Analyzing White Nationalism with Concepts from Economics

3,479 words

Introduction

Applying economic theory to racial thinking permits us to understand why racial separatism is the best option for society. Conversely, applying an understanding of racial differences to economic subjects permits us to shed light on dilemmas such as whether overpopulation will cause an economic downturn, or why economists disagree on how much self-interest is a motivating factor in the economy. My hope is that this piece will provoke new discussions in Alt Right circles and ultimately the world over. Each economic concept is addressed separately.

The Tragedy of the Commons

Probably the foremost concept from economics which applies to White Nationalism is the tragedy of the commons. I will explain what it is before I explain how it relates to White Nationalism.

Suppose a group of shepherds let their sheep graze in a commonly-owned field. Each shepherd has the incentive to feed as much the grass as possible to his own sheep, and if he holds them back from grazing, other shepherds will make their sheep fatter than his. What ends up happening is the shepherds push their sheep to eat a lot, the sheep overgraze, and the grass is destroyed, with the result being a “tragedy of the commons.”

Suppose that to prevent this from happening, the shepherds fence off certain portions of the field, giving each shepherd one lot for his sheep. In this case, because each shepherd owns the plot of land, he has an incentive to prevent his sheep from overgrazing.

The tragedy of the commons explains why goods which are not owned are subject to depletion more often than privately owned goods.

No one owns the white race, so no one has an immediate individual interest in preserving it. Most whites neglect perpetuating the race via procreation in order to pursue wealth and educational status. Holding back from this merely enables other whites to move up in the world relative to others. Although this results in low birthrates which will ultimately cause the white race to run out much as the grass did, nobody has an immediate incentive to stop it. Furthermore, unlike the grass, race is non-excludable, meaning it cannot be exclusively owned by a person like the plots of grass could be owned individually by shepherds. Race is also non-rival, meaning one person being white doesn’t reduce the possibility of another person being white. Typically, goods that are non-excludable and non-rival are classified as public goods, i.e., goods best delivered by the state. Because race is non-excludable and nonrival, it Is a public good. Therefore, if an ownership of the white race is to take place, it must be the collective ownership of white citizens in a white ethnostate.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Suppose the police arrest two prisoners who committed a crime together. There is evidence of each possessing stolen goods for which there is a one-year prison sentence but not enough evidence to convict them of stealing the goods, which has a much longer sentence. The police keep them separated to prevent them from communicating and explain to each of them that if they both confess, they will each get eight years in jail, but if one confesses and the other doesn’t, the one who confesses goes free and the other one gets ten years. If neither confess, they each only get one year. If there is an equal likelihood that each prisoner will confess, it is rational to confess, because the average outcome of confessing is (8+0)/2 = 4 and of not confessing (10+1) = 5.5.

Although not confessing is not a rational choice, it has the most potential to pay off because 1+1=2 and 2 < 4 and 5.5. If each prisoner could be certain his partner in crime would not confess, they each could reach an outcome better than what rational behavior would predict. The magic of white people is that they employ high trust in their societies which thwarts the consideration of not knowing whether to trust another person and as such leads to more optimal societal outcomes than if they were to behave rationally. White people have a natural built-in tendency toward cooperation which I believe relates to aggregate psychological traits, which I believe are mostly genetically-determined.

Self-Interest

The 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith proposed the idea that individuals act according to self-interest. Of course, he didn’t mean that everyone acts this way all the time but that people do so generally, and that this fact determines the functions of the economy. The implication of Smith’s theory is that if individuals are self-interested, they seek only to benefit themselves and perhaps their immediate nuclear family, but that’s it. The argument is that with warring tribes and extended families out of the way, society can reach optimal economic efficiency.

However, people don’t act according to their self-interest all the time, and when whites act altruistically their behavior differs from nonwhites. Whites more frequently make a clear-cut distinction between their individual interests and the interests of society at large. Their sense of altruism is more impersonal whereas that of nonwhites is more personal. When white people think altruistically, they aren’t thinking in terms of family or friends per se, but in the abstract. This kind of impersonal, spaced-out altruism is most on display as whites campaign more than other races to protect the environment. In my best estimation white liberals have the greatest degree of this as they vehemently oppose environmental damage caused by extracting oil or other natural resources from the earth. Whites in general seem to loathe being objectified in a physical sense and want to keep everything sort of principled, rule-based, or spiritual, and this sort of psychological proclivity is one reason why they hesitate to identify racially, apart, of course, from intimidation by (((the usual suspects.)))

When it comes to most nonwhites, their altruism is more often specifically tied to people they know, such as their distant family members or their friends. It makes sense that they would need to think about things rationally more often because they need to determine the degree of relatedness they have with various people in their tribal society. Whereas whites, in their individualistic societies, don’t need to do this as often and can rely on a more abstract altruistic principles.

Now of course, there’s some overlap between whites and nonwhites in these behaviors. Not every nonwhite person is nepotistic and not every white person isn’t, but on average whites, especially the most individualistic ones, are the least nepotistic. Therefore, it is not surprising that the nonwhite Indian Economist Amartya Sen would seek to challenge Adam Smith’s supposition that self-interest was a primary motivating factor in society. According to Sen,

Between the claims of oneself and the claims of all lie the claims of a variety of groups-for example, families, friends, local communities, peer groups, and economic and social classes.

For whites, there is less between the claims of “self and all” than for nonwhites. Sen and Smith are talking past each other. Sen is projecting his nepotistic instincts into a presumably universalist objective study of economics, and Smith is projecting his individualist instincts onto the same, but their instincts are specific to their racial group and cannot be part of an economics which applies universally.

The neoconservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza claims in Hillary’s America that he left India to get away from the “gang,” and moved to America to experience more individualism. Perhaps we could say D’Souza, as an individualist outlier among Indians, was trying to get away from men like Sen to be around men like Smith.

Demographic Mercantilism

Mercantilism is the Renaissance-era belief that gold equals wealth, and thus nations should seek to acquire more gold than other nations. Since then, GDP, or the monetary value of all the goods and services produced in a nation within a year, has become the standard measure of wealth.

However, the concept of mercantilism can be revived if applied to race. A demographic mercantilist believes racial preservation equals wealth and as such would seek to modify the economy in such a way as to maximize the birthrate much as the mercantilist would to maximize holdings of gold.

The primary action a demographic mercantilist can take is to bolster sectors where workers typically have large families. Which sectors might these be? Studies show that whites are more apt to form families when men are gainfully employed. A demographic mercantilist would therefore seek to maximize the number of heavily male occupations, such as software developer or truck driver in the economy and minimize the number of heavily female ones such as dental hygienist, nurse, or elementary school teacher. Perhaps a strategy of permitting nonwhite women who are past their childbearing years to occupy heavily female sectors in a white republic would help to lower the average wages of these sectors and increase the relative earnings of men. This would lower opportunity costs for women related to having children because there would be fewer potential high-paying jobs precluding childbearing.

Tailoring the economy to a more male-centric employment would increase fertility due to another, more subtle reason. The odds of divorce increase the more a wife earns relative to her husband. This is probably due to many wealthy women perceiving low income to mean low status and women being reluctant to leave the luxury which much wealthier husbands can provide. The exception to this problem might be very intelligent couples who are less materialistic since higher IQ people are less likely to divorce, but for the majority of couples, it is a haunting reality.

Divorce is a problem because the children of divorced parents are less likely to marry, which is at least partly due to divorce harming how the child sees relationships with the opposite sex. Specifically, sons of divorced parents are often either too aggressive or too “beta” with women while daughters are often suffer more anxiety. Increasing men’s relative earning capacity would help to prevent these psychological problems, preserve the institution of marriage, promote family formation, and maintain replacement level fertility.

Today’s workplace increasingly benefits women. The United States is a service-based economy which disproportionately rewards skills more common among women such as being congenial and being good at multi-tasking. The picture looks even bleaker considering how trucks will soon be driverless and how many programming jobs are being sent abroad.

Construction is a heavily male sector, where 89% of jobs are occupied by men. Men’s higher average spatial IQ and physical strength make them much more suited to such jobs. Construction is the last refuge of men fleeing the irritations of the sexually-mixed workplace. This was essentially the plot of the movie Office Space, where the protagonist gets fed up with his boring cubical job and his moronic, egotistical bosses, their schmoozing underlings, and doing meaningless “TPS reports.” In the end scene, we find him relaxed and fulfilled, having switched careers to become a construction worker.

Unfortunately for white guys like him, Hispanic immigration is cutting off the safe zone of blue collar job sites. Male Hispanic laborers are taking construction jobs which would otherwise go to white men. This decreases relative demand for white men in the workplace, lowering their market power and wages while discouraging women from forming families with them. The argument that “Hispanic immigrants are doing jobs Americans won’t do” is invalid because without such coolie labor spilling in, wages in those sectors would increase to the point where they attract more white men. However, when Hispanic labor streams in, this cannot happen.

Meanwhile, the wives of these Hispanic men, even if they wanted to work, often cannot because their language barrier holds them back in the workplace more than that of their husbands since female-majority occupations such as education and nursing typically require more verbal communication. Female Hispanic immigrants thus have the incentive to be stay-at-home mothers. This incentivizes white women to cover for them by doing jobs they would otherwise have done if not for the Spanish language barrier, which increases the wages of white women and makes them opt more for earnings above childbearing. For example, many white women would rather be a social worker than be a stay-at-home mom because they view the former as a more high-status endeavor. The children they help as social workers are disproportionately Hispanic, many of them being descended from the wives of Hispanic laborers.

It is important to bear in mind that this demographic mercantilism is not a cure-all for low birthrates. Many white women refrain from having children not because their husbands are underemployed but because they are. Lowering income expectations for white couples who want to have families may go much further than tweaking the economy to provide men more jobs. A societal compromise where women have children at replacement rates which involves no tweaking of the economic to provide more male jobs would be better than if the government pushed for more male jobs while fertility was below replacement level, so attempts to provide more male jobs must be kept in perspective and subordinated to the goal of achieving replacement fertility. Demographic Mercantilism should be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

The Infant Industry Argument

To protect new industries, nations sometimes impose tariffs on goods coming from the home industry’s foreign competitors. The idea is that the new industry is in its infancy or small and helpless and not able to fend for itself and needs protection until it attains a level of efficiency necessary to compete in the global marketplace. Pat Buchanan, a famous advocate of tariffs, claims they enabled America to develop its industrial output and to surpass that of nations like England.

The infant industry argument should also apply to individuals within industries, especially now that corporations have offices all over the globe which can communicate instantly via the web. In other words, now more than in the past individuals and their educational capital are the starting and stopping point of efficiency rather than giant, self-contained industries tied to a nation. Suppose you have a service that can possibly be out-sourced such as computer programming. What happens is that corporations can forestall hiring white programmers who have recently graduated in the US because they can hire someone from India with five years’ experience, usually for less money. One could imagine that with enough decades of global capitalism, first world nations would become late-career nations, nations with intermediate GDP per capita would become mid-career nations, and the third world would have all the entry level jobs.

The problem with this, apart from cultural destruction, is that while the programmer from India is willing to move to the prosperous US, the white college graduate is reluctant to relocate to India where increasingly more entry level programming jobs are. This is partly because most white men prefer women of their own race, and in India he would find none. This contradiction in the need for youthful love from one’s own group and the need to obtain an entry-level job is a fundamental contradiction in the labor market that is producing a market failure. What’s more, with fewer white men gainfully employed as programmers, white women will be displeased with having boyfriends with relatively lower income jobs.

Just as American industry had more potential than that of England, many white guys have more potential as programmers than Indian immigrants. If it is logical to promote an infant industry policy to protect an industry, it is logical to protect those who are in the infancy stages of their career who, because of lack of experience, cannot compete with people coming from foreign nations who have several years’ worth of it.

It would be nice to end the discussion here, but the problem of (((David Ricardo’s))) comparative advantage needs to be addressed. Ricardo was an advocate of free trade in the early 19th century. Explaining his thought experiment fully would take some time so giving an abbreviated form will have to suffice.[1] Suppose nations can only produce two items, apples and oranges. Suppose Nation A can produce both more efficiently than Nation B. Suppose also that Nation A is a lot better at producing oranges but only a little better at producing apples than Nation B. Ricardo would argue that Nation A has a comparative advantage in producing oranges, and Nation B has a comparative advantage at producing apples, so they should each specialize in their comparative advantage and then engage in trade because they will each end up with more overall than if they didn’t trade. (The math he used proves this.)

Ricardo would say that even if the US has an absolute advantage in computer programming, i.e., greater production relative to wages, India should do programming if it has a comparative advantage in it, and the US should find some other occupation for its citizens to do. Now, his thought experiment was simplified for the sake of argument, and in real life it doesn’t justify total national specialization but simply stronger sectors in one nation relative to others.

The problem is that if the US turns away from programming to a strong degree then the occupations to which workers turn may be more heavily female and skewed toward a skill set more common in women than programming, thus presenting problems for the Demographic Mercantilist who values racial preservation via maintaining childbearing-incentivizing male-centric jobs above the added level of economic efficiency that free trade and comparative advantage would provide.

Another objection is that there may be different levels of comparative advantage in different career stages, and by skimming off late-career individuals without as much potential from one nation to supplant potentially more productive entry level workers from another, it may cause a dislocation in the market and therefore market failure by a sort of unsustainable cheating. This is essentially the infant industry argument applied to individuals.

What is certain, is that more thinking needs to be done on this matter to come up with examples of exceptions to Ricardo’s rule of comparative advantage.

Malthusian Overpopulation

The wager between the libertarian economist (((Julian Simon))) and the neo-Malthusian biologist (((Paul Ehrlich))) is the subject of many discussions in economics. Ehrlich believed overpopulation would eventually drive up the prices of raw materials. In 1980 he made a bet with Simon that five metals of his choosing would go up in price during the next decade while Simon bet that they would go down. Simon won the bet because all five metals had gone down in price by 1990, mostly due to technological advancements.

The person after whom neo-Malthusians like Ehrlich take their name is the English philosopher Thomas Malthus, who, in the early 19th century, predicted that the population of England would begin to starve due to overpopulation causing arable farmland to run out. Just as in the case of the Simon-Ehrlich Wager, technological advancements staved off this disaster. Improvements in farming technology enabled crop yields to increase such that no apocalyptic starvation occurred. Citing the failed predictions of Malthus and Ehrlich, overpopulation naysayers claim technological progress will always outpace population growth.

The truth is that overpopulation naysayers are attempting to derive axioms from idiosyncratic conditions. Technological advancement isn’t manna from heaven that falls from the sky. It is contingent on the work of brilliant scientists, most of whom are white. If everyone in the world had an IQ on par with the bell curve in Sub-Saharan Africa, little to no technological progress would take place, and neo-Malthusians would be right. If everyone had an IQ and scientific capability on par with the bell curve of Europeans, then overpopulation would be even farther away from the horizon than it is now. The white mind keeps overpopulation scenarios at bay, and as whites become a smaller minority of the world’s population due to relatively low white birthrates, overpopulation — that is, consumption out-pacing production capacity — will become increasingly possible. By framing the argument of overpopulation in race-blind terms, (((economists))) have distracted the public from the real forces at work.

Conclusion

Concepts from economic thought help to explain why whites neglect supporting the survival of their race, have higher trust societies, promote individualism, and shun nepotism more than nonwhites. They can also explain how a white nation might buttress its birthrates, why white workers need protection from foreign scabs, and what keeps overpopulation at bay. It is my hope that others on the Right can improve upon my arguments, correct them if necessary, and forge new arguments of their own by applying concepts in economics to racial politics. I hope we can develop a school of thought that uses the tools of economic thought – not just that of the neo-classical mainstream, but also those of Austrian economics, Marxian economics, etc. – to show that White Nationalism is justified and consistent with economic prosperity for both the white and nonwhite worlds.

Note

[1] There are examples of Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory online, including the math involved, if the reader wishes to consult them.