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Meet the New Boss, Part One: Empire

The politics of Empire and the National Security State were not an unfortunate deviation of the Bush years, and by no means something peculiar to conservative Republicans.  The roots of American Empire go way back to the early 20th century.

New Left historian William Appleman Williams coined the phrase “Open Door Empire” for the consensus foreign policy that arose at the turn of the twentieth century.  The version of Open Door Imperialism currently in place, the neoliberal system, traces back to FDR’s planning for a postwar global order. …

The Nature of Empire

The Westphalian nation-state’s sovereignty rested on its sole right to define the legitimacy of both use of violence within its boundaries and the exercise of violence against other nation-states. Under the Westphalian system, whatever their differences in actual military power, states regarded each other as equal sovereigns, with equal claims to territorial integrity and equal rights to conduct war, subject to common standards of legitimacy under international law. …

Honestly, I’m getting sick of liberals and their smug assumption of premises that they have no real arguments to back up. I understand that a lot of it comes from a basic cognitive error (assuming that this current state of affairs is the result of a spontaneous order of some sort, without any evidence that it is). Conservatives make this same error, but talking about how conservatives suck is like shooting fish in a barrel, it’s not even a real ideology, there’s no guiding principles to conservatism that they actually take seriously. As I said, fish, barrel. I don’t need to talk about the silliness of so-called conservatism.

But liberalism* is an actual problem because it looks convincing on the surface to a lot of people. A lot of their current ideas basically add up to “if the USA was more like western europe, everything would be peachy!” Tell that to the mine workers in Africa.

It is, in some ways, an attempt to prop up big business by using government to smooth over the contradictions of past government action to prop up big business. It won’t work of course. Big business as we know it is doomed, it’s been living off borrowed time and stolen money for over 100 years… Crushing small business to feed the dying body of big business will only make things worse in the long run. You’re killing the future to save the present. But of course this is why the puppet masters of the liberal ideology constantly invent crises - “no time to think, just do it, or we’re all doomed!”

The truth is, it’s entirely possible to have high technology, prosperity and even mass production of a sort, without having any organizations larger than 150 or so people (my guess as to the large-end of organizations under anarchy). We don’t need to rely on the current model of intensive, inefficient subsidized resource consumption, unless we want to produce enormous surpluses that go right into the hands of our “leaders”. It’s just another scammy revisitation of the hydraulic empire model, just like mercantilism before it. There would be no reason to “tax the rich” if the rich hadn’t scammed us out of our capital in the first place. What they lose from taxation is a tiny fraction of what they have gained from being allowed a license to steal (fractional reserve banking), relatively cheap security services (“public” police and military) and infrastructure by the government (not to mention all the other ways that government creates a “winner take all” model of economics). Take that away, and the rich as we currently know them no longer exist.

* in the modern American sense of “Keynesian/Fabian pseudo-socialists”

“With this in mind, we can move to a meaningful definition of empire. An empire is an arrangement among nations, backed and usually imposed by military force, that extracts wealth from a periphery of subject nations and concentrates it in the imperial core. Put more simply, an empire is a wealth pump, a device to enrich one nation at the expense of others. The mechanism of the pump varies from empire to empire and from age to age; the straightforward exaction of tribute that did the job for ancient Egypt, and had another vogue in the time of imperial Spain, has been replaced in most of the more recent empires by somewhat less blatant though equally effective systems of unbalanced exchange. While the mechanism varies, though, the underlying principle does not.”