euthanasia and eugenics can gain wider acceptance if they are presented as an extension of Darwinism or in some sort of historical context, as a way of improving society.
Mugabe is a very good case in point. He whipped up national anger and hatred towards the land owning white minority (who happened to know how to run farms), and seized their land to redistribute to the people, in a great populist move which in the end unravelled the economy and farming industry and left the people in possession of land, but starving. See also the famines created by the Soviet Union, and the one caused by the Chinese Communists last century in which 20–40 million people died.
Between the Holodomor, Pol Pot’s killing fields, and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, Communism has a significantly higher death toll than fascism, but the left tries to dust this inconvenient truth under the rug. To borrow from Land, liberalism (specifically, welfare-liberalism and revolutionary forms of liberalism) is inherently entropic in that it results in disorder, versus the ‘natural’ order of the strong and productive rising above the weak and lazy. Liberalism seeks to invert this hierarchy to create equal outcomes, even if society is worse-off as a result. Classical liberalism, although it’s still liberalism, is predicated on equal opportunity instead of equal outcomes, and is not (in theory) entropic. The reactionary argument is that classical liberalism is a stepping stone to full-blown welfare/revolutionary liberalism, and this is a valid point.
That was Hitler, but it was also Mussolini, Stalin, Putin, Mugabe, and so many more. Mugabe is a very good case in point. He whipped up national anger and hatred towards the land owning white minority (who happened to know how to run farms), and seized their land to redistribute to the people, in a great populist move which in the end unravelled the economy and farming industry and left the people in possession of land, but starving. See also the famines created by the Soviet Union, and the one caused by the Chinese Communists last century in which 20–40 million people died. It seems inconceivable that people could create a situation in which tens of millions of people die without reason, but we do it again and again.
[…]
Trump is doing this in America. Those of us with some oversight from history can see it happening. Read this brilliant, long essay in the New York magazine to understand how Plato described all this, and it is happening just as he predicted. Trump says he will Make America Great Again, when in fact America is currently great, according to pretty well any statistics.
The article however falls apart when the author tries to equate Trump’s populist support with mass-murdering genocidal dictatorships. That’s a pretty huge leap to make…and one that almost borders on paranoia, as in the case of Ross Douthat a couple days ago when he had meltdown on Twitter over Trump.
The author’s thesis is that Trump will doom the economy, but Trump will never have enough power to do that. Despite the incompetence and ineptitude of Obama, I remained bullish on the US stock market all through 2011 and up until now, because of the strength of the private sector, the efficacy of the fed, and the ingenuity of America’s best and brightest, to overcome eight years of Obama, and I was right. Not to only pick on the ‘left’, the consensus is that George W. Bush was a lousy president, but the economy survived him, too. Companies Facebook, Google, Amazon keep reporting blowout numbers quarter after quarter. The federal reserve is actually more powerful than the executive branch, and fed policy moves the markets whereas Obama almost never moves the market. Also, unless there is crisis that demands urgent action, it takes years to get policy passed through the house and senate.
But for those at the sharp end — for the thousands of Turkish teachers who just got fired, for the Turkish journalists and lawyers in prison, for the Russian dissidents in gulags, for people lying wounded in French hospitals after terrorist attacks, for those yet to fall, this will be their Somme.
The author seems confused. He is right about Mugabe’s famine, but fails to realize that liberalism is also to blame for terrorist attacks in Europe, too.
So I feel it’s all inevitable. I don’t know what it will be, but we are entering a bad phase. It will be unpleasant for those living through it, maybe even will unravel into being hellish and beyond imagination. Humans will come out the other side, recover, and move on.
If history is so certain, there is something called the NYSE and there are many people happy to take the opposite side that bet.
Here is how I would play it: if there is global upheaval, the US will still come out ahead, and yields on all duration treasury bonds will plunge to zero, so one can make money regardless of the outcome by going long America (S&P 500) and shorting Europe and emerging markets, while also going ‘long’ treasuries. Even if there is peace (which I think is still the mostly likely outcome) the S&P 500 should still outperform Europe (which is weakened by Brexit), and treasuries should do well too.