The transformation of the medieval world into the modern world came about with the idea that man could and should transform his lot in life. The liberal individualism of the Enlightenment however was soon countered by reactionary movements, feudal and socio-feudal, seeking to put the genie of individual autonomy back in the box through collectivist movements.
Among the most prominent of these was what would eventually be called socialism. While early socialist movements had been a radical Christian heresy emphasizing communal living, these experiments invariably failed on a local level leaving behind a trail of wrecked lives.
19th century radical theorists began laying out plans for the communal transformations of entire societies. Fourier’s socialist ‘Phalanxes’ which would influence everything from Soviet communal farms to hippie communes in the U.S,. were feudal mass communities with no private property and everyone assigned a role in life under the rule of a centralized ‘omniarch’.
Socialists had to justify the elevation of the collective over the individual through fatalism about the role of man. All evidence to the contrary, man had no ability to change his lot in life. He was only an atom in the larger phalanxes of life. As Robert Owen, the Father of British Socialism, told Congress in an address in 1825, man “never did, nor is it possible he ever can form his own character” but is “universally plastic” and socialists could make him over into anything at all.
The Declaration of Independence asserted that man was born free, but to the socialists he was born a slave and the best that he could ever hope for was to be a slave to the right cause.
Ralph Waldo Emerson insightfully critiqued Fourier because he “treats man as a plastic thing, something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, moulded, polished, made into solid, or fluid, or gas, at the will of the leader… but skips the faculty of life, which spawns and scorns system and system-makers, which eludes all conditions, which makes or supplants a thousand phalanxes.” Was man a “plastic thing” or the bearer of the mystery of the “faculty of life”?
Leftist revolutionary movements might begin by hailing the power of the individual but invariably ended up in a socio-feudalism system making malleable man over to fit the five-year plan.
Socialism postured as progressive when it was reactionary. Its leaders, most often hailing from the upper class and upper middle class, reverted newly liberated societies in Russia and China back to feudalism under the guise of liberating them. The Bolsheviks took Czarist feudalism and rebranded it as collective farming, forbidding the ‘liberated’ farmers from owning property or livestock, and even from leaving their farms to seek a better life in the big cities.
The empowerment of the individual had given way to the enslavement of man in the service of an ideal society. Individuals were once again worthless except as they fit into a larger plan.
The socialist argument against individualism was human fallibility. The muckrakers gathered every example of misery and described them as social ills that society had to collectively remedy. Outwardly private philanthropic organizations claimed to help the poor, but their embrace of eugenics, including mandatory sterilization, seizing children from parents, prohibition, and greater state intervention, including mandatory centralized state education, set a pattern that was innately socialist even when its proponents avoided the use of the word.
Every crisis, including WWI and the Great Depression, was seen as a reason for replacing smaller institutions with larger ones and further disempowering the individual. The National Socialists blamed Germany’s loss in WWI on free enterprise. FDR and the Democrats blamed the Great Depression on free enterprise. Both built a state system for seizing control of it. The Bolsheviks not only blamed individual farmers for their famine, but used it to wipe them out.
The post-war economic rebound in America and Europe did not end socialism, but rebooted it with governments confiscating even more wealth for the benefit of society. The macro conflicts of WWII and the Cold War, the threat of atomic annihilation, were used to define the individual as too small to make a difference on his or her own except as part of a larger mass movement.
Class warfare gave way to identity politics. Individuals had to join groups to fight for a fairer society. What governmental institutions had failed to accomplish in fully transforming man, the new movements set out to accomplish in the psychedelic decade. The individual was told that liberation would come from losing his bourgeois background, worldview, inhibitions, morality and values to a new emerging humanistic blob shooting along the rainbow to the right side of history.
The eighties marked a reassertion of individual priorities over mass movements. The movements that had broken the country were distrusted. Socio-feudalism struck back with an environmental crisis taking place on such a scale that individuals were nothing when measured against it. Global authorities had to immediately seize total power to save the human race.
Environmentalism has brought socio-feudalists closest to realizing Fourier’s vision of abolishing private property and packing everyone off to collective compounds with a defined role in life. Man has had his day, but individuals can’t help selfishly wrecking the planet. Only subservience to larger systems can stop global warming, end human misery and transform the world.
A new wave of gender identity activism further eliminated the line between the individual and the state. The personal was political at the most granular level. The pronouns you used, the products you bought, whether you left the light on or not, were political choices. Human existence became a series of political tests measuring allegiance to a state ideology.
When the personal is political, there is nothing personal left to the individual.
Socio-feudalism had contrived to reduce man to a state of total subservience.
Medieval England banned playing games especially “fute-ball” because it was seen as a distraction from the priorities of the state. Postmodern California passed two laws outlawing Indian mascots, along with plastic bags, gendered toys and a thousand other things.
Postmodern man occupies a world of illusory technologies and shrinking possibilities where children are discouraged from riding bikes, packed off to early schooling at toddlerhood and indoctrinated to believe that their playthings are the reason for the destruction of the world.
Socio-feudalism has the destruction of individual autonomy as its central goal and the pandemic lockdowns showed how easy that goal is to achieve in the face of a crisis. Government could and did assert control over what an individual could wear and whether he could leave the house. The public eventually responded to it not with a mass movement, as those mostly failed or were repressed, but by unilaterally discarding the prohibitions of the state.
Americans had ultimately fulfilled Emerson’s faith in “the faculty of life, which spawns and scorns system and system-makers, which eludes all conditions.” And that is why socio-feudalism will fail unless it can reduce mankind to a state of abject helplessness, ignorance and fear. That is what Communist and Islamist regimes strove for with varying degrees of success. And it is still the great aim of socio-feudalism today.
The ultimate struggle will be less about movements and more about individuals. The more the system fails, the more repressive it will become. And only millions of individuals can defeat it.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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Thank you for reading.
One of the people on that Wall of Shame decided to tell his story.
He explains
that he loves his country but he could not remain in Norway because his
annual tax bill was more than 100 percent of his yearly income. Several
times more than 100 percent!
By the way, it is very easy to wind up with 100 percent-plus tax rates with wealth taxation.
Last month, a plurality of Argentinians voted for a libertarian
in their nation’s presidential primary. This shocking result may be an
sign that voters have sobered up and realized that they have “run out of other people’s money.”
For what it’s worth, The Economist is not a
libertarian-friendly publication. So it is especially remarkable and
noteworthy that the video clearly explains that Argentina’s problems are
the result of statism (the country has the world’s fifth-lowest score for economic liberty).
Argentina’s economic misery is not a surprise to anyone who has paid attention, as I explained in Part I of this series.
The situation is tragic. Argentina used to be one of the world’s
richest nations. Unfortunately, it has suffered from varying degrees of Peronism since World War II (occasional right-of-center governments often are just as bad as the Peronists).
As a result, Argentina has suffered a massive decline in relative living standards.
One reason for decades of bad policy is that the bureaucrats at the International Monetary Fund have a terrible track record of rewarding Argentina when it gets in fiscal trouble (22 bailouts so far!).
So what’s the main lesson to be learned? In part, it will be good if
Argentinian voters reject Peronism later this year in their presidential
election. But I worry that won’t be enough if international
bureaucracies like the IMF continue to play a malignant role.
Editor's Note: Please take some time and review My Argentina File, which goes back to 2012. RK
Communists, Marxists, socialists, progressives, fascists, etc., it
matters little what they're called, since just like Satan, they keep changing themselves into angels of light. The left changes what they call themselves, and what they embrace depending on what will get them the power they so cravenly desire. The fact is, it matters not what they're called, or what their agenda of the moment may be, these are the psychological and
philosophical progeny of the power mongering radical misanthropes of the French
Revolution.
The Balkanization of America is the tool they're using to destroy the America character, the American identity, the American culture, the American economy and intimately the U.S Constitution. The only things standing between them and a form of world governance controlled by socialist lunatics. Lunatics that would quickly send the world into dystopia, and I believe unending violence on a scale
unprecedented. Without America, there is no free world. Without America, there's only tyranny. If America ceases to be America, the world will lose anything resembling human rights and freedom.
America is unique in all of world history. America never offered perfection, it offered the most acceptable imperfection, and that imperfect system, with all our flaws, moles, warts, and scars, brought more people out of misery and suffering than any system in the history of the world.
The right conditions, and the right people were in place at the right time for America's birth, and it was a difficult one. To me, the chances of a creation of another America seem at best to be remote. That's
their goal. A permanent end to America.
The names they identify with at the moment are meaningless, as they're all peas in the same pod. Irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. The power mongering moral foundation of the left is hate, envy, greed, lust and violence. With all the evidence available, why is that so hard for so many to grasp?
When I share examples of socialism humor and communism humor, I sometimes wonder whether we should laugh about ideologies that have imposed so much death and misery on the world.
Not because I’ve been mocking communism and socialism. Both are evil and deserve endless scorn. Instead, I feel a bit guilty because I’ve actually encountered real victims of Venezuelan statism. I’m currently in Medellin, Colombia, where I’ll be speaking tomorrow to the Liberty International World Conference.
(Editor's Note:He's speaking today as this appeared yesterday.RK)
But I first spent a week with some friends in Cartagena, a beautiful colonial city on the Atlantic Ocean. Great food, nice beaches, friendly people, and perfect weather, but I
noticed there were quite a few beggars. But these were not like the
well-fed panhandlers you can find at suburban intersections in the
United States, or the bums in cities like New York, San Francisco, or
Washington. Many of them were gaunt mothers with young children, and I was told they were all from Venezuela.
I had no way of confirming that information, of course, but we were
only a few hundred miles from the Venezuelan border. And since millions
of people have fled that nation’s horrific conditions, it makes sense that some of them wound up in Cartagena. The most heart-wrenching part of my experience is when we left a
pizza restaurant one evening. I had a box with about six leftover slices
(a nutritious breakfast for the next morning).
In the recent skirmish over Chinese evil deeds and their Wuhan Lab, the issue of their overall lack of ethics or morals has yet to emerge. In fact, China is a simple tyranny. Why? First, there are no Human Rights. Second, the society is composed upon Marxist principles with some capitalism. Third, the government is designed upon atheist secular ideals, so bans religion. Fourth, the government has launched a large-scale human organ transplant business. Fifth, there is no law-above-the-law to check any of the above problems. Sixth, influenced by secular media, Americans have a blase’ attitude towards China and don’t understand how dangerous the world’s biggest country is, and many don’t care about the real facts.
Socialism, it seems, always boils down to being forced to eat some kind of rat.
That
was the case in Chile during the early-1970s Salvador Allende period,
where my old Chilean college roommate told of seeing canned rat meat
imported from Maoist China on store shelves there.
Now it's true in Cuba.
According to a detailed report from Frances Martel, writing in Breitbart News:
In an alleged attempt to promote nutritious eating on Tuesday, a news broadcast on
Tele Mayabeque, a Communist Party-approved network, revealed that the
Castro regime had organized a meeting with chefs to design meals
featuring guinea pig meat. The broadcast also encouraged Cubans to
“socialize the experience of raising the guinea pig” by the entire
family.
Cuban
officials, the reporter explained, sought to promote the alleged health
benefits of eating rodents “to incorporate this animal protein to the
family table.”
“According
to the experts, the average protein content [of guinea pig] is 19
percent, superior to porcine and bovine meat. Its consumption is a clear
ally against anemia and malnutrition,” the reporter claimed.
To
“elevate the culinary culture” around eating rodents, the report
detailed, the government asked a group of Cuban chefs to design new
meals around guinea pig as a core protein. One chef noted that they
designed 11 dishes, but ran out of time. Ideas left on the cutting room
floor included rodent meatballs and hamburgers.
It's
barbaric. Guinea pig is not a Cuban food, as Martel notes. Cuban food,
now largely unavailable in communist Cuba owing to socialist
mismanagement, revolves around pig and cattle. Guinea pig meat is simply
cheap rodent being put forth as an alternative to actual Cuban food,
which the government can no longer provide.......To Read More....
Given my complete and utterdisdain for socialism, I’m obviously a big fan of this discussion between Rand Paul and John Stossel.
In the video, Paul and Stossel draw a distinction between
market-friendly welfare states in Scandinavia and genuinely socialist
nations such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and modern-day Venezuela.
That’s because, from a technical perspective, the defining feature of
socialism is government ownership and control of the “means of
production” and government-directed allocation of resources. In the most
extreme cases, you even get policies such as state-run factories and
collective farms.
On this basis, Scandinavian nations are not socialist.
Yes, they make the mistake of high tax burdens accompanied by lots of
redistribution, but there’s very little government ownership and
control. Markets drive the allocation of labor and capital, not
politicians and bureaucrats.
And it’s also fair to say (assuming we rely on the technical definition) that politicians such as Obama and Biden aren’t socialist.
But what if don’t use the technical definition?
YouGov did a survey
late last year to ascertain what ordinary Americans think. Here is
their view of the policies that are (or are not) socialist. As you can
see, the most-socialist policy is government-run utility companies and
the least-socialist policy is separation of church and state.
It’s also interesting that Republicans and Democrats have somewhat similar opinions, other than on the topic of gun control.
But my main takeaway is that ordinary people aren’t that different
than economists. They think – quite correctly – that socialism means
control rather than redistribution.
But they had a better understanding after World War II, as noted by James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute.
When someone calls themself a “socialist” or says they
think “socialism” has a lot of good ideas, what do they mean? …Back in
2018, Gallup updated a question it first asked in 1949: “What is your
understanding of the term ‘socialism’?” …23 percent of Americans today
understand socialism as referring to some form of equality vs. 12
percent in 1949; 10
percent think the means something about the public provision of
benefits like free healthcare vs. 2 percent in 1949; and 17 percent
define socialism as government control of business and the economy vs.
34 percent in 1949. …this idea of “control” is an interesting one. …The
danger this view holds for human freedom and progress is obvious to us
today — or should be… Skepticism of applied socialism — or any
socioeconomic system without political freedom at its core — stemmed
from harsh experience, not learned ideology. For many people,
“socialism” meant “control,” with that control inevitably leading to
terrible outcomes. One should hope these lessons do not need to be
relearned.
Even some folks on the left draw a distinction between
market-accepting left-wing policies (redistributionism) and
market-disdaining control-oriented policies (socialism).
A few years ago, Jonathan Chait made those points in an article for New York.
…in the United States, liberalism faces greater pressure
from the left than at any time since the 1960s, when a domestic liberal
presidency was destroyed by the VietnamWar. While socialism remains
highly unpopular among the public as a whole, Americans under the age of
30 — who have few or no memories of communism — respond to it
favorably. …Meanwhile, Jacobin magazine has given long-marginalized Marxist ideas new force among progressive intellectuals.
…Sanders’s success does not reflect any Marxist tendency. It does,
however, reflect a…generational weakening of the Democratic Party’s
identification with liberalism over socialism. …Years ago, he supported
the Socialist Workers Party, a Marxist group that favored the
nationalization of industry. Today he…holds up Denmark as the closest
thing to a real-world model for his ideas. But, while “socialism” has
meant different things throughout history, Denmark is not really a
socialist economy. …it combines generous welfare benefits…with highly
flexible labor markets — an amped-up version of what left-wing critics
derisively call “neoliberalism.” While Denmark’s success suggests that a
modern economy can afford to fund more generous social benefits, it
does not reveal an alternative to the marketsystem.
David Brooks of the New York Times started out as a socialist, but he figured out that government-controlled economies simply don’t work.
I was a socialist in college. …My socialist sympathies
didn’t survive long once I became a journalist. I quickly noticed that
the government officials I was covering were not capable of planning the
society they hoped to create. It wasn’t because they were bad or
stupid. The world is just too complicated. …Socialist planned economies —
the common ownership of the means of production — interfere with price
and other market signals in a million ways. They
suppress or eliminate profit motives that drive people to learn and
improve. …Capitalism creates a relentless learning system. Socialism
doesn’t. …living standards were pretty much flat for all of human
history until capitalism kicked in. Since then, the number of goods and
services available to average people has risen by up to 10,000 percent.
…capitalism has brought about the greatest reduction of poverty in human
history. …places that instituted market reforms, like South Korea and
Deng Xiaoping’s China, tended to get richer and prouder. Places that
moved toward socialism — Britain in the 1970s, Venezuela more recently —
tended to get poorer and more miserable. …Over the past century,
planned economies have produced an enormous amount of poverty and
scarcity. …Socialism produces economic and political inequality as the
rulers turn into gangsters. A system that begins in high idealism ends
in corruption, dishonesty, oppression and distrust.
And, from the Wall Street Journal, here are George Melloan’s first-hand observations on the track record of socialism.
All economic systems are capitalist. A modern economy
can’t exist without the accumulation of capital to build factories and
infrastructure. The difference lies in who owns the capital—individuals
or the state. …Having first visited the mother of socialism, the Soviet
Union, in April 1967, I can extract a few historical nuggets… The Soviet
state owned everything. State enterprises compensated their workers
with rubles.
…And those rubles bought very little, because the command economy
produced very little (except weapons), and most of what it produced was
shoddy. …stores were short on goods. …Rents were cheap, if you didn’t
mind squalor. …Prices and production quotas were set by a huge Soviet
planning bureaucracy called Gosplan, staffed by thousands of
“economists.” Free-market pricing efficiently allocates resources. Price
controls created waste as factories produced a lot of what nobody
wanted. …Britain, where I was living at the time, was conducting a
socialist experiment… After World War II, the Labour Party of Prime
Minister Clement Attlee had nationalized coal, steel, electricity and
transportation, with damaging and wasteful consequences. …I interviewed a
steelworker in Sheffield who lived with his wife and two children in a
“back to back” house with only a single door, at the front. …He didn’t
own a car and had few other conveniences. A worker for U.S. Steel in Pittsburgh would have been appalled at such conditions.
Based on the above excerpts, which come from the right, left, and
center, it would seem that capitalism has prevailed over socialism.
I like to think that’s true, but I do wonder whether there’s a point
when redistributionism gets so extensive (and the accompanying taxes
become so onerous) that it morphs into control. In other words,
socialism.
And I also worry that there are indirect ways for government to control the allocation of resources.
In a column for the Washington Post, George Will wisely frets about backdoor socialism from the Federal Reserve.
…the Federal
Reserve has, Eberstadt says, “crossed a Rubicon.” Wading waist-deep into
political policies, the Fed is adopting, Eberstadt says, “the role of
managing and even micromanaging the American economy through credit
allocation, potentially lending vast sums not only to financial
institutions but also directly to firms it judges suitable for
government support. …It is by no means inconceivable that the current
crisis will propel it to a comparably dominant position in domestic
commercial credit.” If
socialism is government allocation of economic resources (and hence of
opportunity), …in the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve
launched “creditor bailouts, propping up asset prices to keep investors
from losing money, buying unprecedented assets.” The risk of moral
hazard — incentives for reckless behavior — is obvious. …Central banks
buying trillions of assets are thereby “allocating credit.” Which is the
essence of socialism. The Fed buying government and corporate debt
creates something difficult to unwind — what Cochrane calls “an entirely
government-run financial system”: an attribute of socialism. …Near-zero
interest rates…create, Eberstadt says, “zombie companies” that “can only survive
in a low-interest [rate] environment.” The result is rent-seeking and
economic sclerosis, because “America cannot succeed unless a lot of its
firms fail — including its largest ones. Bankruptcy and reallocation of
resources to more productive ends are the mother’s milk of dynamic
growth.” The pandemic has propelled government toward promiscuously
picking economic winners and losers. As has been said, governments are
not good at picking winners, but losers are good at picking governments.
Let’s close by returning to the YouGov survey.
Here’s a look at the nations that the American people think are (or
are not) socialist. Their top choices are correct, but they’re wildly
wrong to have the Nordic nations ranked as more socialist than France, Spain, or Italy.
It’s also bizarre to rank New Zealand below the United States when the Kiwis routinely score higher than the United States in the major measures of economic liberty.
I’m equally baffled that people Mexico and India have more economic liberty than Canada.
The moral of the story is that the countries with the biggest welfare states are not necessarily the nations with the most government control over the allocation of labor and capital.
By
Alan Caruba Originally Published on Monday, December
2, 2013
"Of
all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most
oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent
moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity
may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will
torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own
conscience." - C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia and many
other works of literature.
It is
one of the great mysteries that, for progressives, also called liberals, the
past provides no lessons, no warnings that would prevent them from repeating
their errors. Progressives are always focused on a magical future in which
there will be no wars, no hunger, no poverty. Their belief in the
redistribution of wealth—communism—is, in Winston Churchill’s words, “the equal
sharing of misery.”
Obamacare
is a perfect example of the progressive inability to accept that socialism
and/or communism simply does not work. It depends on coercion and in the case
of communism it left hundreds of millions dead in its wake over the course of
the last century. Obamacare depends on (1) the belief that human nature will
change—which it will not—and (2) the lies to implement it.
The
news is filled with the failure of the government, despite the expenditure of
hundreds of millions of dollars, to provide a working website. Even assuming
that the technical problems are solved, the failure of Obamacare is built-in
because Americans have always enjoyed a culture of independence, despite the
creep of government programs that occurred over the last half century.
The trust in the federal government, of Congress,
is at an all-time low.
Social
Security is insolvent or soon will be. Medicare was rendered even more
insolvent when billions were transferred to Obamacare. Medicaid will bankrupt
states as thousands more sign up for this program of minimal medical service.
As
I listened to and read about the Obamacare roll-out, I was reminded of an
earlier program that was adopted, Prohibition. It involved a nationwide ban on
the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages.
It was the law of the land from 1920 until 1933. When it went into effect it
was hailed as a victory for public morals and health. By the time it was
repealed with the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, Americans had
seen the growth of organized crime, the corruption that permitted ordinary
citizens to ignore it, and the loss of the taxes to fund other aspects of
governance.
Wikipedia
notes that “By 1925, in New York City alone, there were anywhere from 30,000 to
100,000 speakeasy clubs” where liquor was sold. Prohibition proved nearly
impossible to implement and enforce."
Barack
Obama represents the high-water mark of progressives to impose communism on
America. A totalitarian form of government, we have witnessed how his
administration has turned the Internal Revenue Service into a political
instrument to suppress its opponents and has expanded the National Security
Agency into a means to spy on all Americans, accessing every piece of
communication between them. Obamacare enables the government to know every bit
of information about individual’s health records.
It
is, as C.S. Lewis said, “tyranny exercised for the good of its victims.” Even
so, the progressives ignore the failure of communism in the former Soviet Union
and the decision of China to move to a capitalist economy while endeavoring to
retain a single party government that is encountering increasing protests and
resistance from its population.
Obamacare
is being imposed at the same time that socialist healthcare programs are in
retreat in Europe. In Britain, the government led by Prime Minister David
Cameron has introduced a bill seeking to partially privatize the National
Health Service (NHS) in an effort to avoid the Greek-style financial meltdown
that threatens the European Union member states. Cameron’s argument for the
bill is that there is too much bureaucracy in the NHS system and that it
interferes will patient care. NHS is based on the rationing of medical care as
opposed to the free market system where costs are determined by supply.
As
reported in a recent article by Arnold Ahlert on Front Page Magazine.com, “Last
November, such rationing reached a scandalous level. A study by the
Co-operation and Competition Panel revealed that Primary Care Trust heads were
imposing arbitrary spending caps, denying patients procedures such as hip
replacements and cataract removals—and that waiting times for services were
seen” to be deliberately extended ‘so patients would go private or die before
they were seen,’ to slash costs.”
Obamacare,
as has been widely reported, has increased the costs of healthcare insurance,
particularly for the young on whom the system relies to pay for the costs of
caring for the elderly. It has led to the cancellation of millions of
healthcare insurance plans and millions more will lose their plans.
In
a November 30 Washington Times article by Jennifer Oliver O’Connell, it is
reported that the inherent unconstitutionality of Obamacare will bring about
its end. Cases making their way through the judicial system such as Sebelius v.
Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp v. Sebelius, Indiana v. IRS,
Pruitt v. Sebelius, “may be the final nails in the coffin of Obamacare.” The
first two cases cited will likely be heard in March with a final ruling in the
summer of 2014. There are others such as Halbig v. Sebelius, King v. Sebelius,
the Independent Payment Advisory Board, as well as the HHS employer mandate and
origination clause challenges are among the many cases challenging the basis of
Obamacare.
Finally,
in the November 2014 midterm elections, political pundits are virtually
unanimous in the prediction that Democrats will be driven from their control of
the Senate and Republicans will increase their control of the House.
Obamacare
is the ultimate expression of the progressive and/or liberal approach to
government and it is, just as was the case of Prohibition, the increasing
resistance of the American public and will be, at some point, repealed.
I am in love with successful people. They inspire me to be better than I am now, to reach my full potential just as they have. I don’t seek to tear them down to bolster myself; rather, I seek to learn from them to raise myself to their standards. Of course, some, more than others, are lucky, talented, or more skillful at achievement just as some are lacking in those areas. We judge a proper economic system on whether that system enables more people to have bigger slices of the economic pie, not on the difficulty it poses for the few, and we do not tear it down because everyone cannot succeed within it. Up to this date, the majority of people have, in this country, preferred capitalism.
He goes on to observe how leftism, in its various forms of Marxism and secular humanism, prefer socialism. These atheistic groups ushered in a secular religious philosophy to replace Judaic/Christian principles and ethics, and while sounding good on paper, it simply doesn't work in the real world. They tout social justice, government controlled utopia, government imposed equality, government imposed diversity and government guarnateed universal success. In short, a secular utopia where no one has to work, no one is poor, and no one is responsible for their actions.
But history has show all they ever deliver is dystopia. That's history and that history is incontestable. But if it sounds so good on paper why does it fail?
Because socialism is antithetical to foundational human psyche. If you subsidize those who don't work, you get more people who won't work. If you penalize success, you get less success. If you trivialize criminal behavior, you get more crime. But once you've destroyed those who've been blamed for all of mankind's woes, and they're no longer around, what do they do then?
Since there's no one else to blame, in order to maintain power and control, tyranny must be imposed. They have an unholy desire to control every aspect of our lives to the detriment of humanity but to their benefit. Just as in Venezuela and so many other failed socialist states, dystopia follows.
He goes on to observe:
Intoxicated environmental movements are like a cancer that keeps coming back. They have been reborn in the Green New Deal which, I suspected, was another case of a socialist con job to snatch control over our lives. My thoughts were confirmed when Fox News -- the watchdog of liberal buffoonery -- was on the case.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff recently admitted that the Green New Deal was not conceived as an effort to deal with climate change, but instead a “how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing” -- a remark likely to fuel Republican claims that the deal is nothing more than a thinly veiled socialist takeover of the U.S. economy.
“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Saikat Chakrabarti said in May, according to The Washington Post.
So what are their motives? The underlying moral foundation of socialism is greed, envy, hate and violence, "disguised as Marxist liberation." They use clever sounding phrases like, “We have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor”, to gull the young, the uninformed, misinformed and the disreputable, but sound bites aren't facts, or reality.
They rail against the idea of capitalism because it concentrates so much power in the hands of so few, but so what asks the author. Let's face it, American capitalism gives everyone the chance to be one of those powerful persons. In years gone by the local newspaper would publish the top 25 richest people in America, and guess what. The wealth of top 12 or 13 were always self made. The bottom 12 or 13 were old money and as the years went by they would drop off the list because inherited money is diluted money. Oprah Winfrey was in the top 10.
Margret Thatcher was right when she said socialism fails because "eventually you run out of other people's money", and when that happens the culture that foisted socialism on society will collapse, because there's nothing left. Except for the socialist leaders who live well on the misery of their citizens.
I would like for all those Hollywood loons who swore how they would leave the country if Trump was elected (and said it as if anyone cared) to tell my why they didn't move to Venezuela, a country so many of them praised while heaping contempt on America. Does the phrase "leftist hypocrites" seem appropriate?
“Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out”. David Horowitz
Senator Bernie Sanders’ call for socialism has resonated among many Americans, particularly young Americans. They’ve fallen prey to the idea of a paradise here on Earth where things are free and there’s little want. But socialists never reveal what turns out to be their true agenda. Let’s look at the kind of statements they used to gain power. You’ll note that all of their slogans before gaining power bore little relation to the facts after they had power.
Vladimir Lenin promised, “Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.” That’s Friedrich Engel’s prediction about “the withering away of the state.”
Lenin also promised, “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification,” and “No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.”
Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin, said, “Advance towards socialism cannot but cause the exploiting elements to resist the advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle.” He also said, “Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union,” and that “Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.”..........To Read More....
Welcome to my world all you people appalled by the testimony of professors presenting Constitutional grounds for impeaching President Donald Trump.
Are you disgusted by the display of feminist rage, graduate student earnestness, and droning about the “framers” by tenured elites who have built careers presenting the Constitution as a “living document”?
Ha! Welcome to my world where I spent 20 years until 2013 studying and teaching college English.
I would still be in that world, having to listen to morning-after faculty lounge debates about the relative merits of these three scholars, were it not for the fact that a department chair, and then a college president, did not like op-eds I wrote, because the First Amendment applied only to people with their views. Then the privately funded program under which I was teaching at Emory University ended.
It’s not that I could get beyond the low-paying year-to-year contracts. My thesis and dissertation focused on dead white male cis-gendered (with no “homosexual,” or even “homo-social” tendencies) Christian writers. So I never had a chance.
During my years of struggle, I would try to convey what it was like to those on the outside—family members, friends, and people I met. I described the witchy cackling at meetings, screams about oppression from lecterns, inquisitorial stares from colleagues passing by in hallways, and examples of “scholarship”—like the poster with the giant phallus (and more that I can’t describe in this forum) adorning the office door of the head of “Sexuality Studies,” which was within the English department at Emory. Every day I trudged past that looming phallus, above the poster of Shakespeare in drag advertising a “Shakesqueer” conference.
Oh, that’s just those crazy English professors, said people in the business world and in the sciences. They looked at me slant-eyed after I stammered, “but, but … the giant phallus, and …”
Today, the standards of academe have infiltrated the business world. My former skeptics on the political right no longer post political comments on Facebook. Techies such as James Damore and CEOs are fired for their words and actions that have nothing to do with their job performance. Math and science professors are required to sign statements pledging allegiance to diversity, which means admitting less-qualified women and minorities. They’re required to believe their magical diverse powers will ensure that bridges do not collapse and patients, with their skulls cut open on the operating table, do not die. They must embrace Afrocentric math, “women’s ways of knowing” anatomy, and the path-breaking theory of Lysenkoism.
My world was the faculty lounge (the office with broken-down furniture where several instructors at one time held “office hours”). It’s a world where even such poorly paid hacks thought they were better, smarter, and holier than the majority of Americans and 100 percent of Republicans.
These people need not even look at evidence or consider scholarly shoddiness because they know that if it comes from the wrong source, it is wrong, as an Amazon review respondent who agreed with commentator “Prof. JayG” that I had not cited “any evidence” in my book “Debunking Howard Zinn,” affirmed. My book is simply “right-wing trash.” No doubt, philosophy professor David Detmer still believes I suffer from “Zinnophobia.”
Such “profs” do not need to read entire books and review footnotes because of their superior abilities to “deconstruct” texts. The deconstructionist theorists I had to read in graduate school saw the real meaning of an author’s words. While mere mortals may attach the signifier (the word) to the signified (the thing or concept), the deconstructionists could see beyond. They used this ability to also discern the motives of outsiders: white people, heterosexuals, men, Republicans—and those inside and outside these groups (excluding Republicans) who did not adhere to their ever-evolving standards of what today is called “wokeness.”
These people, unlike mortals, do not need facts. This was true about Donald Trump’s election. They knew there was cause to impeach him immediately after the election, and they said so to their students. I saw this here in Clinton, New York. Mere days after the election, professors chaperoned students from Hamilton College on the “hill” to the village square, where they marched and yelled “Impeach!” before they got on the luxury buses for the mile-and-a-half ride back to campus.
A committee staff member changes the sign behind the Republican side of the dais during a House Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, DC, on Dec. 12, 2019. Alex Edelman/Getty ImagesThis ability to see beyond evidence has been honed for a long time. Back when a few middle-class Americans dared to form a “tea party” movement to protest with speeches, bunting, and prayer against the newly elected “global citizen” President Barack Obama’s agenda of “transforming” this country, the Ph.D.s and other super-intellects discerned that this was not really the desire of law-abiding, hard-working Americans to prevent their country from turning into Cuba. They knew, just knew, that this was racism.
So were the questions about Obama’s longtime “god-damning America” pastor, Weatherman friend Bill Ayers, brobuddy Hugo Chavez, and Communist Party USA mentor Frank Marshall Davis.
Obama’s fundraising party comments about “bitter” Bible- and gun-toting Americans were simple truth. His declaration of being able to rule with his pen and phone was not any threat to the Constitutional separation of powers at all. The Obama Youth Brigade Formation’s chants of “because of Obama I’m inspired to be the next” architect, engineer, lawyer, etc., repeating points of Obama’s platform, and shouts of “Yes, we can!” were signs of rejuvenated youthful optimism.
Whereas professors had proudly sported bumper stickers proclaiming “Somewhere in Texas a village has lost its idiot” during the George W. Bush administration, they recognized Obama’s words as poetic genius.
Michelle Obama, a broad-shouldered statuesque woman was treated like the most beautiful and fashionable woman in the world—even when she dressed up like a giant banana. But a super-model married to a Republican can have no fashion sense. Melania Trump’s white coat in a Christmas video among white-themed Christmas decorations, “exude[d] cold, dismissive aloofness”—so unlike the Santa Clausy Mao Christmas tree decorations in the Obama White House!
The fact that such reactionary outlets such as Fox News reported this as if there was something wrong with having the author of the famous Little Red Book on the tree alongside a drag queen and Obama etched into Mount Rushmore proves how close-minded they are. They’re incapable of seeing the brilliance of a theory developed by the natural genius Karl Marx whose social justice work was supported by the wealthy industrialist Friedrich Engels. (And isn’t it nice that George Soros and other billionaires support similar scholarship these days?)
Marx understood history so well because he had deconstructed it and could see the patterns. Therefore, he was able to predict the future. And he could tell what would usher in a paradise.
When everyday people, like peasants, or reporters doing reporting instead of going to the Kremlin’s fancy parties, presented counter-evidence (in the case of peasants by dropping dead from starvation), the professors shot back. They accused the few reporters jotting down the numbers of beggars and dead bodies (like William Henry Chamberlin and Eugene Lyons) of being reactionaries. They accused the peasants of bringing on their own starvation by not working enthusiastically enough on the collective farms the government had so generously provided them.
Even after Kruschev had denounced Stalin for errors, the professors did not lose faith. They knew socialism could work—if only the “right” people were in charge.
The professors in the 1960s kept teaching about the superiority of socialism, hoping as Bill Ayers and company did, that through the reeducation of their charges they would usher in and rule over a socialistic utopia. And even though the Vietnamese fled North Vietnam, the people there really wanted a communist government. These thinkers knew that Ho Chi Minh was more of a democrat than the slave-owning writer of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.
So, when I recently watched the testimony by the Constitutional scholars Pamela Karlan (Stanford), Noah Feldman (Harvard), and Michael Gerhardt (University of North Carolina), I thought, welcome to my world.
Welcome to my world where someone like Karlan, who at a 2017 conference claimed she had to cross the street from Donald Trump’s hotel (the building apparently shoots cootie rays onto the sidewalk) and to know that Trump did not “believe in” democracy, “the rule of law,” or a “free press.” The legal scholar had denounced “voter suppression” (no, no, not about New Black Panthers outside the Philadelphia polling station in 2008; those were civil rights activists) and claimed that Trump’s sexual assault record was higher than “99.99% of all of the people who have entered this country illegally.” (Let us hope the FBI takes note of this inside information.)
In addition to being an ace legal mind, she was able to go beyond Freud and diagnosed Trump as not being able to tell the difference between truth and falsity. She claimed that he was trying to “destabilize the courts” and predicted that he would blame a Muslim on a future terroristic attack like the one in Oklahoma City in 1995.
At the hearing she explained that “one of the most important provisions of our original Constitution is the guarantee of periodic elections for the presidency.” Therefore, this president needed to be removed. There are so many reasons—like the president’s reference to “Russia, if you’re listening,” i.e., to get on it about Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. All smart people know that this is not a joke, for Republicans are incapable of making jokes.
But those with Ph.D.s learn all the clever inside jokes at conferences. It was too bad that the rubes didn’t understand Karlan’s witty reference to the president’s 13-year-old son. She told Americans that “Trump is not a king” and that he could “name his son Barron” but could not “make him a baron.” But they just didn’t get it. So she magnanimously gave a “qualified apology,” pointing out that Trump had much to apologize for himself—like being born. And like all those feminists attacking phallologocentrism in “Paradise Lost” and “Huckleberry Finn,” she was applauded for “schooling” a “Trump crony,” Congressman Doug Collins (R-Ga.).
In my world, earnest graduate students presented comparison/contrast papers at conferences knowing, just knowing, that someone would recognize their genius. Noah Feldman may have known that his “insights” had been discussed thousands of times before at such insider events, but for the benefit of the folks he spelled it out, explaining that the “framers provided for the impeachment of the president because they feared the president might abuse his power of his office.”
“Let me begin now,” he continued, “of why the framers provided for impeachment in the first place. The framers borrowed the concept of impeachment from England, but with one enormous difference. The House of Commons and the House of Lords could use impeachment in order to limit the ministers of the king, but they could not impeach the king. And in that sense, the king was above the law.”
He then asked his enthralled audience, “I would like you to think now about a specific date in the Constitutional Convention, July 20, 1787. It was the middle of a long hot summer. …”
Feldman had been cogitating on impeachment for a while. Back in 2017, Feldman and Jacob Weisberg compared and contrasted “the collusion of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia” to Watergate, likening “Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and warnings to Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller” to “President Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.”
Feldman also contributed to a collection edited by Cass Sunstein, who served in the Obama White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Titled quite originally “Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America,” the book delved, naturally, into Trump’s authoritarianism. (Sunstein’s earlier book, “Nudge,” spelled out how the government could “nudge” citizens to do what it knew was good for them.) Sunstein, in his introduction, took some creative Sinclair Lewis-like liberties, presenting a future as Lewis did in his novel, even though it was fiction and did not come true then—even under a president who tried to pack the Supreme Court so he could fully take over the economy and who let in British spies to encourage war fervor.
Gerhardt (who has evolved on the Constitution since the Obama presidency) also lectured about the difference between the British system under monarchy and “in our constitution” where “no one, not even the president is above the law” and where there is “a separation of powers.” He concluded “from the public evidence” that the president had attacked the Constitution’s “safeguards against establishing a monarchy in this country.”
With all this talk of kings and monarchy I was reminded of the June 18, 2018, issue of Time Magazine, which on the cover presented Trump looking into a mirror and seeing his reflection with a crown and a king’s regalia—not that I’m doubting that the three professors came to their opinions after a careful review of the evidence—even over a pre-cooked mail-order turkey on Thanksgiving.
Then there was Jonathan Turley, an independent who has always voted Democrat, but who just didn’t get it. He blasphemed in stating that he didn’t believe that there was enough credible evidence to impeach and that Democrats were offering “passion” instead of “proof.” He dared to write about it, along with describing receiving “threatening messages and demands” that he be “fired from George Washington University”—even before he had finished his testimony. I fear that he may fall victim to the kind of purge to which others have succumbed, like Trotsky, and like the more recent one attempted on feminist professor Laura Kipnis.
Over 500 legal scholars after the testimony affixed their names to an open letter to Congress, stating their agreement with Karlan, Feldman, and Gerhardt. Turley had better see the light—that the king must be impeached—soon!
Whoever let him teach at George Washington Law School anyway?
The American people do not appreciate the wisdom of their betters, but President Bernie Sanders will be sure to remind them of how lucky they are to live in a country where the government provides all the food they need and where all they need do is stand in line for it, and not even worry their little brains about what to eat because the Director of the Department of Nutritional Guidance, Provision, and Distribution, Michelle Obama, will see to it that every American gets as much as he, she, they, or it truly needs. Now let’s move! Hop on that tractor! You have a quota to fill.
Mary Grabar holds a doctorate in English from the University of Georgia and is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Grabar is the author of “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation against America,” recently published by Regnery History. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
What do you know about socialism and its impact on American society? Suppose I was to tell you that socialism threatened your individual liberties, religious freedom, and property rights. Would you be shocked, concerned, or nonchalant? Too many Americans are nonchalant. They are ignorant of the threat socialism poses to their way of life.
What if the “greatest threat facing the United States today doesn’t come from China, Iran, or even Russia”? What if “it’s the growing number of Americans who believe Karl Marx’s socialism provides the best strategy for making our communities safer, healthier, and more prosperous?”
My guest today is Justin Haskins editorial director and a research fellow at the Heartland Institute. Justin heads the Heartland Institute’s “Stopping Socialism Project”and he is the author of Socialism is Evil: The Moral Case Against Marx’s Radical Dream. He will share with us how the move towards socialism threatens our way of life..........To Read More.....
The leader of the White opposition, the distinguished admiral Alexander Kolchak, was defeated on the battlefield, betrayed by the Allies and captured by the Bolsheviks.
During the interrogation, the Bolsheviks, astounded by their own victory, were trying to understand how they could defeat the well-supplied regular army, led by experienced military commanders.
“Admiral, why didn’t you promise land to peasants? You could have won this war,” the interrogators asked (Russia was an agrarian country and the ownership of land was one of the most compelling issues of the revolution). “I would not promise what I could not deliver” was the admiral’s response.
The interrogators just smiled. They did promise the land and won.
Bolsheviks who had a propensity for fancy names called it “monopoly on the revolutionary truth.” In other words, the truth in the “decaying” world of capitalism does not mean what it does in the world of “triumphant” socialism. In practical terms, when Bolsheviks promised democracy, freedom, liberty, and inexorable “land to the peasants,” “bread to the hungry,” “peace to the people,” those zealous Bolshevik slogans sounded great but the Russian people found soon enough that “land to the peasants” meant forced collectivization; “bread to the hungry” – man-made famine; and “peace to the people” -- civil war.............To Read More....
When a noun must disguise itself behind an adjective, beware.
By Daniel Flynn June 14, 2019
“We must recognize that in the 21st century, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights,” Bernie Sanders announced at a speech this week. “That is what I mean by democratic socialism.”
The word hiding behind that adjective hides in plain sight at the site of all of the past century’s great atrocities. Whether one thinks of National Socialism or Soviet Socialism, that second word conjures up a horrible track record exclusive of such concepts as compassion, justice, and love — the very words Senator Sanders employed to describe socialism. Sanders’s use of the modifier “democratic” might suggest a kinder, gentler socialism if Democratic Kampuchea and the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea did not already try this approach.
Despite these historical cautionary tales, and the senator’s admission that the recalcitrant bastion of capitalism somehow remains “the wealthiest country in the history of the world,” a Harris poll indicates that 40 percent of Americans would rather live in a socialist country than a capitalist one. The results closely mirror a recent Gallup poll in which 43 percent of respondents affirmed socialism as “good thing” for the United States.
Coincidentally, about as many Americans hold no memory of the Berlin Wall. Many of them, uncoincidentally, support Sanders, whose numbers, although down in recent polls, slide because others coopt, not because they reject, his message. It’s not former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, booed for telling California Democrats that “socialism is not the answer,” seeing his numbers climb. It’s Elizabeth Warren, running as Bernie without the baggage — or at least his baggage..........To Read More....
Since I think comparative economics can be very enlightening, I’m quite pleased to see a new study by David Burton of the Heritage Foundation, which uses several metrics to assess the relative merits of socialism and free enterprise.
This is not necessarily an easy task since socialism is a moving target.
Some people still adhere to the technical definition, which means government ownership, central planning, and price controls. While others assume that socialism is high tax rates and lots of redistribution.
Here’s David’s summary.
State ownership of the means of production is the central tenet of traditional socialist or communist thought. Traditional socialist and communist economic policies involve state-owned enterprises and a high degree of state control over all aspects of economic life. Over time, politicians came to understand that they did not need to have legal ownership of, or legal title to, businesses or other property in order to control them by regulation, administrative actions, or taxation. Furthermore, not having legal title meant that they could disclaim responsibility when government control did not work out well. Thus, the meaning of the term “socialist” evolved considerably during the last half of the 20th century to mean a strong state role in the economy, the pursuit of aggressive redistributionist policies, high levels of taxation and regulation, and a large welfare state—but not necessarily government ownership of the means of production.
And I hope everyone agrees with the arguments about individual choice and civil society.
Now let’s look at David’s description of the morality of socialism.
For what it’s worth, I think the final point is the most compelling.
Socialism (whether the technical version or the redistribution version) basically creates a zero-sum game in which people are told it is moral to take from others simply because they produce more.
And this doesn’t necessarily mean the poor taking from the rich. Yes, that’s a big part of it, but there are all sorts of government programs that burden lower-income and middle-class people in order to line the pockets of the well-connected.
…And those rubles bought very little, because the command economy produced very little (except weapons), and most of what it produced was shoddy. …stores were short on goods. …Rents were cheap, if you didn’t mind squalor. …Prices and production quotas were set by a huge Soviet planning bureaucracy called Gosplan, staffed by thousands of “economists.” Free-market pricing efficiently allocates resources. Price controls created waste as factories produced a lot of what nobody wanted. …Britain, where I was living at the time, was conducting a socialist experiment… After World War II, the Labour Party of Prime Minister Clement Attlee had nationalized coal, steel, electricity and transportation, with damaging and wasteful consequences. …I interviewed a steelworker in Sheffield who lived with his wife and two children in a “back to back” house with only a single door, at the front. …He didn’t own a car and had few other conveniences. A worker for U.S. Steel in Pittsburgh would have been appalled at such conditions.
If socialism is government allocation of economic resources (and hence of opportunity), …in the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve launched “creditor bailouts, propping up asset prices to keep investors from losing money, buying unprecedented assets.” The risk of moral hazard — incentives for reckless behavior — is obvious. …Central banks buying trillions of assets are thereby “allocating credit.” Which is the essence of socialism. The Fed buying government and corporate debt creates something difficult to unwind — what Cochrane calls “an entirely government-run financial system”: an attribute of socialism. …Near-zero interest rates…create, Eberstadt says, “zombie companies” that “can only survive in a low-interest [rate] environment.” The result is rent-seeking and economic sclerosis, because “America cannot succeed unless a lot of its firms fail — including its largest ones. Bankruptcy and reallocation of resources to more productive ends are the mother’s milk of dynamic growth.” The pandemic has propelled government toward promiscuously picking economic winners and losers. As has been said, governments are not good at picking winners, but losers are good at picking governments.
State ownership of the means of production is the central tenet of traditional socialist or communist thought. Traditional socialist and communist economic policies involve state-owned enterprises and a high degree of state control over all aspects of economic life. Over time, politicians came to understand that they did not need to have legal ownership of, or legal title to, businesses or other property in order to control them by regulation, administrative actions, or taxation. Furthermore, not having legal title meant that they could disclaim responsibility when government control did not work out well. Thus, the meaning of the term “socialist” evolved considerably during the last half of the 20th century to mean a strong state role in the economy, the pursuit of aggressive redistributionist policies, high levels of taxation and regulation, and a large welfare state—but not necessarily government ownership of the means of production.
