After making an accurate diagnosis, our task is then to identify strategies for ourselves and the people we can influence or join forces with in our local communities. Hopefully we can learn how to lead more sane, healthy, prosperous, productive, and effective lives while similtaneously increasing our defenses against misfortune.

In "Resolving Opposing Ideologies," we looked at ways to ideologically untangle confusion over the true nature of policy options.

Our Next Step: Now we have to deal with another major stumbling block. We have to examine how we interpret the past. This is very important, because people usually make policy recommendations for the future based upon the use of some kind of interpretation of past events. Dr. Ralph Raico, in his Mises Institute lecture, emphasized this point when he alluded to Winston Smith's job in the Ministry of Truth in George Orville's novel 1984. Smith scanned old newspapers for content that did not seem to fit Big Brother's current policies and threw them down the memory hole. "He who controls the past controls the present, and he who controls the present controls the future."

In this section I want to provide an overview regarding the way in which each perspective described in my "Resolving Opposing Ideologies" section helps us to start asking some of the right historical questions. These perspectives are summarized again as follows:

a) Environmental top down (also known as authoritarian modern liberalism, liberal fascism, and "neo-Jacobinism," all of which describes what America has become today)
b) Environmental bottom up (also known as contemporary anarcho-libertarianism, this is a "sanitized," non-racialist, non-ethnic version of the American Old Right)
c) Genetic top down (also known as authoritarian racial nationalism, this includes German national socialism and Zionism.)
d) Genetic bottom up (I call this libertarian racial nationalism. This is also known as 19th century classical liberalism, the American Old Right, and Paleo-Conservatism)
e) Mutualism vs. Parasitism (Productive practices vs. criminality. The latter include political corruption, organized crime, and subversion).

Link to the following discussions regarding how each of these perspectives produces a unique interpretation of American historical trends: a) Environmental top down (liberal or neo-Jacobin fascism, what America has today)
b) Environmental decentralized or "bottom up" (anarcho-libertarianism)
c) Genetic top down (authoritarian racial nationalism)
d) Genetic bottom up (libertarian racial nationalism, America's founding ideology)
e) Mutualism vs. Parasitism (Productivity vs. criminality --are criminals winning in America today?)

The Environmental decentralized viewpoint

In the last section, that is, the American History "Environmental-Centralized," we looked at the general trend of American history over the last two hundred years, which has been unmistakeably towards more centralization in all areas. By all areas I mean both economics and politics. I also mean peace as well as war. America has also unmistakeably moved ever further towards the left, away from a clearly Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture and racial identity, with a long term Anglo-Saxon-Celtic historical memory, where political power was held by propertied white males, to a Jewish-dominated muliracial, multicultural society where the well below replacement level negative white population growth is steadily trending not only towards minority status, but ultimate extinction if present trends continue.

The environmental decentralized viewpoint, also known as the "anarcho-libertarian" and contemporary "Austrian" viewpoint, is extremely important for a number of reasons:

a) Cleaning up after elephants. As America has become incresasingly centralized, its court intellectuals have promoted economic and political fallacies to justify this trend. (We will not deal with racial fallicies here since anarcho libertarians do not care very much about biological matters, or at least in their public discourse, in any even I will save all that for my "genetic" section), however, there more than enough to deal here with in terms of basic free enterprise to fill volumes. In fact, Dr. Murray Rothbard and Henry Hazlitt are two famous examples of libertarian Americans who spent their entire careers debunking economic lies and fallacies promoted by American administrations to justify their continuous nasty, underhanded power grabs at the expense of Americans.

It is axiomatic that over the very long run, free market forces tend to win out over short term forces of financial manipulation, intellectual myth making, and bureaucratic government intervention. In the long run, it is all about creating products that offer steadily increasing quality at ever decreasing real prices (while maintaining a quality human population capable of sustaining this trend). This is almost like an iron law. Therefore, regardless of the structure of ones societies, or the apparent nobility of its professed ideals, if it cannot deliver the goods, in the very long run it will fall beside the wayside compared to those societies that can deliver the goods. One of the great strengths of libertarian economic theory is that it helps people understand how in the very long run various free market forces tend to win out over all forms of political deception and myth-making and government intervention.

Two of the biggest economic myths perpetrated by American administrations, that I will address in more detail later, are as follows:

a) Massive war spending is inherently good for the economy. Henry Hazlitt called this "The Fallacy of the Broken Window":

b) Massive and sustained government spending and intervention is inherently good for the economy. Rather than seriously distorting the economy (which is what really happens), central planners somehow know better than competent entrepreneurs formulating and executing business plans on a grass roots level. Later I will discuss Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo's work How Capitalism Saved America. Among other things, he talks about how most American legislators across the country determined in the 19th century that the private sector could build roads much more honestly and efficiently than government, whereas in the 20th most Americans are brain-washed to believe that only government is capable of building roads. The Mises Institute also numerous excellent lectures and articles that debunk Keynesian economics.

Professor Trask has written an excellent article about the ten greatest economic fallacies
at: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/economic-fallacies.html

b) The null hypothesis. In decision science theory, one usually has to include the "do nothing" option, which can sometimes be the best option of all. The same principle applies here in our analysis of politics and history. During the colonial period leading up to the American Revolution, Americans had almost no government by contemporary standards. The colonies often acted like separate countries. Generally speaking, the people in the colonies were dynamic, fairly self-sufficient, happy, and prosperous. They were generally optimistic about their future. This state of affairs took place for about 140 years, more than half the time our current problemmatic republic has been in existence.

This information alone should raise some very haunting questions. Why could not Americans remained decentralized as they added more technology and grew their populations? Would America have been better off if the overall country (or various "spin-off" countries in North America) had followed a decentralized growth model?

There are small countries such as Switzerland and Scandinavian countries that seem to be quite happy to remain small -- who says the North American continent has to be economically and politically united and integrated at all costs under an all-powerful government. Why?

c) Libertarian smoke detectors. They say if you want to really understand what is going on in society, "follow the money." That is certainly true, although I also believe there is an important genetic analysis (I will save this for another section). But suffice to say, libertarians are correct that one can learn quite a lot about what is happening in a society over time by understanding what factions are accumulating special privileges.

As we review the march of American history from the colonial period forward, we might ask such questions as "What are the accumulations of economic mythologies?" Also, "Why each more centralized economic and political "New Thing" necessarily better than how things used to be?" Finally, "Who is are those foxes in the chicken coup who raking in ever more special privileges while keeping public attention artfully focused elsewhere?"

It is important to note that the anarcho-libertarian viewpoint gives us the "smoke," that is, the tell-tale symptoms of underlying structural changes in terms of revisions of the legal system and economic relationships. However, anarcho-libertarianism does not do a very good job of explaining the "fire" or motivation, except to usually rationalize nasty trends as the result of forms of ignorance. We need the biological viewpoint to understand such underlying factors as racial envy (genetic distance), territoriality, and the criminal personality (parasitism) to understand why certain destructive trends (from a libertarian viewpoint) may have such viral persistency in American history.




Again, "enviromental" usually means "leftism." I use "bottom up" to mean "decentralized," "grass roots," or "laissez faire." A common synonyn of this viewpoint is "anarcho-libertarian."

As a line of intellectual analysis, the anarcho-libertarian viewpoint tends to look at social, economic, and political problems from the viewpoint of individual choice and grass roots action. It believes that over the long run, the free market always wins out over government intervention, therefore wise policies should prevent distortion away from a free market. Government intervention, large corporations, and other sources of potential monopoly or free market distortion are prime potential enemies, particularly when they destroy liberty and undermine individual freedom of action. Like the environmental top down viewpoint, anarcho-libertarians tend to view conflict more in terms of competing individual action, factions, or classes as opposed to racial, religious, or ethnic categoreis, although individual and factional interests can overlap any of these latter categories.

In their historical analysis, anarcho-libertarians tend to focus upon the accumulation of special privilege and conversely the erosion of individual liberties in a society. They also like to examine how free market principles work in a healthy economy and how these principles tend to trump government intervention over the long run.

Anarcho-libertarians are very correct about one important point. As a society moves away from allowing the free market to work, by definition the economy experiences what is known as "economic distortion." This distortion interferes with the market as an informational feedback mechanism that enables all the complex components of an economy to efficiently adjust to each other. You may not like what the free market tells you, but at least it is relatively simple and straightforward. As you distort an economy away from the free market, regardless of intentions or the ideological motivation behind this distortion, the informational feedback systems become increasingly misleading and crooked. In the long run, this added crookedness usually offsets whatever short term advantages were gained by creating the distortions in the first place. Therefore, the burdon on economists should be to explain first how a straight, laissez faire economic system would work and then justify the distortions that they propose based upon a cost/benefit analysis relative to a baseline laissez faire system.

Another very important point I need to make is that while it is true that most anarcho-libertarians today tend to ignore race, ethnicity, religion and cultural factors and hence come across as a bunch of leftists, it is possible to make some subtle qualifications in the way they define their terms and start sounding more like a radical right winger rather than radical left winger.

For example, in my discussion of the environmental vs. genetic viewpoint, I talk about the "genetic interests" concept. Now most leftist anarcho-libetarians, when they hear about this concept, reflexively dismiss it as a form of "protectionism" that would distort the free market.

I completely disagree. I view racial policy as a long term investment in genetic assets that makes rational free market sense in the very long run for society by optimizing such factors as the number of smart people (optimizing labor factors), optimizing cultural coherence (optimizing productive corporate culture), and minimizing social strife (minimizing economic deadweight).

In other words, you can move anarcho-libertarian theory from being a left wing to a very right wing ideology by simply extending way out in time what economists call "time preference" and by expanding your definition of what they call "factors of production."

I could argue from this perspective that forced multi-racialism, multi-culturalism, and affirmative action reflect the real "protectionism" that distorts the economy. These things not only sabotage meritocracy in the short run, but also sabotage the ability of a society to make rational long term investments in its own genetic assets that would optimize its long term free market economic performance. Of course long term investments in genetic assets also necessarily include long term investment in supporting intangibles such as culture, religion, and heritage consciousness.

This is one reason why early 19th century America, which truly had a free market economy as well as a free market in ideas, was explicitly pro-white racial nationalist. This is also a reason why late 20th century America, which forced Israeli and nonwhite interests ahead of white interests, had a highly interventionist leftist authoritarian economic regime accompanied by phony forms of leftist libertarianism as its permissible kosher opposition.

Incidentally, real world 19th century anarcho-libertarianism had another flavor which is upsets modern leftist anarcho-libertarians, who typically paint a utopian world that encourages pacifism and repudiates violent conflict. Somehow their dream of the absence of forceable government means the absence of violence everywhere. Not true. In an anarcho-libertarian society, you do not get rid of violence, you merely take it out of the hands of the state and official police and default it to the private, personal level. Dueling, blood feuds, and revenge killings are nonstate, privatized, anarcho-libertarian forms of conflict resolution. They tend to become more common. So when cowboys had it out in a gun-draw, that is anarcho-libertarianism. Not surprising, in libertarian Nordic societies such as medieval Iceland or parts of ancient Germany, all men carried swords and spears (in fact, if you did not, you were not considered a man), just like in a later era all American settlers had rifles.

Interestingly enough, some modern historians claim that the rate of violence was actually much lower on a per capita basis among American settlers in the Old West than it is today. One can argue that while it was a primitive and barbaric system system by current standards, it was much more effective. Justice was swift and direct, and you did not have to deal with a clogged court system, convoluted regulations, expensive lawyers, and corrupt cops. One is less likely to cheat or attack someone if that person has a gun and is prepared to take the law into his own hands if he feels that he has really been wronged. In contrast, very wealthy corrupt people today can hide behind their lawyers, and worse than this, can try to wage legal terrorism against people who try to expose their corruption by filing false charges against them and exhausting their financial resources in lengthy procedures.

Below I show George Rogers Clark's anarcho libertarian business travel kit for frontier operations, circa 1778 below:

Rather than get into this not so politically correct intellectual territory, most anarcho-libertarians today earn their bread and butter by identifying specific special privileges that have accumulated in our society and which are dragging down economic performance. In my "Resolving Opposing Ideologies" section, I discuss Special Privilege by Vincent LoCasio. This book describes how central bankers and their allies enjoy some of the most outrageous special privileges in our society. They become even more obscene if one buys into compelling arguments by Dr.Murray Rothbard, that I also mention, namely that central banking in peacetime is not only unnecessary, but does far more harm than good. A good primer on Dr. Rothbard's views in this area is available online as What Has Government Done to Our Money?

In regard to the erosion of individual liberty, Dr. Thomas Woods has come out with the excellent book The Politically Incorrect History of America, a New York Times bestseller. According to Dr. Woods in one of his Mises Institute lectures, a lady who read his manuscript said that it put a cold chill up her spine to realize how many liberties the average American has lost.

One of the biggest blows to individual liberties in the 20th century has been the income tax. America got the income tax in peacetime for the first time in 1913, the same year as our Federal Reserve System. There had a been a Federal income tax during the War Between the States, but it was a wartime measure and was quickly repealed after the war was over.

According to Dr. Woods, (page 136) the top income tax rate jumped from 7 percent to 73% during World WarI, causing a massive capital flight into tax-free state and municipal bonds and starving industry. Following the war in the early 1920's, secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon figured out that the taxes were squeezing the economy, and dropped the top rates from 73% to 40% and later to 25%, with the greatest proportional reductions in the lower income brackets. Economic activity muliplied. However, Dr. Woods notes (p. 135 of The Politically Incorrect History of America):

So although government spending and foreign involvement did indeed decrease in the 1920s when compared with the previous decade, they were both much higher than they had been before the war. This is what economic historian Robert Higgs has called the "ratchet effect.": although government is inevitably scaled back in the aftermath of an emergency, it never reaches pre-emergency levels. Its scope, its spending, and its taxation are lower than during emergency, but higher than before the emergency.

Apart from the ratchet effect, there is also another huge negative to the income tax from a libertarian perspective. In his Mises Institute lectures, Charles Adams points out that in ancient times, the Greeks and Romans felt the only fair tax was an excise tax, such as a sales tax. They felt that an income tax made one effectively a slave to the state, because now the state could collect information on ones personal affairs and confiscate earnings at will.

Another important area involving loss of liberty addressed by Dr. Woods involves America's legislating, imperial judiciary. A prime example involves the interpretation and enforcment of the Fourteenth Amendment, enacted in the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The original act reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Dr. Woods notes on page 83 that "Harvard's Raol Berger devoted much of his career to proving that the amendment was modest in scope, intended to empower the federal government to ensure that the states did not interfere with the basic rights of the freedmen --the right to enter contracts, to sue, and to own property." Despite this, we fast forward to several examples of how the Federal judiciary has used this Amendment to engage in gross usurpation of power. On page 84 Dr. Woods provides as his first example, "Fourteenth Amendment Horror Show #1"

In 1994 California passed a ballot initiative, Proposition 187, which would have denied "free" (that is, taxpayer-funded) social services to illegal aliens. Californians, under the delusion that they had the right to govern themselves, defied fashionable opinion --liberal and "conservative" alike-- in passing the initiative. But they found out who really governed them when the federal courts prevented the implementation of 187, in the name of the Fourteenth Amendment. What does forcing a state to bankrupt itself by giving away "free" services to people who are in the country illegally have to do with the Fourteenth Amendment? Who knows. But this is why many people opposed it in the first place: Language in the amendment that meant something specific and finite when taken in its proper context became a recipe for federal domination of the states when torn from that context.

Most Americans are sold on the idea that the government spending programs play a major role in creating economic prosperity. They are typically shocked to learn about hard historical evidence that the exact opposite is true. Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo's book How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, from the Pilgrims to the Present does an excellent de-brainwashing job in this area. On pages 79 and 80 he notes:

For the first six decades of the nineteenth century, one of the biggest economic policy debates was over the desirability of government subsidies for so-called internal improvements, or the building of roads, canals, and railroads...

...The basic economic argument in favor of government subsidies for canal or road buiding was the so-called free-rider problem. According to this argument, individuals are not sufficiently motivated to contribute voluntarily to the provision of "public goods" by which everyone benefits. Thus, the story goes, such projects as road and canal building will be inherently underfunded if we rely totally on private financing. Supposedly taxation is needed to force potential free riders to pay their share for public goods; the government will use the taxpayer's money to subsidize important infrastructure projects that wouldn't be completed otherwise.

But the fact is, most roads and canals were privately financed in the nineteenth century. Moreover, in virtually every instance in which state, local, or federal government got involved in building roads and canals, the result was a financial debacle in which little or nothing was actually built and huge sums of taxpayer dollars were squandered or simply stolen. Today we call the concept of tax-funded subsidies to business "corporate welfare," and this policy is as economically harmful now as it was in the nineteenth century.

Most Americans are also sold on the idea that increasing political centralization in America since the War Between the States has been a good thing. In fact, in his brilliant book Democracy: The God That Failed, Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that America has enjoyed economic and technological progress in the 20th century despite, rather than because of centralization.

America in the early 19th century was highly decentralized, as I have discussed in the "Revolving Ideologies" section. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830's, he noted that a distinguishing characteristic of America is that it had almost no government by European standards. With about the same population size as France, it had ten times fewer bureaucrats. It was common for Americans to belong to many different local volunteer organizations and handle everything on a community level. During this period, in which America also had no central bank, and money was kept out of the hands of politicians and linked to gold and silver, America experienced long periods of strong economic growth.

Similarly, Dr. Hoppe argues that during many periods of European history, parts of Europe were vastly more decentralized than today. He notes on page 108:

...during the second half of the seventeenth century, Germany consisted of some 234 countries, 51 free cities, and 1,500 indepdendent knightly manors. By the early nineteenth century, the total number of the three had fallen below 50, and by 1871 unification had been achieved. The scenario in Italy was similar. Even small states have a history of expansion and centralization. Switzerland began in 1291 as a confederation of thre independent cantonal states. By 1848 it was a single (federal) state with some two dozen cantonal provinces.

When faced with more competing countries or principalities, rulers were under pressure to keep taxes relatively low to avoid losing their most productive citizens to competitors. However, as the most successful states tended to grow over time, they absorbed or eliminated rivals. With fewer rivals, they could afford to became more arrogant. The arrogance of an empire may finally end when it splinters into smaller countries much like the former Soviet Union or the former Yugoslavia. Dr. Hoppe notes in his two concluding paragraphs of his chapter "On Centralization and Secession" on pages 117-118 of Democracy --The God That Failed. :

Secessionism, and the growth of separatist and regionalist movements throughout the world represent not an anachronism, but potentially the most progressive historical forces, especially in light of the fact that with the fall of the Soviet Union we have moved closer than ever to the establishment of a "new world order." Secession increases ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity, while centuries of centralization have stamped out hundreds of distinct cultures. Secession will end the forced integration brought about by centralization, and rather than stimulating social strife and cultural leveling, it will promote the peaceful, cooperative competition of different, territorially separate cultures. In particular, it eliminates the immigration problem, increasingly plaguing the countries of Western Europe as well as the U.S. Presently, whenever the central governemnt permist immigration, it allows foreigners to proceed -- literally on government-owned roads-- to any of its residents' doorsteps, regardless of whether or not these residents desire such proximity to foreigners. Thus, to a large extent "free immigration" is forced immigration. Secessin solves this problem by letting smaller territories each have their own admission standards and determine independently with whom they will associate on their territory and with whom they prefer to cooperate from a distance.

Lastly, secession promotes economic integration and development. The process of centralization has resulted in the formation of an international, U.S.-dominated government cartel of managed immigration, trade, and fiat money, ever more invasive and burdensome governments, globalized welfare-warfare statism and economic stagnation or even declining standards of living. Secession, if it is extensive enough, could change all this. Teh world would consist of tens of thousands of distinct countries, regions and cantons, and of hundreds of thousands of independent free cities such as the present-day "oddities" of Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Greatly incrased opportunities for economically motivated migration would result, and the world would be one of small liberal governments economically integrated through free trade and an international commodity money such as gold. It would be a world of unheard of prosperity, economic growth, and cultural advancement.

This raises quite a few questions. If greater empire means greater corruption, where the ultimate endgame involves breakup, then why go down this road to begin with? What kinds of people herd others on to this road to serfdom? Conversely, at each step of the ratchet up process of more centralization in American history, why were the forces for decentralization unable to mount adequate resistance?