Moldbug is really unfashionable these days as a 'reactionary' | Imperium Press

Moldbug is really unfashionable these days as a "reactionary" that couldn't quite shed his lolbertarianism, but one of his important insights about free market economics remains undigested by the right.

The laws of economics that support free trade—e.g. comparative advantage—are based on abstracting away violence. But violence is real and is relevant to economics. Once you include that, free trade turns out to be counter-productive, especially if your country is not a financial powerhouse. Hence nationalist countries like China and Russia are winning, because they factor in that there's a continuum between voluntary exchange and conflict.

Moldbug expressed this by saying that Mises is a special case of Carlyle—everything that Mises explains, Carlyle explains and more. It also goes back to Clausewitz saying that war is policy continued by other means. Economics is a subdiscipline of war. Viewed this way, the West is lurching from one mistake to the next.

This is complicated by the fact that the managerial-bureaucratic elite are not just negligent but malicious. They know all this. They don't care. But as nationalists, we can put forward a reasoned and principled case for something like protectionism, because currently, even among some of our guys, globalism (in the form of imperialism) is seen as the only option because progress or something. We can do better.

If you want more on why protectionism would benefit de-industrialized economies, buy our edition of List's National System of Political Economy. It would help us out too because we haven't had a new release in a while. You'll be getting one soon.

https://www.imperiumpress.org/shop/national-system-of-political-economy/