A double cheer for Free Enterprise

Corporate Capitalism and Free Enterprise systems are not synonymous. The former rejoices in oligarchy. The latter detests it.

What made the US great for much of its history was a belief in its own exceptional destiny, its flexible labour market, high degree of innovation and its emphasis on individual freedom. It is also was motivated by a culture of self-reliance that eschewed the class structure of Europe. The country has a market economy and it is this adherence to free markets that have generated the wealth that underpins the success of the nation. The same is true of Hong Kong and Singapore.

So why do free markets work? Essentially they provide through the price mechanism immediate feedback that allows supply and demand of goods and services to reset in a timely manner to a new equilibrium situation. Excessive regulation, price controls and government interference (well intended or not) needlessly complicate the resetting mechanism resulting in shortages, price hikes and unstable situations.

The market aggregates knowledge in a far better way than any committee of elites or central planning forum could ever hope to do.

This does not mean of course that there isn’t a role for government on the economic front but its main purpose should be to provide a legal framework that will facilitate market economics, ensure competition and sustain a level of spending to adequately protect the most vulnerable in the society by providing necessary services.

The Demise of America

The United States is the most critical nation with respect to the immediate future of Western Civilization as it is the economic, technical and military powerhouse for the Liberal world. As it goes, so goes the civilization, for better but largely for worse. Unfortunately the country is being hollowed out at a breathtaking pace. Giant transnational corporations with little loyalty to the population have moved production facilities offshore. Rampant bureaucratic creep has complicated the market place. Public and private debt has soared and an ideologically dominated education system has seen to a fall in standards. Narcissism dominates over modesty with the country being subsumed by an epidemic of racial and gender politics that have cut across all strata of society. American exceptionality is looked on with disdain by a great deal of the population who see the country’s constitution – the role model for the protection of individual rights as an impediment to an internationalist world order that promises a new heavenly earth. If the US is an exporter of anything now it is that of bad ideas (racial essentialism, white privilege constructs, multiple genders, porous borders) that is clearly eroding family, community and national frameworks of cohesion.

For activists and internationalist elites this is deliberate, a necessary step in the tearing down that precedes the rebuild. However the Europeans have added to the deadly mix  (thart has found its way across the Atlantic) with falling birth rates, demographic transformation and surveillance state pressure. This has placed future generations at the mercy of centralized control that is as faceless as it is unanswerable to the population. Natural rights are being sacrificed to the collective will with freedom taking a back seat to authoritarianism.

Has the Frankfurt School destroyed society?

Not yet but in the absence of a push back it will. It has contributed to a significant decline already.

Cultural Marxism itself has its origins in the Frankfurt School (place of birth Frankfurt, Germany 1929) whose idealism incorporated a synthesis of Freudian, Marxist and Hegelian reasoning. It views history as march to an inevitability that can be directed by the control of institutions to facilitate necessary social change. In this way it deviates from Orthodox Marxism whose focus is largely on the economic.

Key thinkers here include Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas and Fromm. Social Emancipation and critiques of capitalism dominate the discourse and its impact across Academia (in particular the social sciences and humanities) cannot be understated. From here it has spread influencing both the biological and physical sciences, the professions and education. All of the disciplines (indeed all facets of life) are viewed as a platform that can be used to advance the necessary social change favored by the ideologues.

In the United States and other parts of the Anglosphere , this fusion of cultural Marxism and post-modernism has worked its way from the university into the mainstream. The intent is to bring in trans formative change consistent with a re-calibration will to power and by all accounts it appears to be gaining the upper hand. Push back began during the Trump era but the failure of conservative elements to seize the initiative earlier on means that the necessary resistance is playing catch up. The power dynamic has shifted to favor these authoritarian leftist ideologues and all strata of society will be the worse off for it.

Cultural Marxism envisions a restructure society in a way that opposes the capitalist infrastructure in support of a top down rearrangement that will advance outcomes that are believed to be more equitable. Critical Race Theory, the dichotomy of the oppressed and the oppressor and a general hostility to the Judeo-Christian core of Western Civilization are vital aspects of its praxis. The mode of thinking is a definite outgrowth of a metastasized leftism but unlike the radicalism of the Bolsheviks, and various State socialisms it has settled for a patience that was willing to bide its time with a slower walk through the institutions.

This walk though has picked up having fueled a ride on the globalist bandwagon that has oxygenated its outreach. It has found a necessary ally in post-Modernism deconstructionist thought, which also abhors legacy structures and tradition.

As it stands today I have very little doubt whatsoever that the West is in decline. The institutions are showing all the rot of ideological take over with identity politics dominating over merit based philosophies. The corporate, governmental, academic and educational worlds have all been infected by the mind virus of guilt ridden wokeism with the subsequent fall in standards making its presence felt ubiquitously.

But like all tunnel-visioned marches that eschew self-criticism it will forge a landscape of collateral damage. Truth will be its first victim followed only slightly by its inability to entertain contrarian initiated free speech. In this it echoes a Maoist zeal that will torch history to rewrite a narrative. Nothing is sacred, definitions are fleeting and victimhood serves as a weapon to justify what is needed. At its core it knows no constraints and if not checked will furnish a body count of lost lives and torched careers that for expedience of power will leave the gains of the enlightenment burning in a smoldering heap