Hungary Looks Set To Swing Right In Polls [So Does Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Soon The USA]

Some Hungarians wore traditional uniforms to vote Preliminary results from Hungary's parliamentary elections support opinion polls suggesting the right is heading for a convincing victory. With most votes counted, the centre-right Fidesz party, narrowly beaten by the Socialists in the last election in 2006, looked set to take 50% of votes.

The far-right Jobbik party is also on course to capture seats in parliament for the first time. Many Hungarian voters were influenced by the sharp economic downturn. The country has been badly hit by the global financial crisis, and has had to be bailed out with 20bn euros (£18bn) from the IMF, the World Bank and the EU. The Socialist government of Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai has imposed a tough austerity programme to reclaim some of the money, but measures like tax rises and salary and pension cuts have made it very unpopular. Tactical voting

With 99% of votes counted, Fidesz had won 206 seats in the 386-member parliament, the Socialists 28, and Jobbik 26. Conceding, Socialist party chairwoman Ildiko Lendvai said: "If results do not change materially, then one thing is clear: the Hungarian Socialist party has lost the opportunity to govern. "But it has not lost, moreover it wants to grasp the opportunity to be the strongest opposition party."

You’re just plain ignorant (in a “traditionalist” sense of the word).

Here’s an excerpt from the Jobbik Manifesto with a link:

http://jobbik.com/temp/Jobbik-RADICALCHANGE2010.pdf

“Jobbik believes that what is required is an eco-social national economy, which means tailoring the economy, through controls which lead it to serve the interests of Hungarians, so as to provide both the environment and the living standards that people deserve; this requires a state that is capable of promoting national economic actors in order to place them on a level competitive playing field, so as to create more just relationships within society through the redistribution of wealth.”

Redistribution of wealth = socialism

An “eco-social” NATIONAL economy = socialism justified via phony environmentalism.

A state that is capable of PROMOTING ECONOMIC ACTORS = socialism. Capitalism means the state neither promotes nor obstructs economic actors. The state has no business and no ability to pick economic winners and losers — not, that is, if you believe (as I do) that the purpose of economic activity is to produce things that the people in their role as consumers desire. Promoting economic actors is code for “boot licking one’s way to success.”

The rest of the manifesto is as bad as the quote above. This is nothing but a turn to some variant of fascism: syndicalism or corporatism.

This is not a “genuine conservatism” of any American variety. This is genuine fascism of the old fashioned European variety.

Europe never really discovered classical liberalism (otherwise known as “freedom”). And Hungary, it appears, has a long, long way to go before doing so.

“... wore traditional uniforms”

Hmmm ... hmmm ... you know, I’ve seen pics of Austrian monarchist gatherings where some of the participants were decked out in the regalia of the old Kaiserlich-und-Koeniglich army.

Damn Woodrow Wilson for involving the USA in the break-up one of history’s few somewhat successful experiments in multiculturalism.

Austria-Hungary may have been the “Ramshackle Empire,” but we owe that description to rabidly anti-Hapsburg British historians. When you look at how it really operated, the Hapsburg empire was one of the better-governed states of Old Europe, largely because the bureaucracy was so inefficient they to a large degree left people alone.

I am vastly oversimplying for effect here.

Freepers, if you have the time, treat yourself to one of Erich von Keuhnelt-Leddihn’s books, especially his late opus “Leftism Revisted.” The way he explains it, the only way to have a multiethnic, or as we would say today, multicultural, society is under a monarchy.

The king or emperor is supposedly above petty ethnic strife, and the protector of all his subjects.

This is again a simplification, and a hard concept for Americans to understand. I’ve read a lot of von K-L and I think I get it on a gut level, even if explaining his ideas stretches my writing abilities.

Also on a gut level, I now realize that the Great War may have been the last chance to bottle up the demons unleashed by the French Revolution. A victory by Germany and Austria-Hungary would more than likely have produced a much more stable post-war balance of power. I know it’s hard for Americans to think of our allies France and Britain so humiliated, but they paid for their victories in so much blood and treasure that they would have lost their empires anyway.

Got news for ya.

1901 to 1974 is considered by most people to have been part of the 20th century. Look it up if you’re unsure of this.

Redistribution of wealth is theft — that is, socialism — plain and simple. It makes no difference if theft and economic suicide are accompanied by one’s own patriotic national anthem, or if one sings the “Internationale” and waves a hammer & sickle. Theft is theft.

The Jobbik Manifesto that you found so impressive is nothing but a blueprint for old-fashioned fascism of the national socialist variety. It was a disaster for Germany in the 20th century; it would be a disaster for Hungary in the 21st. That a different gang of nincompoops would be in charge of the redistributing makes zero difference to the outcome.

If Hungarians can think of no alternative to leftist Marxian socialism than a knee-jerk reaction toward “rightist” fascist national socialism, then they are stupider than I originally thought (though I never gave them much credit to begin with) and they deserve what they get.

(Jeez...)

I’m tellin’ ya.

Even on FR, to find like-minded believers in economic and political freedom is as rare as hens’ teeth.

Just discovered an interesting book which I’ve put at the top of my reading list. It’s called “The Triumph of Conservatism” by an ultra-New-Lefty named Gabriel Kolko. He claims — rightly, I believe — that the “conservative” era prior to FDR and Hoover (1900 to 1916) was in no way an economically free era of laissez faire in which Big Business wanted government out of its way. Not at all. It was an era in which Big Business actively COURTED government intervention into its midst (via forming cartels that it called “Trade Associations”) for the sole purpose of protecting it from the competition of upstarts, changes in consumer tastes, and other forms of market discipline.

The sad part about capitalism and economic freedom is that everyone wants the advantages of free competition as long as it’s in someone else’s industry. In one’s own industry, one usually wants the “advantages” of government regulation and protection from the marketplace.

Except for greater education in economics and morality, I know of no solution to this problem.

I am opposed in theory and in practice to all tariffs. There is no such thing as an “industry-supporting” tariff. Which industry? You mean the particular one that happens to be failing because it cannot produce what people want at a price that covers its costs, but happens to have good lobbyists in Washington? What about all the other U.S. industries that would suffer and not be supported when they are forced to purchase the higher-priced U.S product rather than the lower priced foreign import? This is precisely what happened to many U.S. industries after Bush43 imposed steel tariffs. But I guess no one cares about the other industries that don’t engage in political bootlicking.

And what about all the industries that suffer because consumers will have to economize by purchasing less of the domestically produced higher-priced product? If foreign steel is tariffed, the higher priced domestic steel now becomes one of the inputs to many other U.S. manufactured products and raises all of their prices. Now consumers buy less of their products and those industries suffer.

Tariffs may sometimes have a short-run effect of supporting only that particular industry with political clout in Washington; but they do so only at the cost of hurting all other industries, as well as consumers. Tariffs hurt the economy as a whole. That’s the nature of all protectionism.

Import tariffs did not help Japan in the long run (though that was the popular myth amongst failing U.S. manufacturers who could not believe that the Japanese could actually produce better consumer products at prices that covered their NON-UNION costs). The main effect of import tariffs in Japan was that Japanese manufacturers wound up holding lots of U.S. dollars. Alas, there’s no place in Japan to spend U.S. dollars — they have to circulate, by definition, back into the U.S. — so Japan, if you remember, started buying lots of U.S. real estate back in the 1980s (they owned part of Rockefeller Center in New York City) and started investing in manufacturing within the U.S. (such as opening up non-union Toyota and Honda plants). Thanks for the tariffs, Japan! Your plants provided lots of employment for us! (Just as our tariffs would end up being good for some other country.)

You mentioned “some planning.” That’s another myth worth exploding. A free, unregulated, untariffed market is not anarchic and it is not “unplanned.” The choice is not between “planning” and “no planning.” All economic activity, by definition, is planned, even under conditions of complete laissez faire. The question is only WHOSE plan? The plan of each individual buyer and seller, integrated and coordinated with everyone else’s plan by means of the price system? Or one big plan imposed from outside the price system (hence, outside the individual plans of individual buyers and sellers) by a MITI set of bureaucrats?

Japan outproduced us for very simple classic reasons: they made innovative quality products at costs that were lower than the price they could profitably sell them. U.S. manufacturers were unable to do the same — mainly because of unions — and thus could not compete. It has nothing to do with central planning or governmental industrial policy. It has nothing to do with “management style” (another big myth of the 1970s and 1980s). It has nothing to do with Japanese bureaucrats being better than American bureaucrats — all bureaucrats are the same. It has nothing to do with education or IQ — Israel has a higher percentage of Ph.D.s and M.D.s than any other country, yet Israel is still pretty much an economic basket-case.

It’s very simple. Economic freedom (and the more, the better) leads to economic prosperity.

In theory, and in practice.

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