A Harris victory would have delayed Newsom’s quest for eight years, but now he can start laying the groundwork now for a run in 2028. Newsom will spend the next two years in office before becoming a full-time candidate, and, given the constitutional limit on two terms, the Republicans won’t have the advantage (or the weight) of incumbency and will likely present a candidate with less name recognition than Newsom possesses.

The New York Times already has jumped in feet-first in its “Style” section with a hagiographic portrayal of Newsom, hair gel and all. The writer breathlessly wrote:

Last year, he debated Ron DeSantis on that network, landing rhetorical jabs like “You’re nothing but a bully.” The appearances have burnished his reputation as someone who saunters into the conservative lion’s den and comes out with his slicked hair unruffled.

His first post-election “heroic” move was to call for a special session of the California legislature:

…to protect “California values” in preparation for former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Less than 36 hours after Trump’s resounding victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, the California governor — a prominent opponent of the former president during his first term — called to bolster the state’s legal resources with the aim of protecting reproductive healthcare, climate policies and immigrant communities in California.

One might think that we are looking at something that is light years away, politically speaking, but in the world of presidential ambition, successful candidates spend years scheming to reach that office. John F. Kennedy’s father was planning the political careers of his sons long before they reached full adulthood, Ronald Reagan coveted the presidency more than 10 years before he was elected in 1980, and Jimmy Carter and his advisers quietly launched their quest long before the Watergate scandal gave him a major opening. […]

— Read More: mises.org

Economics takes ends and goals of action as a given and—in matters of value judgments—it assumes neutrality (i.e., non-normativity), which is characteristic of a science. However, questions of suitability of means and various policies adopted to attain chosen ends are not beyond the scope of economic analysis.

The “Dismal” Task of the Economist

The competent economist—when presented with a proposed plan of action—always asks: Is the means adopted suitable for the attainment of the end in view? He critically analyzes the means in question and declares their fitness or unfitness on the basis of logical demonstrations that are unassailable and apodictly true. This peculiar task of the economist is often misapprehended as an expression of his value judgments and an attempt to frustrate the attainment of ends chosen. Thus, the economist is often met with disapproval.

More significant in the history of the science are the several attempts to discredit the economists through a denial of economics as a universally-valid science, applicable for all peoples, times, and places. This is a pernicious attempt because the social, political, and economic consequences tend to be disastrously far-reaching. This article attempts to establish a connection between a denial of economics and the emergence of totalitarianism.

Historicism as a Precursor of Totalitarianism

Historicism was one of such concerted attempts at denying the universal validity of the body of economic theorems. The historicists advanced the view that economic theories are not valid for all peoples, places, and times; and thus, are only relevant to the specific historical conditions of their authors. The German Historical School’s rejection of the free trade theories, propounded by the classical economists, was not on grounds of inherent inadequacies in these theories—given that they never unmasked any logical errors as to the untenability of these theories—but motivated by ideological pre-possessions. Mises puts it very succinctly in Epistemological Problems of Economics:

The historian must never forget that the most momentous occurrence in the history of the last hundred years, the attack launched against the universally valid science of human action and its hitherto best developed branch, economics, was motivated from the very beginning not by scientific ideas but by political considerations.

Historicism is bound to lead to some form of logical relativism, and it is not surprising that the doctrine of racial polylogism gained a general acceptance among many Germans in the early twentieth century. In order to invalidate the relevance of a theory on grounds of historical or racial origins of the author, one has to proceed with the indefensible assumption of differences in the logical character of the human mind amongst different peoples and within the same people at different historical epochs. But in fact, there is no scientific evidence as to the existence of these differences in the logical structure of the human mind. Thus the historicists’ arguments against the universal validity of economic theory are unfounded.

The social, economic, and political significance of a denial of economics would also imply the denial of insights from economics about the preservation of society—concerted action in voluntary cooperation. Economic theory asserts that there is greater productivity to be obtained from social organization under the division of labor than would be obtained in individual self-sufficiency. The Ricardian Law of Association explains the tendency of humans to intensify cooperation given a rightly-understood interest in better satisfying wants under the social order of the division of labor. While there are many ways for people to coexist in the world, there are fewer ways for them to coexist peacefully and prosperously. This is the central lesson of classical economics about human society.

Historicism’s denial of the universal validity of these theories on non-logical grounds betrays a prejudice for policies aimed at attaining the alternative of autarkic self-sufficiency and the substitution of the social apparatus with coercion and compulsion. In fact, the Nazi totalitarian regime, whose intellectual precursor was German historicism, never relented in applying force to induce cooperation while simultaneously pursuing autarkic self-sufficiency by means of disastrous policies. Thus, German historicism, in denying the universal validity of economic theory and the general laws of human action as advanced by praxeology, played a causal role by creating a favorable intellectual climate for arbitrariness and the subsequent emergence of Nazi totalitarianism.

Marxism as Pseudo-Economics

Marxist socialism, on the other hand, denies the validity of economic theories on grounds of the “class origins” of the economists. Like historicism, it subscribes to a variant of polylogism in which it asserts the existence of a difference in the logical structure of mind for the respective social classes—even though Marx never defined what he meant by “class.” Consequently, for the Marxians, the science of economics becomes mere ideological expression of the class interest of the exploiting class—the bourgeoisie.

It is precisely the fact that Marxism rejects the essential teachings of economics in favor of utopian ideas which fail to achieve the ends sought wherever it was tried. The ultimate goals of Marxians—improvement in material and social conditions of its adherents—are no different from those of their liberal counterparts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who enjoyed considerable improvements in standard of living; it is in the choices of means that they differ. But it is the unsuitability of the means adopted by the Marxians that always and everywhere frustrated the attainment of ends sought by Marxism.

Furthermore, as with the capitalist system, based on private ownership of the means of production, the pure socialist commonwealth must be faced with the problem of allocation of resources in view of satisfying the most urgent wants of its citizens. And in this regard, Mises, in his irrefutable criticism of the socialist commonwealth, exposes the impossibility of socialism. He argues that, given the absence of a price structure for factors of production, the problem of impracticality of economic calculation must emerge in a socialist community. The planner, without recourse to tools of economic calculation, would be lost amid the sea of economic possibilities.

That capitalism has succeeded in improving the lives of men wherever its institutions are left unhampered is because those societies recognize the validity of economic theory about the potential benefits of the free market. They did not adopt arbitrary policies that economists declared unfit for the ends they sought to attain. Thus, the horrors brought about by the series of abortive attempts to implement the utopian ideas of socialist thinkers are the logical consequences of a denial of economics.

The Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Totalitarianism

The doctrine of interventionism wrongly conceives of a compatibility of the market and violent interventions by the state, between social cooperation and the apparatus of coercion and compulsion. It purports to be a third economic system—a compromise between capitalism and socialism. But, as the logical demonstrations of the economists show us over and over, interventionism, so-called middle-of-the-road policy, inevitably leads to socialism. Interventionism is, in fact, a denial of economics in that economics recognizes that interventions of any sort in the market tend to produce outcomes that—judged from the point of view of their initiators—are even more dissatisfactory than the previous problems that they pretend to fix.

Mises clearly remarks in his short book The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics that “the worst illusion of our age is the superstitious confidence placed in panaceas, which—as the economists have irrefutably demonstrated—are contrary to purpose.” Interventionism, carried to its logical conclusion, is bound to lead to totalitarianism, given that the more its policies fail to produce the desired outcomes, the more the statesmen who wrongly believe in the appropriateness of interventionist measures find it necessary to employ the coercive state apparatus to compensate for their failures.

Economics and the Free-Market System

The science of economics is a rational science that recognizes the primacy of the laws of human society. Economics teaches that the market is a system of logically necessary relations brought about by the actions of individuals seeking to satisfy their most urgent wants. It teaches that any instance of coercion aimed at influencing the actions of individuals is disruptive to the market process. A denial of these teachings would inevitably lead to the state of affairs in which force becomes the only means of eliciting the cooperation of individuals in society.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

Now comes a lawsuit contending that President Biden’s immigration executive orders, signed on his first day in office in 2021, violated the provisions of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). Yes, immigration allowed by the Biden Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is seen allegedly harming the nation’s physical environment, with the leading environmental watchdog agency, the EPA, seemingly indifferent to this environmental harm.

The Oft-Maligned Environmental Impact Agency (EPA)

President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) in 1970, creating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Americans were receptive at the time to a new, independent, executive branch agency responsible for the protection of human health and the environment, influenced by Rachel Carson’s best-selling book Silent Spring, which spawned the modern environmental movement.

NEPA was designed to force all federal agencies to account for the environmental impacts of their proposed policies, by requiring a detailed environmental impact statement (EIS) of any proposed agency action. This EIS requirement has sometimes aroused Americans to accuse EPA of unnecessarily meddling in the personal use of their private property, potentially even amounting to regulatory takings in violation of the US Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, charges that have resulted in lawsuits against EPA.

Two recent Supreme Court rulings, for example, are West Virginia v. EPA in 2022, which ruled that EPA lacks authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide emissions related to climate change, and Sackett v. EPA in 2023, which stripped wetlands of their federal protections under the Clean Water Act. […]

— Read More: mises.org

George Orwell famously called this subversive language “Newspeak.” Peter Foster describes Newspeak as “a sort of totalitarian Esperanto that sought gradually to diminish the range of what was thinkable by eliminating, contracting, and manufacturing words.”

Mises explains that dictators express their ideas in Newspeak precisely because, if they did not, nobody would support their schemes:

This reversal of the traditional connotation of all words of the political terminology is not merely a peculiarity of the language of the Russian Communists and their Fascist and Nazi disciples. The social order that in abolishing private property deprives the consumers of their autonomy and independence, and thereby subjects every man to the arbitrary discretion of the central planning board, could not win the support of the masses if they were not to camouflage its main character. The socialists would have never duped the voters if they had openly told them that their ultimate end is to cast them into bondage. (emphasis added)

In the proliferation of Newspeak, the reinterpretation of “human rights” has proved to be one of the most powerful weapons of sabotage and revolution. Activists have seized control of a vast empire of international law, NGOs, and human rights charities with a global network of staff who monitor respect for “human rights.” They wield their significant influence in the human rights industry to undermine human liberty by redefining the meaning of “human rights” to denote the antidiscrimination principle. Under the banner of equality and nondiscrimination, they restrict free speech and other human liberties. In other words, the doctrine of “human rights” now denotes the precise opposite: the destruction of human liberty. […]

— Read More: mises.org

However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published the latest CPI at 2.9%, despite annual inflation being 1.4% when she took office. Inflation is a disguised tax and accumulated inflation since January 2021, when the Biden-Harris administration started, has increased more than 20%.

Of course, Democrats blame inflation on the war, the pandemic, and the science-fantasy concept of “supply chain disruptions.” No one believed it, because most commodities have declined and supply tensions disappeared back to normality, but prices continued to rise.

As a result, Harris invented the concept of greedy grocery stores and evil corporations to blame for inflation and justify price controls. Is it not ironic? She blames grocery stores and corporations for inflation, but when price inflation drops, she proudly takes credit.

The reality is that the Kamala Harris plan, like all interventionist governments, creates and strives for inflation. Inflation is a hidden tax. Governments love it and perpetuate it by printing money through deficit spending and imposing regulations that harm trade, competition, and technological creative destruction. Big government is big inflation.

Inflation is the way in which the government tricks citizens into believing that administrations can provide for anything. It disguises the accumulated debt, quietly transfers wealth from the private sector to the government and condemns citizens to being dependent hostages of government subsidies. It is the only way in which they can continue to spend a constantly depreciated currency and present themselves as the solution. Furthermore, it is the perfect excuse to blame businesses and anyone else who sells in the currency that the government creates.

Kamala Harris will do nothing to cut inflation because she wants inflation to disguise the monster deficit and debt accumulation. In the latest figures, the deficit has soared to $1.5 trillion in the first ten months of the fiscal year. Public debt has soared to $35 trillion, and in the administration’s own forecasts, they will add a $16.3 trillion deficit from 2025 to 2034. It is worse. The previously mentioned figure does not include the $2 trillion in additional debt coming from Kamala’s economic plan. […]

— Read More: mises.org

Price ceilings cause shortages of goods and wasteful queuing, in this case for food. Why might such a bad policy win Harris, or any candidate, votes? First, many people don’t understand economics, don’t understand why price controls are bad policy. Second, a majority or people want government to secure a supply of affordable food. Consequently, increases in food costs in recent years may be a key political issue. Recent polling data indicates that economic conditions are leading concern among likely voters.

We can quantify how people feel about food costs. The food-only Consumer Price Index correlates with the consumer confidence index. Consumers feel less confident about their economic situation when food costs rise quickly, and more confident when food price inflation is at a low rate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics breaks the food-only CPI down into two subgroups: at home food and restaurant-eat out food.

As it turns out, the costs of at home food affects consumer confidence much more consistently than do costs of eat out food (a 53% statistical fit versus a 31% fit)1.

[…]

— Read More: mises.org

Yet, the employment situation has not fundamentally changed from what has been common over the past year. Claims of solid, or even “blowout,” gains in employment throughout most of the past year have always been unconvincing if we look at the bigger picture. August’s “mixed” jobs report simply shows a continuation of the gradually weakening employment market that we have been seeing for months.

The lackluster nature of the employment market has been masked in these reports by a focus on a single data point within the report: the establishment survey’s total jobs number. Most reporting on August’s jobs numbers, for example, has ignored the fact that, according to the federal government’s household survey, the number of employed people in America has fallen over the past year. Moreover, the household survey suggests that much of the growth in “jobs” added by the establishment survey are due to made-up numbers created through the so-called “birth-death model” which simply assumes into existence hundreds of thousands of jobs created by hypothetical new businesses.

Let’s take a closer look. […]

— Read More: mises.org

To libertarians, the implications are clear—the program represents a violation of the non-aggression principle, where the government is using its power to impose its will by force on taxpayers without their consent.

The IRS’s actions are reminiscent of the crony capitalism that Rothbard frequently critiqued in his work. By allowing the IRS to bypass due process and impose tax liens without the right oversight, the government is creating an environment where special interests and bureaucrats can exploit and punish taxpayers as they see fit in a politically-weaponized environment. While the program’s supporters argue that it just makes the audit process simpler and increases the ease of tax collection, it ignores the fundamental principles of due process and the rights of taxpayers to be treated fairly and justly.

The government’s role is to protect individual rights and property, not to exploit them for its own purposes. The Direct File program is an extreme conflict of interest, where the fox isn’t just guarding the henhouse, but making himself all too comfortable. The introduction of the IRS Overreach Prevention Act is definitely a small step in the right direction towards restoring taxpayer sovereignty and protecting individual rights, though many might argue it doesn’t go far enough to hold the agency accountable. […]

— Read More: mises.org