1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

Doug Casey On Class Warfare, 'Eat The Rich' Sentiment, & What Happens Next

Via InternationalMan.com

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.