Socialist Conservatism

Published by

Clarissa

February 1, 2023

When Orban initiated price controls in Hungary, its inflation rate was 8%. A year later, oil imports met a third of the nation’s demand. And the inflation rate? 24%, the highest in the EU. He should have learned from Nixon! https://t.co/hp31SRIiEd
— Tiana Lowe Doescher (@TianaTheFirst) February 1, 2023

Price controls were a method used by Hugo Chavez to destroy the economy of Venezuela. I don’t like to overuse the word socialism but this is literally socialism. I’m still very confused as to why Orban is supposed to be a conservative icon.

I will never understand how it’s possible to be a conservative and support price controls. There were price controls on everything in the USSR. Does anybody need a reminder on how that worked out? This socialist shit renders currency worthless and immiserates the people every single time.

People very often confuse words with actions. “Yes, but he said…” Who cares what anybody said? Look at the actions. Observe the results. I can’t tell you how many times people respond to my question as to why they detest one politician and support another with a sentence starting with “he said…”

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8 responses to “Socialist Conservatism”

Pen

February 1, 2023

I like the new theme! The comments are a lot less compressed, too, which is awesome.

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1. cliff arroyo
  
  February 1, 2023
  
  “new theme!”
  
  A bit sudden… I submitted a comment and then it changed (was wondering if my computer was having a stroke for a moment….).
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    February 1, 2023
    
    Sorry… It must be the weed I got from that dealer. 🙂
    
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2. Clarissa
  
  February 1, 2023
  
  Thank you! I wanted a theme that would show clearly how many comments there are, and this theme finally does that.
  
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methylethyl

February 1, 2023

Orban is “supposed to be” a conservative icon, because our “conservative” office-holders would prefer that conservative voters continue to be perpetually, impotently agitated about social issues– trans-this, abortion-that– since that allows them to continue their main mission in government: profligate spending and bribery.

Everybody look at something that’s not the economy.

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1. Clarissa
  
  February 1, 2023
  
  Yep. That’s exactly it. Next step: price controls in the US in the name of conservatism.
  
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  1. methylethyl
    
    February 1, 2023
    
    Sigh.
    
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Post Alley Crackpot

February 1, 2023

“I will never understand how it’s possible to be a conservative and support price controls.”

That’s easy! And that’s the problem.

It’s easy to pass on what is in essence a cloaked price control by enacting “sensible regulation”, “fair import duties”, and so forth.

When the “conservativism” is nothing more than a pseudo-reactionary stance, it’s easy to absorb some of the vocabulary and styles of the people who are against it so that they may push an agenda with familiar words.

The “progressives” do the same thing with neo-conservative talking points, especially the ones that make it sound like they’re speaking from “authority”, so this isn’t anything new to consider.

As for the problems with currency, that’s what you get with fractional reserve banking that allows the basis of the currency to be devalued in order to support people who expect free things to flow to them as a result of theft by takings (also known as “taxation as theft”).

Many people have some kind of internal dialogue that ends up with self-representation within a notional group of honest and good people, despite that internal dialogue being filled with stuff such as “deserving” free stuff.

“Oh, but we’re such hard working people, we deserve it …”

As for the readers: were you just trying to raise a defence for that talking point?

Then you implicitly agree with a fallacy known as The Labour Theory of Value, and it’s the thing that produces all of these demands people have where they believe they’re entitled to unrealised gains because they are upstream participants in some kind of economic action.

It’s like this weird “conservative” talking point that people have vis-à-vis Russia of the present day in terms of an “industrial economy” that produces “real things”.

That’s all lovely until you realise that some speculative action has to exist to produce “new real things”, and without that, all you get is a heavily commoditised economy without enough people to draw on those commodities to allow the economy to expand.

But for these “conservative” people, the US economy is somehow evil because it’s being over-represented by “financialised” things, rather than understanding that the US economy outgrew its “real things” basis, settled into “new real things” for a while, and so hugely overheated that the only escape valves were into physical commodities and into speculations that could somehow absorb some of that heat.

You explain this to people, they’ll nod their heads, and they’ll continue to assert that they have some rights on the downstream by being upstream producers.

So what’s a leader of a potentially overheating economy to do?

You start by destroying production in order to destroy demand so that the economy doesn’t overheat.

You put your thumb on the scales of the markets threatening intervention if they don’t allow this to flow top-down as if it were proclaimed from the top of Mount Sinai.

Because if you don’t do this, you look like you are Doing Nothing which is perceived to be worse than Doing Something, since often it is.

Inflation at a 50% rate is justifiable in such a situation if it keeps “financialisation” from overwhelming the economy to such a point that sovereign power erodes by making it profitable to import anything and everything.

The US itself is the model of how this goes horribly wrong over decades rather than years.

And so while it’s tempting to scapegoat Orban and denounce his “conservativism”, I don’t see that he had much of a choice without leading Hungary down an economic rabbit hole that it couldn’t climb out of.

In particular, Orban had a counter-example already in the form of the US, with a debt hole so deep that the only conceivable way out of it once “financialisation” stops working is to default or collapse, and after seeing how that could only be corrosive to such a thing as a “national identity”, he decided that it was better to see inflation and take the hits earlier instead of later.

If only the US could have done that back in 2007 and 2008?

But of course the main contributor to that economic overheating was political overheating, and everyone at the time wanted their cheap house with cheap government-backed credit.

We’re going through this now in the US: it’s better apparently to blow up forward demand than it is to torpedo everyone’s mortgages, home equity, and forward valuations.

Socialism is alive and well at your local mortgage lender.

They say things in the suburbs that placate the most staunch of conservatives with heavily cloaked bits of socialism that would have impressed the likes of Trotsky with their pragmatism.

“… as to why they detest one politician and support another …”

Go ahead and detest me, I DARE YOU.

I’m no longer running for public office, so it doesn’t matter anyway. 🙂

But keep in mind: when the economic process breaks, the political process still remains viable

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