Why the State and Keynesians Love War

A look into the minds of those who love war

Governments love going to war, which may seem a bit strange because according to the "What the State Fears" section of Anatomy of the State, governments fear above all else the end of their power which can either come from another state conquering them through war, or by revolution from the people. However, while wars do pose some risk to governments, war also gives governments a great chance to expand the scope of their power, both over new territory that they conquer, and even among their own people as they flood them with propaganda that this war isn't really about one government fighting another, but one people, fighting another people, totally separate from your own. In the words of Randolph Bourne, "war is the health of the state".

The evil, evil Nazis who want nothing more than to eat the heads of babies.

In the Medieval days, this fallacy was almost entirely destroyed, and war was simply looked upon as pointless endless squabbles between various nobles that the peasants simply ignored. However, with the rise of democracy, identification of the state with society as a whole has been redoubled, and people once again believe that wars are waged against them and not the government. In the US, this fallacy is heard all the time as people talk of the "brave men and women fighting in Iraq for our freedom" or some similar bullshit.

So beyond simply encouraging nationalistic/patriotic thinking and giving governments a chance to expand their power base, war is also a great chance for politicians to gain prestige as "great leaders". FDR, Winston Churchill, and especially Stalin all did horrible, horrible things with their position in power, yet many people (except for Stalin thanks to the Cold War) are looked up to as great leaders among men, not because the people are able to make good comparisons between these men and peace-time leaders, but because of propaganda and readily apparent action.

Furthermore, along with the power, the prestige, and the propaganda, war also allows governments to gain massive control over the people's everyday lives as "emergency wartime measures". Governments nationalize industry and force businesses to switch production over to certain kinds of goods that are necessary for this war. After all, any red-blooded American should be happy to help their governments defend them from the evil Nazis, and anyone who resists might as well be a traitor to his people. If they don't take over an industry, the government may still impose price controls as a way of making sure they get the price for what they want. They may say that this is because we need "rationing" in a time of war, so prices must be controlled by them. Never mind that prices going up and down already rations goods in the economy.

War is also a perfect excuse for governments to take over the money supply, eliminating a gold standard, so that it may print as much money as it needs to spend. In times of war, the government needs lots of money and it needs it now, so it can shame unpatriotic "gold hoarders", and fund its war.As you can see from this chart, governments really do love to print money, especially for war.

If people complain about these situations and the government is not able to guilt the public into shutting up, then they are able to simply shift the blame over to the enemy, who has forced them to impose these terrible measures as they are necessary for victory. Of course once these measures are in place, they very rarely ever go away, even after the war is over. Governments don't voluntarily give up power once they have taken it. Take a look at the illustrated version of F. A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom. War gives governments a chance to exercise their real power.

These kinds of actions are unthinkable in an anarcho-capitalistic society. Defense groups would be unable to hide the cost of their actions by inflating the money supply, and warmongerers are required to charge higher prices for their destructive acts (paying for people to go and die, paying hazard pay, paying for the things they destroyed, etc.), moving them over to their cheaper, more peaceful, and more efficient competitors.

Liberty is to peace as government is to war.

Now Keynesians especially love war, as war means that governments are going to dramatically boost their spending, which to them is synonymous with a healthy economy, and exert the kind of control over the economy that they lust after. According to the Keynesian version of history, America was stuck in the Great Depression for years due to overproduction of capitalism, causing the general glut. President Hoover tried the laissez-faire approach, but the economy just got worse, but then good ol' Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the stage and started his New Deal programs,which helped, but it wasn't quite enough to save the economy. But then, thankfully, the US entered into World War 2 which raised spending enough to get out of the Great Depression.

Wars create this wonderful economy because the government spends its money on tanks and ships and planes and bombs and ammo so that it can all send it out into the middle of the nowhere (if you're lucky.) and blow it up. Apparently, doing that is good for the economy.

Just to prove that this is not an ad hominem attack by me, I will provide a good example of this type of thinking. The most prominent Keynesian economist (or at least English speaking journalist) is Paul Krugman from the New York Times. Krugman is basically just a synonym for Keynesianism and inflation now. Krugman actually won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science back in 2008, so this is not some crazy guy on the fringe of economic thinking. And, in all seriousness, the Nobel Prize winning Paul Krugman advocated for the government to fake an alien invasion so that the government could increase spending and get us past the recession.

Ozymandias would be proud.

But war gets even better for Keynesians. Not only does the government increase its spending, but the public often needs to as well (except of course for those under rationing). Keynesians joyously count all the houses bombed during war as the "blessings of destruction", which has "backed up demand", encouraging people to spend money on building new houses. And those people need to replace all the furniture, refrigerators, and washing machines that got blown up as well, so that's more "prosperity creating spending".

And the Keynesians may even further count the blessings of war as it "creates jobs", decreasing unemployment! Thanks to war, people may be rounded up and shipped off to the battlefield so that they may fight to the death. Do the wonders of war know no bounds?

So by Keynesian reasoning, through diverting production to things which serve no socially useful purpose, and even worse, blowing them up causing the destruction of the useful things they were made of and destroying other useful things that blow up with it, and sending all your most able-bodied people to go out and die instead of working to produce things that help themselves and other people live better lives, helps the economy.

And this is why the broken window fallacy is so very, very important.

What is demand?

It occurs to me that many misunderstandings of economics today come from a confusion with "demand" and "need". A common broken window fallacy is to say things like "World War 2 boosted demand for tanks and similar resources to fight off the Nazi's, and since a depression is essentially a lack of demand, World War 2 (and big government spending in general) ended the Great Depression. Furthermore, the bombing raids that destroy people's homes increases demand as well, as those people will now need to buy new homes.", or similar reasoning.

"What actually brought the Great Depression to an end was the enormous public spending program otherwise known as World War II."

- Paul Krugman

These statements only appear to have some genuine reasoning behind them because the english language has two different uses for the word "demand".

In one sense, demand can mean a need or desire. It is certainly true that war can create very pressing needs in society, both for protection from destruction and repairs for the damages it causes, just as it is true that breaking a shopkeeper's window creates a need from him for a new window.

Look at this thriving economy!

But the other meaning that I think economists are more familiar with when talking about markets is desire enabled by purchasing power. It doesn't matter how much I want something if I don't have the ability to purchase it from someone else. An increase in purchasing power, not need, is what increases demand.

So with this distinction, we can immediately see a problem with the idea that that destruction increases demand as it focuses on generating need as compared to empowering already present needs. But to avoid further logical blunders and to understand the full extent of the damages of destruction, one must understand what purchasing power is.

So where does purchasing power come from? If you ask your average Joe how you can increase your purchasing power the first response you'll likely here is "get more money". This appears to be true at first. If I want to make more purchases, I need to have more money. If you look at supply and demand charts, the axis beside whatever you are trying to purchase is measured in dollars as well. 

But it goes a little bit further than this. If money itself was what enabled demand, then simply printing more money could increase demand. This is exactly the mistake people make when they support "stimulus packages" that will save the economy by giving everyone more money, thus letting them buy more things and fixing the economy forever. But that's only looking at half of the story. Money is just a commonly used medium of exchange. Take out the extra step, consider trade in the term of bartering, and you can see its true nature.

To be able to demand anything you need to produce something someone *else* demands. To be able to offer something in trade, you need to have produced that thing that you offer in trade, just as they needed to produce the thing they are offering to you.

On markets, products are exchanged against products.

With this, we can see that words like "supply" and "demand" are really entirely relative terms. They're two sides of the same coin. The graph above would be just as accurate, nay, more accurate to say "quantity A" and "quantity B" instead of "quantity" and "price". The x-axis could be the quantity of wheat demanded while the y-axis could be the quantity of corn, alcohol, televisions, gold, or dollars. My supply is your demand and your demand is my supply.

Jean-Baptiste Say, along with his market

So in answer to the original question, purchasing power comes from production, from the supply of goods that can be offered in trade. This is the essential lesson of Say's Law of Markets.  If one wants to increase demand, simply printing more money will do you no good as it adds no more things to indirectly trade for. People will receive a sudden increase in dollars and mistakenly believe themselves to be rich only to find that they have nothing to buy. Its a medium of exchange with nothing to mediate between. Furthermore, this reveals new light on the destruction of war. Not only does destroying things fail to increase demand, but it actually reduces demand as people now have less products to trade against to other people!

In short, production of what people want is what creates demand, while the destruction of things people want destroys demand.

Economics: Lesson 2 - Value

Throughout it's history as a science, economists have puzzled over prices as a very central issue. What made one good more valuable than another? Why are prices one thing and not another? What do similar prices reveal about certain goods? To solve just why prices are the way they are, economists came up with different theories of value to explain it.

OR IS IT??!?!?

Among the classical economists, the mainstream theory was the labor theory of value. This idea was pushed by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx.

Adam Smith                               David Ricardo                               Karl Marx

According to this theory, the value of a good is derived by the amount of labor required in obtaining it. Because of this, the value of that good is inherit. There is an objectively "correct" price.

The value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not as the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour.

- David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Chapter 1

Karl Marx play an interesting role here, actually. By his thinking, if all value comes from labor, then any "capitalist" who makes a profit must do so by denying the laborer the full value of their output. Hence, all profit is exploitation. The labor theory of value is key to most, if not all, of his school of thought.

Of course, his theory of value is a bit unique as he's declaring for abolishing private property.

This theory was so widely accepted because of something known as the Diamond-Water Paradox. Why is it that water, something absolutely vital for human life, has such a low price while diamonds, which certainly don't serve as a basic human necessity, demand such a high price? The answer Adam Smith had come up with is that water is just a lot easier to get. It does not require anywhere near as much labor, so it has a lower price. Diamonds, however, require a lot of work both collecting and refining it, so it has a higher price.

The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.

- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Chapter 5 

The labor theory of value wasn't universally accepted though, even in the days of Adam Smith.  Frédéric Bastiat, the inventor of the Broken Window Fallacy, took particular problems with it. After all, wouldn't this mean that sources of difficulty actually make work more valuable? Bastiat pointed out the absurdity of this notion in his book Economic Harmonies.

It is too bad that Robinson Crusoe has invented nets to catch fish or game; for it lessens by that much the efforts he exerts for a given result; he is less rich.

...

It would be too completely evident that wealth does not consist in the amount of effort required for each satisfaction obtained, but that the exact opposite is true. We should understand that value does not consist in the want or the obstacle or the effort, but in the satisfaction; and we should readily admit that although Robinson Crusoe is both producer and consumer, in order to gauge his progress, we must look, not at his labor, but at its results.

-  Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Harmonies, Chapter 4, emphasis added

The idea of value being presented here is the subjective theory of value. It states that value is not inherit to a good, but is derived from the value that man gives to the world around him. His value is derived from the relative ends a man is trying to fulfill.

However, Bastiat was unable to come up with a coherent explanation for the diamond-water paradox. After all, if this is true, why do we pay so little for drinking water? Are we honestly supposed to believe that people value having a diamond less than drinking?

Because of this, the subjective theory of value was not really accepted into mainstream economic thinking until the end of the 19th century, when it was discovered independently and nearly simultaneously by William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger, the last of which founded the Austrian School of Economics. These men developed the concept of marginal utility.

Carl Menger and his magnificent beard.

Essentially, this insight showed that people are never in the position to judge a good by its class. You are never in a position to ask whether you would rather own all the diamonds in the world or all the water in the world. If you were, I doubt the diamond-water paradox would arise! Instead, people are trading discrete quantities of goods.

Imagine that I offer you a cup of diamonds for a cup of water. If you are like most people, you would accept this trade. But when you make this trade, you are not giving up drinking. Instead, you are giving up whatever end you would have fulfilled if you had another cup of water, which might be something frivolous like watering one of your plants again. This concept of what you could have done with this extra unit is known as an opportunity cost. This cost is the true cost of every exchange you ever make.

This theory also works well because it explains how trade works. If the value of things are intrinsic, then what would be the point of trading something of equal value? I'll trade you this dollar bill for your dollar bill. According to the Austrian School, a person's action shows their scale of values, or an imaginary scale by which they value one thing over another. If I buy milk at the store for $1.00, then that shows that having milk is higher on my scale of values than having $1. I "win" the trade. At the same time, the person selling the milk shows that having $1 is higher on his scale of value than having milk. He "wins" the trade. Each person comes off more satisfied and richer than before. If value was inherit, each person coming out of a trade with a more valuable thing makes about as much sense as each person coming off with the heavier object.

There should also be a note that this idea of subjective values is in no way trying to make a moral or philosophical statement. There might be some divine being out there that sets an official scale of values, such as a moral doctrine, that can accurately be called an objective standard of value. There might be some "perfect form", like Plato suggested, of beauty. One might argue that there is an intrinsic value to human life.

Economics and praxeology does not deal with such matters though, but only with how people act. If person A murders person B, we can accurately say that to his standard of values, person A preferred person B to being dead rather than him being alive. From the scientific standpoint, we cannot say whether this action is moral or not. To him, this human's life was obviously not considered intrinsically valuable.

This concept blew apart any previous idea of value, and was so influential that it's discovery is known as the Marginal Revolution. It forever changed the approach of economics as if it were a natural science, existing on its own, to something entirely dependent on people's own values, that can never be fully understood. To properly understand economics, we must understand the motivations of an acting man, not of something intrinsic to the world.

LOL, kidding, that would be retarded. Economics is a science, and those head government scientists properly know how to run the country and can control and manipulate it so it does exactly the right thing. Only those crazy Austrian Economists still think crazy things like that. Trust your leaders. They have very complicated charts and graphs, after all.

How to Secretly Rob a Nation

How does one rob an entire nation? There are quite a few ways, actually. Most under the name "taxation", but I want to look at one that is done secretly, where very few people even realize they're being robbed. I'm talking about printing and loaning fiat currency.

Say, that some nice property you got there.

It'd be a shame if something... happened to it.

First let me explain what I mean when I say taxation is theft though.

All taxation is theft and extortion by definition. If Fat Tony rolls around demanding "protection money" from the local laundromat, we call that out as extortion, and rightfully so. The laundromat owner had no choice about contracting the mafia to protect him. They simply threatened him into accepting their "services".

But how is this different from the actions of a government? You do not "sign up" to be governed. If you think you're government's charging too high a price, you can't switch over to another company. The government is nothing more than the biggest mafia in town, both pretending to have some kind of "rightful claim" to your money, when you really have no choice about it. The only real difference here is that the taxman might actually believe his claim.

Your money or your life!

All government taxes aren't quite so obvious though. If I want to find out how much money was robbed from me directly in a sales tax, for example, it's right there next to all the legitimate trades on the receipt. I think I'm right in saying that people aren't "shocked" to find out the government took their own cut of a deal that had nothing to do with them.

Other ways are a little more surprising. For example, the inflation of a fiat currency.

Now what is inflation? How does it work? The simple answer is, money is a good, and like any other good, it is subject to the law of supply and demand. With a high supply of something, it's price drops because it's more easily attainable. We value rare things more highly *because* they are rare. If we gained the abilities of King Midas and could turn things to gold with a simple touch, the price of gold would not be very high.

So when the supply of money rises, when it inflates, the value of money falls. It has less purchasing power. You can't buy as much with the same amount of money any more, because that money is less valuable. The supply of something rises and falls for many natural reasons, like the discovery of a new gold mine for example, so you'd expect inflation in any society with any currency. However, as total supply is really hard to upset naturally, the value of money normally stays pretty consistent.

However, the inflation of a fiat currency is *not* a natural reason. Have you ever heard the phrase "money doesn't grow on trees"? The phrase means that money is not something easily attainable, and is used to encourage someone to save and to be more thrifty. People need to act responsibly with their money, and not be wasteful.

Well, for the Federal Reserve, money does grow on trees. Better yet, they don't even need to wait on the trees to bear fruit, they can just print the money themselves. If these banks are ever strapped for cash, they can literally just print money for themselves. This is not earned money. This is the creation of money ex nihilo.

How does this work out as theft from you and me though? That new money is getting it's value by stealing it from your saved money. While the central bank and government now have a lot of new money, the money you have is worth less and less. It is *exactly* the same as a tax.

Luckily for the ones printing the money, they are the last ones to feel the effect of the inflation. After they've printed the money, they still hold basically the same purchasing power as they did before. People haven't figured out that the money supply has gone up yet, and haven't had time to readjust prices.There are absolutely no downsides to them for printing more money. They have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

And it doesn't just stop there. Then these bastards have the nerve to loan the new money out and charge interest on it! But hey, I can't condemn charging interest entirely. After all, people need to be compensated for the sacrifice of their money over so much time. They worked long and hard to earn it. That money represents the contribution they've made to society by producing things people wanted, and we're creating an opportunity cost of what else they could have done with this money they earned oh wait this money was never earned the central bank just printed that money out of nothing and didn't do any work themselves even in the past to earn it nor are they taking on any personal risk by departing from their money!

And still! Still! Even while they're earning interest, if you miss your payment they get to take away your stuff as collateral! They can take your property away from right under your feet, at no personal risk for themselves. Not to mention that when the Federal Reserve loans it's money to the government, they have to tax you to pay for it! They have the all the money they could ever want, and can just sit back and get all your stuff too.

And the best part is, the nation never even sees it happening. You never face the taxation directly. All you know is that the price of everything seems to be going up, the economies in the tank, when you hear this great news from the central bank that they're going to get everything under control with nice sounding systems like "quantitative easing". You're not sure what that means, but it sounds soothing and really smart, so it must work, and you trust them to make things right.

I don't think I could come up with a more brilliant scam if I tried.

Economics: Lesson 1 - Cast Away

To understand economics, you must always always always look towards the individual. You must understand the tree before you can even hope to understand a forest. Likewise, if you don't understand the individual, you can't understand the vast complexity of commerce among a great number of individuals.

To best illustrate this, many economists use the classic example of Robinson Crusoe, the famous castaway. I haven't read Robinson Crusoe, so instead I'm going to use Tom Hanks in Cast Away.

Even stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere, people still act economically. They work to get food, water, and all the supplies they need. More complex ideas like property rights and trade are purposefully kept out of the picture so that we can just look at this one man, fighting against nature.

Before today, this island was entirely uninhabited. This island was not part of any economy. It had rocks and trees and coconuts on it. But now that there is a human on it, with the presence of an acting man, this island is (or at least soon will be) economized.

Stranded on this desert island, Tom Hanks takes action. Now, when we say this, we mean purposeful behavior. Tom Hanks, the individual, has goals that he wants completed. His world is unstable, and he believes he can improve it. He wants food. He wants shelter. He wants warmth.

To satisfy these wants, Tom will employee some means to achieve these ends. This is purposeful action, entirely distinct from unconscious twitches and basic reflexes. Tom will employee his mind, his reason, to figure out what these means are. The things which Tom uses as a means to fulfill his ends are called goods.

One of the first things Tom will need is a source of food and water. These goods will directly satisfy his desires of staying hydrated and staying nourished. By eating, he directly satisfies his hunger and by drinking he directly satisfies his thirst. Because these goods will directly satisfy his desires, we call these things consumer goods. Please note that consumer goods do not need to be literally consumed. The clothes he is wearing, for example, are consumer goods, since they are directly keeping him warm.

But strangely enough, Tom Hanks is unable to bite through the coconut. How ever will Tom Hanks ever solve this problem?

Now, he could keep gnawing on it until it breaks, but that's rather inefficient. If he is going to eat the coconut, he's going to need to figure out a way to open the coconut up. So he picks up a rock and starts hitting it. This rock has become something known as a producer good. This rock will not directly satisfy Tom Hanks hunger problem, but he hopes that by using it as a tool, he can obtain his desired consumer good more efficiently.

However, the rock is very dull, and doesn't break through the coconuts very easily. As time goes on, Tom will want to increase his income, or the rate at which he obtains goods, by boosting efficiency. If he spends time developing that rock into something new like a knife, he will have created a special type of a producer good known as a capital good.This producer good is distinct from the rock in that it is a man-made tool, as compared to just something that was lying around naturally. Nature has been developed upon.

This capital, by the way, is what we refer to in the name Capitalism.

To create a capital good, Tom had to restrict his consumption, also known as saving, and transfer his labor from producing immediately satisfying consumer goods to the production of the knife so that he may consume more in the future. This process of creating capital goods is known as an economic investment.

But the most valuable producer good that Tom has at any time is himself! When we use our own bodies to produce something, it is called labor.

This is in direct contrast to when Tom uses his body in the way he wants, like relaxing on the beach, swimming, or sleeping. In these cases, Tom's activity is known as leisure.

Now, Tom might enjoy working, but that does not stop it from being labor. If there was no end result in his mind, then he would not consider doing the job. For example, Tom might like climbing trees to collect coconuts, but if he already knew a certain tree didn't have coconuts, he wouldn't consider climbing it.

Instead, Tom would engage his time in play, a consumer good, which is any activity that is sought for it's own sake. This could, again, end up just be climbing trees, but the distinction is that he is not directly seeking a final product, but is just enjoying the activity.

So as you can see, even in our one man economy, many of our basic economic principles are still in place. We still have production, goods, capital, and income. Economics isn't just this big, complex working of society. As long as their is a man taking action, trying to fulfill his desires, economics is taking place.

Male Privelege vs The Titanic

Modern feminism just comes off as really annoying to me. On most points I would agree with them on, they already have. It comes off as really preachy over issues that I normally consider to be of minor importance at best, while it ignores much more pressing issues for its own benefit. Congratulations, not only can you vote, but you have a lot of legal and social institutions in women's favor while still retaining all the social expectations of chivalry and not being drafted to go die in drafted wars, what more do you want?

Today, they do not try to fix discrimination by encouraging that the rights of all people be respected, but instead claim that a certain group is being discriminated against and that we need to be racist and prejudice towards a different group to "balance out" the discrimination the other group was receiving. They fixing discrimination by discriminating themselves, and will only stop discriminated once you learn discrimination is wrong.

Despite their so-called progressive ways, they still divide people up into groups. Attempts to celebrate diversity just continually push the mindset that we are different from those people. Are differences are great, so don't forget how different you are from people of other skin colors. We are all the same except that we are not.

You don't see that kind of bull when people talk about hair color. Why not? Don't they want to celebrate their diversity of hair colors? No, they don't, because no one cares. That's the beauty of it! To even accept the premise that this counts as "diversity" means you accept that these people are fundamentally and irrevocably different from one another.

For true harmony, individualism is not only the best way to counteract discrimination, but it is the only way. Only once we focus on and respect the rights of the individual, judging each person for their own merit, can we get past arbitrary distinctions like gender and race.

Now, I am mainly focusing on a specific strand of feminism known as Radical Feminism.

I am sure there are many of self-proclaimed feminists out there that are actually battling sexism and discrimination. It's no secret that women's rights in the Middle East is messed up. There are many, many entirely legitimate issues that feminists can complain about.

But tell me, honestly, when you think of feminists, do you think of someone fighting for the elimination of special privileges for men and women, or someone complaining about how men rule the world? That's what I thought. Today's feminists are not the feminists of the early 20th century. Radical feminism has taken it over by virtue of being more obnoxious.

I'll start off with the idea of patriarchy, the good and the bad. Patriarchy is essentially the idea of a male dominated society, that men are a privileged class, and that women are degraded. This has appropriate uses. For example, in a monarchy it is often tradition for the male heir to inherit the thrown, even if a female sibling is older or more capable. But as monarchies are a very common form of government anymore, this is not really what the modern feminist will be talking about.

Modern "patriarchy" looks nothing like this. Patriarchy isn't just a comment on a specific group, like the royal bloodline, that favor men over women. To feminists, patriarchy extends to all culture and they have learned to apply to every and any situation they disagree with it. It lurks behind every corner. Feminists don't talk about patriarchy as a comment on a specific situation, but as if it's some invisible force controlling society.

On a side note, where the hell is the joke?

In spite of this, women make up 57% of all bachelor's and 60% of all master degrees. Women vote more than men. Women can go into any field of study, any business, and it would be seen as normal. Women wearing pants instead of dresses and skirts no longer shocks the general public. But that's all part of the secret plan to keep the women down! After all, the best chains are the one's you can't see, right? Ha ha ha!

Patriarchy has turned into a conspiracy theory.

Yeah, you keep telling yourself that.

But hold on there! What about the wage gap? Don't you know that for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes 75 cents? This appears to be true. If you add up the income of all women in the workforce and divide by the number of women, and then do the same process for men, you will find that women one average make 75% of what men make. But remember, there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

But do you not see anything odd about this? Personally, if I thought I could hire women to do the same job as a man, but I could pay her only 75% of what I would for a man, I'd hire the woman. Think of the profits! Screw patriarchy, I want to get rich!

If this was true, why aren't businessmen taking advantage of these huge savings? Do feminists simply believe that "the patriarchy" just isn't greedy enough?

What this simple statistic doesn't show you is that men and women make very different choices in where they work. Men are more likely to go into engineering while women are more likely to go into social sciences. So while men are making more money in the business world, women are in lower paying careers. This is not a form of discrimination, but a personal choice to pursue a less lucrative job. This comes from their choice.

Men and women also make different choices in how they work. Most men expect to be working full time for the rest of their lives, while women are more likely to leave at some point in their career to raise children, or at least want to leave an option open for that. Employers also need to consider this when choosing who to promote, since they don't want to lose good employees.

That's not even getting into the issues of overtime and the workplace danger. Obviously, there are plenty of rational, non-discrimination reasons men get a higher pay on average.

Just look at these male chauvinistic bastards.

Now, you might want to say that women are only making these choices because of the patriarchy. Women go into nurturing roles because that's the role given to them by society. But I don't really care about whether that's true or not. If you don't think enough women are going into the jobs you want, that's not my problem. I want to fight discrimination, not impose my personal values on other people. If you feel so bad about it, make your own choice on your own life.

And never mind that men are pushed away from the more social jobs towards a higher paying yet soul-crushing jobs because society expects them to be the bread-winners of the family. No, clearly women are the only ones being oppressed by gender roles.

But what about male privilege? Men get everything handed to them, while women have to work for everything they get. On a date, women always have to pick up the tab. Men can flirt their way out of speeding tickets while women always have to pay.

When there's a divorce, men take half of their ex's property and the children. And let's not forget that the woman is always expected to pay child support, when the woman might not have wanted the kid in the first place and the man lied about using protection. Men just treat women as their own personal piggy bank.

During a war, who is called first for a draft? Women. Women are considered disposable, dying on the battlefield while men sit around in safety back in their homes.

When the Titanic was sinking, it was men and children first, while the women are left to drown. Men set themselves first. How can anyone see this and not think men are the privileged gender? Down with the patriarchy that has driven women to make up 75% of suicides and 92% of occupational fatalities!

Of course, it's the other way around. Now, women of course have difficulties of their own and different expectations, but that's the whole point. Feminists will complain about a gender role they perceive as being placed on women, blame men for it, and totally ignore any role placed on men.

Even worse, they'll try to twist it around to make it about them, as if their privileges are actually insults. The women and children first rule shows that men consider women equivalent to children! Men don't consider women as strong and as capable as them, devaluing them to the level of children! So it's still part of patriarchy. It was all part of their clever plan of oppressing women by letting them live as they die.

Let me tell you, there are no feminist women on a sinking ship.

That's, like, the exact definition of a secondary victim.

Also, men have fathers and sons too, ya know.

These people clearly can't even tell the difference between bring privileged and being discriminated against. Why in the world should I listen to them on anything?

Now this has been quite long, yet I have so much more to say. I'll leave it with this though. Voltaire once said "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." Watch the above video, and tell me if you really think society is based around patriarchy. Ask yourselves what would happen if the situation was reversed.