Counter-Currents
2,544 words
Two of the white identitarian movement’s most trusted sources for news and analysis are Kevin MacDonald’s The Occidental Quarterly, and Ron Unz’sThe Unz Review. These gentlemen have, within the past year, each published an essay on the proper economic organization for a prospective ethnostate. Ron Unz has platformed a vision of the future white ethnostate based on libertarian principles, and Kevin MacDonald has published an opposing view that envisions a national socialist regime. Our objective here is to clarify the choice to be made between these political antipodes.
Artificial Intelligence and Economic Calculation
Just this last May, Mr. Unz shared the public release of an especially powerful version of ChatGPT called Deep Research, (DR).[1] Setting DR to work fact-checking his American Pravda series, Mr. Unz established almost total conformance between his massive output and what might be called “the truth insofar as it can be known.”
Expressing gratitude for DR’s ratification his work does, however, place Mr. Unz in an awkward position regarding his libertarian sympathies: DR’s response to the question “Has SFEcon [2] solved Mises’ Economic Calculation Problem, as formulated by Hayek in 1945?” returns the answer “. . . it appears that SFEcon has solved Mises’ Economic Calculation Problem as posed by Hayek in 1945.” [3] The categorical impossibility of artificial economic calculation has been fundamental to the libertarians’ Austrian economics since Mises formulated his calculation problem more than a century ago.
Economic calculation is central to economic thought because it computes the general economic optimum; and we think economic stability happens because the economy is continually reorienting itself toward its unique, thereby singular, optimal state. The greater number of white identitarians will have become familiar with the deeply esoteric calculation problem during a libertarian phase of intellectual development.
For those not having had a fling with libertarianism, we summarize the mathematical formulation of economic calculation as a challenge to compute the optimal rates for each economic input to flow into each productive process, throughout a theoretically free market economy. [4] This would be to say that continuously solving and re-solving the calculation problem is what the actual economy does.
It is therefore significant that established economic science has never produced a functioning analog to economic calculation. DR’s recent confirmation that at least one credible analog can be found among fringe economic initiatives is likely to refresh a few stale political disputes.
Libertarianism vs Economic Command
Discussions of economic calculation focus what is probably the most irreconcilable discord in radical right politics. The libertarian capitalists in our midst argue, with their characteristic certainty, that only free market operations can effect ‘solutions’ to the calculation problem, and agitate for a new ethnostate formed through installation of the freest forms of market capitalism. A more numerous but less focused contingent favors a regime that subordinates pure economic efficiency to an ethno-political dirigisme likely to be created in response to a global financial crisis.
The first possibility is opposed by concerns that unbounded capitalism tends to degenerate into oligopolistic gangsterism; and that, so conceived, any white ethnostate would be born clasping a kosher asp to its bosom. The second possibility is resisted in that political leaders generally fail in their attempts to control a nation’s macroeconomic affairs, as discovered by Stalin and Roosevelt during the depression years. It is far from certain that the superior outcomes accomplished by Göring during that same period might be achieved again.
According to The Guardian online, Ron Unz “started off dabbling in the paleoconservative, libertarian side of things but has moved to the extreme far right with multiple extremists writing for him” [5]– many of whom, we might assume, are invited to publish essays with which Mr. Unz does not wholly agree, but which are nonetheless selected for publication in anticipation of the informed commentary they are likely to generate.
This Guardian article goes on to quote Megan Squire, a data analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center who tracks extremism: “[Unz’] website has become a one-stop shop for hate from many different vantage points.” The title of a recent article in Unz Review, “Why We Should All be Holocaust Deniers” [6] would no doubt be taken by the Guardian’s staff as re-enforcing their view of Mr. Unz.
Digging a bit deeper into the content beneath this intriguing title, we see that Mr. Unz has platformed one Jorge Besada, “a free-market educator, author and activist” devoted to “the primary civic duty” and thus “the teachings of economics” and more specifically, the evolutionary ideas of Carl Menger and his so-called “Austrian School of Economics, which provide a complete understanding of how the socioeconomic order works.” In 2020 Mr. Besada represented the Libertarian Party in an unsuccessful bid to represent Washington’s 9th Congressional District. He is a regular contributor to LewRockwell.com.
Mr. Besada prefigures his contribution to UR via a photo of himself with Holocaust investigator Germar Rudolf taken at Ludwig von Mises’ Mausoleum in Ferncliff Cemetery, Hartsdale, New York. This article of 3900 words essentially asserts that denying the Holocaust somehow affirms Austrian economics, together with its categorical rejection of socialism:
Again, criminalizing speech-thought is an error and injustice […] Both Socialism and our current disastrous Holocaustianized [sic] Zionism grew from restrictions on freedom of speech.
To begin disentangling this thought pretzel, we note that advocating for any sort of national socialist project is currently proscribed, while sympathies toward global socialism are generally affirmed. Clearly, the distinction being made in regard to “criminalizing speech-thought” is between nationalism and globalism. Socialism is beside the point, as is Besada’s notion that the “Holocaust myth” (his repeated characterization) developed as a justifiable response to immemorial anti-Semitism.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Toward a New Nationalism here.
Austrian economics’ assertions that schemes of economic command inevitably dissolve into chaos has strong historical support. But Austria’s attribution of these failures to the impossibility of artificial economic calculation is certain to have consequences that could not have been foreseen at the time of attribution.
Now that AI solutions to the calculation problem are becoming available, it seems more and more likely that technically enlightened ethno-political dominion can preserve economic stability while carrying through nationalist impulses. The post-war Scandinavian nations, insofar as they remained ethnically coherent, are recent historical instances of such regimes’ successes occurring prior to the possibility of assistance from AI. And we currently see approximately the same model operating, however precariously, on behalf of the Han Chinese.
Globalism and Nationalism
The contrast between free market capitalism and economic command aligns quite well with the distinction between globalist and nationalist sentiments. We see this in that the theoretical limit of pure libertarianism would be realized as a single, worldwide, free market.[7]
This alignment was fully developed in a Fall, 2024 TOQ article titled “Economic Command and the Dissident Right” [8] – the essentials of which might be almost entirely conveyed in tabular form:
| GLOBALISM
|
NATIONALISM | |
| Tikkun Olam | National Self-Interest
|
|
| Buccaneer Capitalism | Enlightened Economic Command
|
|
| ‘Artificial Economic Calculation is Impossible, And Here’s Why . . .’ | ‘Artificial Economic
Calculation is Demonstrable, And Here’s How . . .’ |
|
| Talmudism
Received Economic Theory |
Specifically Western
Science
SFEcon |
The anonymous author “Econometrix” asserts that admission to the economist’s guild requires concurrence with Mises’ finding that solutions to his problem lie entirely “beyond the capabilities of merely human intellect.” In other words, economics has made itself the science of why economists cannot be expected to develop concrete, mathematically specific, practical analogs to what their subject matter does.
Apparently written by a knowledgeable economist who has had enough of this pious humbug, she(?) makes one derisive comparison after another between various schools of economic thought and SFEcon. Her article is epitomized by a quote from Takimag: “Economic non-computability is the most shameless (certainly the best financed) academic fraud since the Piltdown Man.” [9]
Ultimately this TOQ article distinguishes between SFEcon and economics proper in that the former is a creature of Western science, while the latter is a Talmudist offshoot; and it does not neglect to report the ethnic identities of those at the sources of these opposed lines of thought. The opposition between nationalist and globalist impulses is aligned with these same cultural poles.
Emergence via the Internet
SFEcon’s instructional videogames have a natural appeal for today’s students; and discovery of these desktop prototypes online is inspiring student presentations. One such is an excellent senior thesis [10] posted by the student’s instructor in order to draw comments from professional academics having Austrian views.
A Reddit exchange initiated for this purpose begins by stating that the student had much instruction from SFEcon, and that the greater number of his references were taken from the TOQ article cited above. Some of the more evocative responses from this exchange are transmitted here:
SFEcon is presented as a contrast to “economic Talmudism” insofar as it operates entirely within the Western Scientific Tradition.
This juxtaposition is not analytically meaningful and appears racially coded. To use “Western science” and “Talmudic performance” as methodological opposites is to traffic in antisemitic binaries under the guise of intellectual taxonomy. That this framing informs the foundational contrast within the student’s thesis renders the project ideologically compromised beyond the level of technical modeling or theoretical coherence.
No quantity of peer-reviewed publication or formal rigor can counterbalance a thesis that incorporates racialized critiques of entire academic traditions. The problem is not tone or citation ethics. It is structural. Once the categories of legitimate versus illegitimate economics are defined in ethnocultural terms, the thesis ceases to participate in science. It becomes, by definition, a political statement disguised as methodology.
As a computational experiment in constrained optimization, the SFEcon system may have limited illustrative value. But as an economic theory, it fails to engage core methodological objections, replaces epistemic constraints with mechanical analogues, and ultimately rests on a foundation drawn from racially motivated ideological critique. If this project is to serve the student in graduate school or beyond, its first requirement is a formal severance from all racially or ethnically coded source material. Absent that, no amount of modeling, publication, or recontextualization can insulate it from its compromised intellectual lineage. [11]
If there is anything anti-Semitic in the student’s thesis it escapes me. Though issuing from a Redditor who is obviously literate, intelligent and well-versed in his subject, his critique of an undergraduate submission clearly lacks any sense of proportion: are we to believe that this extensive commentary, plus a great deal more, was initiated by too many footnotes mined from an article in TOQ? Perhaps we are witnessing a release of emotions pent-up in response to other stimuli – a release that was merely triggered by a rather innocent, and in any case wholly algebraic, presentation.
Though he probably did not realize it, this particular Redditor reflexively instantiated everything said by Econometrix in TOQ. What could be more Talmudic than “intellectual taxonomy”,’ “ideologically compromised”, “legitimate versus illegitimate”, “racially or ethnically coded source material”, or “compromised intellectual lineage”? What could be more Western than “technical modeling”, “theoretical coherence”, “mechanical analogues”, or whatever else that we must know, a priori, to be deficient, counter-factual, or morally intolerable?
Whither the Petrodollar?
Whether for good or ill, SFEcon is emphatically Western/nationalist insofar as their technology functions as a measuring device for absolute value – presumably the very core of economists’ concerns. SFEcon’s algorithm is currently under consideration by the BRICS+ nations as a basis for a new international currency with which to replace the petrodollar.[12] This realization of Keynes’ proposal for a “bancor” would be used exclusively for international trade; its adoption would therefore liberate all domestic currencies from any obligation to function as a global reserve currency, thus freeing national currencies to be what are supposed to be, viz.: instruments for affirming national sovereignty.
Our European culture is presently tyrannized by people who have established the privilege of hypothesizing the existence of money, and thereby acquiring the police powers with which to defend their right to charge interest on their hypotheses. One obvious way of breaking this tyranny would be to reconstitute the very notion of money on an unfalsifiable value standard. A solved calculation problem opens one possibility for achieving such a result.
According to Max Planck,
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.[13]
Hopefully the advent of AI will free science from its current “one funeral at a time” method of progress.
Reports by our most authoritative robot intelligence that another robot intelligence solves a famously indissoluble problem suggests that the very meaning of what is meant by ‘factual’ is evolving. Robot intelligence is not only able to synthesize all pertinent web commentary and posted academic papers in mere moments, it is also able to exercise mathematical demonstrata while evaluating the computer programs generating them, thence to assure us that a model’s avouched computational substrate is actually what produces its avouched behaviors.
Analysis this thorough and comprehensive will take generations if it can only be performed through academic procedures involving peer review and academic promotion. Given that economic calculation has been called ‘the most complicated mathematical problem that actually has a solution’ and having sampled the extent to which the academic mentality might go in denigrating the solution once it arrives, it seems entirely possible that methods for artificial economic calculation might remain forever unrealized if not validated by some form of automated Deep Research or its successors.
To close with another reference to the Deep Research program, we might note that DR’s response to the question “Is SFEcon anti-Semitic?” was “There is no widespread public information or credible allegations suggesting that SFEcon itself is anti-Semitic.” [14]
Notes
[1] Ron Unz, “Fact-Checking the American Pravda Series” Unz Review May 26, 2025 https://www.unz.com/runz/fact-checking-american-pravda/
[2] SFEcon is a freely accessible online teaching initiative available at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt0NQhbUtZfAlxXlnd-HRWg and www.sfecon.com. A refereed presentation of its technology is available at: http://www.sfecon.com/Economic%20Calculation.pdf.
[4] Friedrich von Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” American Economic Review; XXXV, No. 4, 1945, p. 519-30. http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html
“The conditions which the solution of this optimum problem must satisfy have been fully worked out and can be stated best in mathematical form: put at their briefest, they are that the marginal rates of substitution between any two commodities or factors must be the same in all their different uses.”
[5] Ed Pilkington, “Harvard affirmative action challenge partly based on Holocaust denier’s work” The Guardian online, Jun 6, 2023
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jun/06/harvard-affirmative-action-supreme-court-ron-unz
[6] Jorge Besada, “Why We Should All be Holocaust Deniers” Unz Review, June 29, 2025
https://www.unz.com/article/why-we-should-all-be-holocaust-deniers/
[7] E.g.: as essayed here: https://jacobin.com/2024/02/crack-up-capitalism-interview-libertarianism-democracy
[8] Econometrix: “Economic Command and the Dissident Right”. The Occidental Quarterly; vol. 24, No. 3, Fall 2024.
https://www.toqonline.com/journal/cart/index/product/id/182/c/
The authoress’s personal version of her submission is available outside TOQ’s paywall at:
[9] Christoph Hargreaves-Allen, “In Search of Lost Money” Taki’s Magazine, 7 January 2016. https://www.takimag.com/article/in_search_of_lost_money_hargreaves_allen/
[10] Senior thesis, with author’s identifiers removed:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j6Yc5Wfw8nQ8_K41CrgG4w2pbzKPIZnb/view?usp=sharing
[11] URL of the referenced Reddit exchange:
[12] This interview with SFEcon’s founder outlines his initiatives in re BRICS+: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-O8A7aY7SIOUguLzmt7dxXpHK3YrhRt9/view?usp=sharing
Though unsourced, and obviously over-edited, the interview’s internal consistency and references indicate that it did indeed take place early in 2023. It is clearly a precursor to the TOQ article of 2024; and its analogous preference for anonymous authorship suggests that the interviewer was likely to have been ‘Econometrix’ herself.
[13] Max Planck: Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers. New York, 1950, Philosophical library p. 97.
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22 comments
Interesting article. I came from the Austro-paleolibertarian (really Austro-paleoconservative) camp. I still have sympathies with it, particularly Hoppe’s views. A question and a comment:
Can something really be proven by AI? Mises’s economic calculation problem is solved because AI said it has been? We have solid empirical evidence that Marxism is an economic failure, as every nation or entity that implemented it impoverished itself. Wouldn’t economic calculation by AI at least have to be implemented somewhere and successfully tested in the real economy before victory could be declared?
Murray Rothbard (yes, I know he was Jewish) identified the medieval Scholastics as the true forerunners and foundation-layers of Austrian economics. As the progenitors of Western science, they can hardly be classified as Talmudic.
A couple of good catches here. Let me try to do them justice.
First, we should agree with Greg Johnson’s piece on “The banality of AI.” AI is indeed banal; and so is a socket wrench. Both are tools, and it is good to think of tools as banal so that any enthusiasm for their application does not result in their being misapplied. My inquires to AI regarding SFEcon would confirm Greg’s finding that AI is prone to a certain species of error. And, in any case, AI cannot be more truthful than the internet itself. There is no ultimate arbiter of truth, and let us hope there never will be.
If I gave the impression that SFEcon is anything other than a simulation algorithm, then that is unfortunate. According to the Reddit thread at the heart of my investigation . . .
“SFEcon is not a LLM creation. It is an intelligence, and it is artificial, but it is not what is generally regarded as a product of AI. It does not search among extant knowledge to learn what it is to do next; it internally generates the new knowledge (prices) that it needs to guide its next step into the future.”
My formulation of “robot intelligence” is intended to include – not equate – AI and SFEcon. The former is a comprehensive search algorithm that can be expected to reliably bring together the most general notions about what economic calculation IS with what the latter actually DOES.
It is not difficult to establish that “Marxism is an economic failure, as every nation or entity that implemented it impoverished itself” but does that mean that every historical instance of economic command has also failed? My article cites the successes of the ethnically coherent Scandinavian nations and the Han Chinese. Have you evidence that these nations would be happier if they were more capitalistic? What would such evidence entail?
And, yes, it would be best if an emulator of economic efficiency could be “successfully tested in the real economy” before implementation; but it is most likely that events will force such tests upon us, as they did with the Axis powers. It is common hereabouts to cite the Third Reich’s conspicuous success in resurrecting the German economy during 1933-35. Should similar challenges confront us, it might be wise to experiment ’on the fly’ with some machine-aided intelligence regarding economic causality.
You will find your reference to Murray Rothbard and the medieval Scholastics to have been fully anticipated among SFEcon’s teaching materials:
https://www.sfecon.com/1_Discussions/12_SFEcon/123_Orthodox/Catholic/Just_Price/JustPage.html
Those points of agreement having been established, there remains much room for debate as to whether the Schoolmen are to be considered “the progenitors of Western science.” According to the TOQ article cited,
“The heretic Galileo is credited with initiating our Western scientific tradition because he successfully established that ‘Demonstration is the essence of science.’”
Scholasticism, Talmudism, et al, are all verbalizations and therefore remain susceptible counter-verbalizations. “Ptolemy ARGUED that all celestial bodies revolved around the earth; Galileo BUILT a telescope.” SFEcon is not an argument; it is a demonstration:
http://www.sfecon.com/YouTube Demo.xlsm
Had an editor insisted, I could have changed my title to “Economics, Scholasticism, and AI.”
Speaking of dissident econ, Nicolas: care to read my paper (assuming Dr. Johnson approves it) challenging the Austrians on the notion that protectionism can’t possibly make a nation more prosperous than free trade?
The author of this essay reports that one of the alleged “most trusted sources for the white identitarian movement,” Ron Unz “has platformed a vision of the future white [sic] ethnostate based on libertarian principles… Just this last May, Mr. Unz shared the public release of an especially powerful version of ChatGPT called Deep Research.”…
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So what? I do not identify as a member of Mr. Unz’s so-called “white identitarian movement,” and would trust that multi-millionaire racial Jew as a leader of anything pro-White about as far as I could throw him, which will never be attempted. Serious White racial nationalists have no need for Jewish leaders who “platform visions” for them. Period.
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Nicolas d’Or Esmé: August 26, 2025 ... First, we should agree with Greg Johnson’s piece on “The banality of AI.” AI is indeed banal… My inquires to AI regarding SFEcon would confirm Greg’s finding that AI is prone to a certain species of error. And, in any case, AI cannot be more truthful than the internet itself...
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Agreed. Being an electronically-challenged Boomer I have no interest in AI, seeing it as artificial. It has its uses but I’ll leave them to those who like it for our purposes, like Kevin Strom, the National Alliance’s Media Director, who has done some excellent work, using AI.
Banal is a good descriptor for AI. Don’t look to it for the truth any more than looking for the truth about our cause from WikiJews. David Sims, a brainy physicist who was Dr. Pierce’s editor has proven AI lies in this recent exchange he had, when the double-talking Gab-AI robot had to admit “You caught me in a fabrication.” See “Beware of AI Fibbing!” at whitebiocentrism.com.
Rothbard, Mises and Alisa Rosenbaum (Ayn Rand) were all jews, The “luminaries” of modern clown libertarianism all promoted individualism to the goys out of one side of their mouths, while at the same time supporting hyper ethnocentrism for their own tribe out of the other side of their mouths, and it was really blatant. “Paleoconservative” Paul Gottfried is a fake conservative jew who gatekeeps the mental midgets on the right, and promotes jew ethnocentrism. Everything you just posted is jewish subversion and gibberish. In future, just be honest and post your name as Ultra Zionist.
You are apparently prone to prodigious leaps of logic and making accusations with no evidence. You are not a CC supporter – why is that?
Rothbard, Mises and Alisa Rosenbaum (Ayn Rand) were all jews
Tell me something I do not know.
Ayn Rand certainly talked with a forked tongue, for which I despise her. You seem to be right about Gottfried. I do not know whether Mises was a Zionist. Rothbard was not a Zionist as far as I am aware, and wrote many positive things about Europeans, European culture, and the Catholic Church. He also needled his co-ethnics for their Leftism.
Everything you just posted is jewish subversion and gibberish.
Really? Questioning whether AI can solve the socialist calculation problem is gibberish? Pointing out that Rothbard had good things to say about the medieval Catholic Scholastics – who probably contemned the Talmud more than you (pretend?) to do – is Jewish subversion?
In future, just be honest and post your name as Ultra Zionist.
If you knew me you would know how absurd that is. You don’t even need to know me – you can read some of my previous comments on this site, if you are not too lazy to do so.
“You are apparently prone to prodigious leaps of logic and making accusations with no evidence. You are not a CC supporter – why is that?” Speaking of making accusations with no evidence, you have positively no idea as to if and how I support C-C, none at all. As to your autistic rabbi-like quibbling over what a Zionist is, all jews are Zionists. As the Talmud and Torah make abundantly clear, Zionism is nothing more than a state of mind that believes the hebrews/jews are the desert god’s master race who shall by hook, or by crook establish a home base, and from it rule the goyim cattle of the world. Zion-ism is Judah-ism. In a recent media interview, the Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt stated clearly that all jews are Zionists, and this was more than just media posturing. Moses Hess and many jews throughout history confirm Greenblatt’s view. You are using this forum to spread subversion, no doubt about it.
LOL troll
“Now that AI solutions to the calculation problem are becoming available”
No. AI is NOT overcoming the calculation problem.
See my article for a brief overview of the Mises-Hayek explanation of the impossibility of central planning: Two Reasons Why Socialism Repeatedly Fails
——————
“With the Internet, pricing information all over the world can help customers find/nourish cheaper/better products/orders/companies and also help producers likewise thus greatly accelerating competitive knowledge/order-spreading but it will NEVER lead to the success of central economy-wide planning because no computers/system can get in the brains of entrepreneurs to predict what products/businesses they will create and thus alter society, and similarly, no computers can get in the minds of consumers and predict how they will choose to spend their money/wealth thus once again altering the social order’s numerous cycles of production and consumption. As Mises so eloquently explains:
“The consumers, by their buying or abstention from buying, ultimately determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. They render profitable the affairs of those businessmen who best comply with their wishes and unprofitable the affairs of those who do not produce what they are asking for most urgently. Profits convey control of the factors of production into the hands of those who are employing them for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers, and losses withdraw them from the control of the inefficient businessmen. In a market economy not sabotaged by the government the owners of property are mandataries of the consumers as it were. On the market a daily repeated plebiscite determines who should own what and how much. It is the consumers who make some people rich and other people penniless.”
But who is in a position to determine what it is the consumers want and need? Only private entrepreneurs who daily are either rewarded or punished by the needs of consumers in the marketplace.”
The answer to your closing question is on pages 12 thru 14 of the student thesis cited as endnote 10.
Hi, Jorge Besada. This is D. H. Corax, the self-taught Austrian protectionist (praxeological protectionist, if you will). I written here on CC and on Occidental Observer about a particular way of doing protectionism that not only would raise the standard of living of the the white and East Asian nation that should practice it but of the entire world.
Think that can’t possibly be?
Well, I’ll be sending a condensed version to CC that explicitly challenges you Austrians–who have been putting out non-stop articles saying how protectionism of any kind can’t possibly help any nation overall–on the matter. Mises lists your email so I’ll email you when it’s out. Let me here pose a challenge to you: if after you read it you realize you’ve encountered an argument you’ve never heard before (whether you think it’s correct or not) you will attempt to refute it in an article to be posted on Mises and CC. How about it? Do you accept the challenge?
I believe I agree with you: to my way of thinking, a nation is remiss if it is not using whatever combination of protectionism and open markets best serves their people’s interests. So I, for one, would be pleased to see how you develop your premise.
But I am not sure that Counter-Currents is the right place for debates about economic policy. Libertarians do not, in any case, debate their economics: opposition is falsified a priori; and irrespective of any particular you offer, they will smother it by flooding the debate space with endless repetitions of the same outworn assertions. Witness YouTube’s presentations on economic calculation, or the post to which you are responding.
I suggest the best way to overcome these people is to isolate them in their own thought bubbles by ignoring them when they push their way into legitimate discussions. I apologize for breaking my own rule by calling attention to Mr. Besada’s performance at Unz Review; but his premise – denying the Holocaust affirms Austrian economics – was actually original and, to my mind, deserving of notice.
Glad you are interested and would be happy to hear your thoughts on it; just keep an eye out for the paper in the near future (I’ll be sending it tomorrow—not sure when the admin, assume they approve it, will post it). I’m glad I noticed this article: the stuff about SFEcon is truly fascinating and original—and the odd Holocaust claim is, if nothing else, original—as you say. As far as engaging the Austrians in debate, I’ve found them to be curiously bifurcated on that matter. On the one hand, there were the famous public debates (from the early 2010s) between Robert Murphy and the elites of rival schools, such as David Friedman (son of Milton) of the Chicago School, Mosler of MMT—and of course, Murphy did spend huge amounts of time and effort trying to get the Keynesian Paul Krugman to publicly debate him; and the same was true with the now-banished (for cheering the genocide in Palestine) Walter Block. On the other hand, the Austrians do have an awful tendency to arrogantly dismiss you without actually reading what you’ve written (assuming in their arrogance that there’s no way you could possibly have a new argument, let alone a correct one), as I discovered trying to challenge Murphy and Block via email (and to their slight credit they did at least read the email, though not the essay, and write back). I wonder how much of it is arrogance and how much of it is fear: if they’ll outright challenge an idiot/regime crony such as Krugman, but will try to ignore a DR type who knows what they’re doing. At any rate, I think it might be possible to get them to debate and, if they do, use it to increase the libertarian-to-Dissident-Right traffic a bit; I’m working it out and will tell you in the comments of my essay if you’d like to hear it.
Well known people only debate better known people – too much to lose otherwise. My contact at SFEcon tells me that Robert Murphy, Walter Block, Joe Salerno, George Reisman, and Stefan Molyneux have all refused to debate SFEcon. As much as these guys like to talk, it seems that none of them is willing to confront a gadget that enacts economic calculation.
I could see some problems with a big computer running a command economy for an entire nation. (To name one item, I bet a few programmers would quickly become the richest people in the country…) I prefer Distributism, which prioritizes small businesses and local trade.
I prefer Distributism, which prioritizes small businesses and local trade.
As do I. I suspect that Wilhelm Ropke, named in the referenced article, had strong distributist sympathies as well.
I endorse your sentiments, but the history of capitalistic competition is convergence toward oligopoly or outright monopoly. The question would seem to be whether the oligopolists are to be controlled by the state, or is the state is to be controlled by the oligopolists? Presumably the oligopolist will set prices that maximize his wellbeing. Absent competition, generally optimal prices must be imposed. To be imposed, they first must be known – as by a robot intelligence that can enact a simulacrum of economic calculation. The practical implications envisioned for SFEcon are linked-to in endnote 12.
The first part of the answer is to put in structural restraints to favor local small businesses. My concept of this is that Mom and Pop stores will have low taxes and fewer barriers to entry. Regulatory requirements etc. increase generally in proportion when the businesses pass a certain point, and more stringent yet for gigantic multinationals, though not beyond reason. If they want to ship jobs overseas, they will be required to pay a living wage, have pollution controls, adhere to factory safety standards, etc. This reduces the competitive advantage of sweatshop labor. They’ll get surprise inspections, and cheating will be subject to strict penalties, up to and including civil forfeiture.
Also, executive salaries will be capped at 12X of the lowest-paid employee, the way the Swiss do. (If that seems restrictive, Thomas Jefferson recommended a 5X ratio.) I might contemplate looser standards for the founder of the company, but not for a successor who simply won a game of boardroom musical chairs.
Will this impede the free flow of capital? Yes it will, to a degree. Fortunately, I’m not an economite and I understand that not everything good can be measured by $$$$$$$$$. Externalities are an important factor to consider. For those unfamiliar, I discussed the topic in my classic post “Onlyfans is an evil Satanic plot to destroy the world.”
The other part of the answer is getting corporations out of the government. Corporate lobbying will be permitted, but we need sweeping campaign finance reform. If they can keep buying politicians, then eventually we’ll be right back to the New World Order again.
Is there any value to the Theory Underground YouTube channel’s voices? They seem to appear surface hostile to our guys nor do I have a clue what ‘timenergy’ is, or if their perspectives have any relevance to the current topic, a mere perplex to the uninitiated, or a garrulous boondoggle?
I can’t say I always grasp economics well, but this is how I imagine AI calculation going:
There is a popular brand of cereal that becomes managed by AI. The AI forecasts that, during a sales slump, only 90 units are required for production instead of the usual 100. However, there is a temporary distraction against purchasing the brand, and so only 70 units are consumed. The AI updates its model and only 70 units are produced for the next slow season. However, there is a demand for all 70 units that season, so some consumers go empty handed. Seeing this as a success, the AI only makes another 70 units for the next slow season. Since many people expect they won’t get any of the cereal, they don’t try, and so only 60 units of the cereal are consumed. The AI updates its model to make only 60 units…. This continues until, one year, 0 units of cereal are consumed out of the 10 made. The AI updates its model and concludes that no one wants the cereal anymore and closes down all production for that brand.
However, one year a Store Manager wants to try to sell more units and hopefully reinvigorate sales. He reboots production, manually choosing 80 units to be available. All 80 units are consumed, but the AI believes this is a fluke and shuts down production immediately after. The Store Manager is stuck manually forecasting units of consumption every year that he wants the product available.
Perhaps there’s a reverse of this scenario where the AI could overproduce in high sales seasons, and production gets shut down anyway due to lost resources from waste.
My general point is that an AI is probably going to have trouble predicting human whim and tarry. Perhaps human behaviour is predictable to some extent but that’s only true to a range with a lot of wiggle room.
Socialism and protectionism is akin to “all birds have wings but not all can fly”, there’s no real dichotomy there against capitalism and believing so speaks of babies and bathwater.
Sorry no real dichotomy between protectionism and capitalism. It’s just a bordered economy.
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