Back when I wrote my first post in this series Williamson and the other cucks were accusing everybody who doesn’t like how the current economic system destroys traditional communities and promotes rootless cosmopolitanism is a liberal, because, according to them the inhuman destruction of community and the promotion of rootless urbanism all in the name of greater efficiency is the definition of conservatism.
Clarkhat wondered:
Not socialist, probably.
But there's a host of options other than full communism and rat utopia.@ClarkHat
— Free Northerner (@FreeNortherner) March 14, 2016
So, today, I’m going to propose some non-socialist, non-liberal, and traditionalist measures that could be potentially taken to stop the rapaciousness of the modern US economy. There is no liberalism or big government in these measures, simply traditional common-sense. I’ve already explained how the market should be restructured on a large scale to be more human, it should be owned, but the following are more practical in nature, and could all be implemented within our current system. (also, keep in mind my points made about the economy and GDP here throughout).
Replace Income Taxes with Tariffs and Consumption Taxes
We could raise tariffs on foreign goods. Trump has mentioned this and many conservatives have pointed out that this is a tax on consumer goods. They’re right but they’re also wrong in that they’re bad.
For the government to function it requires taxes of some sort and I have yet to hear a conservative saying we should entirely eliminate government. So we need taxes. For taxes we have a few options:
Wealth taxes are the worst: they encourage consumption, discourage savings, punish the virtues of planning and thrift, and destroy capital. Corporate taxes are the next worst form of taxation: they are inefficient, they hinder entrepreneurship and production, and the costs are simply passed down to the consumer and employees in the form of higher costs and lower wages. Income taxes and payroll taxes are almost as inefficient: they discourage working, punish labour, and hurt production, they also reduce the amount a worker retains after working. Consumption taxes are the best: they are more efficient, they punish consumption rather production, and they discourage consumerism while promoting savings and thrift.
If we’re going to tax (which everybody but anarcho-capitalists agree we will) we should gain tax revenues from consumption taxes rather than other, worse forms of taxes. Tariffs are a form of consumption tax, but they have an added advantage: they specifically punish the purchase of foreign goods made by foreigners for the profit of foreigners, while general consumption taxes punish all consumption, including the consumption of domestic goods made by domestic workers for domestic profits.
So, if you care about your nation (and if you don’t you are not conservative in any meaningful sense) you should be support tariffs over any other forms of taxation. For any funds needed that can’t be raised through tariffs, we should use consumption taxes. This would have the benefit of promoting the reindustrialization of America and encouraging real growth through savings and investments.
A proper tariffs scheme will also effectively end off-shoring as it would no longer be worthwhile to do so.
Decentralize and Reduce Federal Regulation and Bureaucracy
Conservatives pay this lip service, but rarely do they actually do anything real. Cutting red tape and solving inefficiencies sounds nice to the ignorant, but it is limited. So actually start doing real cuts and and passing more power to the states.
The Department of Education should be immediately eliminated. It serves no purpose and is entirely superfluous, if not actively harmful. Anybody who doesn’t make this a plank of their platform is not meaningfully conservative.
Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services should be rapidly devolved. Agriculture should be eliminated, food safety can be spun off to its own small agency. Transport should be heavily slashed; any ground-based regulations should be devolved to the states. Energy should be eliminated; their laboratories and regulatory functions sold ot devolved and nuclear weapons programs moved to Defence. Labour should be devolved. Commerce should be slashed, limited to foreign trade and statistics. Veteran’s affairs should be placed under Defence, and Defence should be slashed to the point where the US has no more troops in foreign countries we are not enagaged in war with. State should be slashed as the US reduces foreign entanglements.
End Student Loans
I’ve already gone in depth how the tuition bubble is economically raping and enslaving our young, leading to a massive economic waste as people pursue the empty status-signalling of degrees.
If we simply stop all federal student loans (and any other government post-secondary education subsidies) and make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy like all other loans, the problem will mostly right itself. Banks will only loan out to students they are sure they can make a profit from (ie. those who can make use of a degree), while the intellectually deserving will still get scholarships. With fewer people going to college, degrees will no longer be necessary status signals to get jobs where post-secondary education is not necessary.
Eliminate Mortagage Insurance and Securitization
I’ve went over this before, housing is mostly a positional good. Easy and cheap mortgages raise demand for housing, accelerating out of control housing costs, and making people house poor. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, and any other federal organization dedicated to securing, insuring, backing, or otherwise making loans easier to obtain should be eliminated. The lenders should be solely liable for any mortgages they lend out with no government involvement. This will makes mortgages harder to obtain, lower house prices, and stabilize the housing market.
Eliminate the Federal Reserve
The Fed destroys savings and real growth and enriches bankers at the expense of the people through manipulating interest rates and money supply. It should be eliminated.
Raise Interest Rates/Stabilize the Money Supply
This is a lesser version of the previous point. If you’re unwilling to end the Fed, then at least set a set schedule in the rate of growth in money supply, preferably a low one to prevent inflation and the subsequent erosion of capital. As well, raise interest rates (slowly, over time, not as a sudden shock) to ensure that we are allocating capital efficiently.
End Illegal Immigration and Minimize Legal Immigration
Wages are low, particularly for low-skill jobs, because we keep increasing the supply of low-skilled immigration. Reduce the labour supply and wages will increase. “Economic efficiency” may suffer slightly (remember what I wrote), but the actual economic health of the nation will improve.
Criminalize Usury
This is the first one that is an actual regulation. Usury is the abomination at the base of most of our economic woes and many of our social woes. It is the fuel of degeneracy. Criminalize it. Usury regulation is traditional and Christian.
Criminalize Credit Cards and Payday Loans
If you’re not willing to fully criminalize usury then at least criminalize credit cards and payday loans. These are the most virulent forms of usury; prey on and enslave the poor and middle classes and promote hollow consumerism. They prioritize consumption over savings and provide no long-term economic benefit.
Lower the Legal Work Week to 20 hours
As I’ve already shown productivity has increased 500% over the last 70 years, while work hours have only decreased by 12%. The 40-hour week was formalized in 1937, 8 decades ago during a time of massive productivity gains. We should reduce the legal work week to 20 hours. This should not be done all at once, but a slow transition, say, for example, 2 hours a year for 10 years. We’d still be producing far more than we used to, but we’d have more leisure. This would ease the effects of the transition to post-scarcity and create more productive employment for more people while overall work is declining.
Some might argue this is government intrusion in the marketplace, but we’ve already accepted that the government should be allowed to regulate work hours. This is only a difference of degree, not of kind. This objection is only valid from those opposed to any and all limits on work hours and overtime pay.
End Free Incorporation
Incorporation is a government intrusion on the free market. They distorts the free market, promotes big business over consumers, and reduces accountability. They are anti-free market and it should be ended, or rather our current way of using them should be. Maybe We could reinstitute chartered corporations , but we should end free incorporation.
End Government Unions
If we have a government, we will have government workers. They should not be allowed to unionize. Doing so only creates a bribery system for government workers.
Encourage Off-site Work
With the increasing digitization of many white collar jobs, actually going to the office is becoming less necessary as time goes on. All government workers who’s physical presence is not required for them to do their jobs, should be work from home. Hopefully, by setting this example, private businesses will follow. This will result in cost savings, may help improve quality of life, and will have the added long-term benefit of reducing the pressure on urban real estate markets, as commercial office real estate becomes less important.
Some other savings, albeit smaller, that can be made is abolishing the encroaching Marxist/Feminist court systems. Particularly the family court. There’s no doubt family issues will continue, but these courts haven’t achieved anything whatsoever. It’s a 100 million dollar social engineering project that failed miserably. Abolish it and just return to previous systems that were unfair and tragic, just like the current system is, but without the federal rent seeking.
Tremendous ideas
I don’t remember the particular essay, but in Tate and Agar’s “Who Owns America,” one of the essays brings up the point that the modern American is incapable of leisure, and by reducing work we only increase consumption and sloth. I think they made a good point that we would be better off with 60 hour work weeks, since it would give us less time to frivolously spend money and stare mindlessly at the television.
Of course, if most of that could be done from the home via the internet or some other mechanism, we kill two birds with one stone – keeping Americans off the sofa and keeping a parent in the home so children aren’t being raised by public employees and day care workers.
A consumption tax only sounds painfully death-by-deflation-ish to me. Otherwise suggestions are dank a/f and I would definitely support.
You’d probably find that the end of corporations would be the rise of the “chaebol”, or a return to aristocratic/dynastic power away from the managerial power of today. A wresting of control from the CEO-chhetris by the bramins. Fine by me fam, as a perpetual ghetto-labourer I think corps and unions alike can all get dicked.
Also I hate to sound like a hippie, but the West ceasing to hoover up the “best and brightest” of the world would not only be good for our social cohesion, but would stop the fatal brain-drain of the third world and give them a chance to build on what they have. Win-win, really; Dr. Patel’s butthurt notwithstanding
I don’t think that you though this through. First of all, where’s the point about the greatest of all producers of the high-time preference trashy people, the welfare state? I see no “eliminate the welfare state” here. Secondly, ending free incorporation doesn’t really sound wise, quite the opposite in fact. Without limited liability a lot of businesses would simply cease, or would never be possible in the first place. Corps today may be trashy and loyal to Cathedral, but there’s nothing wrong with the concept itself (also note that, as Nick B. Steves says, under normal circumstances you wound want people to be loyal to the ruling class, and dissidents would be the bad guys) – for instance all religious communities are limited liability corporations. Lowering the legal work week to 20 hours by force would be catastrophic. End the welfare, and bring in the hard money, and the work-hours will gradually decrease on their own (but leave the option of working more possible to those that want to). And thirdly, niggers gonna nig, the only way to eliminate usury is the same as the only way to eliminate abortion and drug abuse, and that is to hunt down those that demand such immoral services. Are you prepared to fiercely punish the usuree (the abortee, and the junkie) himself? Of course, before you can even contemplate banning usury, you have to implement hard money, otherwise it would be nonsensical because of the very nature of the fiat money.
Actually, I consider myself a sort of hyper-capitalist and still find little to disagree with in this post. Mostly, your reforms would actually REDUCE interference in the market from central actors, place more responsibility on the individual, and make the market MORE free. Consumption taxes are infinitely better than income taxes. Income taxes are patently unfair – as much as I hate to use that word, it still rings true.
The problem with Gordian’s idea of a longer weak is that it is harmful to family formation. In the 21st century longer work weeks just means smaller families. A healthy society is not 1.5 or lower forever
Japan basically has this and they are declining in population quite rapidly. Its takes time to have children, raise them and so on after all and exhausted people don’t have as much sex either or since its all office work high T levels
And note yes during a brief blurb in the early industrial era we had a mass work culture with some population growth . It was in this squalid sea of human misery Leftism grew. That periods traditions were abandoned or forced out by violence for a good reason. It was hell on earth
Besides what’s wrong with leisure or subject to ecological constraints, consumption? Its nice to be a wealthy society and to have time to enjoy that wealth ? Why bother making it than
What causing trouble is far too many economic ideas predate the computer/automation era where most the material goods anyone wants or needs can be created quite efficiently with little labor .
Some inferior goods, like say a PDF books vs. a print book or music MP3’s or videos are basically post scarcity.
I can take say a book, a movie or song in the public domain and legally share it with anyone with a phone, tablet or computer nearly instantly for little more effort than saying “tea, Earl Grey, hot” This BtW is most of humanity , around 6 billion people.
This is a huge change and anyone making any policy suggestions who doesn’t get it will fail.
Most work now is make work, it been that probably since the 1930’s where the “needful” amount of work is for average people maybe 30 hours for a family of 5 , 50 for a few declining skilled trades. That’s all.
To reiterate , everything else is make work
Well that or a parasitism tax of the useless elite living off interest , welfare or to fund people not working since we don’t want to pay them enough to save enough to stop at some point.
If we make policy, it can’t be “idle hands” or arbeit mach frie” work is everything thinking but a rational, responsible series or choices that take tech into account and take the needs of the bulk of humanity whose IQ averages in the 90’s, around 100 if we somehow deport enough people into account.
Doing this, creating a don’t work too hard society, decoupling economic liberalism from social conservatism while keeping Leftism and its incessant harmful social signaling in check is a challenge but its the best option we have.
@Free Northerner: Your article brings some insights. I assume that some of its points are meant as interesting ideas to consider rather than as things you would actually, definitely do if you had the power — but maybe you do literally mean them all; that’s for you to say.
Regarding the tariff: I agree with you so strongly on this point that one would like to see you make the best possible argument for it, so let me play devil’s advocate. According to tariff theory, a significant problem with tariffs is that it causes overconsumption of domestic manufactures and underproduction of goods our country happens to produce more efficiently (comparatively) than other countries do. Part of the argument goes: We should export apples to Chile in the fall and import them in the spring, so that both we and the Chileans have fresh apples to eat year-round. With the tariff, we eat more apples than we really want in the fall, make do with fewer and worse apples in the spring, and grow too few apples in any case.
Now, I do not happen to agree with this argument — in fact, I think the argument highly imprudent, and note (as you do) that tariffs do not prevent the importation of fresh apples from Chile — but one is well aware that we trade protectionists will never overcome the resistance of intellectually vain elites until we grasp their own arguments better than they do.
Do hyperlinks work here? Let’s try it. Further reading: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckscher-Ohlin_model]; [whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2016/05/whats_the_matter_with_garbutt_1.html]; [http://cafehayek.com/].
Again, I don’t agree with those. I agree with Ian Fletcher, Pat Buchanan and you. Nevertheless, if you are for a tariff, it is of crash-priority importance to understand just how sophisticated the best arguments against the tariff truly are.
@ A. B. Prosper
1. More work equals less family? Only in urban, industrial settings. Tell this to the average Rural turn-of-the-20th C. farmer, with his 8+ children and dawn-till-dusk schedule. The segregation of work-time and home-time destroys the family, and ending the labor-leisure dichotomy is its solution. Your implicit negative associations with labor demonstrate the poisonous liberal culture around you. Work is a thing to avoid, it is “lost time.” Labor is life, wherein you develop important and character-forming skills as well as providing the things which are necessary to life. This is why I’ve always advocated requiring children to do some form of agricultural work, regardless of how much money you make. Children need to learn that working is the flip side of eating, all one united activity. Work needs to be re-socialized, reintegrated into our lives, through de-industrialization of the workplaces and reintegration of home and labor. Technology and the rise of the decentralized workplace via telecommunications is our greatest ally in this endeavor. When you work with your family, around your family, and for your family, labor supports family formation.
2. Leisure and consumption, where to begin? We can begin with mass-debt as the first consequence of unrestrained consumption, and move on through cultural malaise toward a political system which is wholly materialistic in perspective. As far as I’m concerned, there is no difference between the massive increase in American waistlines and the massive increase in U-Store-It complexes across the suburbs, both represent a kind of gluttony where people try to deal with their anomie through devouring, either food or consumer goods. The Romans had their censor, and America had the old time preachers, to deal with this morality-destroying consumption mindset.
With leisure, it is similar. Americans do not know how to have leisure because they divide their time into “work” and “sloth” without anything comparable to what the Greeks called schole, or the time devoted to self-improvement. What is the average American’s leisure time spent doing? Watching TV or increasingly spent on social media. Both of these are not just wastes of time, but detrimental to human health, physical and psychological. Putnam’s Bowling Alone and Murray’s Coming Apart testify to the damage that leisure time does to American society and families because we have no knowledge of how to spend free time.
3. Though you talk about it, there is no solution to dealing with the average worker in the age of automation. The solution is the return to the agricultural economy, part-time work which pays less than a living wage plus the expectation that each person subsidizes their income with home labor. There frankly is no other option, as technology is making human labor in the industrial arts obsolete. Agriculture is the only way to ensure the average worker remains anything but an angry urban serf, as subsistence farming is immune to the rise and fall of markets so long as they consume rather than sell their own produce. 20 hours at the market job, 40 hours at home on the land, produces a better social outcome in terms of families and a decent material well-being for a 80-90 IQ worker. His family is eating better than the average low-income worker, his children grow up with healthy attitudes toward work, and they’re removed from poisonous cities which consume people as fuel.
Frankly, I’m a poor advocate of this stuff. You’re better off reading the originals. These three give a good introduction to the concepts of a restoration of economics and society.
I’ll take my stand, by The Twelve Southerners
Who Owns America, edited by Allen Tate and Herbert Agar
Ideas Have Consequences, by Richard Weaver
Great ideas from top to bottom FN. Reminds me a little of the nice thorough soup-to-nuts reforms listed here:
http://mpcdot.com/forums/topic/7763-my-populism-career/
A few things off of that list that I would humbly propose as additions to your own:
– Anyone who receives welfare benefits for longer than 6 months gets implanted birth control. It only gets removed once you’ve gone a significant period of working and supporting yourself gainfully.
– Aggressive anti-trust actions and reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. If a single company has too much of a national market share, force it to break up into at least 2-3 regional businesses, no excuses or shenanigans allowed. Take a very harsh line on collusion and cartels as well.
– Institute a portable, tax-funded health insurance system covering serious trauma and genetic/infectious diseases. Minor complaints and lifestyle diseases would have to be covered out of pocket or through private insurance.
– Very high inheritance taxes for large fortunes (with indexing to prevent this from creeping down below the 0.1%). There’s a strong public interest in periodically breaking up and redistributing massive concentrations of dynastic wealth.
This sounds better than the cuckservatives’ (and subversive poseurs’) proposals which are only ever really half-measures. Because I can picture the establishment types laughing at a lot of these 6 months ago, I can there-by deduce that the ideas are worthwhile to discuss and analyse at a professional level. The anti-white establishment is either sick, delusional, or alien and they need (and are probably looking for) ways to get their feet back on the ground. Of course, I’d rather set finanical penalties against them for the destruction of my people, but there are those more charitable than myself…
A.J.P.
Gordian.
I’ve been a farmer and it sucks , as such I am immune to agrarian romanticism. I’ve lived in a homogeneous exurb if such things still exist and it was pretty good but its not for everyone and can only support a small population.
So long as we have a large population and energy, we will be living in cities. The US which is more small town/rural than most countries is 80% Urban. We will not at least till peak oil be changing that, well unless zombie Mao and zombie Pol Pot lead an army of the dead or something. Cities are the future. This means smaller families. Once the energy runs out, there will be a mass die back of the population, less people living in an urban system , bigger families but far less people in any case.
First, with a few exceptions , things that endanger myself or others , its really no ones business what I own or if I prefer to pursue hobbies over family or have ten storage rooms full of useless stuff I’ve bought
No one currently has the legitimacy, god granted or otherwise to say a thing about it.
As for preachers. give me a break. You are living in a secular society and are not getting another hit of free social capital. Hell modern US churches are consumerist, many are “prosperity gospel” and many Leftist heretical yes but its how they roll.
We are not rolling back to that Old Tyme Religion either. The US is highly religious but only roughly 1 in 5 go to services weekly . No one, well alright 1% does in the UK and its only 15% in France mostly low IQ Muslims and some old Catholics . The Christian faith as pillar of the state is gone in Europe, and most of the West and shrinking here too. It won’t grow much for a lot of reasons, not germane here,
As for schole, feh. I spend all day doing this kind of thing but understand the Greeks were writing for an about the elite of their era, a better stock of humanity than exists today in any case. Most folks simply want to live their lives, given a choice will have a spouse, stable work and a kid or two . Its ample. They don’t need the elites help to do that except to have a good non Leftist foundation and economic regulation so they have work.
We are not however going to induce people to live hand to mouth so we can put in more machines to make more people live hand to mouth . Its stupid and evil all at once.
We have two choices, we can kill them soft or hard and hope they don’t smash the machines, the elite and the policy makers first or we can accept that modernity with a decent population is expensive and pay people enough, Its not perfect but if it comes to automation or regulation, screw the “market”
If we cannot in any way shape or form stomach the regulation that we go to social credit and pay people a stipend, x amount adjusted for singles xx for families up to 3 and nothing for single moms/dads
This will mean nominal taxes will be much much higher and we will have to live with it. However making this work means an authoritarian socially conservative highly homogeneous state . Its not easy
As for NZT “sterilize them” suggestion, I get it but no. Not with so little work. Its past the acceptable moral grounds for the religious (who still make up 1/3 or more of the US population) and of most people and of the mostly Non Whites that would be affected. Frankly if BLM rioted over that, I’d stay out of it as riots are bad news but they’d be in the moral right, , Its basically genocide of the inner cities and more important to me Appalachia .
If work is important, we’d be better with automation taxes instead. lets say I dunno a kiosk at a fast food restaurant would cost 4 jobs at $15 part time only. This is I dunno $1200 a week. What you do is tax it at $2000 a week and redistribute $1500 of that wealth anyway. The state is ahead $500 and the welfare gets paid .
Its sucks and for foreign visitors the US will see, a bit backwards and soviet but it might work and while yes its make work, it will allow a work for prosperity culture to persist. It does mean minimal trade though and frankly a lot of multi purpose technologies costs jobs.
computers like the ones we are posting on, cost most of the jobs of late. A society where you can’t use Uber , must plan travel through a licensed planner , need a Real Estate Agent to sell a house and so on adds a lot of friction and transaction costs and I’m not sure it will work even if we can keep corruption in bounds.
Japan ran like this but while its homogeneous its also in fast population decline. It may be that developed humanity has reached a population bottleneck do to technology.
We may not be able to deal with that. In that case, the human IQ will decline to a sustainable level and complexity will crash anyway. This screws our more grandiose dreams of space travel or virtual immortality but the species will continue.
A.B.P.,
You wrote As for preachers. give me a break.
Are you not a Christian? As a Christian, I see that the proposed free time would give the heathens a lot of time to destroy one another and this sort of self-selection would mean that the detritus gets washed out. This seems funny to me, although perhaps it shouldn’t, certainly the better of the seculars would see the change coming and adjust their behaviour accordingly. I look forward to more freedom via a righteous government and that stands in stark contrast to the slavery of today.
A.J.P.
“Frankly if BLM rioted over that, I’d stay out of it as riots are bad news but they’d be in the moral right, Its basically genocide of the inner cities and more important to me Appalachia.”
Well, this quote is enough to see that this discussion is a waste of time.
Good recommendations, but if politics is truly downstream of culture, it still comes back to changing the culture to fix society.
As Gordion noted, in the West, the idea of spending leisure time on other work or self-improvement is a lost concept. I agree that leisure time should be expanded, but for many that will mean spending the freed time on slothful pursuits, not improvement.
The policy changes could only come after placing a cultural imposition on the people, so that the culture creates some “self”-discipline and reduces the need for external disciple via government. creating policies that encourage positive behaviors wouldn’t work if the majority of the public refuses to accept those incentivized behaviors.
And finally, let’s come out and say the awful truth. There are some really dumb and degenerate people out there and the post-scarcity situation will leave them light years behind. letting these people breed, at what point does allowing for it cross from kind to cruel? If they can’t feed or manage themselves and are unable to compete in society, what then? Kick them out and create a penal colony of sorts and let them figure it out? Or do we sterilize them and let them live comfortably until they die off?
And finally, let’s come out and say the awful truth. There are some really dumb and degenerate people out there and the post-scarcity situation will leave them light years behind. letting these people breed, at what point does allowing for it cross from kind to cruel? If they can’t feed or manage themselves and are unable to compete in society, what then? Kick them out and create a penal colony of sorts and let them figure it out? Or do we sterilize them and let them live comfortably until they die off?
L.O.L….
How does your “consumption tax” vary from the Socialist Value Added Tax (VAT)?!
The introduction of the income tax was the camel’s nose under the tent of the citizen. Killing it far exceeds even all benefits from an improved system of taxation. But the great danger is this: we will settle upon an improved and simplified system of taxation without actually killing the income tax.
@jamzw: For information, even at a 35 percent tariff and best-case projections, tariffs can generate only 14 percent of current U.S. federal revenues.
Data for 2014 (the most recent year for which complete data are available): federal revenues, $ 3.021 billion; imports of goods $1.633 billion. For a best-case projection, assume that a 35-percent tariff reduces imports by a factor of only 1/(1+0.35) — though, more realistically, the reduction in imports, and therefore the reduction in tariff revenue, would certainly be greater than this.
So, best case, sustaining current spending levels, even with a tariff, you still have to come up with 86 percent of revenues from other sources. If those sources do not include an income tax, they’ll have to include a whopping big tax on something else.
Now, I am strongly in favor of a tariff, as stated earlier; but I have no illusions that a tariff alone could fund the 21st-century U.S. federal government.
Alan, yes nominally I am a Christian without faith,. Simply I choose to live in a Christian manner and am a professed Christian.
However given that Christian teachings basically are the foundation of the Cathedral itself and a huge part of why problems can’t get solved, the broad scale won’t miss them. Europeans were pagan far longer than Christian in any case and did fine without it.
Also most t people do not go to church these days and frankly have better things to do.
truth is in a normal society people aren’t broken or especially stupid and almost anyone raised by a mother and father with clear traditions and a path to work and marriage will be fine. They need no stewardship or nannying to do well.
They need protection from organized banditry like corporations, foreign religions, illegal immigrants, globalism. They don’t need protection from themselves
Honestly there is basically nothing in the West that cannot quickly be fixed with a homogeneous authoritarian Right Wing state that itself isn’t economically liberal either.
I looked up consumption tax and apparently that was the mainstay for United States’ taxation, historically, in the 18th Century.
A.B.P.
*tips Dawkins book
M’professor.
A.J.P.