Feminism as the Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Economic Decline

Bad RedPill Economics Part III

 

The article in question

 

This article sucks. Not that I’ve come to expect much from the manosphere when it comes to economics, but this is really something else. Unlike the last article we looked at, this one is written somewhat coherently, which indicates that that the author did have enough self-awareness to at least and try and make his article readable. Yet unfortunately for us, the author was not self-aware enough to realize that he knows nothing about economics. Now I’m just an undergrad, but you don’t need to be Paul Samuelson to see that this is some Bad Economics^TM. Unsatisfied with just violating the rules of economics, the author has also decided to violate the rules of basic human decency, writing up a racist, sexist, xenophobic manifesto that reads like the love-child of Human Action and Mien Kampf. Let’s dive in.

 

Part I: The Introduction

What better appetizer for bad economics than some bad math? The author writes

A recently released report reveals that a full 1 in 5 people in the United States are now either immigrants or their children. The growth of the immigrant population has been occurring at a rate of over 350% since 1965.

Here, the author misleadingly confuses total growth with growth rate, using the phrase “since 1965” to imply that this growth rate has spanned multiple time periods (meaning more immigrants) rather than being the growth rate for a single period: 1965 to the present.

The author then introduces the main topic of the article

This tidal wave of immigration has innundated the traditional American population, who have been asleep at the switch thinking that having children is either declasse or an antiquated notion. As a result, they are being demographically replaced in their own nation.

(By the way, unless he’s referring to Native Americans, the idea of a “traditional American population” is some Bad History.) So basically, the author’s saying that white people aren’t having enough babies because of feminism, and so are becoming a minority. Got it.

 

Part II: “The Consumerism Machine”

Here’s where the economics gets bad.

In order to keep a consumption economy that needs perpetual growth running, the political and economic powers in our society need an ever-increasing population.

(I’ll let you figure out who the author means by “the political and economic powers in our society.”)

A cursory look at history demonstrates that this isn’t true. The economies of Japan and Korea underwent periods of massive economic growth with comparatively-small population growth at different points in the past century. I think the author’s arguing that population growth leads to more consumers, and that more consumers are necessary for economic growth. Apparently people can never increase their standard of living and consume more.

The author then makes a few smaller claims that I’m not going to waste my time on, because he provides no statistics to back them up. Claims such as:

In the modern age, Western women now marry themselves to a corporation rather than a strapping young man.

Or

Tragically, women are now looking for child replacements like cats and dogs to silence their maternal instincts.

I wonder who he had in mind when he mentions the “strapping young man” that gets ignored by women…

The author then makes a second claim

Declining populations are correlated with recessions and depressions while growing populations are correlated with economic growth … Part of the reason the United States and Europe are importing so many immigrants is feminism has rendered white women statistically sterile. Birth rates are not enough to even sustain the population, much less create an engine of economic growth.

I have a feeling that the author is using the word “correlated” to imply causation. Not that it matters, though; there is no evidence that population changes move with the business cycle. The US population has been consistently growing over the course of the past century, during which the US has experienced several recessions. While it’s true that population growth can affect a nation’s standard of living, this is not the same as affecting the business cycle. It’s also possible that people are less likely to have children during recessions, but this is a change in the rate of population growth, not the total size of the population.

 

Part III: “The Numbers”

The author then says

Women refusing to have families and children requires the flood gates of immigration to be swung upen because a consumer economy needs increasing numbers of warm bodies to buy its wares … Low fertility and mass immigration are leading to irreversible demographic change in the United States and Europe.

Once again, no they don’t. There are problems associated with declining populations, but this isn’t one of them.

The author then goes on a tirade about how white Americans are becoming a minority in their own country. But he doesn’t make any economic claims, so I won’t talk much about this part. The author does hint at where he’s going with this article, saying

It seems in today’s world, destroying national sovereingty and cultures to turn people into shopping fools is an acceptable strategy by government in service of the corporate bottom line … Cultures are lost, nations are lost, but people can buy lots of shiny things they do not need.

So apparently governments are promoting consumerism… somehow in a conspiracy to enrich corporations. How exactly is the government doing this? The answer is…

 

Part IV: “Free Market”

… feminism. Of course.

The need for mass immigration to the West has been caused by feminism, and feminism was designed by a collusion of corporate and government interests to take women out of the home and turn them into corporate cogs and taxpayers.

This is a case of reverse causation. Modern feminism was in large part a result of women gaining economic clout because they began wage labor. Getting more women in the workplace only became a major part of feminism much later on. Once again, the author provides no evidence for his claims, and doesn’t specify which corporations are colluding with which government interests.

The author then makes another economic claim:

The rise of corporate monopolies and the disproportionate power they (using their government servants) exert over the lives of the average person is a corruption of the free economic market. In a free-market economy, prices for goods and services are set freely by the forces of supply and demand and are allowed to reach their point of equilibrium without intervention by government policy, and it typically entails support for highly competitive markets and private ownership of productive enterprises … Adam Smith knew that a completely unregulated market would see the rise of monopolies (like today’s corporate monopolies) and was therefore not free … The problem is instead of preventing monopolies as it should, the government has aided and abetted them.

First of all, monopolies have not become more prevalent. If anything, they’ve become less prevalent compared to during the late 19th and early 20th century as the field of antitrust law has developed.

We don’t even need to use a model to explain why the author is wrong here; he has confused the definition of “free market” with “perfectly competitive market.” Perfectly-competitive markets are characterized by a large number of buyers and sellers such that no one buyer or seller can influence the price of a commodity. It has nothing to do with government policy or private property. And while there exist certain “natural monopolies” and situations in which monopolies can occur in the absence of regulation, there is no rule that states all markets tend towards monopoly.

The author concludes this part by saying

One of the problems created by the unchecked consolidation of corporations, in addition to the issue of converging interests corrupting government and subverting the will of the people on matters like immigration, is wage gutting.

 

Part V: “Wage Gutting”

Corporate interests support increasing legal immigration even further, which has one major benefit for them: cheap labor … This is yet another example of the corporate-government complex at work. The tech industry doesn’t want to pay workers what they are worth, so they lobby Congress for increasing immigration to suppress wages.

While it’s true that corporations want more high-skilled immigrants in part because they are willing to work for lower wages, this is an odd criticism considering the author’s praise of perfectly-competitive markets in the previous section. In a perfectly-competitive labor market, workers are paid their marginal product, i.e. what they are “worth,” in purely economic terms. (Whether labor markets are truly perfectly competitive is another story.) An increase in the labor supply, say from immigration, would decrease each worker’s marginal product of labor, meaning that each worker would be “worth” less and would therefore be paid less. If anything, restricting immigration would make the labor market less perfectly competitive, because perfect competition implies easy market entrance and exit.

 

Part VI: "Environmental Impact"

Next, the author talks about how female consumerism is supposedly being fueled by fiat currency

As Stefan Molyneux has pointed out, if there was truly an effort to end overconsumption to solve the problem of global warming, world leaders would be saying the following about fiat currency and central banking: We must end fiat currency, we must end central banking around the world. Because central banking and the continued overprinting of currency and the taking on of national debt is causing a vast overconsumption of nature’s scarce resources. This should be the central and fundamental and irrefutable argument for ending central banking and returning to a gold standard. In short, fiat currency causes overconsumption. The need for fiat currency is caused by an economy that caters to women, who make 4 out of 5 purchasing decisions in a consumerism-driven waste economy. And the economy is supported by population growth which is no longer occurring in traditionally white nations since the feminist movement. It’s the perfect storm.

Now things are starting to get incoherent. What does central banking have to do with consumerism? The author seems to be arguing that the government is using monetary policy to incrase consumption and grow the economy. But if we accept that money is neutral in the long run, then monetary policy can only affect consumption and output in the short term, and not in the long term.

 

Part VII: "Men Failed As Guardians"

Now that he’s whipped himself up into a frenzy, the author goes completely off the rails

There have been warnings going back thousands of years in Western literature about the societal costs of not giving women proper direction. This is perhaps illustrated nowhere better than this type of economy cannibalizing Western civilization. Proverbs 31:3 is a good example of this ancient wisdom: “Do not give your strength to women, your ways to those who destroy kings.”

First of all, Proverbs is from the Hebrew Bible, yet somehow that counts as “Western literature.” And I wouldn’t really call the above quote “ancient wisdom,” but that’s just me.

Then, the author goes full-on 19th Century racist and gives us this gem of bad politics:

Conservatives are the more crucial linchpin to civilization. Without liberals, we might have worse movies and fewer charming coffee shops. But without conservatives, we might have no civilization at all, having handed over the keys to the White kingdom to babbling barbarians.

Wew lad.

Then, to top it off, he shares with us some bad history:

In normal historical cycles, the warrior would ascend in times of decadence and social disconnection to bring balance to the force. But these are not normal times. Feminism, the ideological spawn of Satan and his thousand reptillian succubi, thwarts the natural ascendency of the warrior class, allowing the shitlib devolution to continue unhindered and unchecked.

So apparently the ascension of “the warrior” is supposed to save civilization. What is this, Borderlands 2? Was this article written by Handsome Jack? Somehow I doubt the “handsome” part. However, I do think the “Jack” part rings true; as we’ve seen on our journey together today, the author clearly knows jack shit about economics.