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The Socialist Kiddies Don't Know Nuttin'
This came up on my X-feed. A socialist student telling Ben Shapiro how a pencil factory wouldn’t be nothing without the workers.
Capital need labor infinitely more than labor needs capital.
Not the case, says Ben Shapiro. Because “millions of people” are willing to work for wages.
Actually, I’d say that everything needs everything else. A pencil factory owner needs “wood, paint, graphite, rubber and aluminum,” as the student asserts. But he also needs a factory and a market and wholesalers to buy his pencils, and on and on. And he needs the prices for labor and materials and energy and money to add up to a profit. Because if the sums don’t add up there are no pencils, no jobs, no profits, no nothing.
And do you know how that all comes together? In the market and its prices, including prices for workers, equipment, money, real estate, and on and on.
If you do not understand that, dear socialist friend, you know nothing, and you certainly should not be pontificating in public, or running for office, or conducting peaceful protests, or administering the pencil industry from a government bureaucracy.
But the bigger issue is that it does not matter if you know nothing and do not understand capitalism and markets and prices. You can know nothing and still survive and thrive in a market economy.
All you need to do is show up at the supermarket with money and pay the price for the groceries you buy. You don’t have to know about butchering cows, or bottling milk, or making butter. That all happens off stage, and is the result of it all is the price the supermarket wants you to pay. If you don’t like the prices or the products you can go somewhere else.
All you need to do is apply for a job and decide whether the wage offered is good enough for you to take the job. If you work at a job for six months and you don’t get a raise, you can always quit and go find a job somewhere else.
All you need to do to get a roof over your head is find a house to rent. You do not have to have the skills to build your own house, only to demonstrate that you can make the rent.
Maybe the true miracle of the market economy is that you don’t need to know nuttin’ about it. The people that created the market economy knew nuttin’ about it. The rulers that allowed cities to create local market economies knew nuttin’ as to how the market works. Workers migrated from rural serfdom to wage labor in the cities without knowing a thing about how to live and work in an industrial city. We live in houses filled with gadgets that we know nothing about, except how to use them — sorta.
And yet it works. And yet it has visited unimaginable wealth on all of us.
And in every generation some dumb kid thinks he knows better than the millions of minds and lives that created the life he lives and takes for granted and complains about.
Remember the song:
I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales
You never know what might be going on a couple of connections away from your own little life.
What a world!
| Fri, 07 Aug 2026 21:51:32 GMT |
Nothing Has Changed Since 1000
We wise moderns all know that there’s been nothing like the Commies of the 20th century and their kissing cousins the Woke Faithful. And don’t get me started on Literally Hitler.
But Bjorn Merker in Perishing Promise tells us that the Catholic Church had the whole thing down pat starting at the turn of the First Millennium.
He tells the story through the growth of the Latin Church. See, after the Fall of Rome the Church knew if was “in danger of sharing its fate.” The whole point of Augustine’s City of God therefore was to dissociate the City of God from the Earthly City of the deceased and fallen Roman Empire. So the Church pushed into northern Europe and went to work on Christianizing the Germanic tribes.
But, of course, the Christianizing of the Germanic pagans didn’t just involve religious conversion.
In the process Christian doctrines, values and institutions were impressed upon societies undergoing the far-reaching changes attendant on the transition from an essentially preliterate tribal culture to a literate civilization.
The point is that the conversion was both religious and political.
This fusion of tribal and ecclesiastical power… [was] characterized by an absence of a principled distinction between worldly and spiritual authority and power[.]
And it didn’t hurt that the Church “engaged in large-scale land clearance effort, introduced efficient management techniques, and improved agricultural methods.”
But what happened after the conversion was complete — even extending to Iceland? Perfectly simple. It was time for “activism.”
Professing Christians could easily be shown to violate their own ideal in practice,, handing activists the lever of shame in pursuing their goals.
Sound familiar doesn’t it.
[T]hat lever and logic is a constant fixture of activist movements, whether religious or secular, [as we shall see.]
And they even had a Peace Movement, the “Peace of God.”
In due course came Pope Gregory VII, born Hildebrand of Soana, and he declared in Dictatus Papae in 1075 that the pope had the power to depose emperors. Yes, so Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV had to take the Road to Canossa.
Then the Church invented the Crusade.
The nature and scope of papal aspirations were reflected… in the Holy War or Crusade, directed against external enemies, and the Inquisition directed against internal dissent (heresy).
The point to understand is that the Crusades were not just fought against the Muslims, but also against Byzantium, Jews, and “non-Latin Christians such as the Copts.”
Internally, within the boundaries of papal authority, there was what we now call totalitarianism. If you were not a baptized Christian you were excluded from society.
Thus, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) prohibited Jews from owning land and from all civil and military functions.
And woe to those outside the gates.
[T]he heretics, even if innocent of any other crime, were considered fit to be killed, and were in fact killed.
You can see what Bjorn Merker is setting up here. He is telling the history of the last millennium as though it were the first draft of our own totalitarian age, where religious and political leaders are ever tending towards enforcing a one true faith under one great leader.
As we say now: it’s in the jeans.
More to come.
| Fri, 07 Aug 2026 02:12:53 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Nietzsche: I philosophize with a hammer. Me: No, Fritzi; you philosophize with the one-liner.
When you have dominated the oppressors, what do you get? Oppression or domination?
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
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