Mindset Engineering

Many if not most readers of Liberty’s Torch will already be familiar with the phrase battlespace preparation. It refers to the attempt to establish certain propositions as beyond question, essentially making them into postulates for an impending political argument. Some such effort is dedicated to establishing explicit public policies as necessary beyond dispute. The rest is distributed over a broad range of subjects, including premises about rights, valid and invalid interpretations of the Constitution, and the characters and backgrounds of significant public figures.

I like the phrase, but though it has broad application, it doesn’t quite cover the phenomenon that’s on my mind this morning: the conditioning of the public to react in a particular non-rational way to suggestions that point in certain preferred or dispreferred directions. Non-rational reactions, by definition, have nothing to do with reason. They’re visceral in nature, proceeding from physiological mechanisms that can occlude the reason. Despite that, we tend to refer to the source of such reactions as one’s mindset.

An example of mindset engineering pertinent to political discussion would be how we’ve been conditioned to react against any suggestion that the State isn’t really necessary. It no longer matters what facts or reasoning are marshaled toward that thesis, because as soon as a listener notices that your argument is heading in that direction, his gut will cast up a near-to-impenetrable wall against it. Why? He’s been conditioned into that reaction by decades, even centuries, of hectoring to the effect that anyone who advocates the abolition of the State is either too silly to take seriously or too dangerous to tolerate.

(An aside: I can argue the inevitability of the State as well as anyone. I can argue the inevitability of anarchy equally well. Both arrangements are inevitable, because both are inherently unstable. But that’s a subject for a three-volume novel.)

Today’s tirade focuses on a bit of mindset engineering of comparable gravity.

---

Have a gander at this article from Forbes:

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) quietly dropped a bomb in its October Fiscal Monitor Report. Titled “Taxing Times,” the report paints a dire picture for advanced economies with high debts that fail to aggressively “mobilize domestic revenue.” It goes on to build a case for drastic measures and recommends a series of escalating income and consumption tax increases culminating in the direct confiscation of assets.

Yes, you read that right. But don’t take it from me. The report itself says:

“The sharp deterioration of the public finances in many countries has revived interest in a “capital levy”— a one-off tax on private wealth—as an exceptional measure to restore debt sustainability. The appeal is that such a tax, if it is implemented before avoidance is possible and there is a belief that it will never be repeated, does not distort behavior (and may be seen by some as fair). … The conditions for success are strong, but also need to be weighed against the risks of the alternatives, which include repudiating public debt or inflating it away. … The tax rates needed to bring down public debt to precrisis levels, moreover, are sizable: reducing debt ratios to end-2007 levels would require (for a sample of 15 euro area countries) a tax rate of about 10 percent on households with positive net wealth....

“Financial wealth is mobile, and so, ultimately, are people.… There may be a case for taxing different forms of wealth differently according to their mobility … Substantial progress likely requires enhanced international cooperation to make it harder for the very well-off to evade taxation by placing funds elsewhere.

“A revenue-maximizing approach to taxing the rich effectively puts a weight of zero on their well-being—contentious, to say the least. What then if some weight is indeed attached to the well-being of the richest? Figure 19 provides a way to think about the trade-off between equity and efficiency considerations in setting the top marginal rate in that case. … If one attaches less weight to those with the highest incomes, the vote would be to increase the top marginal rate.”

The article’s author, Bill Frezza, makes several indisputable observations about this proposal, but one stands out above the rest:

If ever there were a roadmap for prompting massive capital flight and emigration of productive citizens toward capitalism’s nascent frontiers in Asia, this is it.

They who saunter casually about the halls of power, both here and in Europe, might be evil – indeed, I’d give odds on it – but they’re not stupid. They know full well that what Frezza said above is absolutely correct. The next question is inevitable: If they know it, why have they mused publicly about plans that would trigger it?

Give that a moment’s thought while I refill my mug.

---

One of the lines of thought we’ve been conditioned away from considering seriously is that of political conspiracy, particularly as it applies to persons who officially wield power. Conspiracy has been made almost as unspeakable a word as nigger. The mere suggestion that elements of the United States federal government might be conspiring to fasten a totalitarian, social-fascist regime upon our necks is enough to get you snorted out of most social circles as a hairy-eyed kook.

Cui bono? the old Latin scholar asks. Who benefits from having made the consideration of that possibility so viscerally frightening that virtually no one will entertain it?

Don’t all answer at once, now.

The IMF report above, if publicized – and you can bet the rent that Forbes won’t be the only organ to cite it – is nearly certain to intensify the ongoing flight of liquid capital from the economies of the West. As capital departs our shores, our economic malaise will deepen. Jobs will grow scarcer. Loans will get even harder to obtain. The overall mobility of goods and services will shrink, as it always does when its essential lubricant – money – is in short supply. Our anemic 1% to 2% growth rates of the Obama years will dwindle still further, perhaps into the negative numbers.

That will put enormous pressure on the American welfare state and the ability of the federal government to fund it: a perfect justification for exactly the sort of confiscatory policies and capital controls delineated in the IMF report.

The IMF is a creature of the Western governments. Its policies are determined and ratified by consultation among highly placed persons from the major states of the West, including the United States. That all such governments have been swiftly tightening down on all economic and fiscal matters for decades is hardly in dispute. Until recently, Westerners’ attachment to property rights retarded them from the ultimate assertion of “eminent domain” over our bank accounts.

But now they can point to Cyprus. Shortly they’ll have Greece as well.

And we upon whom their crosshairs rest are absolutely inhibited against even thinking the word conspiracy.

---

In Catherine Drinker Bowen’s marvelous narration of the Constitutional Convention, Miracle At Philadelphia, she records delegate Gouverneur Morris’s statement to the Convention that “Men don’t unite for life or liberty...they unite for the protection of property.” Indeed, the desire to protect Americans’ property rights was so strongly and sincerely felt by the Conventioneers that they all but forbade direct federal taxation, by mandating that it be uniform across all persons and places:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; [Article I, Section 8]

In such a scheme the major impetus toward direct taxation, the redistribution of wealth, would be impossible, thus greatly reducing the desirability of such taxes. It wasn’t until the Sixteenth Amendment:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

...that direct taxation of property in the possession of individuals became a regular feature of these United States.

The merits and demerits of direct taxation have been voluminously discussed in other fora. My point here is that we avoided all such taxes for more than a century, because they were regarded as an infringement on property rights. But Americans’ attachment to property rights – at least, to the property rights of other Americans – has been weakening over the decades. Today it’s about even money that a randomly selected American can’t even articulate the concept. Don’t bother asking him for the reason behind that clause from Article I, Section 8.

Redistributive policies founded on the income tax have thus set the stage for an assertion that the State has first claim on all wealth, in the name of the “common good.” A small sovereignty in the eastern Mediterranean has already acted on that premise. Another will soon follow. And the IMF, and the governments that support it, are looking on with unconcealed avidity.

Does the word conspiracy come any more easily to your mind, Gentle Reader?

---

Please reflect on that IMF report and the labyrinth of approvals its publication required. Then please reread this emission from a few days ago. Please reflect on the phenomena of “ObamaPhones,” and no-exclusions medical insurance, and 99 weeks of unemployment insurance payments, and the removal of most restrictions on welfare eligibility, and on author/commentator Matt Bracken’s pithy evaluation of the scene developing before our eyes:

It looks like Obama plans to crash the economy and instigate massive food riots in November. This will be blamed, naturally, on the Evil White Racist Tea Party Republicans. American Pravda, (ABCNNBCBS, the NYT, the WaPo, the LAT) will dutifully serve as Obama’s microphone for this scapegoating....

Last Saturday’s hours-long EBT “glitch” led to mass panic and near riots in 17 states. Was that just a “warning” from the regime to the GOP to extend his infinite debt ceiling pronto, “or else?” If the EBT system is shut down for even three days, every supermarket will be looted, and riots will sweep our cities that will make 1968 look like a picnic. This is not an accident, this is deliberate.

We’ve seen this kind of deliberate provocation before: Reichstag Fire, anyone? I’m beginning to feel like it’s Berlin, 1933, and my name is Goldstein. And the new “Berlin Zeitung” will be the NYT and the Washington Post.

If you can come up with a non-conspiratorial reason our government is behaving thus, to say nothing of the governments of Europe, I’d very much like to hear it. For the nonce, I’m going to whisper “Conspiracy...conspiracy...conspiracy” to myself throughout the day. Just to see if I can decondition my guts out of reflexively convulsing at the sound of the word, of course.