Peter St Onge
Peter is an economist, a Fellow at the Mises Institute, and a former MBA professor.
Authoritarianism is back across the West – from Europe to the Biden-Harris censorship regime that would fit perfectly in Communist China.
I think many of us were surprised during Covid to realize just what the supposedly liberal West has become: Essentially the Soviet Union but with better uniforms – well, better video games, anyway.
Of course, it was decades in the making – Covid just showed their cards.
The question, as always, is What’s Next.
For better or worse, authoritarianism has happened many times in history – it’s kind of the human default. The original state.
Humanity has a lot of experience with authoritarianism.
So how did people protect themselves last time?
Dodging Tyranny in the 1940s
An elegant illustration is the 1940s, where essentially the entire globe went authoritarian socialist and then – as always – went to war.
And the correct response very much depended on where you were.
If you were in New York, you adjusted your stock portfolio.
If you were in Britain you moved to the countryside and stockpiled canned food.
If you were in Switzerland you packed a go-bag in case the German army decided to fill in the map.
And if you were in Germany, of course, the only plan was to get the heck out.
The problem is when to pull each trigger: When do you adjust the portfolio? Buy the canned food? Pack the go-bag? When do you get the heck out?
Each of these preparations has a cost. And the more successful you are – the more you’ve built or achieved – the higher those costs go. Moving your family, your business, converting your career to location-independent where you can support your family.
People ask why people didn’t leave Berlin before it was too late, and those costs are why.
The good news is that this means the vast majority of us will stay and fight.
I mean, true patriots will always stay and fight. But those mounting costs mean even apolitical people will fight.
They will fight in proportion to the risk – because the cost rises with it. And they will fight in proportion to what they’ve built.
That is, the people with the most to lose – the natural elite – are the most likely to stay.
Every election since George W we’ve been treated to Hollywood liberals threatening to leave the country. You don’t hear influential people on the other side saying that.
We will stay.
The Bleaker It Gets, the Better Our Odds
And stay we should. Because I know I’ve made this point repeatedly in videos, but we are going to win.
Why? Partly tactical. They launched their takeover too soon. Because Covid fell into their lap, and they were still a generation away from the brainwashing it would take for a totalitarian takeover.
Instead, the people rejected it. The Covid state left dangerous remnants, to be sure, that will become malignant if not excised.
Still, it’s striking – perhaps unprecedented – the degree to which a totalitarian regime, once installed, was almost entirely removed. And the reason is encouraging: Because it polled atrociously – you may remember the Dems turning as one just after Biden assumed office.
In other words, even with our shabby election infrastructure, they still fear the people.
What remains post-Covid is an institutionalized left that has lost credibility with the majority. That is overextended, that has completely lost touch with the people.
This loss of legitimacy means they are far weaker than pre-Covid.
And Democracy is coming for them.
Liberty’s Moment
We’re already seeing the backlash with Trump surging in the polls, with Canada on deck next year, and European countries electing populists.
Even more encouraging, if you zoom out rarely in history has liberty had so many advantages. Thanks to the internet — with a big assist from Elon.
Of course, liberty starts out with the advantage that man is not by nature a slave. Slavery is an unstable equilibrium. It’s fragile. Just waiting for the right push.
But this is up against the natural advantage of authoritarianism – it has the money. And money buys guns.
It has the money because it seizes half of what you earn and uses it against you, then prints up whatever else it needs at the central bank. Then it uses that money to control the levers of society, from education to media to finance.
We have the numbers, they have the money.
What’s Next
If it comes down to numbers vs money, our numbers are growing fast. Moreover, gloriously, the more they push the more we grow.
Meaning they only have two options: pull back and hold on for dear life against the backlash. Or keep pushing and they’re out of power. It’s only a matter of time.
In the 1970’s the great economist Murray Rothbard noted that you could fit the entire liberty movement in a New York living room.
Now there are literally a billion of us.
Forget a living room, we couldn’t fit in a state.
Meanwhile their advantage – money – is collapsing before our eyes. Crashing in crippling debt, nervous financial markets, the limits of inflationary printing, and the moribund stagflation that always accompanies it.
In short, we’re getting stronger. They’re getting weaker. And the longer it takes, the more spectacular will be our victory.
A version of this appeared at the author’s Substack and was republished by the Brownstone Institute.
