Monday 7 October 2019

Is this a simple basis for understanding the PIGs?

In recent years, my brother has become more and more critical of the Politically Incorrect Guides and their allies, arguing that the PIGs (as I always call them) have one single objective that is not mentioned in any of their books: to enrich rich people more and more. My brother argues that every policy they argue for is designed to either do this directly or encourage poor people to support their objective.

PIG Policy:

  1. Does it enrich rich people?
    1. If not, do not support it
  2. If it does:
    1. Will it help gain poor votes?
      1. If it does, support it openly
      2. If it does not, support it quietly
When this was discussed, I asked my brother why the PIGs support Christianity. Given that I know traditional religion and moral laws lessen the demands of the majority – if not their actual consumption because of resultant lower taxes and living costs – supporting traditional religion will enrich rich people. It will also help gain the votes of poor people, many of whom fear changing morals from the secular and “big government” Millennial Generation.

In contrast, corporate welfare – consistently ignored by the PIGs although it utterly contradicts their philosophy of zero government regulation – helps make the super-rich richer, so the PIGs simply ignore it for the most part.

Robert P. Murphy is, however, very critical of bank bailouts in his Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal. If my brother’s thesis be true, this could only be because he thinks that they serve as a criticism of Barack Obama, whom the PIGs hate, according to my brother, because he is black and a Democrat rather than because of his policies or dislike of the Constitution as Stephen Hayward says in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents. The same is true of other PIG-allied groups criticising General Motors, which was once called “Government Motors”.

Philosophically I can only be highly supportive of a constitution that strictly outlaws all business bailouts. Were they outlawed, rich people would lose substantial protection from government, without many costs I can testify from my own life to result from large-scale public welfare. Cuts to corporate welfare would also save a large – if unknown to me – sum of public money to return to the public or to reduce printing of new money. The only problem I do see is that jobs might not be provided rapidly enough to replace those in large businesses after they collapse.

Another book – one of the worst of the series – whose connection to “enriching rich people” I do not see is The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East. Paying for aid to Israel must cost rich people a lot of money given the amount of aid given by the US, yet it is supported vigorously by the PIGs despite their general isolationist leanings and the fact that the US aided the most virulent Muslim regimes to fight Communism. Opposing Saudi Arabia as proposed consistently by Robert Spencer in the Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam would not enrich rich people – it would have made Asia more vulnerable to Communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the contradictions between those two PIGs are indication of very bad quality control in the writing of the series, and even Robert Spencer acknowledged these contradictions when I messaged him many years ago.

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