Every Monday morning the readers of the UK’s Daily Telegraph are treated to a sermon on the benefits of Keynesian stimulus economics, the dangers of belt-tightening and the unnecessary cruelty of ‘austerity’ imposed on Europe by the evil Hun. To this effect, the newspaper gives a whole page in its ‘Business’ section to Roger Bootle and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who explain that growth comes from government deficits and from the central bank printing money, and why can’t those stupid Europeans get it? The reader is left with the impression that, if only the European states could each have their little currencies back and merrily devalue and run some proper deficits again, Greece could be the economic powerhouse it was before the Germans took over.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (AEP) increasingly faces the risk of running out of hyperbolic war-analogies sooner than the euro collapses. For months he has been numbing his readership with references to the Second World War or the First World War, or to ‘1930s-style policies’ so that not even the most casual reader on his way to the sports pages can be left in any doubt as to how bad this whole thing in Europe is, and how bad it will get, and importantly, who is responsible. From declining car sales in France to high youth-unemployment in Spain, everything is, according to AEP, the fault of Germany, a ‘foolish’ Germany. Apparently these nations had previously well-managed and dynamic economies but have now sadly fallen under the spell of Angela Merkel’s Thatcherite belief in balancing the books and her particularly Teutonic brand of fiscal sadism.
Blame it on ze Germans
The pending bankruptcy of France’s already semi-nationalized car industry is, of course, not to be blamed on high French taxes, strangling French labour market regulation, increasingly uncompetitive French wages, and grave business errors – French car companies have been falling behind their German rivals for years – but the result of French ‘austerity’, which hasn’t even started yet and will culminate in – quote AEP, and drum roll please! – a ‘shock therapy’ next year of 2 percent. Mind you, France’s state has a 57% share in GDP, and the economy deserves the label socialist more than capitalist. Does France really need more state spending, or even unchanged state spending? Another government stimulus? I bet you could cut the French state by 10 percent instantly, and in a year or two you’d have faster growth, not slower growth!
However, Monsieur Hollande is eager to live up to his socialist promises, all the egalité he was voted for, and does not shrink the state but instead raises taxes further, lowers the pension age and raises minimum wages, none of this a demand from Rosa Klebb in Berlin, as far as I know, but AEP doesn’t quibble over such detail. It is all ‘austerity’ to him and ‘austerity’ is always imposed by Germany, and to make really sure that you get that this is a bad idea, and a bad idea coming from Germany, he now calls it the ‘contractionary holocaust’.
Nice touch. There is no place for subtlety, I guess.
Bootle does not stoop quite so low but his pieces are equally filled with the Keynesian myth that there is no economic problem that cannot be solved by more debt and easy money and the occasional devaluation. The fallacy here is the standard Keynesian one: there is no limit to debt, the market doesn’t matter, people can be fooled forever.
The real issue
The reality is different: the markets are slowly waking up to the fact that the social-democratic welfare-state that dominated the West since the First World War is going bust. Everywhere. Faster in some places (Greece, the UK), more slowly in others (Germany), but the direction and the endpoint are the same. This is not a specifically European problem, or even one that is particularly linked to the single currency project; it is pretty much a global phenomenon, and it will shape politics for years to come. It is naïve, dangerous and even irresponsible to dress this up as a design-fault of the euro and thus imply that the problem would be smaller or more easily manageable, or even non-existent, if countries could only issue their own currencies, print money, keep running deficits and devalue to their hearts’ content. The false impression that is being conveyed by Bootle and AEP is that Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy could somehow simply turn back the clock and, in the more open, more competitive world of the 21st century still run the cosy big state, high inflation, frequent debasement policies of the 1970s.
Bootle and AEP represent the naïve Keynesianism that still believes deficits just pop up in recessions as a ‘natural corrective’ – in fact, AEP exactly describes it that way. The truth is, countries like Greece have been running big deficits in good times and now run bigger deficits in bad times, and they are far from being alone in this. Since the introduction of unconstrained fiat money, most states see no need to balance the books but operate blissfully under the assumption that they can keep accumulating debt forever. Since Greece joined the euro and thereby benefitted from lower borrowing costs, the country’s average wage bill went up 60%, compared to 15% in Germany over the same period. Present Greek structures are simply unsustainable. An economy that has been stifled for decades by the persistent political rent-seeking of its powerful, connected and self-serving interest groups, by an overgrown public sector and uncompetitive wages, simply will not be reinvigorated by yet more debt. And in any case, the bond market has now had enough and won’t fund the Greek state any more anyway. Letting deficits rise, as AEP suggests, is no longer even an option. Not now in Greece, and soon elsewhere. Austerity is, increasingly, not a policy choice but an unavoidable necessity.
So what about devaluation? — It is a bad idea. It must mean inflation, the confiscation of wealth from savers – and savers are the backbone of any functioning economy, even though Bootle and AEP apparently believe it is the state and the central bank that make the economy tick – it must lead to persistent capital flight and hinder the build-up of a productive capital stock. And once you have accumulated a certain level of debt, devaluing the currency could undermine confidence completely and end in hyperinflation, default and total economic destruction.
No country has ever become prosperous by having a soft currency and devaluing repeatedly, yet many have become poor. A hundred years ago, Argentina was among the 8 richest nations in the world and has since managed to decline from first world status to third world status through persistent currency debasement. Since the end of Bretton Woods, Britain has consistently debased its currency, more rapidly than Germany or even the United States, a policy that has undoubtedly contributed to the country’s de-industrialization over this period, its high debt-load, low savings rate and its dependence on cheap money that lasts to this day.
True and lasting prosperity – as opposed to make-believe bubble wealth – has the same sources everywhere and at all times: true savings, proper capital accumulation, and as a result, rising labour productivity. Hard money is the best foundation for these powerful drivers of wealth creation to do their work.
Default instead of devaluation
It is not my goal to defend the policy of the German government or of Chancellor Merkel here. The present policy is wrong in many ways and will fail. But the reasons and my conclusions are different from those advanced by AEP and Bootle. Merkel is desperately trying to pretend that these governments are not bankrupt, that the debt will be repaid, and in so doing she throws good money – that of the German taxpayer – after bad. Most of the governments in Europe, plus the US, the UK and Japan, are unlikely to ever repay their debt, and the big risk is that, once the 40-year fiat money boom that facilitated this bizarre debt extravaganza has ended for good, and the illusion of living forever beyond your means has evaporated, a lot of that debt will have to be restructured, which means it will be defaulted on. That is not the end of the world, albeit the end of the type of government largesse that has defined politics in the West for generations, and it will be the end of the modern welfare state, and herald an era of proper austerity, imposed by the reality of the market and not the Germans. The question is only if policymakers will desperately try and postpone the inevitable and in the process also destroy their fiat monies.
In the case of Greece and Portugal and other countries, default should simply be allowed to occur, a proper default, not the type of managed default that Greece went through and that left the country with more debt as a result of more official aid – all in the vain attempt to pretend the country is somehow still solvent and creditworthy. Whether any issuer is solvent or not, is not decided by a bunch of Eurocrats in Brussels but by the market. The market is not lending to Greece, ergo Greece is bankrupt. Period. It would be better for everybody to admit it.
Germany is far from healthy. It, too, is travelling on the road to fiscal Armageddon, just at a slower speed. Merkel’s policy of bailing out her ‘European partners’ – a policy for which she gets little credit from AEP, Bootle and the rest of Europe – will only hasten that process.
Proper defaults on government debt would also teach bond investors a lesson, namely that they should not engage in the socially destructive practice of channelling scarce savings through the government bond market into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats with the aim of obtaining a ‘safe’ income stream out of the state’s future tax receipts (i.e. stolen goods) but to instead invest savings in capitalist enterprise and thus fund the creation and maintenance of a productive, wealth-enhancing capital stock. Losing their money in allegedly ‘safe’ government bonds is, quite frankly, what they deserve.
In defence of a common currency
None of this means that defaulting nations should be forced to leave the single currency. There is, in most cases, simply no need for leaving, and staying in a widely shared common currency does indeed have many benefits.
The idea that numerous countries – even countries with very diverse economic characteristics – should share the same money is entirely sensible and highly recommendable. Money is a medium of exchange that helps people interact on markets and cooperate via trade, and this cooperation does not stop at political borders. Money is valuable because it connects people via trade, and the more people money can connect (the more widely accepted and widely used any form of money is), the more valuable it is, and the more beneficial its services are to society overall. Yes, the best money would be universal money, global money, such as a global gold standard. It is nonsense to have money tied to the nation state. This type of thinking is a relic of the 19th century when the myth could still be maintained that a ‘national economy’ – somehow magically congruous with the political nation state – existed, and that the national government should manipulate the national money according to national objectives. That is the type of thinking that Bootle and AEP epitomize. Although, already by the late 19th century, this myth of the national economy was dying, as the Classical Gold Standard began to provide a stable global monetary framework that allowed peaceful cooperation across borders by vastly different states, and heralded a period of unprecedented globalization, harmonious economic relations and relative economic stability.
Every form of money is more valuable the wider its use. Currency competition is deceptively appealing to many free marketeers, and as an advocate of pure capitalism, I would never stop anybody from introducing a new form of money. But the economic good ‘money’ conveys enormous network benefits. Because of its very nature as a facilitator of trade, there will always be an extremely powerful tendency for the trading public to adopt a uniform medium of exchange, that is, for everybody to adopt the same money.
There is a persistent fallacy out there, and Bootle and AVP are among its numerous victims: the fallacy is that countries can do better economically by cleverly manipulating their own domestic monies. This is erroneous on a very fundamental level. Any easing of financial conditions through extra money creation, through an extra bit of inflation or a bit of devaluation, can never bestow lasting benefits. Such manipulations of money can only ever result in short-lived growth blips, at the most, and these growth blips always come at the price of severe economic costs in the medium to long run. Monetary manipulation is never a free lunch. It is always damaging in the final analysis.
Being part of a currency-union means the end of national monetary policy, and that is, on principle, to be welcome. The main problem with monetary policy today is that there is such a thing as monetary policy. Money should be hard, inflexible, apolitical and universally accepted to best deliver whatever services money can deliver to society. The problem with the euro is not that it encapsulates so many diverse countries but that it is not hard, not inflexible, and not apolitical. The euro is a paper currency, and like any state fiat money it is a political tool, constantly manipulated to achieve certain ends, and over which ends to pursue there is, quite naturally, almost constant conflict.
If only the euro was golden!
Some people say that the euro is like a gold standard and that its failure demonstrates the undesirability of a return to gold. This is nonsense. To the contrary, the euro would work better if it operated more like the gold standard and if it was as hard, as inflexible and as non-political as gold. Then, interest rates could not have been kept artificially low back in the early 2000s, for the benefit of Germany and France, a policy that laid the foundation for the real estate and debt bubbles in the EMU-periphery. Then banks could not have ballooned their balance sheets quite as much as they did with the help of the ECB and not have dragged us all into a major banking crisis, and once the banks had self-destructed, they could not have been bailed out with unlimited ECB loans and artificially low and even lower rates so that they might continue in their merry reckless ways. Today’s major imbalances, from over-extended and weak banks to excessive levels of debt, are inconceivable in a hard money system. But even now that these imbalances have been allowed to accumulate, it would still be preferable to go back to hard and inflexible money. Under a hard money system politicians and bureaucrats cannot lie and cheat and pretend, at least not as much as they can today. Hard money has a tendency to expose illusions.
This is not a defence of the EU, which is a wretched project, and increasingly morphs into a meddling, arrogant super-state, an ever more potent threat to our liberty and our prosperity. I am not particularly keen on the fiat-euro either. But still, the idea of many countries sharing the same currency is a good one. No question.
If Bootle and AEP were right that weaker nations should opt for weaker currencies, for the monetary quick-fixes of devaluation and inflation, what would that mean for so-called national currencies? By that logic, shouldn’t Italy not only exit the euro and return to the lira, but instead adopt a number of different local liras? Should Italy’s Mezzogiorno not issue its own super-soft currency and devalue against the hard lira of the north? Why should these two diverse regions be tied together under the same currency? Should Scotland have its own currency and happily devalue versus more prosperous South East England? And wouldn’t Liverpool and Manchester not benefit from their own monies, conveniently manipulated to stimulate and reinvigorate their local economies? The absurdity of the whole idea becomes quickly apparent.
But AEP is quite happy with his little island nation state. The extent to which he hopelessly underestimates the challenges facing his home nation – and by extension, the world – becomes apparent when he assures the reader that he, AEP, too, supports modest austerity, namely the present coalitions’ pathetic and entirely insufficient attempt of trimming spending by ‘1 pc of GDP each year’, ‘thankfully’ (AEP) flanked by generous debt monetization from the Bank of England and constantly checked by the Labour Party’s opportunistic clamouring for more deficit spending. Well, last I checked, the UK was running 8 pc deficits per annum. Next to Japan, Britain is the most highly geared society on the planet (private and public debt combined), and when the markets pull the plug on this island nation, the fallout might make Greece look like a walk in the park.
But then, AEP won’t be able to blame it on the Germans.
In the meantime, the debasement of paper money continues.
This article was previously published at DetlevSchlichter.com.
Many thanks Mr Schilichter for reminding me why I know longer buy the Daily Telegraph.
However, these journalists do not, of course, make up these absurd the-way-to-restore-prosperity-is-to-create-more-money-from-nothing ideas.
They are simply repeating what they were taught at university (the days when journalists on the Daily Telegraph were men like Frank Johnson, who worked their way up from the streets, are long over) – they half remember this rubbish (and it is rubbish) so when an establishment economist tells them X, Y, Z, it rings a bell. “That must be right – I sort of, remember this stuff……”
That is what going on here. And it is so easy – if only more money were created (from nothing) people would be able to buy more stuff (“effective demand” would rise) unemployment would fall, men would be more upright, women would smile, children would laugh and play…..
It is a pity that it is all total and absolute nonsense. Indeed that it is highly damanging – and, in the end, leads to the opposite results from what the media people want.
And then there is the “deflation” dodge.
“I do not want to create MORE money I just want to prevent the amount of money falling – just as it did after 1929”.
I have had this recently – a banker will say (and with a straight face) “the money existed but then it did not exist – it was nothing to do with us, DEFLATION destroyed the money”.
So the banks never created a credit bubble (by lending out “money” that no one had ever really saved – i.e. not REAL SAVINGS) – the money “really existed” and then some evil “deflation” elves stole the money from the vaults (no fault of the bankers – they were in tears when they found that the money that “really existed” had been stolen by the deflation elves). And government should increase the “monetary base” in order to “restore” (not inflate) the money suppply.
And, I repeat, they come out with this stuff with a straight face.
To look someone straight in the eye, speak with a gentle (and concerned) voice – and then lie one’s head off. That appears to be a good way to succeed in this modern world.
The problem here is really the intrinsic nature of government. Governments exist to loot productive people. No other reason. In order to get away with this, a shell game needs to be played with productive people, to convince them that it is to their benefit that government exists. Thus promises of benefits such as free healthcare, education and pensions are made. Each politician competes with another to make the more attractive promises.
Then the politician must at least make a pretense of fulfilling the promises. To this end he needs money to fund the benefits. Eventually the direct taxes run out and so the politician turns to the printing press. Of course, by running the printing press the politician is really just consuming the wealth producing capital of the productive people. As such, total collapse is an inevitable feature of the politician’s dastardly scheme. We are witnessing this collapse now.
There are many possible outcomes of this collapse, the worst of which could be a switch to full on oppressive socialism as the productive people accept the politician’s lie that capitalism is to blame.
My favoured outcome involves a lot of feathers and a lot of tar.
Tar and feathers?! Something else I can look forward to.
Steve, I think we can safely leave you off the tar and feathering list! :-)
Hannah Arendt, in her book “The Human Condition” points out:
“Strength, …nature’s gift to the individual which cannot be shared with others, can cope with violence more successfully than with power-either heroically, by consenting to fight die, or stoically, by accepting suffering and challenging all affliction through self-sufficiency and withdrawal from the world; in either case, the integrity of individual and is strength remain intact. Strength can actually be ruined only by power and is therefore always in danger from the combined force of the many. Power corrupts indeed when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before. The will to power, as the modern age from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it in glorification or denunciation, far from being a characteristic of the strong, is like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one.”
The strong have little need for the state, which is a mechanism for the acquisition and deployment of power by the weak. If one feels that the weak have some moral superiority over the strong, then the nation-state is appropriate, if one advocates the reverse it’s an abomination.
Chuck, in my view, the state loves the weak. They are always more numerous than the strong and in their constant state of fear, easy to bamboozle. In such fashion, the strong are looted and eventually become the weak.
Of course the state is no friend to the weak. The weak are merely unwitting pawns for the power games of the few who control the nation.
Yet another anti-Keynsian rant from Schlechter. What’s the purpose of his articles? No doubt the converted who want to be preached to and have their opinions or prejudices confirmed will read his articles, but no one else will.
I have a suggestion. Could Schlechter (or the Cobden Centre) turn out a definitive article (I suggest 3,000 words maximum) which sets out as clearly and logically as possible their objections to Keynes.
Then the rest of us can have a good look at it. Study it in detail, and sort out exactly where we disagree with Austrians.
And please, no rhetoric or hyperbole or emotional stuff. That cuts no ice with me whatever. It’s just water off a ducks back. I want to see completely cold, emotionless factually correct logic – or an attempt at same.
Try Hazlitt’s The Failure of the New Economics,
https://mises.org/document/3655/Failure-of-the-New-Economics
Or even,
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2010/12/the-greatest-threat-to-civilisation-is-not-climate-change-but-bad-economics.html
Honestly Ralph whats the point? The truth is out there and has been since before you were born. As has been revealed by Steve and Paul, there is no shortage of authors who have soundly demolished Keynes’ “theories” even before Keynes was born!
While it was obvious to me, as a 19 year old studying Keynes many years ago that his “theories” were bunk, in your case you are in complete denial. A signed statement from God wouldn’t convince you otherwise. With respect Sir, unless you are prepared to be intellectually and ethically honest about economics there is no point in anyone engaging you seriously about Keynes or any other economist. The mere fact that you ask other people to do the work for you proves this point.
Ralph – there are many books explaining the fallacies of Keynesian ideas.
For example “Where Keynes Went Wrong” (by Hunter Lewis), Hutt’s “Keynesianism: Retrospective and Prospective (and his later “The Keynesian Episode”) and Hazlitt’s “The Failure of the New Economics”.
“No – I want an essay of only a few thousand words”.
O.K. How about the collection of essays (by various economists) in “The Critics of Keynes”.
But we both know you are not wildly likely to read any of the above – any more than you are modern books such as “Where Keynes Went Wrong”.
“It cuts no ice with me” “It is water of a duck’s back” and on and on.
Who ever said this site was about “converting” you Ralph?
I could not care less what you think – in fact I rather doubt that you think, about these matters, at all.
I do not go on sites loyal to your ideas and abuse you and others. I leave you and your kind alone. And my only desire from you is that you return the favour.
The time for converstation and for reform is over – long over. Things are much too far gone now.
Now is the time for preparing for what most come – what is unavidable now.
Ralph,
I thought the following article of Detlev’s was very good (its available on the Cobden website):
“Contra Richard Koo and the Keynesians: it is not about ‘aggregate demand’ but about real prices – By Detlev Schlichter, on 9 November 12”
It seemed to me to be quite a lucid analysis of some key Keynesian arguments. Not especially emotive either.
There are countless articles on the Mises Institue pages that avoid excessive emotism -esp by Mark Thronton, Roger Garrison, Frank Shostak, Philip Bagus, de Soto.
Are you seriously saying Keynesian portagonists avoid emotion? Their arguments are frequently riddled with it.
And yes while I may instinctively sit on the Austrian side of the fence I also struggle with parts of it – e.g., i still can’t quite see why boosting aggregate demand thru monetary expansion wouldn’t pull us out of recession when there are unemployed resources but at the same time the Keynesian side also seems too simplistic.
I guess I don’t know the answers and I am prepared to look at the arguments dispassionately. Others retreat into blind dogmatism.
Charles (“Chuck”) Martel.
First congratulations on saving Europe for the forces of Islam! It is amazing that you have lived so long.
Seriously…….
The strong seem to do quote well out of state intervention – even at the national level.
Indeed if we turn specifically to money and banking…..
The basic point of Richard Cantillon (way back in the 1700s) was that the people who got long term benefit from boom-bust monetary manipulation tended to be rich (strong?) and those who tended to take the long term loss for boom-bust monetary manipulation tend to be poor.
Do you really think someone like Ralph is on the bread line?
On the contrary he is likely to be someone who beneifits from building a credit bubble (the “expansion of broad money”) and (when it inevitably busts) screams for government (and Central Banks) to “fight the deflation” by “expanding the monetary base” in order to “safeguard effective demand”.
Believe me – poor people do not come up with stuff like this.
By the way…..
I would love to believe that the alternative to the nation state is free market “anarcho-capitalist” (or some such) but there is no evidence that this so.
Indeed the alternative appears to be more statist – transnational government (such as the European Union, the IMF and so on) with international monetary expansion and international regulations.
In short – NO WHERE TO RUN TO.
Freedom depends on the right of “exit” – internationalism (“world governance” the “coopertion of the international community”) cuts off this exit.
A Pound to a penny says that Ralph thinks that “international cooperation” is a good idea.
However, of course I would love to see such things as the return of such things as an independent Bavaria.
The “nationalism” of the 19th century (for example German and Italian “unification”) was a terrible mistake.
It is just that “internationalist” statism – is even worse. So if the choice is between the nation state and the “international community” the less bad option is the nation state.
Robert Sadler.
Your reference to tar and feathers reminds me of my reaction when some unelected judges declared that New Hampshire was going to have a State wide property tax (on top of the local one). The judges believed that “not enough” money was spent on the government schools.
I (watching from far away) expected protests – after all this was taxation without the consent of even the majority.
Not two wolves and a sheep having a vote on what to have for lunch – but all three being had for lunch (by some freaks in funny robes).
All the Founding Fathers were against judge power (they had enough experience of that – from the King’s judges) and, in the early days of New Hampshire, the people would have indeed have dragged the judge from his chambers and covered him in tar and feathers.
But today that simply would not happen. I was wrong – the people were submissive.
The people have become weak – culturally weak.
They look to the government (from their government schools, or private schools dominated by those trained in the mainstream universities, onwards) and they have no independent spirit – they are servile.
Such people do not need force to take their freedom away.
Just put on a robe and a stern voice (and use long words) and they will obey.
Hand over their money, bend over and touch their toes… just about anything.
The people are losing their freedom because they no longer DESERVE freedom.
Quite right Paul. It is quite sad to see the blithe acceptance by the average person of Gov’t intrusion into almost every facet of our lives. This in turn supports the arrogance of the average bureaucrat, who thinks it is their business to decide how you conduct your everyday affairs.
All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
Yes Robert – and the American “Progressive” movement loved Mussolini (as did the New Dealers).
Today they say they hate Mussolini and Fascism – whilst still carrying on the principles of his policies. They even have the cheak to call people who want a smaller government “Fascists” thus not only lying but reversing the truth.
A simlar dodge is to quote Mussolini but to reverse his meaning – specically regarding government and business organisations. Mussolini’s idea of the Corporate State is like German War Socialism of the First World War (a very different situation from France in the same war) or the policies of the National Socialists in the 1930s. Government control of business. The Progressives pretend it meant business control of government.
However, we must remember that are some “pet” businessmen who welcome government control (it makes their life so much less complicted – or so they, mistakenly, think before they find that pleasing political masters can be an even more difficult task than pleasing customers, indeed can have terminal consequences if they do not please their political masters).
Also there are Republican politicians who are just as Progressive as Democrat ones.
Such at the vile Richard Price Controls Nixon (the man who crawled to Mao – the largest scale mass murderer of all time).
It was, of course, Nixon who created (by unconstitutional Executive Order) the EPA.
When peoples homes and business enterprises are taken by the arbitrary regualtions of the despotism that the EPA is (in defiance of the Supreme Court judgement that struck down the Fascist style National Recovery Administration in 1935 – and put General Johnson and his jackbotted “Blue Eagle” thugs out to pasture) Comrade Barack Obama may laugh – no doubt he does. However, it was Richard Nixon who set this organisation up.
No suprise – after all the vile man even had a picture of “Teddy” Roosevelt above his bed as a boy.
The Republican T. Roosevelt (just like the Democrat Woodrow Wilson) was a follower of Richard Ely – and the whole Germanic colllectivist movement of the time. Although the American Progressives (with a few exceptions) later supported war with Germany – “there can only be one” seems to have been the reasoning. J. Goldberg “Liberal Fascism” is good on the general background.
Such dreadful people – T. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson (the lunatic obsessed with black people not using the same toilets as white people)….
All treated as heros by the establishment elite.
The only one who is not treated as a hero is Nixon.
And they do not despise Nixon for his real offenses (wild government Welfare State spending, price controls, the EPA, endless other regulations, crawling to Mao…..) no…
They despise him for trying to cover up a break in – a break in which nothing was stolen, indeed a break in that was trying to recover stolen property.
“But he lied and covered things up”.
Like Benghazi where an American Ambassador and three other Americans were brutally murdered.
Yet the establishment elite do not care about that at all.
As for the EPA – it appears the only real solution (to defend private property – homes and business enterprises)is secession. As it is the only real solution to so many problems.
However, the chances of achieving this are close to zero.