What LBB is All About

Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute is always worth a read. One article in the Daily Sceptic in particular recently caught my attention. It questions how American capitalism mutated into American corporatism.

This goes very much to the heart of what LBB is about. We want (small) governments to support free enterprise and the healthy supply of new and small businesses. We also want them to stop conspiring and colluding with big corporates to tilt markets in their favour, reward each other with jobs and advantage, and silence and censor the proles.

As Tucker points out, it really is a major intellectual challenge to work out what is going on and who our enemies are. Perhaps that is why the majority of western populations fail to see anything that is happening. But a lot of what he says resonates with the LBB charter and our motives. I thought these paragraphs in particular, correlated very well with our world view:

“It [the military-industrial complex] has become a main curator and censor of our news and social media presence and postings. It is in a position to say which companies and products succeed and which ones fail. It can kill apps in a flash if the well-placed person does not like what it is doing. It can order other apps to add or subtract to a blacklist based on political opinions. It can tell even the smallest company to comply or face death by lawfare. It can seize on any individual and make him a public enemy based entirely on an opinion or action that runs contrary to regime priorities."

In short, this corporatism – in all its iterations including the regulatory state and the patent war chest that maintains and enforces monopoly – is the core source of all the current despotism.

"It obtained its first full trial run with the lockdowns of 2020, when tech companies and media joined in the ear-splitting propaganda campaigns to shelter in place, cancel holidays and not visit grandma in the hospital and nursing home. It cheered as millions of small businesses were destroyed and big-box stores thrived as distributors of approved products, while vast swaths of the workforce were called nonessential and put on welfare."

This was the corporatist state at work, with a large corporate sector wholly acquiescent to regime priority and a Government fully dedicated to rewarding its industrial partners in every sector that went along with the political priority at the moment. The trigger for the construction of the vast machinery that rules our lives was far back in time and always begins the same way: with a seemingly inauspicious Government contract.”

This is why our charter draws parallels with Adam Smith and his writing the Wealth of Nations in 1776.

“He expressed concern that European mercantilism depended on a web of laws, subsidies, special economic privileges, and government-licensed monopolies designed to benefit specific manufacturers and merchants. This system, however, inflated prices, hindered economic growth, limited trade, and kept the masses of people impoverished.”

March 2020 was when the full force of the military, industrial and censorship complex was unleashed on the world. Amazon has doubled their market cap since then, and Microsoft almost trebled theirs. In the US during the Covid era a new billionaire was created every day. The uber-rich ended up 30% more wealthy as we emerged from the first year of the Covid fog of war. More spectacular than the levels of governmental deceit, industrial-level censorship, and pharma fraud was that we lived through the greatest ever re-distribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. What happened to the ordinary people? They were impoverished. GDP in the UK plummeted in 2020 and has flatlined since. GDP per head looks in terminal decline as the great immigration con is now not even creating overall economic 'growth'.

At LBB, we believe that something has to happen in a big way in order to reverse the endless punishment of free enterprise, small businesses and the ordinary people through increasing red tape, spiralling taxes, ‘net zero’ ideology, and censorship of speech and thought.

None of us at LBB really consider ourselves as political. However, we do feel that to an extent the events since March 2020 have politicised us. None of us have faith in the major political parties. Between them they have imposed the regime we now have, they have suppressed debate and monopolised the airwaves and media with he help of corrupted quangos like Ofcom.

So our mission is to create a voice for smaller businesses and those who work in them. One that we hope can add to the great work being done by other grass-roots organisations that have sprung up in the woke of the Covid period to fight for liberty and freedom of speech.

Latest Articles

Other Stories