Totalitarianism and Externalities

The extent to which an ideology claims that behavior creates externalities can be viewed as a measure of the extent to which the ideology is totalitarian.  Merriam-Webster defines externality as something that is external or that involves a secondary consequence, such as pollution.  The perception of externalities arises when behavior is viewed as eroding public morals or being immoral or that activity that is private harms society at large.  Hence, in the extreme, communism views private economic contracts as being exploitive, hence harmful and immoral.   Theocracies view dissenting religions as immoral, hence threatening the state, and this works both ways: the commitment to secular humanism views religious belief as threatening its moral assumptions, hence threatening its version of the state.       

                                                     

Once a claim is made that a private behavior creates externalities, the solution is enhancement and centralization of state control, i.e., increasing totalitarianism.  Merriam-Webster defines totalitarian as:

a : of or relating to centralized control by an autocratic leader or hierarchy : authoritarian, dictatorial; especially : despotic

b : of or relating to a political regime based on subordination of the individual to the state and strict control of all aspects of the life and productive capacity of the nation especially by coercive measures (such as censorship and terrorism)

2 a : advocating or characteristic of totalitarianism

b : completely regulated by the state especially as an aid to national mobilization in an emergency

c : exercising autocratic powers

In other words, there is a tradeoff between the claim that behaviors are externalities and the claim that we have a right to engage in the behavior, that is, that we are free.   The claim that behaviors create externalities is equivalent to the claim that totalitarianism needs to be increased.

A quantitative measure can be derived that gauges the extent to which a given ideology is totalitarian.  A list of characteristic behaviors and the extent to which the ideology claims that they create externalities and are not purely individualistic and private can be scored and weighted.  A totalitarian score can be created to compare ideologies, such as those of the Democrats and Republicans, as to how totalitarian they are.

To what degree are today’s American political parties totalitarian?  With respect to Merriam-Webster’s definition (a), both parties have increasing opted for centralized control and the rejection of federalism and states’ rights.  Democrats do so based on the history of racial discrimination, while Republicans do so based on economic efficiency.  As well, Americans have been increasingly susceptible to authoritarian leadership during the past century. 

With respect to (b), we also see increasing subordination of the individual to the state. Mental health regulation, child protection regulation, environmental regulation, substance abuse regulation,  minimum wage regulation, and workplace regulation increasingly subordinate Americans’ lives to the state and strictly control the life and productive capacity of the nation by coercive measures, including terror.  

Hence, the democratic process increasingly results in totalitarianism.  In the past 10 years both parties’ presidents have used executive orders to exercise autocratic powers, and Congress seems to consider its powers unlimited.

To operationalize the concept of totalitarianism, we may consider the extent to which the state regulates or controls a list of specific personal behaviors, for example consumption, production, economic activity, recreational activity, sexual activity, and the extent to which it views such activities as externalities.   

Political Correctness and Ritual Purification

Purification has been a constant in the worst 20th century totalitarian crimes, such as gulags, mass murders, and ethnic cleansing. Totalitarian, socialist movements, which aim to supplant religion with belief in the socialist state, reinvent purification rituals and infuse them with violence and intolerance.

Religious purification rituals are, in today's world, mostly not coercive. In the Jewish faith, the ritual bath or mikveh is used by men and women in association with sexual relations and childbirth and as part of the conversion process. The tradition was adopted by Christianity in the ritual of baptism. All religions have processes and rituals of purification, to include the separation of men and women and dietary rules such as kashrut and halal. In Catholicism there are seven sacraments, and several Protestant faiths believe in the cleansing power of the Holy Spirit.

The impulse toward purification is ingrained in the human psyche, and it may have arisen because of tribal relations, both in terms of acceptance of new members and exclusion of those who violate tribal norms. It is difficult to know whether such patterns are instinctive or cultural. In either case purification is common to most cultures, but the left in its interest in radical transformation of society has put greater and more violent emphasis on purification than ever before.

The nineteenth century saw a rejection of religious faith and  an invention of newly violent and punitive varieties of purification. The French Revolution saw the Reign of Terror, in which supporters of the Catholic Church and the monarchy were guillotined. Marx believed that society needed to be purified of capitalists and exploitation and that the purest, most sacred form of economic relation was that of the industrial working class or proletariat managed by its own dictatorship. Wilhelm Marr, the left-wing, German founder of the Anti-Semitic League--and creator of the term "antisemitism"--saw purification as the elimination of Jews. The American eugenicists, who were an important if not dominant element in the Progressive movement, saw purification as the improvement of the genetic stock. Hitler and the Nazis carried forward these left-wing purification faiths.

The concept of purification among left-wing activists has evolved into an even more totalitarian doctrine of political correctness. From a faith in industrialization and proletarian work, through the efforts of Frantz Fanon and 1960s activists, who substituted race for class in their analyses, the left became a movement of identity rather than class politics. Purification became political correctness, the belief that any who oppose the agenda of left-wing identity politics, including those who believe in Christianity, those who oppose government-enforced equality agendas, and those who tell off-color jokes, must be cleansed.

The purification rituals of the American left target Republicans, classical liberals, Christians, and supporters of the Second Amendment, all of whom are banished by media, school district and university committees of public safety.

In the media, the telling of off-color jokes is grounds for immediate banishment. Much as Increase Mather and his followers burned witches to purify their community, so does ABC Television fire comedians for political incorrectness. Some forms of sexual deviance, those forms allied with the American left-wing committees of public safety, are hallowed and pure. Other forms of sexual deviance, which are not so allied, are impure.

How Long Will the Dollar Runup Last?

Below is a picture of the log of the dollar valued in milligrams of gold. The sharp decline in the dollar began around 1971, following the Great Society and around the time of the abolition of the gold standard in 1971. The Great Society and mega-government of the LBJ and Nixon eras and the post-Reagan stock market bubble have been funded with paper money. Before then the dollar was relatively stable. The source of the chart is PricedinGold.com . (See the chart here.)  The inflection point that worries people holding gold now is the local bottom. My late friend Howard S. Katz wrote about the commodity pendulum  whereby Fed monetary expansion reduces the cost of capital, expands the number of miners, pushes down the cost of gold and other commodities, causes bankruptcy among the miners, which in the end results in a whipsaw and additional sharp leg down in the dollar and up in gold. You can see that in the post-1983 Reagan reflation pattern, which ended with the stock market correction of 2000 and an additional sharp decline in the value of the dollar. The question is whether the massive monetary expansion of 2008-2014 will result in an even greater upturn in the value of the dollar than the 1983-2000 upturn. That is, will the current upturn in the dollar's value continue for 17 years or more, as did the 1983-2000 upturn in the value of the dollar. I don't claim to know the answer, but gold miners have sold at depressed levels for some time.