How do you discuss something you’re not allowed to name? The media and academia declared the Alt-Left a myth, a product of American dialectical thinking that requires a balance to the Alt-Right, but not really something to worry about. Pay no attention to the club-wielding, masked thugs in Charlottesville, Berkley and Boston. Keep your eyes trained on the “fascists” because the Alt-Left doesn’t really exist and to use the term “Alt-Left” is a pejorative” used only by the right-leaning media and the center Left to attack a legitimate people’s movement. “Smart” people know it’s all nonsense.

For those self-identified liberals who may have been seduced by this belief system with its propaganda — I know I made you mad just now. I hope you will continue reading because this is a conversation we need to have.

I would define Alt-Left as a leftist, illiberal authoritarian ideology rooted in postmodernism and neo-Marxism that supports censorship, condones violence in response to speech, is obsessed with identity politics (much like the Alt-Right), and functions like a secular religion that gives its believers a sense of moral self-worth.

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Ahead of the book launch for “A Threatening Fragility”, I’m looking for some free promotion for Transformation Project.

Life As We Knew It

Objects In View

A Threatening Fragility

#books, #fiction, #apocalyptic, #libertarian, #kindle

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I stopped saluting the flag about four years ago when someone I respect pointed out that it really does look like idolatry. I thought about it a while and agreed with her, so ….

I still stand, in deference to my fellow Americans and respect for veterans like my brother. I hold my hands respectfully in front of me, but I don’t speak the oath and I don’t cover my heart. I am respectful to those who respect the flag, but I’ve drawn a line on idolatry and that includes the flag. I never really cold sing the National Anthem, as I’m sure Robert Goulette and a host of other famous singers who muffed the Star-Spangled Banner can agree. I do still sing the Alaska flag song because it’s a cool song written for people who aren’t opera stars and nobody is asking me to swear allegiance to it.

When Colin Kaepernick took a knee rather than salute the flag last year, I was irritated by it not out of any respect for the flag or disagreement with free expression, but because he was protesting “white privilege” in America while earning more per year as a professional athlete than I will earn in a lifetime. I was born in poverty and that was with a father who was so white he made Casper look tanned. We may have “wealth privilege” in this country, but poverty hits all colors of skin. And, clearly, wealth is also visited upon quite a number of people of color. Is there some sort of black privilege going on with the NFL? Ever look at the starting lineup of any team? Yeah … I’m just saying.

And, Kaepernick himself has ZERO room to complain. He was raised in an upper middle-class family and went to a good college. Clearly, being half-black didn’t hurt his prospects in life. Maybe he’s pissed off at his white adoptive parents or his white biological mom because he doesn’t feel it’s acceptable to be pissed off at the black father who abandoned his bio mom when she got pregnant, but news flash, other white people didn’t do that. And, ultimately, Kaepernick  was rewarded for being a big strong, part-black athletic male with $39 million dollars over a three-year career of declining performance. While I’m sure he’d like to blame his not being called out of free agency on racism, I suspect it has more to do with stunts like his girfriend’s tweet comparing Ray Lewis, owner of the Baltimore Ravens, to a slave owner while Kaepernick was in negotiations with the team. Slaveowners don’t give you millions of dollars to run an oddly-shaped ball up and down a field and, any sane person, when compared to Simon Legree, will chose to gift some other, less contentious athlete with those millions.

Trust me, if someone had given me $39 million when I was 25 years old, I’d not have to worry about money for the rest of my life because I know a thing or two about living in poverty. I could live a nice, comfortable, middle-class existence on $39 million dollars and probably leave more than that to my heirs.

So, Kaepernick has ZERO room to complain about “white privilege”. His kneeling is about wanting attention and nothing more, from a young man who may see racism behind every bush because he’s been taught to look for it, but who has never experienced a hard day of living in his life. Notice that he didn’t do his kneeling under the presidency of Barack Obama. It’s not about racism. It’s about politics.

Now, if he’d been protesting the killing of civilians of all colors by police, then he might have had my support … I who have been quietly not participating in flag worship for nearly a half-decade now.  But as long as he’s only upset when cops kill black people, I think he’s showing his racist knickers and I’m not going to stand … or kneel … with him.

That said, President Donald Trump needs to learn to control his comments about other people’s right to free expression. Kaepernick has a right to protest. So do other NFL players. They have the same right as Trump supporters do to put their opinions out into the public square … to be challenged or supported as the case may be. That’s how freedom of speech – a cornerstone of liberty — works. I am free, even as one who declines to worship the flag, to criticize Colin Kaepernick for his motivations. He’s welcome to an opinion, but others are welcome to point out the fallacies on which his opinions rest.

 

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I admire the French satirical magazine Charlie Bedo for its continued confrontation of cultural sacred cows. I’m not a regular subscriber because I don’t read French well enough to fully enjoy it, but I like their cartoons and a friend who is fluent sometimes forwards translated articles. Still, I think they went too far with this cover, which features the phrase “Dieu Existe! Il a noyé tous les néo-Nazis du Texas” as the caption.  When my friend sent me the cover and asked me what I thought, I didn’t even need his translation of the French to know that this was rude and insensitive. I know just enough French to know it said something about “God exists” and “neo-Nazis of Texas.”

The caption translates to “God Exists! He drowned all the neo-Nazis in Texas!”

Charlie Hebdo is not exactly known for kindness, tact, or any sort of respect, but this sinks pretty low even for a magazine that specializes in low.

Before I could think about what I would blog about it, people quickly to remind Hebdo that the world (including the United States) stood by the publication when their offices were attacked by Islamic terrorists and that the U.S. military did a pretty good job eliminating the Nazis during WWII.

It pissed off Brad, who lived in Houston for about five years. He says the cover makes no sense. Houston is not a Republican city, the people of Texas most definitely are not neo-Nazis, and people of all races and creeds and colors were affected by the flooding and the storm. It comes off as a cheap shot at a community that is already suffering, and it’s pretty tasteless. If Hebdo is attacked again by folks angry over their slaying of sacred cows, they will have one less supporter and I don’t think I’m alone.

You have a right to free speech, but there are lines that just shouldn’t be crossed.

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Stevie Turner

This week the topic is: ‘Tell us your biggest business lesson learned. If you were to start your writing career all over again, what would you do differently?’

I sometimes wish I could start my writing career all over again.  I started off in 2013 by writing ‘The Porn Detective’, which I unpublished in 2016 in order to re-write it using the lessons I had learned since the original publication in October 2013.

Basically the first and biggest thing I did wrong was that I rushed the book and it was published too soon.  As we all do when we start out, I had a yearning to see my book on the Amazon website.  I had sent it off to a few agents before publishing it; one of which debated whether or not to represent me before replying in the negative.  Another one replied to say it was a good…

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September 25, 2017 – Tell us your biggest business lesson learned. If you were to start your writing career all over again, what would you do differently?

Here in Alaska’s Interior, some rivers meander through gently rolling hills, occasionally changing their courses, creating slow-moving sloughs with a trickle of water flow that eventually become oxbow lakes stranded from the main channel. Other rivers run through the broad, mostly flat Tanana River valley in miles-wide multi-channeled braids, occasionally divorcing sloughs that might only have water in them every decade or so. When you’re canoeing or riverboating, sometimes you end up going down a slow-moving slough and get stopped by a big logjam or gigantic beaver dam, so you have to turn around and paddle back upstream to take another route. What does this have to do with our OP? It’s a metaphor.

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My writing career has been long and varied and I’ve learned a lot from the many mistakes and writing sloughs I have taken. I started out as a creative writer, scribbling for my own pleasure in elementary school and junior high and then submitting to school literary publications in high school. But I knew that I couldn’t make a living doing that, so I majored in journalism in college. Newspaper reporting was fun, low-pay and frustrating as the politics of the editorial staff began to dictate what facts were allowed to be reported. Throughout the rest of my career, I’ve done a lot of technical writing – editing grant documents, producing newsletters and excelling at desktop publishing. Different kinds of writing are useful in different parts of my life, so I can’t call any of them “sloughs” or “mistakes.”

Throughout all of it, I’ve always written for my own amazement and I am now mining my back catalog of tales written for myself to publish.

I have no regrets writing-wise, although if I had to do it all over again …

• I’d have jumped on the self-publishing bandwagon sooner. It doesn’t mean my books are lesser quality. It just means I have a smaller advertising budget.
• I’d have embraced Facebook and Twitter for marketing sooner.
• I’d have started socking small amounts of cash into my Pay Pal account earlier so that I would have a larger cash-flow stream now.
• I’d have paid closer attention in art class to improve my book covers now.
• I’d have worked harder at teaching myself to write Alaskana – it sells, but I struggle with it (which is why I haven’t published any … yet).
• I’d have not taken a 25-year hiatus from writing short stories. They’re a great marketing tool for the novels if you can get them into good anthologies.

Overriding lesson – write for your own amazement and you might find other people enjoy it as much as you do, but also do things sooner, don’t be so slow to adopt great ideas … be adventurous. You’d think an Alaskan would already know that lesson about adventure.

 

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It’s safe to say that email is the communication mode of choice in the 20-teens. It’s quick, you don’t have to spend time in idle chatter and you get a receipt that says whether it was delivered and opened. Yet, e-mail is not always the best form of communication. It’s sometimes misunderstood even by people we know pretty well. As the sender, we understand what we meant, but the recipient may not “get” our point or they might read into the e-mail something we never intended.

Back when I worked in social work, I appended a wry comment to a response to a coworker’s email. It was meant to be funny and I am known to be quippy. Imagine my surprise when I had to explain my email to the Human Resources officer because my coworker thought I was commenting on her sex life. For the record, I never discuss other people’s sex lives (unless they give me express permission to discuss it on this blog and then I change their names to protect their privacy. The HR officer was pretty sure that was what I meant and the coworker actually ended up apologizing to me, but it made me a lot more cautious of trying to make a joke over email. The inability to include body language and voice modulation in email should cause all of us to carefully read our e-mails and pause before we respond and hit the SEND button.

Likewise, reading a letter to a church that was written 2,000 years ago can be challenging. It’s easy to misunderstand the author’s intent because we may not be aware of what was taking place in the life of the church. Often, God’s people jump to conclusions before carefully studying a biblical passage. Have you been guilty of this? I know I have been. I think we all have. Then, there’s a whole lot of people fairly unfamiliar with the Bible who google Scripture passages and take them out of context to try to score some points in online haranguing sessions.

Christians, our aim must be to understand Scripture in the way God intended. We must try not to read our own traditions, preferences, or experiences into God’s Word. Scripture should inform our choices, not the other way around. This is especially important when it comes to the controversial areas of worship and spiritual gifts.

What does the Bible teaches about what a church worship service should look like? 1 Corinthians 14 gives us some insight into that question. It also calls some of us to task for how our churches currently conduct this important gathering.

If there’s an overriding message for today’s lesson it’s “Put your ministry where your mouth is.”

Clear communication is critical in the church. 

Paul highlighted prophecy and tongues as important spiritual gifts, but he gave prophesy the greater significance.

Pursue love and be eager for the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. 1 Corinthians 14:1

First and foremost, Paul commanded the churches to pursue, strive for, and seek after love. This command “pursue” (dioko) means “to pursue or persecute.” It is a strong word that serves to remind us that love can be an elusive thing. We do not find real love by wishful thinking or halfhearted effort. We must pursue it eagerly every day if we are going to find it operating in our lives as it should. As a church, if we make love our top pursuit we will discover that our capacity to minister to those around us grows with every passing year.

Paul then commanded the church to “desire earnestly” spiritual gifts, particularly prophecy. To prophesy is “to proclaim divine revelation” or “to speak on behalf of God.” Prophecy is not necessarily preaching or teaching, but it has elements of both. It can be both spontaneous and prepared. Paul suggests in this passage that all God’s people can exercise prophecy. When we gather for worship, we ought to pray that the Lord will give us a word for someone in the church (see 14:26). Hence, we all come to church to minister. It’s not just the pastor who does this.

Apparently, the Corinthian church had exalted the gift of tongues above the prophetic gift of the proclamation of truth. Paul wanted to restore a healthy balance to the public worship life of that congregation by comparing and contrasting speaking in tongues and prophesying, while explaining why he put prophecy above tongues in terms of importance.

For the one speaking in a tongue does not speak to people but to God, for no one understands; he is speaking mysteries by the Spirit. But the one who prophesies speaks to people for their strengthening, encouragement, and consolation. The one who speaks in a tongue builds himself up, but the one who prophesies builds up the church. I wish you all spoke in tongues, but even more that you would prophesy. The one who prophesies is greater than the one who speaks in tongues, unless he interprets so that the church may be strengthened. 1 Corinthians 14:2-5

Some observations:

• Paul held a high view of speaking in tongues and considered it a viable spiritual gift. Some are critical of tongues because of its divisive nature, but my own belief (drawn from Paul’s words here) are that the only problem with tongues is when Christians abuse the gift and behave in an immature and prideful way. Tongues is a good gift that God has given His church for its edification. The problem doesn’t lie with the spiritual gift, but rather with those who misunderstand and misuse what God has graciously provided.
• The gift of tongues that Paul referred to in this context is a private prayer language. Ooo, I feel the Southern Baptist Convention looking my way with displeasure. Sorry if that upsets some non-charismatics, but Paul wrote that he would like to see all the Corinthians inspired by the Spirit to speak in tongues, but presumably only in the privacy of their own homes and only if they had been given this gift (see 12:28-30).
• The gift of prophecy is for today (see 1 Thessalonians 5:19-22). Not in the sense of authoritative, inerrant revelation from God, but as a word of “edification, exhortation, and consolation” (14:3). The words “prophet”, “prophecies”, “prophesy”, and “prophesying” are used over 200 times in the New Testament. The whole notion of prophecy and prophesying is a big part of the New Testament. It’s not a minor doctrine. It’s a major teaching of the New Testament.
• Paul’s primary concern was the edification of the body of Christ (the church). A form of the word “edify” is used four times in this passage. This is the foremost reason why spiritual gifts were given to us (see 12:7). It is important to note that Paul was not being critical of tongues speakers edifying themselves. He was not opposed to edifying oneself. This is one reason we come to church on Sunday, to strengthen ourselves. When we exercise our spiritual gifts, we edify ourselves in a similar way. Nevertheless, there is a double meaning to the word “edify” in this context. Since arrogance was such a problem the Corinthian church, it seems that some were getting puffed up over their use of tongues. Paul’s wish that everyone would speak in tongues is still a genuine desire, but in public worship, we should only engage in what builds up the church. Edification is the benchmark by which we measure what goes on in public worship.

Now, brothers and sisters, if I come to you speaking in tongues, how will I help you unless I speak to you with a revelation or with knowledge or prophesy or teaching? It is similar for lifeless things that make a sound, like a flute or harp. Unless they make a distinction in the notes, how can what is played on the flute or harp be understood? If, for example, the trumpet makes an unclear sound, who will get ready for battle? It is the same for you. If you do not speak clearly with your tongue, how will anyone know what is being said? For you will be speaking into the air. There are probably many kinds of languages in the world, and none is without meaning. If then I do not know the meaning of a language, I will be a foreigner to the speaker and the speaker a foreigner to me. 1 Corinthians 14:6-11

Paul explained the problem with uninterpreted tongues is no one benefits from something that he or she can’t understand. Paul wanted to be sure that what occurs in the worship service is profitable for all attendees, so he emphasized gifts of clear communication. Paul wanted everything to be done for edification… strengthening … of the church body, not just select individuals who wanted to look good.

Paul gave three analogies or metaphors that expound on the necessity of intelligibility in congregational worship.

1. In order to be understood or appreciated musical instruments must play a discernible melody. If the musicians playing the flute and harp don’t give a clear distinction between the notes, the audience will not understand the tune.
2. On the field of battle, bugle calls must be clear enough for soldiers to distinguish “Advance!” from “Retreat!” Trumpets or bugles were often used to summon people to battle or to give a signal for when to charge the enemy or when to stop fighting because the battle was over. Presumably there were different note patterns for each command. But if the trumpeter sounded either an unclear note pattern or a muffled sound so that the soldiers could not clearly distinguish what was being played, they would become confused and not know what they were supposed to do.
3. Foreign languages remain unintelligible to those who have not learned them. The one who speaks in tongues without interpreting is speaking into the air. It is important to understand that these verses merely serve as an illustration. Paul was not saying the gift of tongues in this context is a foreign language. He was simply trying to say that tongues must be interpreted or they are of no value to those who can’t interpret.

Applying all three of these illustrations, Paul said that it is not the mere sound of speaking that is important, but whether the sounds can be understood by the hearers.

It is the same with you. Since you are eager for manifestations of the Spirit, seek to abound in order to strengthen the church. 1 Corinthians 14:12

Paul again commanded the church to seek those gifts which would build up the body, particularly prophecy.

Look around your church on Sunday and ask yourself if the congregation you attend matches that instruction. If it doesn’t, that okay, because Paul provided the solution to the problem of uninterpreted tongues.

So then, one who speaks in a tongue should pray that he may interpret. If I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unproductive. What should I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my mind. I will sing praises with my spirit, but I will also sing praises with my mind. Otherwise, if you are praising God with your spirit, how can someone without gift say “Amen” to your  thanksgiving, since he does not know what you are saying. For you are certainly giving thanks well, but the other person is not strengthened. I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you, but in the church I want to speak five words with my mind to instruct others, rather than ten thousand words in a tongue.  1 Corinthians 14:13-19

What must a person do if God has given him or her the gift of tongues? Paul exhorted those who speak in tongues to pray that they will be able to interpret their own tongues and those of others. He then explained that he prayed and sang in his native language(s) and his prayer language. He sought to experience the best of both worlds—the spirit and the mind. Yet, he was still sensitive to ensure that during the worship event, people understood what was happening. Turns out, my Baptist buddies, Paul was an avid tongues speaker, but out of consideration for others he left his prayer language at home.

Mature thinking is critical in the church

Paul sought maturity in public worship.

Brothers and sisters, do not be children in your thinking. Instead, be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature.  1 Corinthians 14:20

Paul wanted the Corinthians to stop thinking like selfish, prideful children with regards to the gifts. They should be naïve infants with regards to evil, but mature believers in the worship service.

Citing a prophecy from Isaiah 28:11-12 (see also Deuteronomy 28:49), Paul wrote:

It is written in the law: “By people with strange tongues and by the lips of strangers I will speak to thispeople, yet not even in this way will they listen to me,” says the Lord. 1 Corinthians 14:21

The point of this Old Testament quotation is that if Israel would not hear the Lord through the prophets, they would not hear even when He spoke in foreign languages to them through foreign people. Why then, Paul asked, the emphasis on tongues in the Corinthian congregation?

So then, tongues are a sign not for believers but for unbelievers. Prophecy, however, is not for unbelievers but for believers. 1 Corinthians 14:22

I suspect this is one of those Jewish rabbi rhetorical questions that Paul sometimes slipped into his writing. It would be confusing to read it any other way because it seems to say the very opposite of what we would expect Paul to say. In Paul’s mind, tongues are a sign for believers and prophecy is a sign for unbelievers. How do I know that? I read the next few verses. (Context is everything!)

So if the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and unbelievers or uninformed people enter, will they not say that you have lost your minds? But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or uninformed person enters, he will be convicted by all, he will be called to account by all. The secrets of his heart are his heart are disclosed, and in this way he will fall down with his face to the ground and worship God, declaring, “God is really among you.” 1 Corinthians 14:23-25

The effect of Christian prophecy on the unbeliever is threefold:

• He will be convicted of sin (see. John 16:8)
• he will be called to take account of his sins and examine his sinful condition
• and he will have his sinful heart and past laid open to inspection (see John 4:16-19)

The triple use of “all” in verse 24 emphasizes that all the church through its prophetic message plays a part in bringing the unbeliever to this place of conviction. For the unbeliever in the church service will recognize that God really is present and dealing with him.

In the modern churches there are two competing groups: evangelicals and charismatics. Both groups are similar, but they do have a different flavor and for many, many years, they were somewhat hostile to one another.

Brad and I are evangelicals. He prays in a spiritual language in his place of solitude (otherwise known as our basement). I do not. God has not given me that gift and I don’t feel deprived because I can’t exercise it. We sometimes worship with charismatic friends who are generally okay with Brad not praying in tongues in their prayer meetings, but some of them get a little pushy with me because they feel I am missing out on something or refusing God’s guidance. Meanwhile, our Baptist friends are concerned that Brad prays in tongues when he’s alone (or sometimes in my presence). Not so much younger Baptists, but a lot of the older ones.

I believe God wants us to move beyond segregation by spiritual gifts to tolerance and even acceptance of the gifts of others. God would have His churches reconciled on this subject. He is calling the two halves of the churches back together again, not just to endure one another, but to delight in one another’s uniqueness and profit from it. God is calling us to a higher level of unity than ever before. He is asking us to embrace the full diversity of the body of Christ.

Remember, in heaven, there won’t be any evangelicals or charismatics. There will only be Christians worshiping with Jesus. We should get used to it now, because we will be worshiping Him in our own ways in heaven.

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The great investor and writer Andy Kessler frequently points out that the failure rate among Silicon Valley start-ups is 90 percent.  Every member of the economics profession would be wise to memorize the previous figure and repeat it daily. If so, economists might come closer to understanding why they’re mystified by what they deem slow economic growth. And mystified they are. So much so that they’ve apparently given up.

Source: When Economists Are Enemies of Economic Growth | John Tamny

 

Central bankers plainly don’t understand what drives economic growth.

Less Is More

According to New York Times reporter Binyamin Appelbaum, the theme that emerged from the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole confab is that economists have ceased offering growth proposals. Appelbaum indicates that they’re playing defense now; floating ideas to allegedly ensure things don’t get worse. Having tried everything since 2008 (more on this in a bit), they’ve given up arguing about what they plainly don’t understand, or recognize. It almost renders the credentialed sympathetic in some weird, pathetic way.

And it’s encouraging. While the role of central banks (the Federal Reserve the world’s #1 employer of economists) in the economy is vastly overstated either way, it’s good to see a routinely incorrect profession realize that it is nearly always incorrect. The first step to healing is recognition of the problem, or something like that.

While central bankers plainly don’t understand what drives economic growth, they need to realize that what they do has little to do with growth as is. Lest they or readers forget, central banks project their always overstated and rapidly shrinking economic influence through antiquated banks; banks arguably the least dynamic sources of credit in the world, and surely the least dynamic in the U.S. Going back to the Silicon Valley stat that begins this piece, does any sane person think banks have anything to do with the finance that drives this hotbed of innovation? This is a short way of saying that even if central bank economists actually had a clue, their doings would have little relevance to the economic sectors that actually power growth.

It’s also worth pointing out that Silicon Valley dynamism is likely not being captured by GDP, and other dopey numbers that central bankers follow.  To understand the previous point, readers might consider how the 19th-century introduction of coal as a source of fuel multiplied the productivity of workers twenty times over.  And this was coal. Imagine what technological advances like the computer, internet, smartphone, and the GPS that is standard in modern smartphones have meant for individual productivity.

Recessions Are a Source of Strength

Yet the economists in Jackson Hole were busy self-flagellating about sub-2% GDP. Ok, but GDP is backwards. It rises when governments take our wealth and consume it, it falls when our productivity rates voluminous imports and foreign investment, and it rises when governments bail out sub-optimal producers like General Motors.

Silicon Valley succeeds a lot precisely because it fails a lot.

GDP isn’t just backwards and wrong, it plainly can’t factor our enormous surges in productivity that spring from technological advancement. In short, the slow-growth laments of economists are the equivalent of one judging the quality of play in the NFL by solely watching games played by the New York Jets; the Jets the non-dynamic equivalent of the banks that central bankers still think relevant to economic progress.

Taking the above further, readers should never forget that the economics profession is near monolithic in its absurd belief that World War II ended the Great Depression. Oh yes, the horrid, sick-inducing process whereby armies in developed countries killed the customers of their countries’ top businesses around the world, whereby developed countries’ best and brightest were taken out of production so that they could be murdered and maimed around the world, whereby production of goods and services was halted to varying degrees so that it could be directed toward weaponry meant to destroy people and wealth around the world, whereby the division of labor that is the source of abundant production around the world was shredded in favor of murder and wealth destruction around the world, had an economic upside.

The extermination of people and wealth constitutes growth to economists. In that case, how can they possibly lament a lack of what they once again don’t understand, or recognize?

Back to reality, economists would be wise to memorize the stat about Silicon Valley because it might turn on a light where there’s presently darkness. The most prosperous region in the world, one where economic growth is abundant, is defined by near constant failure.

The extermination of people and wealth constitutes growth to economists.

Here’s the reason why economists don’t get growth. They don’t see that the quickest path to it is experimentation, realization of information (good and bad) through experimentation, and the release of precious resources back into the marketplace when experiments fail. Silicon Valley succeeds a lot precisely because it fails a lot. Its “recessions” are the source of its strength, yet economists think the path to growth involves fighting recessions. It’s not just GDP that’s backwards.

Despite economy-cleansing slowdowns being the source of strength in booming parts of the world, at Jackson Hole former Obama administration Council of Economic Advisors chairman Jason Furman talked up government spending to allegedly make sure things don’t get worse. Ok, but when governments spend they’re extracting precious resources from the private sector only to centrally plan their use in politicized fashion. When governments spend there’s less experimentation, less information, and less in the way of precious resources being released to new stewards by the failures simply because government experiments generally aren’t allowed to fail.

Fed Chairman Janet Yellen talked up the dangers of bank deregulation, but as Silicon Valley reminds us yet again, it’s the total lack of regulation there that ensures intrepid experimentation, abundant information, and quick failure if the experiments come up short.  Banks aren’t relevant to the U.S. economy for many reasons, but a major one has to do with the fact that they’re too regulated to die with the frequency that ensures the industry’s dynamism. Regulation is stagnation – for any industry – simply because industry sectors gain essential strength from the information-abundant failures.

Not only are economists incapable of recognizing what economic growth is (once again, they think war has a growth upside), they also propose policies that are inimical to the progress necessary for growth. The profession is near-monolithically confused.

But if it wants to matter, as in if it wants to stop retreating into defensive postures, it must realize that its problems are bigger than not being able to predict growth, or not being able to recognize policies conducive to same. Indeed, missed by economists is that the policies are the problem; meaning economists are the problem. “Economy” is just a word for people. People want things, but they can only fulfill their wants insofar as they supply first. Which means the answer to growth isn’t policy as much as it’s a reduction of the barriers to our natural desire to supply.  Basically an absence of policy.

Which should cause one to wonder if economists will ever move beyond admitting they have a problem. They would have to acknowledge that growth is the natural human state, and “policy” is the only barrier to growth. If economists can realize the latter they’ll see that we don’t need them, and better yet that we’ll thrive without them.  Economists need to recognize that the path to economic growth is an absence of economists.

Reprinted from Real Clear Markets. 

John Tamny

John Tamny is a Forbes contributor, editor of RealClearMarkets, a senior fellow in economics at Reason, and a senior economic adviser to Toreador Research & Trading. He’s the author of the 2016 book Who Needs the Fed?(Encounter), along with Popular Economics (Regnery Publishing, 2015).

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The National Socialist German Workers Party (Hitler’s party) were socialists. How do I make that claim? It’s right there in their title, for one, but also because Hitler’s henchman Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He considered Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that espoused by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations like dandelion seeds, it would operate just within German-speaking countries, thus assuring cultural victory.

For the modern Left not to know this shows gross historical illiteracy. That they try to explain the connection away would be laughable if I believed most people in the US were educated enough to know the Left is stupid.

Hitler boasted that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx.” Hitler thought Marx had erred in fostering class division rather than national unity. By setting the workers against the industrialists Marx had, in Hitler’s view, missed an opportunity to unite them to the same goals. He meant to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists.” He thought the bankers and factory owners could serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state.

Yeah, the national socialists  and the international socialists loathed one another and rushed to put each other in prison camps or before firing squads, but that was merely a territorial food fight between two tribes that hated free-market individualists. They were brothers and brothers tend toward rivalry, but they were still brothers, more alike than not. Both were evil forms of statism … one attracting people who envied the wealthy and the other seeking recruits by demonizing non-Aryans.

Somewhere along the line we’ve forgotten what Nazism really was and we’ve allowed leftists to define it as a more extreme form of conservatism. The myth revolves around the idea that left-wing means compassionate and right-wing means nasty and we all know fascists are nasty.

Does that sound silly worded like that?

That’s because it is. The media calls all sorts of groups “right-wing”. The Taliban, for example, is “right-wing” according to the media. Yet, the Taliban, while being conservative Muslims, want communal ownership of goods. The “right-wing” Iranian revolutionaries seized industries and destroyed the middle class.

So let’s step back and consider this. Both ideologists favored authoritarianism as a means to their ends. So do, for that matter, the Iranian revolutionaries and the Taliban. Authoritarianism is the believe that state (government) compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal. That goal might be scientific progress or great equality or the protection of religion. It was traditionally a characteristic of social democrats and revolutionaries, as pointed out by the very progressive HG Wells, who in 1932, told the Young Liberals they must become “liberal fascists” and “englightened Nazis.”

Wells wasn’t not advocating for embracing Hitlerism, which didn’t actually exist in 1932. He was describing government interventionism. A lot of people in the United States at that time were pro-interventionism, having not yet recognized the racism and anti-Semitism that were part of the fascist program. They didn’t know what they didn’t know.

What is the excuse of modern people who excuse communism today? We know where it has always led and we should know that it will lead there again, but some of Americans romanticize an ideology that killed tens of millions of innocent people. Do you not realize that T-shirt of Che Guevara champions the vicious enforcing of Cuba’s totalitarian regime.