International Man: Politicians looking for ways to finance their extravagant spending increasingly complain that the wealthy aren’t paying their “fair share.”
It’s a trend in motion that is accelerating. This rising anti-wealth sentiment seems to be taking the US into dangerous territory.
Our friend Rick Rule once said, “Eat the rich? Prepare to starve.”
What is your take?
Doug Casey: Once upon a time, government apologists liked to say that the rich had to be taxed in order to help the poor. That’s no longer the case. Nobody in America is starving. Even poor people have flat-screen TVs, air conditioning, and refrigerators. The poor live better than medieval royalty.
What’s going on is the institutionalization of envy, a terrible vice. It’s different from jealousy.
Jealousy says, “You have something that I want. I want one too. Give it to me.”
Envy says, “You have something that I want. If I can’t have it, I’ll destroy it, so you can’t have it either.” Envy is the moral flaw that underlies all socialist economic theories. Socialist feelings and morality underly the economic lies, race hatred, class hatred, sex antagonism, and political polarization tearing the US and the West apart. Envy and socialism have become secular religions. The country has been divided into two different and mutually antagonistic worldviews.
It’s a question of what’s right and wrong, what’s good and evil. It’s not a question of economics, about what’s more productive. This is a much more serious division. It amounts to a religious war between the Left, who want to overthrow and transform society, and the Right, who want to more-or-less maintain traditional values, but lack any real ideology.
The Left is proposing all manner of outrageous, destructive, and genuinely stupid ideas. Free stuff for everybody. Not just food, shelter, schooling, and medical care provided at the expense of producers—which they’ve basically achieved. But now a guaranteed annual income. Everybody is supposed to get a thousand dollars a month, according to the silly twit and wannabe US president Andrew Yang. They won’t have to do anything, just exist, presumably hanging out at Starbucks playing with their iPhones all day. They’ll genuinely be what Yuval Noah Harari, the World Economic Forum’s mincing court intellectual, has called a permanent class of useless eaters.
At some point, however, people who work, create, produce, and believe in traditional values will react. Maybe they’ll explode in a violent counter-revolution. Maybe they’ll quietly go on strike, as did Ayn Rand’s heroes in “Atlas Shrugged.” Or maybe they’ll roll over and be transformed into serfs—which is what The Elite would prefer and expect. But something wicked this way comes.
International Man: What do you make of the hiring of 87,000 new IRS agents in the context of this trend?
Doug Casey: Those people aren’t being recruited just to collect taxes, although that’s absolutely one of the things that they will do. They will amount to a national police force, one that has a different mandate than the FBI, the ATF, the DEA, or other Praetorian agencies. The tax authorities have a right to look at any economic activity everywhere and anywhere.
As a moral issue, they’ll try to turn nonpayment of tax on the part of producers into a crime against society. I shudder to think of the type of amoral creatures being recruited—at fat salaries and with immense powers—to investigate the lives of their countrymen. They’ll be exactly analogous to Germany’s Gestapo or Stasi.
These new IRS agents will have little to do with the poor. The poor are increasingly irrelevant, except for their votes. As it’s been throughout history, the uneducated lower classes basically do hand-to-mouth labor. They’re mainly interested in bread and circuses, and that’s what they’ll get. Their numbers are growing in this country for the first time.
The new IRS agents won’t have much to do with the elite either; they can afford tax lawyers and accountants to fend them off. They’ll take a few casualties for show and the sake of “fairness,” but the elite are the main beneficiaries of the hundreds of billions of dollars that the government is pouring on society. This is all going to be paid for by the middle class, the people who actually produce and save.
These new IRS agents are a direct attack on the middle class. The elite hate the middle class and what they stand for—independence, stability, and traditional values. The fact that they’re doubling the size of the tax police is truly extraordinary. As the economy continues to decline, you can expect class warfare—along with race and sex warfare—to increase.
As I explained last week, this is an important part of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Hundreds of billions of dollars that the government will spend through their Inflation Reduction Act will be financed—intentionally—by the creation of new dollars.
The reason why they say it’s “inflation reduction” is because the same number of dollars will theoretically be taken out of society through taxes. The new dollars will be placed with the people and companies the government likes. They say it won’t be inflationary because the same number of dollars will be taken out of the economy from people and companies that they don’t approve of. So, theoretically, the net number of dollars in society will stay the same, and the general price level will stay the same because the money supply will stay the same.
That’s their economic argument. But the moral argument is far more important. MMT allocates hundreds of billions to those the Left approves of and will take that much away from the middle class through taxes. It’s diabolically clever. As I said, this amounts to a religious war because the people behind MMT are actually evil.
Unfortunately, “evil” is a word which has been discredited; people no longer take it seriously. It’s been overused by emotional and often corrupt Bible thumpers, hell, and brimstone preachers. But evil really does exist. Evil is the intentional act of destroying something good.
International Man: With financial markets falling and the US dollar’s purchasing power plummeting, many people are feeling poorer and are looking for someone to blame.
What is your view on this dynamic and how it could affect the political situation?
Doug Casey: The speech Biden gave on September 1 was intended to be shocking and disturbing. It mimicked a scene out of V for Vendetta or 1984. They went out of their way to have Biden deliver it in Philadelphia, where the US was founded, and use red lighting against a dark background to fan emotions. These people are serious. Biden’s words were full of hate and venom, calling out half the country as the enemy—the speech was unprecedented. It was a warning and an overt threat.
Look at the scene. The red background was over the top. Placing a couple of Marines in the background said, “I have power, and I’ll use it against the enemy.” Theatrics such as these are unprecedented. It amounted to a declaration of civil war. It was followed up by the outrageous raid on Trump’s home and the FBI perp-walking about 50 of his prominent supporters, with dawn raids, in subsequent days.
These people truly want to overturn society. They’re actually a reincarnation of the Jacobins and could turn out to be just as violent and dangerous.
They’re working to create an active environment of class warfare in the US. They’ve succeeded in fomenting race hatred, where people identify not as human beings but as people of color and anti-white. And sex warfare, wherein people are no longer either men or women—albeit a few with aberrations of varying degree—but as one or more of 50 or 60 genders.
These people hate the middle class, with their traditional cultural and religious values. This is why Trump is so popular and why they identify with him. It’s not because many of his ideas are particularly good; he’s essentially a populist with no philosophical center.
The elite and wannabe elitists hate Trump because he’s a cultural traditionalist. These people want to overthrow traditional culture itself and eliminate the middle class. In the ideal world of the WEF types, the vast majority of people, the deplorables, would be serfs and the kulaks serving the nomenklatura ruling on the top, assisted by their apparatchiki.
I know it sounds outrageous, but that’s what’s on their minds. We’ve seen this before in history when Leftist intellectuals get control of real power, the apparatus of the State. They truly want to overturn the very basis of civilization. The Jacobins in revolutionary France, the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Nazis in Germany, the Maoists during China’s Great Cultural Revolution, and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. It can happen anywhere when conditions are right. It seems to be happening now in the US and other Western countries.
Let’s hope it blows over. But don’t plan your life around that…
International Man: Historically, the size and power of the middle class made the US different from other countries.
But now, the US middle class is shrinking and feeling squeezed.
Where is this trend going, and what can the average middle-class person do about it?
Doug Casey: What was the average man supposed to do when the Jacobins brought out the guillotines in France in 1793? What should the average middle-class person have done in Russia in 1917? What should the average middle-class person have done in Germany in 1933?
There’s not much you can do when actual forces of evil are in control. There’s very little that you can do except get out of Dodge.
Here in the US, we still have a large middle class. Many are fat, dumb, indoctrinated, or addicted to Prozac and Zoloft. But millions of others are, to coin a phrase, mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. The things we’ve been talking about could turn into a genuine civil war.
What to do? Diversify your political jurisdictions. Don’t roll over like a whipped dog; speak up, and resist. But the most important thing you can do personally is become as rich as possible while maintaining your ethics. Being rich can help you to insulate yourself from evil and stupidity.
Reprinted with permission from International Man.
